Page 4 of Hell Bound

A heavy hand gripped the back of my thigh and tucked it up around his hip as he bucked his hips against me.

But another voice broke whatever spell had fallen over me, and my panic returned in full force. It did nothing to dim my arousal, but thankfully, it overpowered the crazy lust that gripped me.

“Hey, hi, yeah, great to see you and all, but we can’t stay here, Commander. Your reunion will have to wait.” The speaker was a gangly young man with messy brown hair.

He looked… totally normal, wearing a Nirvana band tee and ripped jeans, like every other guy in Miami.

What the hell was a guy like that doing with these people?

My attacker moved away abruptly, also freed from the trance, an expressionless mask taking over the hungry rage that lingered in his blue eyes.

“Move out,” the commander clipped.

“Should we deal with the body?” The question came from another man that was nearly as tall as his commander. Blond hair hung in what looked like ragged dreads, highlighting a harsh face. He released the necklace he clutched, revealing a pendant made of… bones.

My fear ratcheted up another notch.

“Leave it. Let the humans deal with the mess.”

The record scratch in my head banished all thoughts of the feelings the commander had aroused in me.

Excuse me,humans? What exactly are they, if not human?

Refusal of the obvious truth rang through my mind, but then I remembered how Eric’s head was on his body one moment and gone the next.

My hand rose to my throat, and I felt the drying, sticky handprint left by the commander’s fingers.

No wonder the wound where Eric’s head had once been was so jagged.

The commander had ripped it off by hand.

“Not human” was making more sense with every passing second.

My certainty that I was the only human present intensified when a shimmer rippled in midair over the street, spreading outward until a large, pitch black circle formed.

Nope.

That was the line for me. Whatever paralysis had settled over me disappeared in an instant, and I dug my heels in when the commander tried to pull me toward the growing portal by the elbow.

Dread filled my gut as something—or more accurately, somewhere—began to materialize in the circle.

If I stepped through that doorway, it was over.

Never let them take you to a secondary location.

A swirly magical circle was doubly qualified as a secondary location.

I tried to yank my arm from his grip, using every ounce of strength I possessed—which wasn’t much. Of course, they had to go for the girl with a lifetime of chronic anemia issues.

I could have been pulling against a marble statue for all the good it did.

“Hurry up!” The snapped command made me jump, but I continued to fight. It turned out he hadn’t been talking to me, anyway.

The two men I’d seen so far hurried to obey, and two more stepped out of the shadows cast by the streetlight. As a unit, they strode toward the portal, but at the last second, one broke away.

“Are you sure about this? There’ll be no going back.” He was the young one who’d spoken earlier, breaking the spell between the commander and me. Now that I got a good, up-close look at him, and how normal he was against these LARPing psychopaths, something tugged at my mind.

Have I seen him before?

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