“Don’t pretend you know me, female,” he warned.

“I don’t have to pretend. It’s a billboard hanging over your shoulders for all to see.” She shook her head. “Just stop fighting. It’s a goddamn waste of energy. And I’m sorry I distracted you so that you got hurt. I think we’re even on that score now, though—”

“You thought I was the Reverend,” he said abruptly. “That’s why you came back, wasn’t it.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“You’re right.” He took at step toward her. “But answer me something.”

“I have to go—”

“If you’d known I wasn’t him, would you have still tried to save me?” When she didn’t reply, he lowered his lids. “Come on, be honest. What do you have to lose?”

“No,” she said after a pause. “I wouldn’t have come back.”

“Good.” As surprise flared in her face, he shrugged. “It proves you have half a brain, and something tells me you’re going to need it, sweetheart.”

The female took a deep breath. “If you call me ‘sweetheart’ one more time, I’m going to mace you.”

Sahvage chuckled a little. “Sounds like fun. I’ll even let you hold me down when you do it. I like the idea of you on top.”

The flush started in her throat and rode up to color her face—and that wasn’t the only heat that flared. The scent of her arousal traveled on the breeze to his nose, and he inhaled slowly, deeply.

“It’s a shame you’re leaving,” he said in a low voice. “I have to take a shower and I could use some help with my back.”

The female shook herself, as if out of a trance. “It goes without saying that I am beyond uninterested. You can keep your soap to yourself.”

On that shutdown, she dematerialized so fast, he was astounded at her mind control. And then, as her absence properly registered . . . for a split second, he did as she had, and reached out into thin air.

Even though there was nothing in front of him.

Dropping his arms, an emptiness washed through his chest and was carried out to his limbs. The feeling of being nothing more than a void that breathed was a familiar one. It was who he’d been for a very long time.

Yet for some reason, that female made him conscious of his barren existence as if the weightlessness was brand-new.

Like anything mattered, though, he told himself as he dematerialized out as well.

Besides, he could reach his own goddamn back.

Always had, always will.

• • •

Down below, at ground level, Mae re-formed in the darkness and studiously ignored the fact that she was panting. And there were all kinds of other things in her body she refused to acknowledge, but she wasn’t going to dwell on them. Not that they existed. Because she was ignoring them.

“Fuck,” she muttered. Even though she rarely swore.

Then again, this night was breaking allllll kinds of records.

Caught in her head, she started walking without bothering to see who was around. Fortunately, the cops were kibitzing on the other side of the parking garage, and all the other humans had already gotten out of Dodge, as the saying went.

Crossing the street, the random flashes of red from the lights on the squad cars strobed around the abandoned buildings, and there was absolutely no traffic on any of the roads in what seemed like a ten-block radius. Likewise, the parking lots that had been SRO for those flashy cars were now empty, nothing but trash and the occasional beater left behind—and overhead, the police helicopter was turning off its searchlight and paddling out of the area.

It was like the last scene in a horror movie, the scares over, the heroine safe, the lessons learned. Cue the credit roll.

Great analogy—metaphor, whatever.

Yeah, except this was always when Jason came back out of the proverbial lake and dragged the counselor down to the bottom with him.

Claiming his last kill, after all.

Her car was where she’d left it, and getting in, she cranked the ignition, put things in reverse, and k-turned around. As she headed off, in a direction that ensured she’d avoid the cops, she gripped the steering wheel, but sat back in the driver’s seat.

God, this was not at all how she’d thought things would work out. And she needed to call Tallah.

Instead of getting her phone from her purse, she just drove out of downtown’s Venn diagram of one-ways, finding an entrance ramp onto the Northway—

Shit, she was headed south, not north.

“Damn it,” she muttered as she looked over her shoulder to merge.

There were no cars, just a couple of semis, and Mae got off at the next exit, tangled with a stoplight, and headed back onto the highway, going in the right direction.

Even as she kept the car in her lane, and stayed at the speed limit, and monitored the ascending numbers of the exits, she was mostly in her head, a slideshow of everything that had just happened flipping through scene by scene. As the start-to-finish came to an end and got ready for a replay, she glanced at the clock on her dash.

Holy crap. Only an hour had passed.

It felt like twelve.

Or maybe an entire week.

Yet for all that had transpired, the essentials remained unchanged, and the crushing reality of her situation made it hard to breathe. Cracking her window, she took some big inhales. Then she turned off the heater.

When she came to her exit, it felt as though her car got off on its own, and the same thing happened as she approached the Shell gas station she had been stopping at every night. As the Honda rolled to a halt in front of the shop part, away from the pumps, her head turned to the ice cooler.

For a moment, things got blurry, the cartoon penguins with their red scarves disappearing in the midst of their arctic landscape.

She held the breakdown off by opening her door and getting out with her purse. Heading into the convenience shop, the young guy behind the cash register looked up from his phone.

“Oh, hey.” He stroked his scraggly beard. “The usual?”

“Yup, thanks.”

As Mae got out two twenty-dollar bills, the human did his beep, beep, beep thing at the register and the cash drawer popped out. When he handed her back twenty-seven cents in change, she put the coins in the plastic dish for someone else.

“I kept it unlocked for you,” he said as he resettled on his stool and went back into his phone. “You sure throw a lot of parties.”

“You want me to pull the chain for you and put the lock on when I’m done?”

He glanced up in surprise, like a customer helping him had never happened before. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Take care.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Back outside, she went over to the freezer. It took her three trips back and forth to her car, and on her last one, she put her slippery, cold bundles on the pavement, ran the chain links through the pull-handles, and clicked the Master Lock in place.

Looking up into the security camera, she waved.

Through the glass wall, the man behind the cashier lifted his hand over his shoulder in response.

With a grunt, Mae gathered the final bags of ice and humped them over to the trunk. Tossing them in with the others, she slammed things closed and got back behind the wheel.

She cried all the way to her house.