Unhallowed (Rath and Rune #1) - Jordan L. Hawk Page 0,58

wicked silver blade from his coat pocket.

“No!” Sebastian cried, at the same time Peter ordered: “Run, children!”

But it was Bonnie who acted. She grabbed up the scented candle, the one she’d left unburned in deference to him, and lobbed it at the man’s head.

The candle caught the ruffian in the temple—not hard enough to hurt him, but hard enough to distract.

Ves surged across the room. The gunman screamed as his wrist snapped, and the weapon fell to the floor. At the same instant, two tentacles whipped toward the man Bonnie had hit. One snaked around his throat, the other around his waist, and heaved him straight into the brickwork of the fireplace. His skull connected with a wet crack, and he went limp in Ves’s grip.

The other man was still shrieking. Ves hurled him into the wall. He collided with a much less final sound and crumpled into a moaning ball against the baseboard.

Everything went still and silent. Ves stared down at the dead man with his strange goat eyes, an expression of horror on his face. The tentacles hung around him like some sort of dark nimbus, poised and ready.

Sebastian’s mind spun. What was Ves? Not one of the kindred of the sea, not with those eyes. “One of the Dark Young,” the intruder had said, seconds before Ves killed him right there in the sitting room. Thank God the children had run when Bonnie told them to.

“Ves?” Sebastian said, unsure what to do.

Ves’s head whipped up. His gaze met Sebastian’s, and he swallowed heavily. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Then he was gone, back out the window, leaving only the swaying curtains in his wake.

Chapter 20

“It was a monster, I tell you!” the gunman shouted. “A monster!”

His yells turned into a cry of pain as the police officer cuffed his hands behind him, heedless of his broken wrist.

“Is that so,” the officer said, clearly uninterested. “What do you expect, breaking into people’s houses and threatening them with a gun?”

The policeman hauled him away. A detective watched them, then turned to Sebastian, who sat on the couch beside Pete. Bonnie had taken all the children up to her bedroom, attempting to calm them.

The body had already been removed. All that remained of the night’s terror was a splotch of blood and hair on the brickwork of the hearth.

“Sounds like a case of self-defense if I’ve ever heard one,” said the detective. He’d introduced himself, but Sebastian was too rattled to remember his name. “Good thing you managed to get the jump on him and break his wrist. Too bad the other fellow tripped over his own feet and hit his head on the hearth, but what can you do?”

They’d said no such thing to the detective. They hadn’t needed to; the moment the gunman had started raving about monsters, the police had filed the incident under “L” for Look the other way. Sebastian had no doubt the medical examiner would find whatever the detective told him to find.

As for the criminal himself, no judge or jury outside of Widdershins was going to believe he was attacked by a monster. And even if they did, the bullet hole in the ceiling and the testimony of the Rath clan was proof enough he’d broken into their house and threatened them with a gun. They’d say his motive was robbery and that would hopefully be the end of it.

God. They might have died tonight, if Ves hadn’t saved them.

“Thank you, Detective Boyd,” said Pete, who’d apparently been paying more attention than Sebastian. “I’ve spent most of my life at sea, survived hurricanes and pirates, but I’ve never been so afraid as when that lunatic was pointing a weapon at my children.”

The detective nodded gravely, then tipped his hat to them. “Good night, captain, librarian. You should have a quiet night, unless you’ve reason to think otherwise.” He paused, but when they didn’t contradict him, he said, “Call us if you need to.”

Bonnie came down just as Boyd left. “Everyone is asleep except for Helen,” she said. “She apparently wants to, quote ‘grow up to be like Mr. Rune.’”

Sebastian took off his glasses and rubbed at his face, a half-hysterical laugh bubbling beneath the surface. “That doesn’t seem very likely.”

“What is he, Sebastian?” Pete asked, his grizzled face creasing into a frown. “The bastard he killed called him ‘one of the Dark Young.’ What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” The world was comfortably blurry without the lenses between himself and it. “I didn’t know. I