Page 6 of Tick Tock, Darling

He didn’t hesitate. Not once, not even a flinch, and he was handling the same black magic that had me swallowing bile three feet away.

Either he’d done this so many times it didn’t register, or vampires don’t feel it. Neither one made me like him better.

Except I did like him. That was the trouble, and I’d been walking around it since the second I spotted him leaning against the doorway. I liked him and I wasn’t about to let him find out, because a man like that gets one inch and takes the whole road.

A light peeked through the plaster where somebody had tried to bury it. But not the dark magic, not the bricks, not even the plaster could hide it. The shard.

My breath went out of me and adrenaline coursed through my veins. My hands shook. It was here. Really here.

I was right. About the church, about the bricks, about all of it.

Don’t smile. Don’t you dare smile.

Caspian was watching me. The corner of his mouth had gone up and it stayed there. I had no idea what my face had already done.

I snatched the shard out of the pile of bricks. Power surged through me and I shook. Pain burned through my palm. I cried out, but held on anyway, clutching it tighter.

“What happened?” Caspian carefully touched my wrist.

Something pumped through me. Stars floated around my eyes.

That wasn't my magic. I've known my own since I was a girl and this wasn't it — it came in through my palm and went up my arm and kept going, and it didn't ask.

I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what happened and wasn’t going to tell him anything. Not until I knew what it was.

But the burning intensified and I dropped the shard. Blisters had formed on my hand in the shape of a star.

Not a burn. Burns don't have edges like that. Five points, even, right in the meat of my palm, and I've put enough sigils on enough surfaces to know a mark when I'm looking at one.

Something had signed me.

“It’s nothing.” I pulled away from him. That’s twice his touch had ignited a response I didn’t want to acknowledge. He must have that effect on women. I didn’t want to be one of those women who succumbed to his touch.

He looked at me. Not at my face. At my hand, at the shard, at the smoke coming off my palm, and something moved behind his eyes that had nothing to do with the shard at all.

“You’re hurt,” he said as if he cared.

“I’m fine.” Not true. The pain intensified as if I had refused to pull my hand away from a burning stove.

The shard glowed on the dirty floor like a fallen star.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

No container. I’d come all this way and never once thought about what I’d carry it in.

Beads of sweat trickled down my temples. My body turned hot as if the shard was turning up the temperature inside me. I bent down to pick it up.

“Wait.” He tore a strip off his pant leg and grabbed the shard. “It’s burning you. Let me carry it for a while.”

“I told you I’m fine. I need the shard.” My flesh continued to sizzle and nausea sloshed inside my gut.

He looked at my hand and his mouth flattened, and for a second he wasn’t the man who’d been leaning in that doorway.

Interesting. I had always thought that Caspian was selfish and uncaring—a total narcissist, but he had ripped a pair of his pants to stop me from being in pain. Not something I’d ever suspect Caspian Hook of doing.

Something that made me like him a little more. Something that scared me.

Chapter Three