Page 17 of The Last True Hero
A critter chirped in the slowly descending night. Frog, maybe?
"What is it?" Mia whispered.
"I thought...."
She was going to have a heart attack from the suspense.
"Thought I heard something following us, but it's either really quiet or we scared it off." McClain knelt down, pressing his fingers into a faint impression in the dirt. "There's some kind of animal living here. "
"Shadow-cats?" A chill ran through her and she spun, her gun quivering as her hands shook. A pack of mutated shadow-cats had taken her parents when she was younger. She could still remember finding their abandoned jeep covered in claw marks where the shadow-cats peeled it open like a tin of rotten beans. Jenny had tried to shield her from it, but that bloody image was burned straight into her brain.
"I don't think so. This is smaller."
"Maybe kits?" She looked around nervously. The problem with shadow-cats was that you never saw them coming. They'd been cloned back before the Darkening, with intense camouflage patterns that made them almost invisible in the dark, which just happened to be their favorite time to hunt.
"Not sure." McClain straightened. "But the reivers are definitely here. I can see bootprints."
And they were the focus. Mia let out a slow breath. Sage. Sage could be here with the reivers.Ifthey could find them. This place was enormous with its hulking buildings, ruins, and strange oddments peeking through the vines....
"And whatever left these tracks is long gone. These are hours old."
Hours. "Ha. Yeah. Long gone. That's really comforting."
"You wanted to come."
She gripped her shotgun tighter. "And I still do. I just hate knowing there's something out there that probably wants to eat us."
"Good thing I brought you then," he said. "I can probably run faster than you."
She stared at his muscled back. Was that a joke? "I'm leaner than you are, and shorter. I probably look stringy. You, however, are Grade-A rump. If I were looking for plenty of meat, I know who I'd pick."
McClain glanced over his shoulder at her. He paused. "Did you just...."
Mia smiled, and looked him up and down. "Jade used to say that you could bounce a pre-D penny off that ass."
Jade wasn't the only one who'd commented on it. Mia scrambled past him, climbing up what looked like a fallen pile of bricks.
McClain moved a little slower, as though he were chewing over what she'd just said. "I thought you'd prefer to sink your teeth in my ass? Wasn't that whatyoutold her?"
Mia jerked to a halt. She'd definitely said that. "How did you...?"
"You're not as quiet as you think you are." He held out his hand, as though to help her step over a fallen beam.
Mia's eyes narrowed. She remembered that night. She'd had one too many sips of her own homebrew. But she knew McClain had been across the room from her.
There was no physical way he could have heard her.
"Do you read lips now?"
His smile was hot and slow. It burned her all the way through. "Maybe. Or maybe I was just focusing real hard on yours. I couldn't stop thinking about them that whole month."
"You were dreaming if you thought I was going to kiss you," she said, with a snort. Anything to defuse the sudden situation she'd found herself in.
"If I were dreaming," he countered, "then I wouldn't have been imagining your mouth on mine. Those lips would have been elsewhere."
She had a sudden intense flash of what his naked body might look like. All tanned skin, like the darkened gold of his arms, and cut with muscle.
Shit. Every nerve in her body lit on fire. She was pretty sure her nipples just flagged his attention. McClain had spent the entire month in her bar uttering sweet nothings at her. It hadn't ever gone further than that, and he'd remained politely distant, as though testing out her intentions but not quite pushing hard for them.
