her cap into her belt. Bella brushed against her. “I’m okay, girl,” she said to her partner.
EMTs had arrived and were surrounded by cops for protection. A couple of them pushed past her to see what they could do for Danver. They would soon discover their attempts to resuscitate him would be in vain.
Others were already working frantically on the other guy. Skye maneuvered around them with Bella right beside her and stood looking over the shoulder of a crouching EMT. This victim was dressed in a SWAT uniform, but most of his gear had been stripped away, laying bare his torn neck and bloody chest.
The pounding rhythm—the chanting, the keening—started once more inside Skye’s mind.
There was another decision to make. Was he yet another fallen hero she needed to help to the other side?
The cop was apparently breathing…barely. Fortunately, they’d already taken the first steps to stop the bleeding and were now busy setting up their medical equipment. Not watching her.
She took the man’s hand and stared at his face. Owens. She recognized him, too. Not that they’d often gotten within twenty feet of each other. In Angeles Beach, the SWAT team trained alone.
His features were strong and masculine—so appealing that she had an urge to stroke his slack cheek.
Get real, Rydell. She had work to do here. Fast.
As she continued to grasp Owens’s limp hand, a sensation pulsed through her, startling her. There was something this officer had left to accomplish—needed to accomplish.
She had felt it in the other injured people whose lives she had determined to save. It was an important factor in her split-second decisions.
Those she had saved had never been so far gone. But, with this man, there was something utterly critical yet to come in his future. That was what she felt. What she knew. And there was more. Something disquieting. Something important to her? A bond of some kind between them?
She sensed some intense emotions inside his mind as well as a determination to survive.
“You’ve got to move, Officer,” an EMT shouted. She ignored him for an instant.
This cop could not die. She would not permit it even though she felt his spirit approach the bridge where Danver had crossed.
You will live. It is not yet your time. Open your eyes. The unspoken voice issuing commands was hers, and it was inundating him with a life force that flowed intentionally, excruciatingly, from her.
Officer Owens groaned and his eyes opened. They were dark, the deep brown of polished mahogany, and stared straight into Skye’s.
“Holy shit,” said one of the EMTs. “I thought this guy’d had it. But look at those vitals. Atta way, sir!”
They’d hooked Owens up to some monitors. Apparently whatever showed there looked promising.
Yes, Skye thought as she stood up and got out of the way. You will live.
That didn’t make up for helping the other officer to die, but it lessened her pain, a little.
Although utterly exhausted, she managed to smile down at Owens, soothingly and encouragingly.
And when he gazed faintly back at her while lying there with blood covering his badly injured body, a sensation she could not identify rolled through Skye. Recognition? Pleasure? Satisfaction? Anticipation?
All of them?
Time to get out of there. Bella and she had work to do, and it didn’t involve daydreaming.
And yet, she couldn’t help watching as Owens’s eyes closed again. Slowly. Peacefully.
He was going to live.
Skye hoped that whatever she’d sensed he’d needed to do was worth it and that he would in fact accomplish it.
She nearly stumbled over her own shuffling feet as she took Bella’s collar and made her way out of the warehouse.
In the chaos outside, she was handed a shirt by another officer. “Suspect’s still at large. Got this from his automobile—ran his plate. See if Bella can find this bastard.”
Skye led Bella back inside to where officers who’d witnessed the shooting said the suspect had stood to shoot the two downed men. She held the shirt out, and Bella sniffed it.
She immediately picked up the scent. Skye followed—until Bella lost track of it in the parking lot outside. She couldn’t pick it up again.
The suspect must have stolen a different vehicle.
He was gone.
Chapter 2
“That’s why you feel so tired,” said Hayley Sigurd. The willowy ice-blonde who’d been Skye’s friend since childhood smiled sympathetically. Although she’d kept her voice low, it was unnecessary. Bernardo’s at the Beach wasn’t only the favorite dinner hangout of Skye’s group of transplanted Minnesotans, it was also Angeles Beach’s most popular restaurant, and the boisterous crowd around their table of four was noisy enough that no one could be eavesdropping.
“Yeah,” agreed Kara Woods, at Skye’s left. “Helping the first guy pass over was draining all by itself. And if that second guy was as gone as you say…” Kara was the most curvaceous of them. Her straight black hair belied her mother’s Nordic ancestry, but her dad’s side of family was Native American, and her strikingly sharp features had come from him…just as her powers, like Skye’s and Hayley’s, had come from her mom’s side of the family.
“Of course he was.” Ron Gollar jutted his broad, smooth chin out belligerently as if expecting the women to contradict him…as usual. Like the others, Skye sometimes enjoyed giving Ron a hard time for fun, but not today, when she felt utterly serious and drained.
Although Ron was also twenty-seven, he was like Skye’s little brother. He’d been in the marines for a while and now was a rookie ABPD cop. He had been at the warehouse, but not close enough to the victims to see how far gone they were. At the moment, he was just being supportive of Skye, which made her want to hug him.
Skye sipped her peach margarita, feeling the sweet alcohol drink slip through her, relaxing her even more. She stared out at the golden sky. The sun was just setting over the Pacific, a beautiful, peaceful twilight that also helped to mellow her mood. As exhausted as she’d felt since her work at the crime scene that afternoon, she’d also been edgy. Worried. Had she made the right choices this time?
And what was that odd sensation she had felt about the second victim, Owens? Since she’d left his side, she’d ached to see him again—to assure herself he really would be all right, to try to understand his unassailable need to survive, and why she had felt so compelled to save his life.
“It’s the first time I ever took on two victims at the same time,” she said to her friends. “How do you two handle it?”
Kara was an emergency medical technician. She faced multiple casualties nearly every day. And Hayley, who was on her way toward becoming a trauma surgeon, did as well. As a male, Ron did
