Fury’s Kiss Read Online Free Page A

stepped away from me again.
    “Look.” She nodded at the mirror. Her whole hand trembled as she raised it to point at my reflection.
    “Fine,” I hissed through gritted teeth, turning toward it. “But just so you know—”
    Oh. My. God. My eyes were something out of a horror movie, the usually hazel irises now a dark, orangey red surrounded by black. My pupils were an even darker, true red.
    Blood red.
    My hair danced like someone waved a static electricity wand over my head, long strands weaving and tangling around themselves. If you watched for a minute, it kind of looked like… I turned my head sideways.
    Like snakes.
    Alex’s reflection next to mine was pale-faced and breathless, and it made me inexplicably furious. She and Rachel were like sisters to me, and this was what it took to convince them I was telling the truth? Some friends they were.
    I had a mental flash of Alex and Rachel lying in the living room, still and swollen like the man from the parking lot, and I tore my gaze away from the mirror. What was I doing?
    With intense effort, I forced myself to calm down enough to remember the meditation classes I sometimes went to at the local rec center and pictured a door slamming shut, cutting off my anger from the rest of me. Immediately, my hair went limp and my anger faded away. I braced myself against the sink, breathing heavily. When I leaned closer to look at my eyes again, my irises were back to the same familiar hazel they’d always been.
    I met Alex’s frightened gaze in the mirror, then turned to look at Rachel as I asked the question we all had to be thinking. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
    No one volunteered an answer, so I staggered back into the living room and made it as far as the couch before my legs went rubbery and gave out. Alex braced herself against a bookshelf, and Rachel sagged weakly onto the arm of the cushy old chair we’d found at a yard sale the summer before.
    “You really did kill that guy, didn’t you?” she whispered.
    “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” My voice began to rise again, but I forced the panic down to a more manageable, gut-churning level of anxiety. I rubbed my temples with my fingertips as if I could massage away the memory of what had happened the night before.
    Then I dropped my hands to stare down at my left wrist. “My arm doesn’t hurt anymore.”
    “So what?” Alex said. “Come on, Tara, focus. We’ve got a big problem here.”
    “It’s just, whatever happened last night…” I flexed my fingers and my skin tingled. I looked up at her with wide eyes. “When I changed just now… I think I healed myself.”
    I bent forward to hide my face in my hands. “God, what am I going to do? I’m turning into some kind of freak and the cops are going to come looking for me, probably sooner rather than later. Nora and this guy, Jackson, saw me leave the bar at the same time the dead guy and his friend showed up.”
    I purposely avoided saying the dead man’s name—Clinton Miller—out loud.
    “Are you sure you don’t want to tell the police what happened?” Alex asked. “I mean, I’m not the biggest fan of cops, but this is kind of a big deal.”
    A montage of every police procedural I’d ever seen flashed through my head and panic rose in my throat again. I thought about having to endure the questions that would follow my report, the medical exam I would be subjected to, and shook my head decisively. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
    Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to report what had happened. Hawthorne was a small town and if I wasn’t pegged as a criminal, I would always be a victim. I couldn’t face living that way.
    Rachel took a deep breath. “OK, it’s your choice. You know we’ll support you whatever you decide.”
    I reached for her and Alex’s hands. “Thanks, you guys. Seriously.”
    Rachel smiled weakly. “So I guess the important thing now is to figure out how we’re