Michael Brandt was no ordinary prey. He whirled aside with blinding speed. The reflexes that enabled him to pilot a car around a racetrack at two hundred miles per hour pulled him out of the way of his attacker and sent him leaping into a spinning kick that struck the man on the side of the head. Big and strong though the man might be, that blow was too powerful to be shrugged off. He stumbled to the side and fell to one knee.
Still moving almost too fast for Jessie’s eyes to follow, Brandt hit the man with a right and a left, rocking his head back and forth, and then kicked him in the chest. The man went over backward, but he rolled and flipped and came back up on his feet. He rolled his shoulders and moved his head from side to side, shaking off the effects of the battering Brandt had given him.
“Not bad,” he said, “but nowhere near good enough.”
He charged Brandt again.
As if the man holding Jessie had just realized what Brandt planned to do, he called, “Wait!” but it was too late. Brandt had already shifted smoothly to one side, grabbed the black shirt that his attacker wore and used the man’s own weight and momentum against him by twisting and heaving him along the path toward the door of the lodge. The guy yelled in panic, unable to stop his out-of-control plunge. That yell became a scream of agony as he stumbled through the doorway and burst into flame.
Jessie hadn’t been expecting that.
Brandt’s two friends—Max and Clifford, he had called them—were waiting for the man who was now on fire for some reason. They pulled weapons of some sort from under their coats. Knives? Jessie couldn’t tell. But they used the weapons like knives, stabbing them into the man and driving him to the floor of the foyer inside the door.
Funny thing, though. Nothing actually hit the floor except the now-empty black shirt and trousers the man had been wearing.
Where had he gone?
Jessie didn’t have the time or inclination to worry about that, even though the tiny part of her brain that wasn’t gibbering in mindless terror made a mental note of the oddity. Stars began to explode behind her eyes as the lack of oxygen finally got to her. A red mist seemed to drift in front of her, cloaking her vision as Brandt faced her and the man holding her.
“Damn you!” the man said. “You killed him!”
“That’s what he…intended to do to me.” Brandt was a little breathless, despite being in superb physical shape. His voice grew stronger and steadier as he went on, “Now let her go.”
“I’ll let her go, all right,” the bastard growled, and his grip tightened even more.
This was it, Jessie knew. She was about to die. He was going to snap her neck like a twig. Maybe even twist her head right off her shoulders.
But before the man could do that, Brandt’s arm drew back and then flashed forward. Something whipped past Jessie’s face, brushing her cheek so closely it felt like a kiss. A rough kiss, because it also stung as if something had scraped her skin.
The man holding her stiffened and staggered and suddenly the crushing force on her throat went away and air, precious, life-giving air, flowed back into her lungs. She gasped and gulped as she fell to her knees. Although it hurt her neck to twist it, she half turned and looked back over her shoulder at the man who had been her captor until a couple of heartbeats ago.
He stood there with his face twisted in a rictus of agony as he pawed at a six-inch-long wooden shaft maybe an inch in diameter sticking out of his right eye.
“Get down!” Brandt shouted to her.
Jessie obeyed the order without thinking, pitching forward so that she lay flat on the flagstone walk. Brandt sailed over her in a flying kick. Both his feet crashed into the man’s chest and knocked him backward. Brandt landed with an agile grace, leaned over and ripped the shaft out of the man’s eye socket. It had been sharpened to a wicked point on the end.
A wooden stake?
An instant later, Brandt drove the stake into the man’s chest. Jessie heard a sound like bacon frying, and then the guy was gone, just like the other one.
“Stay down, Michael!” one of the men from the lodge yelled as he and his companion burst out of the place carrying crossbows loaded with similar wooden stakes. “There might be more of them!”
“No,” Brandt said with a shake of his head as he straightened from his crouch over the remains of the man he had just…killed? Destroyed? Jessie wasn’t sure what the right word would be. “There was another one, but he ran off into the night. I don’t sense any others.” She couldn’t think straight as he moved to her side, grasped her arm and effortlessly lifted her to her feet. “Are you all right, Miss Morgan?”
“You…you remember me,” she said. The words sounded stupid to her.
“Of course I remember you. And I’m not surprised you tried a ruse like this.” His voice hardened. “Too bad it got your friend hurt.”
Ted! Oh, God, he was right. Ted was injured—or worse—and it was all her fault.
Despite that, his callous comment made her so furious she wanted to slap him or curse him or both. But she couldn’t do either because her head was spinning so badly and as she staggered to her feet she was so sick to her stomach all she really wanted to do was puke or pass out.
Instead she did both of those, first one and then the other.
Chapter Three
Michael watched her as she threw up, wanting to help her somehow but unsure what to do. The rare moment of indecisiveness on his part passed quickly. When Jessie groaned and started to topple to the ground, he stepped forward and caught her. She sagged against him as his arms went around her.
He might have liked to have her in his embrace under different circumstances, but not like this. Not with the dust that was all that remained of the two recently destroyed enemies drifting away in the night breeze and the crumpled body of the kid from the night desk lying there. Not with Jessie unconscious, shocked into insensibility by everything she had seen here tonight.
“Clifford,” Michael said as he turned toward the door, still supporting Jessie, “see to the clerk.”
Small, intense, graying Clifford lowered his crossbow and hurried over to kneel beside the young man. With a couple of fingers he searched for a pulse in Ted’s neck. That was his name, Michael recalled. Ted.
Rhymed with dead.
“He’s alive,” Clifford said, sounding relieved. “I don’t know the extent of his injuries, but at least he’s still breathing.”
Michael nodded. “You and Max know what to do.”
Max, the burly, blond man who had been driving the limo that afternoon, gestured toward Jessie and asked, “What are you going to do with her?”
Michael looked down into Jessie’s face, which was slack-featured in unconsciousness.
“I’ll take her and find her car,” Max offered when Michael didn’t answer. “I’ll put her in it and when she wakes up she’s liable to think she dreamed the whole thing. Either that or had a hallucination.”
