Dark Destiny (Dark Sentinel #1) - Lexxie Couper Page 0,27

empty eyes and before Patrick can move, Peabody’s hands wrap around his throat and fingers of ice sink into his neck.

“Time to die, Patrick Wat—”

“No!” Patrick jolted awake, sucking in breath after breath. He looked around his bedroom, the pale, weak light of predawn filtering through the curtains, turning the furniture into a collection of indistinct, looming shapes.

No dead, rotting men reached for him from the shadows. No thin men in black suits watched him with yellow eyes.

He raked his hands through his hair and flopped backward onto his bed. Jesus. What a nightmare.

Staring blankly at the dark ceiling for a moment, he fought with his hammering heart, forcing it to steady.

Okay, two nightmares in one night was just not on. This was what he got for going back to bed while Ven went off hunting Fred.

An image of the woman insisting she was Death popped into his mind, destroying the residual ghosts of his nightmare. “Great,” he muttered as his body stirred with elemental male response. “Getting turned on by a memory. A weird memory of a weirder moment. Shit.”

He threw himself from the bed, his feet hitting the floor with a thud.

He needed to get his shit together. Normality seemed to be unraveling around him. He was turned on by a woman who may or may not have murdered a man with just a single touch of her fingertips, who called herself Fred and somehow turned up in his bedroom in the middle of the night. A woman Ven insisted was the Grim Reaper, who was almost half his brother’s size yet strong enough to fling him across the room like he was a rag doll.

A woman capable of making herself disappear before Patrick’s very eyes.

Normality unraveling.

Like it had before.

Frowning, he crossed to the cupboard and snatched his work clothes from the top drawer. He wasn’t going to think about that. He’d pushed that particular “unraveling” to the back of his mind and that’s where it was staying. No one knew about it, not even Ven, and it served no purpose thinking about it now. What he needed to do now was get dressed and get to work. It might be only—he shot the clock beside his bed a quick look—four thirty-five a.m., but it was the middle of summer. The sun was beginning to break the horizon and that meant there’d be swimmers and surfers already hitting the waves in the faint predawn light. Swimmers and surfers who needed to be watched over. Protected from danger. From…

Pestilence.

His chest squeezed tight at the unexpected thought and an image from his dream smashed through his head. A man in a black suit who didn’t cast a shadow on the sand. A familiar man.

“Stop it,” he snarled, frustration turning into self-contempt.

He yanked on his shorts and left the room, tugging his shirt over his head as he went. He wouldn’t let normality unravel again. Not again. He’d barely recovered the last time it had happened.

Maybe Ven is right? Maybe you are something—

“Jesus bloody Christ, Watkins, stop it!”

The jog to work passed in a blur of denied memories and denied images. Memories he didn’t want to dwell on, memories of strange occurrences he’d never told Ven about, strange “accidents” he couldn’t explain but almost cost him his life. Memories of a shadowless man on a deserted beach. Staring at him. Wanting him dead.

Images he wanted to dwell on a lot, too much. Images of the mysterious woman, images of her stretched out on his bed, waiting for him to join her, waiting for him to make love to her until they both climaxed, screaming each other’s name.

The crunch of sand on concrete under his feet snapped Patrick from his torment. He blinked, his attention turning to the empty car park around him and the dawn-quiet stretch of beach before him. He was at work already?

He looked at his watch. 4:52 a.m.

What the hell? He’d left home at 4:50.

Hadn’t he?

Normality unraveling, Patrick?

“Screw that.” Refusing to acknowledge the squirming tension in his gut, he took the stairs up to the patrol tower’s door two at a time and let himself in.

What he needed was some normality. He’d punch in and then hit the water. Perhaps all the swimming required to check out the surf’s conditions would clear his head. After that he’d work through the morning’s paper work, pitch the safe-swimming flags and then call Ven. His brother was probably settling in for the day by now, and he wanted to touch base