Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers Read Online Free Page B

attacker had knocked me out and shot Erin.
    It was the only story that made sense. The only possible explanation.
    But they would determine all of that after I’d been in jail for months. After I’d had a lawyer assigned to me and been dragged over the coals in a long trial.
    By that time, my life would already be ruined. The killer long gone.
    It wouldn’t be any justice for Erin.
    No, I wasn’t going on trial. I wasn’t following the Bloody Douchebag Gang into prison. It wasn’t happening.
    Someone had messed with Erin—had messed with me —and I was going to find out who.
    That was the decision I’d come to after five minutes of pacing in the holding cell. It only took a split second after that to decide how I’d escape.
    You see, I’d been able to escape this whole time. But Suzy had asked me to cooperate, so I had been cooperating. Why not? Someone had been going to save me anyway.
    But since the OPA thought I was guilty too, there was no point in sticking around. There was only one person that could prove my innocence, and that guy was me. I wouldn’t be able to do it if I was stuck behind bars.
    I climbed up on the bench. It had been bolted to the wall so that it couldn’t be used as a weapon. It wasn’t directly below the narrow barred window, but it was only a foot or two to the right, and I could reach it. I had long arms. And not just long—but muscular.
    Three days a week at the gym hadn’t built me up like a bear. I mostly went to do the cardio machines. A few hours on the treadmill to help make sure that I could catch a suspect on foot.
    What had given me these insane shoulders were the foul-tasting poultices that I chewed every morning, the potions brewed on my stovetop in Walmart cookware, and the charms I kept hidden in my gun safe.
    I wasn’t a normal human. Not like these cops were, and not like the people they usually arrested were.
    They weren’t ready for someone like me.
    My hands tightened on the bars. My forearms flexed and the muscles bulged like steel cable under the skin. The scratches from wrist to elbow twisted and distorted. Magic surged in my veins.
    Crunch .
    I was holding the window in my hands. Pulled it free of the brick, steel frame and all. I dropped it to the bench and didn’t look behind me. I knew the cops were coming—that hadn’t been a quiet noise. I could hear them shouting, and I had about three seconds before someone freaked out and shot me in the back.
    Hauling myself into the window frame, I wriggled my shoulders through. They almost got stuck, like a snake that had eaten a mouse too big for its maw. But once I had that part out, the rest of me was no problem. It was an easy drop to the ground outside.
    I was in a parking lot. It was raining hard. There were police cruisers around—a lot of police cruisers. The fence was twice my height and topped with barbed wire.
    It only took a second for a skull-shattering alarm to go off.
    Jesus, my hangover wasn’t loving that.
    Three long strides and I’d reached the fence. Dug my fingers into the chain-link, found a toehold, started climbing. Domingo would be proud to see how fast I moved.
    At the joint where the fence formed a right angle, there were two posts right next to each other without barbed wire on top. Good handholds. Nothing sharp that could cut me open.
    I leveraged myself over the top and dropped onto the street.
    The alarm had gone off quickly, but the men who were following me were slow, sluggish humans, unprepared for a magically juiced witch on the run. I wondered what they thought of what they saw—how quickly I had crossed the parking lot and scaled the fence, how little the fall to the other side had fazed me. I wonder if they might have been thinking that something supernatural had been going on or if they just thought I was on speed or something.
    Denial was a hell of a drug.
    Either way, I was out of there in a heartbeat.

 

6
     
    There was nothing free about being a man on the run.