Syn stared straight ahead. As if he were in a different world.
“Seat belt?” she prompted.
When he didn’t move, she hit the brakes and reached across him to—
In the cramped space, he moved so fast, she couldn’t track him. One second he was like a full-length coat crammed into a shoulder bag. Then next, he had grabbed her around the throat and was looking at her with blank, unseeing eyes.
True fear shot through Jo’s chest. “Please . . .” she croaked out. “No—”
He blinked and focused on her properly.
“Oh, shit . . .” He immediately dropped his hold. “I’m sorry. You took me unaware.”
Sitting back against her seat, she put her hands up to her neck. “I’m not going to do that again.”
“It’s just because . . . I’m somewhere else. I’m not going to hurt you, I swear.”
As he shuddered, he seemed to have trouble breathing right. And even though he was physically strong and clearly a tough guy, she felt an overwhelming need to take care of him. He looked broken.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “You be wherever you are. I’ll handle the rest right now.”
“I knew I couldnae trust you.”
As Syn’s father spoke, Syn put his back to the sweet cottage, to the young female and her little brother, to the innocents who ran with abandon and unknowing bliss through the wildflower meadow.
His sire took another step forward, another fallen branch cracking under his horrible weight. “And I knew where you would go. Care you not that I hunger? You were to get something to sustain me, but it looks as though I must find something myself.”
Glittering black eyes shifted to above Syn’s head, and they tracked the fragile prey that had been marked. As his father’s lips parted, the tips of his stained fangs descended, and his body lowered into an attack stance.
Syn moved without thinking. He burst forth and bit the back of his sire’s hand, the one that had previously held his front teeth within its flesh. As his molars found home, his father’s roar was so loud, it rebounded through the trees, and Syn prayed unto the Scribe Virgin that the female and her brother heard it and ran for safety.
There was no waiting round to see if his entreaty unto the higher power was granted.
His sire turned upon him with a vengeance that was madness and aggression combined. And Syn made sure that he stayed within range of the punishing blow that came down with the swiftness of a hawk upon a lemming. At the moment before impact upon his face, he ducked and scampered back. His sire took the bait, lurching forth, swinging again, stumbling, for he was as yet in his mead though he had stopped his imbibing long before.
Syn kicked his father in the shin and went further back. Then he took an off-kilter punch to the side of the head and went another step back.
He knew he had provided a sufficiency of challenge and affront when an unholy red light, emanating from his father’s eyes, bathed him in the color of coming death.
It was then that Syn ran.
And he ran fast, but not too fast.
He had no idea where he was going. He knew only that he had to draw the monster away from that family if it was the last thing he did. And indeed, it would be. He was going to die in this, but hopefully the female and her kin would take heed of his broken body and protect themselves—and mayhap this was the best solution for all. He would be over, and that young female would be, if not safe, then safer, for surely Syn’s sire would be cast out of the village by the elders?
Another thing to pray for, not that he had time to entreat the Virgin Scribe once more.
With the red light of his father’s violence streaming behind him, the forest was lit in a murderous manner, the trees and brush, the trail that Syn found himself upon, the deer that were flushed from their stands, illuminated in the fashion of the blood that would soon be shed.
Syn’s thin legs pumped as fast as they could, and the only thing that allowed him to keep the lead was his father’s prodigious weight. Verily, the hoarse breathing, the huffing and puffing, was like a dragon that labored upon the ground in a canter when it should have taken unto the air. His sire did not have that skyward option,