Jo’s chest and made her heart skip beats, and both got worse as her eyes came back online. Across the empty space, in the far corner, smoke wafted inside on erratic wind currents, its frothy path illuminated by the light inexplicably flooding in from the outside. No, not inexplicably. Part of the building had been blown apart, the force of whatever had been set so great that the metal was peeled back, the hole big enough to drive a semi into.
It was courtesy of the illumination that she watched the horror movie unfold.
Even as the gunshots and shouting continued out in the parking area, even as there was another explosion somewhere on the property, she forgot about everything else.
As she witnessed three killings happen right in front of her.
The hulking shadow with eyes that glowed red moved fast and low to the ground, taking the men down one by one, and not by shooting. A knife. A dagger—no, two daggers—slashed in a deadly dance, the hazy headlights streaming through the ruined wall of the building showing all of the blood that flew from sliced throats, opened veins, and amputated limbs.
One after another, the three men who had locked themselves in fell to the concrete, writhing, bleeding out, mortally wounded.
Syn was so lethal and fast, it was as if he were a machine, and when he was finished, he braced his feet and sank down into his thighs. With the light shining on the front of him, he was nothing but a black shadow to Jo, his Mohawk a raised stripe on his head that rotated as he scanned the area—
And that was when Jo realized there were no more gunshots out in the lot.
There were, however, the sounds of screeching tires and pounding footfalls.
Jo pushed herself off the wall. As her weight came fully into her boots, she was about to say Syn’s name when a high-pitched whistle sounded out in a series of four short bursts. Immediately thereafter, there was a response from another direction, in a different rhythm.
And that was when the roar ripped through the groundskeeping shed.
Jo put her palms to her ears as her body shied away, not from conscious thought, but primordial, survival instinct.
Syn reared back as he released his battle cry, his arms extending out from his torso, his matched set of knives jutting from his brutally hard fists.
And then he put the daggers away. As they disappeared somewhere inside his jacket, Jo had a thought that he was going to come check on her.
He did not. Instead, he marched over to the first man he had cut up. Standing above his prey, he snarled something—
And bent down low.
Syn attacked the man with his . . . teeth. Or at least that was what it looked like as his head went down over and over again, pieces . . . pieces seeming to be torn away from . . . the face. And dear God, the victim was alive as he was torn apart, his legs kicking and his arms flailing, as juicy, gurgling, gagging sounds rose up from the hole in his throat.
Syn did not stop.
When he was finished with the first, he moved on to the next, picking that man up off the floor by the thigh and the neck, and slamming his spine on the top of Syn’s leg. The crack was so loud, Jo jumped—
Syn slammed the now-corpse headfirst into the concrete, the sound of a skull shattering even worse than that of the lightning strike snap of the vertebrae.
“Stop . . . stop . . .” she whispered as she held a scream in.
But there was no stopping him.
Especially not as he moved on to the third, taking the slowly churning legs by the ankles and swinging the almost-dead man around in the air like a discus. Once, twice . . . and then Syn released his hold.
Against the spotlight of the high beams that penetrated the blast hole, through the still clearing smoke, the body spun like a Frisbee, blood leaving from its open wounds with a curious grace, floating up on the air.
Defying gravity for a brief moment.
Before crashing down along with everything else.
Including Jo’s illusions about who she had been sleeping with.
With a screech of tires, Mr. F fled the fight, K-turning the car he’d stolen and punching the gas like his immortal life depended on it. The ten-year-old Ford Taurus was like a turtle on a skateboard, and as he careened down the side of