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She lunged forward before the guy in the lead could reach her and drove her ringed fist right into his face with a smack that rang across the pavement. As he reeled backward, clutching at the scratches dribbling blood from his forehead, she knocked the gun from his hand with the crack of broken fingers.
As that guy swore and sputtered, Lou was already whipping to the side to slam two other men’s heads into each other with a thud that I knew would leave bruises if not concussions as well. They stumbled dizzily while she kneed the next approaching attacker in the groin.
That thug’s knees had barely hit the pavement before she was kicking another goon’s legs out from under him with a swift sweep of her foot.
Her poncho billowed out around her limbs like an all-encompassing cape, as if she were some strange superhero vigilante. She definitely was a sight to see.
Even as I rammed my fist into one of the guys at the rear of the pack and drove my elbow into another’s ribs hard enough to provoke acrack!, I couldn’t stop glancing at her. And not just to make sure she was okay.
I’d known her mother had trained her in all kinds of fighting techniques. I’d been around for some of those sessions, not to mention a few missions that’d devolved into gang warfare.
But I’d always stepped in to make sure I took the brunt of any attack. Mireya had never pushed her daughter to her limits, at least not in front of me.
It seemed the coldhearted bitch had taught her daughter to fight better than even I knew. Or maybe it was simply that now Lou had something to lose, something she truly cared about.
My heart twisted. She was thinking of those two guys.Herguys. Niko and Jasper.
Not me.
But no matter who’d inspired this show of force, she was incredible. A whirling dervish of lunges and blows, leaving her attackers scattering in her wake. Not just fierce and powerful but bringing the same grace to the battle that had always taken my breath away watching her on the ice.
“Jesus Christ,” one of the slower guys muttered, easing back from the brawl. “She’s fucking crazy!”
Oh, he didn’t know the half of it. But she was my kind of crazy, all the way through.
I couldn’t have been prouder to be standing here by her side than I was in this moment.
I kneed him in the gut and toppled him to the ground for good measure, but I wasn’t sure Lou even needed me for that much. She already had half a dozen guys sprawled and groaning around her, and the remainder had slowed their roll, eyeing her from a careful distance with their weapons drawn.
One of the men still standing had a pistol. I grabbed my own, ready to intervene if he decided that outright killing her was a better option than taking her hostage, but then Lou launched into her final trick.
I didn’t even see her reach into her pocket. There was a click and a flash of a lighter by the edge of her poncho—and then the entire specially-treated piece of fabric burst into flames.
My heart stuttered with the urge to dash in and save her from the terrifying scenario she’d just created. But we’d gone over this—she’d protected her skin and hair, she’d read all of the safety measures.
She needed to convince these idiots that they weren’t going to win this war, not against her, and for that she needed to pull out all the stops.
The flames sizzled all around her torso as she strode toward the remaining men without a hint of hesitation. Her voice bellowed through the mask, the hollow effect it created making her words sound twice as threatening.
“If you assholes know what’s good for you, you’ll pack your shit and get the hell out of this town. If I ever — and I meanever— catch you in Hobb Creek again, it’ll be your stone-cold corpses I burn.Do you understand me?”
The men jerked back when she struck out with her flaming arms, their jaws gone slack, their weapon-arms faltering. I’d bet these imbeciles had never seen anything like this little but potent force of nature before.
“You’re all dead men the next time I see you,” she growled in calm ferocity. “I’ll bury you right where I ice you.”
She whipped a fiery blow straight at one of the men standing, and a flicker leapt from her poncho onto his shirt. He shrieked like a baby and swatted at it as he scrambled away from her.
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here!” someone shouted.
A few of the injured men were heaving to their feet; their colleagues yanked others off the pavement. They fled for the working vehicles like the hounds of hell were snapping at their heels. I noted the damp spots on a couple of crotches where the goons had pissed themselves.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” one of them mumbled under his breath. Several of the faces had gone sickly white.
One of the guys leaned out of the driver’s seat of the truck as he started the engine. “This crappy town is all yours, you freak!”
I enjoyed a brief moment of triumph that was mostly Lou’s watching the truck and cars speed out of the parking lot and then groped at my bag for the fire-retardant blanket. The longer Lou let the fire rage on, the more chance—
