LITMIR.BIZ

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Isabella to duck and cover, her eyes burning with the flare of light.

      Unbelievably, it was raining men.

      Jacob crashed to the floor about ten feet to Isabella’s left with a bone-jarring thud that kicked up an enormous cloud of dust. Another body slammed into some boxes not too much farther away. A third struck the floor near the open doors, actually landing on its feet. The man absorbed the shock of his landing like a cat. Then, with a swirl of the fabric of his coat—or was it a cloak?—he turned and ran out of the open doors.

      Ignoring everything else, Isabella reached for the broad shoulders of the man heaving heavily for breath on the floor.

      “Jacob!”

      “Isabella, get the hell out of here!” Jacob roared the command as he lurched awkwardly to his feet, grabbing her and thrusting her back and away from himself so hard that she fell over backward and landed on her bottom. She sputtered for a moment, cursed at the embarrassing and bruising pain, and had every intention of telling Mr. Jacob Macho to go to hell.

      The words froze in her throat as the man who had landed in the boxes rapidly rose up above them.

      Literally, rose up.

      Floated right up into the air.

      Isabella gasped as she witnessed this and as she realized several extremely important things. The man who was hovering above her and Jacob was not a man at all. Although bipedal and relatively humanoid, it was actually some kind of enormous creature with hellish green eyes glowing fiercely out of its misshapen head. It had long, enormous ears that pulled up and back into points, fanning out like webbing or fins rather than ears.

      It had fangs.

      Oh, and very, very big wings.

      Isabella had a strange, hysterical urge to giggle.

      Okay, when exactly, she wondered, did I fall asleep? Of course people didn’t just catch people who fell out of windows. She absolutely would never follow some strange man into an abandoned warehouse. And there were no such things as fanged, bat-faced creatures flying around the Bronx.

      Then the creature focused directly on her.

      Okay, time to wake up, she thought as panic rose in her throat.

      The winged thing began to make a dive for her.

      Like flashing lightning, Jacob flew off the floor in another incredible leap, connecting with the monster midair. Their collision was a sickening sound of flesh and bone impacting, and Isabella flinched. Jacob’s momentum sent the tangle of their bodies hurtling into more boxes well across the room.

      Frantically, Isabella scanned around herself, looking for some kind of protection. The first thing she found was a heavy rod, rust flaking off in her hands and scratching at her palms as she picked it up. She scrambled to her feet, hoisting it like a Louisville Slugger, waving it threateningly in case Jacob hadn’t quite finished the job.

      He hadn’t.

      Suddenly the two struggling bodies leapt out of the boxes in a burst of flying cardboard. This time the slimy beast had the upper hand, its enormous wings building up speed as it hurtled Jacob helplessly upward, finally slamming him full bore into the ceiling. The sound of long metal plates buckling pinged through the shadows and Isabella watched in horror as Jacob plummeted to the ground like a weighted stone.

      He hit at bone-breaking speed, the appalling impact kicking up another cloud of dust. Isabella choked, horrified as she watched a dark puddle ooze out from beneath the darkly beautiful head of her would-be savior.

      She stood, frozen in place, as the creature circled above her once, twice, drifting down like an anticipating vulture until it lightly came to rest on the balls of its clawed feet just in front of her. She got a good look at it, taking in the slimy russet skin, protruding chest, and concave belly. Its lips were thin and pulled back to expose two rows of fangs, as well as the two that tusked out in a terrible snarl. The hands were the worst, tipped with greenish claws about six inches in length, dripping a dark liquid that looked suspiciously like the puddle forming under Jacob.

      “Pretty,” it hissed.

      Okay, so the voice is worse than the hands, Isabella amended mentally.

      “Yeah, well, you could use a facial or something.” Isabella slapped a rust-covered hand over her own mouth. Oh, great, Bella, antagonize the big bad creature, why don’t you?

      “Pretty meat,” the creepy thing elaborated.

      Well, that didn’t sound good at all, she determined.

      “Um…you know, I hear vegan is the way to go these days,” she offered, her voice pitching higher as the fiend advanced on her with a step, forcing her to backpedal.

      “Warm meat. Hot meat.” Then the thing made a crude speculation about the meat of a particular part of her female anatomy.

      “Hey! Watch your mouth, buddy! And stay where you are, or…or…” Isabella raised the rod threateningly, trying to think of the best way to intimidate a gargoyle. “Or you are going to get whacked in your meat!”

      Well, it was a male after all, and some things just had to be universal.

      Then again, she thought as it smiled wickedly and reached to fondle itself between the legs, maybe not. The look it was giving her was positively lascivious, its eyes rolling around in its head, drool dribbling down its chin.

      Now if that wasn’t universal, she didn’t know what was.

      Suddenly, it grew tired of toying with her and leapt forward. Isabella squealed in alarm, instinctively falling to the floor and somersaulting right out from underneath its target area. She scrambled to her feet much more easily than she would have imagined a bookworm like herself would have been able to. She turned, her heart pounding violently, just in time to see the thing regroup and lunge angrily toward her once more. This time all she could do was swing out at it with the rod in her hands, praying she made hard enough contact.

      She didn’t.

      Instead, she spun around, 360 degrees. She promptly fell onto her backside.

      All at once the creature was falling on her, laughing and slobbering with glee one minute…

      …screaming a terrible scream of pain the next as it landed right on the rod she still held, impaling itself through the chest. Isabella blinked, momentarily shocked at how easily it seemed to slide into the creature, hardly any pressure or counterforce from her hands needed. She was next aware of powerful hands jerking her out from under the writhing monster just in time to save her from being at flashpoint as the thing burst into a conflagration of flames.

      After a hot, wild burn, the creature disintegrated in a puff of smoke and ash. The overpowering stench of sulfur made Isabella gag even as she was pulled under the protection of a now-familiar overcoat and taken swiftly outside. Once she had a few gasps of fresh air and could wipe away the tears streaming down her face, she looked up into those dark, troubled eyes she had just begun to know.

      “Jacob! I thought you were dead!”

      “Hardly,” he assured her, reaching out to brush away the rust and tears streaking willy-nilly across her cheeks. “Just had the wind knocked out of me.”

      “I should think so! You’re bleeding!”

      She reached for his wounded head, but he caught her wrist in a sturdy hand before she could touch him.

      “I am fine,” he insisted. “I am the one who should be worried about you. How did you manage to keep him away from you?”

      “I don’t know. I grabbed the first thing I could.”

      She opened her hand, realizing she still had the rusty rod clutched tightly within it. It was covered in a goo she didn’t think she wanted to identify. She held it toward Jacob, but he jerked back away from her as if she were going to set him on fire. He grasped her wrist, turned it away from himself, and gave it a little shake until the

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