“I’ll kill him quick. He won’t know what hit him, I swear. And you get to walk away. If you can.” He brushed a thumb over Will Robinson to demonstrate his meaning. “You’re going to call him and get him over here, but if you tip him off, I’ll make it slow for him and even slower for you.” He buried his face in my hair and inhaled.

“Why?” I asked, searching the area frantically for a weapon. I could still have summoned Reyes. It wasn’t as though the man could hurt him in his incorporeal form, but I really wanted to know why he was after my affianced. Why he wanted to kill him quick. Why he wanted to kill him at all. Reyes charging in here and maiming the man before we got answers would do neither of us any good. “What did he ever to do you?”

The man barked a humorless laugh. “Ain’t never done anything to me. Just the price of being who he is, I guess.”

What the hell? Was this guy possessed? Was he sent to kill Reyes? And why lie in wait for me? From the look of things, he’d been waiting for at least a week.

“Who sent you?” I asked, relaxing against him in the hopes he’d respond by loosening his grip. I’d spotted a grungy wooden spoon half hidden under the brushed aluminum prep table. It wasn’t much, but if I dropped to the floor, letting my weight jerk me out of his grip, I might could get to it, break the handle, and use it to defend myself before he had a chance to sink the screwdriver into my back. Which would suck on several levels.

Did I dare risk summoning Reyes? He would be so angry with me. The dread of that scenario was almost more than the dread I felt toward screwdriver man.

“Call him. Get him over here. And make it good or you get a shiv in your throat before you can cry uncle.”

That seemed horridly unpleasant. When I reached into my front pocket, his grip tightened.

“I’m just getting my phone. But you must not know Reyes very well if you think you’re going to take him on with a screwdriver.”

“I’ve taken on bigger with less,” he assured me.

“Right. Like I said, you must not know him.”

I took out my phone, but he stopped me with a thoughtful, “What do you mean?”

“I mean that on Reyes’s first day in gen pop, three of the biggest, baddest members of the South Side gang were sent to take him out. Less than thirty seconds later, they all lay dead on the cafeteria floor while Reyes remained completely unscathed. Winded, but unscathed. They’d had weapons, too.”

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered to himself. “I f**king knew it. Dollar, that f**king piece of shit.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, trying to reason with an addict. An impossible feat on my best day. And clearly today was not my best day.

He twisted a hand into my hair and jerked my head back. His emotions gushed out as though a dam had broken. The drugs he was on, most likely meth, were making him unpredictable and even more dangerous. His emotions went from a sadistic joy to an absolute rage within the span of a heartbeat. He’d been duped by someone, but I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. Did someone named Dollar send him? Was that even a real name?

“Only thing you got to understand is now I got myself a predicament,” he said, pulling the tip of my ear between his teeth again, his teeth sinking lightly into the cartilage before moving to the lobe.

I tried to jerk away, but his fingers entangled in my hair would have none of it.

“Do I shove this flathead into your skull or —?”

I locked my focus on to the spoon and waited for him to give me option B, hoping it would prove to be far more appealing than option A. If I didn’t survive this day, Beep wouldn’t survive this day, and that was not an option at all. So I gave him a moment to evaluate his choices, to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse, but after a pause that seemed to stretch for several minutes, I heard a sound like a tear or a rip, then a gurgling sound. His grip didn’t ease, even when I felt a warmth saturate the back of my neck to trickle down my shirt.

Startled, I pushed out of his grip, but he tried to hold on to me when I turned to face him. His lids were saucerlike, shock and fear radiating out of him in hot waves as blood gushed out of his throat, his esophagus and surrounding tendons laid open as though a lion had taken a swipe at him. I shoved to break his hold, but he kept a grip on my shirt. Warm, sticky blood sprayed out of him and onto me in pulsating bursts, his mouth open in horror as his life drained from his body. As his expression faded.

I fell back and he lurched forward, still clinging to me. We fell to the ground, his blood soaking my shirt and my hair in seconds.

My mind instantly jumped to Reyes, but he had never done anything like this before. He worked much cleaner, causing internal destruction with no external trauma whatsoever. Without an MRI, there was no way of knowing exactly how much damage he’d done to someone on the inside.

The man’s head lolled onto my shoulder, the deluge slowing as his weight pinned me to the filthy, now blood-soaked floor. Before I could come up with another theory, a sound raked over me, low and vicious, the deep, raw undertones reverberating through to my bones. I paused a solid five seconds as absolute terror took hold of me.

Before I lost control of my faculties altogether, I squirmed beneath the deadweight of my attacker. I felt a sharp tug on my left arm followed by a raging sting as I scrambled out from under him and ran for my life. Literally. I didn’t look back. I didn’t dare. I scaled the stairs, the adrenaline pumping through me like rocket fuel, and ran down the hall to the front doors, heedless of the trash and debris in my path. Hitting the door like a nuclear missile, I stumbled into the blinding daylight and sprinted to the gate, where my mind couldn’t quite latch on to the code. My gaze darted around wildly, trying to spot the beast before it ripped my throat out as well. Somewhere in the frantic recesses of my mind, I registered a blistering pain in my left arm and the thundering beats of my heart. I backed against the gate, laced my fingers through the chain link, and stared at the front door like a sentry. Waiting. Dreading.