Defying Fate Read Online Free

he was sick of Dante jacking off in the backseat.
    “I’m heading back,” Spencer said.
    Dante grunted with disinterest. “What about Zane? Shouldn’t we pick him up?”
    “Maybe,” Spencer said, mentally calculating the distance to base. How long would it take for them to realize that they had lost contact?
    They could pick Zane up, as long as they were quick about it.
    He turned on the hood-mounted spotlights as he crept toward the bar. It was a warehouse-sized brick box at the next intersection, monolithic in the darkness of the night. His lights fell on the dusty windows.
    The screen of the GPS navigator fuzzed, and the earpiece’s beeping cut off.
    Frowning, Spencer rapped a knuckle on the screen. “Hey, Dante,” he began.
    The wall of the bar exploded onto the street.
    The blast rocked the SUV, making the suspension squeal. Half of a brick smashed into the windshield. Glass sagged toward Spencer’s face.
    Another explosion. The south half of the building collapsed with a roar of shattering brick, and Spencer thought he heard gunfire. Dust billowed over the road.
    Dante was out of the SUV in an instant, his girlfriend’s tits forgotten.
    “Take cover!” he shouted, crouched behind the wheel his shotgun. His curls were white with brick dust. Spencer shielded his head with his arms as he jumped out of the driver’s seat.
    Wooden beams groaned and snapped. The north corner of the bar collapsed with a street-shaking concussion.
    Dante peered over the hood of the car. “Oh, shit,” he said, hugging the shotgun to his chest and launching around the bumper.
    Shotgun blasts rocked the air. A man screamed, interrupting Spencer’s fumbling attempts to load the handgun he had grabbed from under the driver’s seat.
    Was that Dante’s voice? Or was it Zane’s?
    Spencer craned over the hood to see what was happening in the bar. The entire street-facing wall was missing, baring the guts of electrical wiring, wooden studs, and plumbing. A waterfall fountained from an exploded pipe on the third floor. The haze of dust made it impossible to make anything out below that.
    “Dante?” Spencer called, knuckles white on the gun.
    The screaming stopped.
    A gust swept over the street, and Spencer coughed into his arm as the debris whipped past him. But before he could shelter in the SUV, the wind stopped, leaving silence in its wake.
    He straightened to peer over the car.
    Spencer was ready to face anything that might emerge from the wreckage of the bar. After that kind of mess, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see the mother of all demons herself strutting onto the street.
    But the man standing over Dante’s limp body wasn’t the mother of all demons, nor was he one of her offspring. He didn’t have the pale skin, dark eyes, and weird hair. But Spencer wasn’t so sure that meant he was human, either.
    The man wore a pair of jeans with the fly unbuttoned so that they hung loose around his hips, and a shirt hanging open over his chest. Every inch of bare skin below the neck was covered in marks that looked like they might have been drawn by a graffiti artist.
    Despite all of the shooting Spencer had heard, he didn’t look like he had a single injury on his body.
    Spencer leveled the gun and braced his elbows on the hood. He licked his lips, trying to find moisture to make his tongue work. “You’re under arrest. This area’s been evacuated for weeks, and you’re trespassing.”
    Judging by Dante’s limp body, trespassing was the least of this guy’s crimes, but better to start with the easy stuff.
    “It will take a small army to remove me from this hotel,” the man said in a cultured voice, almost like a college professor.
    “We can probably arrange that.”
    “Good.”
    Plaster sprinkled from the floor above. Both of them looked up at the same time.
    Zane staggered out of a second floor bedroom. Blood coursed down his cheek. Even though he was barely standing, he managed to keep a solid grip on his gun.