Page 61 of Nightfall


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He was well over six feet tall, heavily muscled, and covered in ragged scars, including those on his face, branching out from where his eye patch sat, down his cheek and jaw, and along the left side of his neck. His dark hair was cut very short, almost shaved. He wasn’t the type of man you wanted to meet in a dark alley like this. Not if you valued your life.

Declan Reyes was scary as hell.

My hero.

I finally allowed myself to let out a long, shaky sigh of relief.

Declan came toward me and roughly brushed the hair back off my neck. “Let me see,” he demanded.

I reluctantly pulled my hand away from the bite wound.

His lips thinned. “What the hell did you think you were doing just now, Jill? Trying to get yourself killed?”

“They were going to kill a girl in there,” I explained. “Right in front of everyone.”

“So you offered yourself up as a willing sacrifice instead?”

“I thought I could distract them without getting bit.”

“You thought wrong.” Declan pulled a clean rag from his pocket and held it against my throat. “Where’s Noah?”

“He hasn’t shown yet.”

“Then you shouldn’t have stuck around.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the bar. “You need to stop trying to protect others all the time. You have to focus on protecting yourself.”

Declan had a tendency to see me as way more altruistic than I actually was. “So I should have just stood by and watched them tear her throat out?” I asked.

“Next time come find me first before you decide to play the Pied Piper to vampires.” He touched my face gently. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“We need to go,” he said.

“But Noah—” I began.

“Isn’t here. Something must have gone wrong. We’ll wait for him to contact us again.”

“Don’t you think we should wait just a little while longer?”

“No. Best to cut our losses and try again later.”

I felt the thud of disappointment push away the small amount of hope I’d allowed myself to feel earlier. Declan had chosen to remain outside when we’d arrived just before ten o’clock. While it wasn’t the classiest bar in Los Angeles, the way he looked—like death incarnate, which as a vampire hunter he came by honestly—might have gained us a bit too much attention.

Declan was a dhampyr—human mother, vampire father. While this gave him a great deal of extra strength, it wasn’t nearly the same as being fully vampire. He healed much faster than a human, but every time he received a flesh wound it left a scar behind as a reminder of the horror he’d been through.

It was Declan who’d kidnapped me, kicking and screaming, from my normal life two weeks ago. It may as well have been two years by how different I felt and looked. It was the Nightshade formula I’d been injected with that had changed my blond hair and blue eyes to black. It was the Nightshade that meant any vampire who drank my blood would die a horrible, fiery death.

Declan stopped a dozen feet away and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Are you coming?” he asked.

When I moved closer to him he turned his face away so the scarred side would stay in shadows, away from the light shining down on us from the street lamp. The undamaged side of his face showed the man he could have been in a different life—a handsome, if a bit rough around the edges twenty-eight-year-old. Same age as me. Very different lives.

I wanted to touch him, but I stopped myself. “Don’t hide from me.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“You asked me how I was feeling, so now I’ll do the same. How are you feeling right now?”

His jaw tensed. “I’m fine.”

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