made him glance at the heavy door they’d come through. The locking mechanism was not a bog-standard dead bolt. Hell no. It was a bifurcated iron bar with a crank mechanism in the center. When you rotated the gear, the horizontal pegs plugged into brackets mounted on both sides of the jambs. Nobody was getting through that setup. Not unless they came with a battering ram.
Mounted on the front of an Army tank.
“How did you find this place?” he asked as he checked out some slacks. “I mean, is this living space even legal? It’s in a commercial building.”
“I am allowed certain—” She hissed on an inhale. Then cursed softly.
When she didn’t say anything else, he glanced behind himself. She was by the tub and facing away from him, struggling to unhitch the fastenings on her bustier with hands that were cranked around back to her shoulder blades. As a result of her contorted quarter-turn, the swell of her breasts and the drift of her hips was obvious . . . but that wasn’t the half of it. She had taken off her ruined panty hose and her skirt, nothing but a slide of black silk covering her bottom.
Butch looked away. Rubbed his face. Stared at the industrial door.
“Do you need help with that?” he asked roughly.
Technically, Syn was out in the field.
As he and Jo walked around a flat clearing large enough to host multiple games of soccer or football, he had springy, winter-dead grass under his boots, and there was a cold breeze in his face, and across the meadow bare-limbed trees stood at attention around the edges of the acreage.
Sure, okay, fine, it was just a field, instead of the field, but beggars/ choosers/all that shit. Besides, he didn’t care if it was a playing field, a park lawn, or this scruffy, crappy expanse of formally-used-as at this abandoned school, he was not leaving Jo’s side. Slayers could be anywhere, and they would recognize her for what she was, even though she didn’t have a clue about her nature.
Yet, he reminded himself. She was going to turn and then . . .
Yeah, and then what? he thought. Happily ever after for the pair of them? Hardly.
“This is a waste of time,” she announced as she stopped and made a three-sixty.
Fuck.
When she put her hands up to her head, he said, “You seem exhausted. How about we go back?”
“If I could only get my brain to stop.” She dropped her arms. “I mean, there’s nothing here. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Let’s go back to the car.”
Jo looked over at him and a breeze teased out a strand of her hair. “You must think I’m nuts.”
“Not in the slightest.”
Her green eyes drifted to a ruined structure of some kind, its roof torn up, one wall collapsed into a collection of rotted, loose lumber that looked like a set of bad fangs.
“In the video,” she said, “something like that was attacked by the dragon. It was a shed, or . . . and . . .”
Syn had sworn to himself he wouldn’t touch her. He broke that vow by putting his arm around her waist and steering her away from what troubled her.
And, to be fair, what troubled him as well. He knew exactly what had attacked that out building. Rhage’s beast. But he couldn’t tell her that.
“You’re cold,” he said.
“Am I?”
“Your teeth are chattering.”
As he started them back up the hill, she touched her lips. “They are?”
He nodded and kept them ascending at a steady pace. He hadn’t minded the walk around with her. They had plenty of privacy, and his instincts, which he trusted more than any other thing about himself, were not firing, not yet: There were no scents on the air that shouldn’t have been there. No movement in the shadows that his keen eyes caught. No sounds other than, off in the distance, the occasional passing car on the city road they’d come in on.
But she was clearly out of gas, and at least her car appeared back into view soon enough. When they came up to it, Jo hesitated and glanced over her shoulder. Then she looked at what was ahead of them, the vacated classroom buildings and the dorms.
As her eyes roamed the campus, his stayed by her and tried to be patient. He really just wanted her to get some rest. The change was so brutal on the body, and she needed to be strong.