Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,162

to my front and wildly scratched at Seth’s face.

He screamed as I caught flesh and tore from forehead to chin, his flesh collecting under my nails, his blood trailing after them. Taking advantage, I writhed out from under him, my hands burning in the snow as I struggled. When he lunged blindly after me, I kicked him in the chin, delighting in the way his head snapped back with a crunch before I flipped over and got to my feet.

I ran again, lungs burning with acid, muscles spasming as I pushed them too hard. Sobs racked my chest, tears falling hot from my eyes onto cold cheeks as I sprinted for my life.

If I could just get out of this godforsaken forest, Priest might have a chance of finding me. I knew he wouldn’t stop until he did, that every thought, breath, and action he took since I was taken would be in service of finding me.

I made it another kilometer, maybe, but my body was failing me, dark spots obscuring my vision, my feet so numb I could barely move over the ground.

I collapsed before he could reach me, dragging myself by the fingers through the snow, hoping to find some kind of hiding place where he wouldn’t find me.

God was not with me.

Something tangled in my hair and wrenched my head back, Seth’s voice descending softly sinister in my ear. “Stop fighting me. You’re only hurting yourself. You are mine, Bea. This is God’s divine plan.”

“You aren’t a Prophet, Seth. You’re a fucking madman,” I seethed as I struggled.

It was too dark to see more than the outline of his face, but I sensed the twisting of anger in him seconds before he lashed out and hit me sideways across the jaw. Pain exploded in my head, my thoughts fizzing out into nothingness, white noise filling the space. His hand came up to grasp my chin, forcing me to look over at him, but he ventured too close to my mouth, and I claimed his thumb with my teeth. The hot tang of his blood flooded over my tongue as I dissected the pad with my bite.

He made a fierce noise of anger like a waking dragon, but he didn’t release his hold on me. Instead, he picked up a loose rock and banged it against my cheek, the skin splitting open like an overripe peach. At that point, there was so much pain and numbness from the beating, the running, and the cold that I was beyond feeling it.

I had the sticky, iron slick of blood on my mouth, but I wasn’t certain anymore who it belonged to. Both of us were bleeding from multiple contusions, a thick ribbon of it falling off his jaw from the deep gouge I’d made in his left cheek.

“Look at me,” I demanded, wrenching to look over my shoulder at him as he successfully pinned my hands to either side of my torso with his knees. “Look at the blood on my hands, your skin under my nails. I am not what you want me to be. I never was.”

He studied me in the darkness, shafts of moonlight cutting through the trees like knives. I shouldn’t have taken that as a symbol of hope, those bladed points of light, but they were too much Priest, too much me not to take courage from them.

“Not now, maybe,” he conceded thoughtfully, hands twisting mine so painfully I cried out. “Not yet, but you will be again.”

And then he hit me over the head with a rock, and I descended into blackness once again.

Priest

The Fallen compound was littered with bikes lined up in the moonlight, the silver glint of it on the black tanks making them look insectile, some scene from one of Bea’s classic horror flicks. Men in leather gathered in the garage bays of Hephaestus Auto, arming themselves while even more met in the Chapel, discussing tactics, poring over road maps and hand-drawn ones made by men who’d live so long in the mountains of the coast, they knew them better than cartographers.

Everyone was mobilized to find Bea.

We’d spent the day trying to track them from the field, but even Kodiak, who had a talent for such things, drew up blank after a few kilometers in either direction. Bea’s friend Eric was in surgery for the bullet wound put there by the cops when they assumed he’d been the one to fire the gun, but Loulou went to his house and spoke