Jacob. Jacquelyn Frank

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СКАЧАТЬ watched in fascination as she once again blew back her hair with an exasperated sigh and planted her fists onto her round hips, her feet bracing stubbornly apart.

      “Look, there’re just some places where it isn’t a wise idea to stand in the middle of the street arguing, and this is one of them! If you’re bent on staying here, that’s fine. I’m going—”

      She stopped on a sharp gasp, her hand flying up to her throat and a faint gurgle of sound bubbling up. Jacob instinctively reached out to help her, not liking the wide and wild look of her startled lavender eyes.

      “Isabella? What is it?” he demanded, pulling her protectively into his hold.

      “Someone…oh, God, can’t you smell it?”

      He could. It was all around him, faint but unmistakable. The scent of burning flesh. Sulfur as well. But he had the honed hunting senses of any predatory species he wished, and it was none of those senses that brought the scent to him. There was no trail, no path. It was obscured from him. He was perplexed, but only spent a moment being so. This was a human woman with no such abilities as his, and yet here she was, gasping for breath, behaving as if she were breathing in thick clouds of smoke and sulfur when clearly she wasn’t. Not physically.

      Someone else was.

      Saul.

      A type of clarity burned in the back of Jacob’s brain, although he was more mystified than ever. The Enforcer didn’t pause to mull over the whys, hows, and impossibilities of what was happening. He only wanted to know one thing.

      “Where? Can you tell me, Isabella? Where is he?”

      “Close! Inside of me!” Her hands grasped at the fabric of her shirt across her chest, as if she wanted to tear the presence out. Her eyes were tearing, fat droplets flowing down her face as they tried to wash away smoke that wasn’t even there.

      “No. Listen to me.” He reached to cup her face between his hands, instantly aware of how small she was between them, how delicate, as he tilted her face up to his. “It is near but not within. Where? Look and tell me where!”

      Isabella whirled out of his hold and began to run, coughing and choking on phantom smoke as she lurched and sprinted. Jacob was fast behind her as they rounded a corner and crossed the street. She took one more corner and brought them face-to-face with an imposing set of rusty corrugated steel doors.

      A warehouse. Long abandoned, and yet, in an upper window there was light flashing violently. Unnatural, cold light Jacob had foolishly thought he would never see again in his lifetime. He seized his tiny guide by her shoulders, drawing her back against his body as he bent toward her ear. Despite the disparity in their heights, she came to fit against him flawlessly.

      “Listen,” he murmured soothingly as she continued to struggle for her breath. “This is not your agony, Bella. Do not own it like this.” He glanced up at the ominous glow in the window, his heart pounding with the pressure to act, but he couldn’t leave her there to suffocate. If her mind believed enough to react with tears and a hoarse voice, then she could believe herself into asphyxiation. “You can see there is no smoke. Are you listening to me, Isabella?”

      She was. Though she didn’t speak, she drew in her first clear, deep breath in what had felt like ages to them both.

      “Good,” he whispered, his warm breath skittering down her sensitive neck. “Now stay here, out of sight, and just breathe.”

      Jacob reached for the seam between the doors and wrenched them open as if he were tearing paper and not enormous pounds of steel, camouflaging the sound as a matter of second nature. Anyone inside would perceive it as merely metal creaking in the wind.

      Instinctively, Isabella followed him into the dimness beyond the doors, giving no thought to his instructions. She was afraid of what was happening, but she was more afraid to be alone. She trailed him, her hands clinging to his flapping coat as he strode through the pitch and shadow. There were flares of light and then blackness, the combination blinding her painfully. Jacob walked on without hesitation, as if it were broad daylight, moving toward the light with a sense of menace that was palpable to her. Unexpectedly, she felt him rising up before her, apparently climbing a ladder. He slipped out of her grasp and she was left fumbling for the ladder on her own.

      She couldn’t find it. No matter how much she felt around, she couldn’t find the means he had used to bring himself up to the loft level of the warehouse. All she could do was turn toward the light that now backlit his figure as he slowly, stealthily crept up on the source of it. Her harsh breath seemed to make too much noise as she struggled for oxygen. Jacob moved closer and closer.

      Suddenly, he leapt.

      Really leapt.

      Isabella might have been seeing things in all that haze of gloom and light, but she could’ve sworn the man made a lithe twenty-five-foot leap from a standing position into the fray of whatever it was that was up there.

      Hell promptly broke loose.

      Without warning, the smoke she’d smelled roiled out of the sickly light, spilling off the edge of the loft like a foul waterfall in green, rust, and black clouds. Then there was a massive explosion, debris and bodies hurtling out of the loft like missiles, forcing Isabella to duck and cover, her eyes burning with the flare of light.

      Unbelievably, it was raining men.

      Jacob crashed to the floor about ten feet to Isabella’s left with a bone-jarring thud that kicked up an enormous cloud of dust. Another body slammed into some boxes not too much farther away. A third struck the floor near the open doors, actually landing on its feet. The man absorbed the shock of his landing like a cat. Then, with a swirl of the fabric of his coat—or was it a cloak?—he turned and ran out of the open doors.

      Ignoring everything else, Isabella reached for the broad shoulders of the man heaving heavily for breath on the floor.

      “Jacob!”

      “Isabella, get the hell out of here!” Jacob roared the command as he lurched awkwardly to his feet, grabbing her and thrusting her back and away from himself so hard that she fell over backward and landed on her bottom. She sputtered for a moment, cursed at the embarrassing and bruising pain, and had every intention of telling Mr. Jacob Macho to go to hell.

      The words froze in her throat as the man who had landed in the boxes rapidly rose up above them.

      Literally, rose up.

      Floated right up into the air.

      Isabella gasped as she witnessed this and as she realized several extremely important things. The man who was hovering above her and Jacob was not a man at all. Although bipedal and relatively humanoid, it was actually some kind of enormous creature with hellish green eyes glowing fiercely out of its misshapen head. It had long, enormous ears that pulled up and back into points, fanning out like webbing or fins rather than ears.

      It had fangs.

      Oh, and very, very big wings.

      Isabella had a strange, hysterical urge to giggle.

      Okay, when exactly, she wondered, did I fall asleep? Of course people didn’t just catch people who fell out of windows. She absolutely would never follow some strange man into an abandoned warehouse. And there were no such things СКАЧАТЬ