build resistance to their scent.” He nudged her foot under the table. “And the tips don’t hurt.”
A smile bloomed across her face. “Good. You can pay for my milkshake.”
Tucker grinned back in her direction and just kind of got lost there, somewhere among her freckles and lips that were probably strawberry flavored. Soft. Had she kissed a member of the opposite sex before? His gut didn’t seem to like that possibility at all. It churned loud enough that Mary raised an eyebrow. But whatever she was going to say fell on deaf ears, because a prickle of awareness danced up Tucker’s spine.
Long before Tucker was Silenced, he’d had an odd knack for sensing when something was about to go wrong. It dated back all the way to childhood when he’d decided to walk to school one morning because his skin had prickled sharply when the bus turned the corner onto his road. Ten minutes later, he’d heard sirens in the distance. Once he arrived at school on foot, he was told the bus skidded on a patch of ice and slammed into a tree.
Around the time he went through the nasty business of puberty, he’d experienced a tremor in his fingertips and the full-body shakes while playing baseball after school. The tremor had moved down to the soles of his feet. Seconds before a water main broke, he swore he could see straight through the soil and grass to the rupturing pipe, witnessing it shake.
He’d been stunned by the incident and scores of less significant ones, but his mother always danced over his concerns, ruffling his hair and telling him not to worry. Eventually he’d listened, ignoring his heightened senses, desperate for normalcy. And they’d mostly gone away, except for his intuition for trouble.
Now, as inconspicuously as possible, Tucker glanced back over his shoulder and watched the group of slayers saunter into the diner, taking seats at the soda counter. Three of them. He’d tangled with plenty of slayers in his lifetime as a vampire, but he’d never once been scared. He was now. Because the beautiful soul sitting across from Tucker had chosen him to bring her somewhere safely. She trusted him. And the fact that her safety could be called into question made a growl burn up the walls of his throat.
“Tucker?”
“When I tell you to, I need you to get under the table and stay there, Mary. Hands over your head. Do you understand me?”
The tempo of her breathing escalated. “Yes.”
Tucker picked up his discarded spoon and held it at chin level, using the reflective metal to watch for movement behind him. It was no coincidence that these clowns were in the same middle of nowhere diner as him and Mary. The slayers had followed them. Or been alerted of their whereabouts by someone who’d spotted them between here and New York. One or the other. The slayer network was vaster than anyone realized and Tucker was nothing if not recognizable. Hell, he worked for the king and dressed like a drug dealer. Pretty hard to miss.
As the three figures remained in place, Tucker took a mental catalogue of the situation.
The fae had been allies of the slayers, right up until Tilda bounced over to the dark side. To Hadrian’s side. Had the news spread through the underworld already? Was Mary no longer safe from the slayers?
To say nothing of him—a vampire. He’d never be safe from them. Not as long as he walked the earth, but that was the least important thing on his mind at that moment.
There was only her.
His back teeth ground together. Hard.
Company policy was to leave the slayers alive, since they were humans, but if they tried to harm Mary, it would be game over.
He’d deal with Jonas’s disappointment and potential penalty later.
Through the chorus of a sizzling stove and Willie Nelson’s voice, Tucker listened for the tiniest hint of the air changing. And when it finally did, it happened fast. The bodies reflected in the spoon loomed closer and Tucker growled, “Now, Mary.”
No sooner did she disappear beneath the table did Tucker kick up and out of the booth, hitting his first assailant with a spin-kick to the jaw. With bone crunching under the arch of his foot, he was already launching the next attack, using the flat edge of his hand to send the second attacker’s jugular into the back of his neck.