Page 22 of Helsing: Demon Slayer (The Dragon’s Paladins #1)

Dianne glanced at Ryan. He hadn’t answered her question about how he stayed in touch with Olivia. Maybe he wore an invisible earbud tethered to a cellphone in his backpack or pants. She had to find it, but searching his pants’ pockets would have to wait.

Kneeling, she reached into the backseat and pulled Ryan’s backpack into her lap to search for a phone.

Besides half a dozen chocolate bars, a wicked black knife that she almost cut herself on when she unknowingly engaged its release, and a large stainless-steel water bottle heavy with water, the bag held only flat, black cartridges filled with bullets.

In the front pocket, she found a leather travel wallet.

Inside, besides an American passport, a credit card, and some cash, there was a worn photo of a beautiful woman with long light-brown hair and the head tilt of someone used to taking selfies.

She wore a bikini and shiny lip gloss over a wide smile of bright teeth.

A surge of jealousy clutched Dianne’s chest. Who was she? Ryan’s girlfriend?

Just then Ryan muttered. Dianne shot a look at him.

She needed to get her head in the game, now .

Shoving the photo back into his wallet, she slid it into the backpack.

There was no cellphone or anything that looked like a communication device in the pocket.

She’d just have to get Ryan into the passenger seat somehow and drive farther on the highway, hoping that she’d stumble on Mihàil’s helicopter or at least find a place to stop and get help.

She had to trust that the daemons had targeted Germaine and that she and Ryan had been collateral damage.

Dianne got out and ran around the front of the car.

She tugged and shoved at the unconscious Ryan for a good ten minutes before two preternaturally handsome men in T-shirts and jeans coming from the direction of the church approached their borrowed Volkswagen.

Dianne didn’t know whether to be thankful or terrified.

She decided to be thankful when they asked her something in what she took to be Croatian, motioning to Ryan.

She tried to tell them what she needed in English in case they understood her.

Miraculously, they did. They smiled and motioned to Ryan, signaling that they would move him.

Dianne shot a nervous glance around the highway but saw no other cars or any sign in the clear-blue sky that a legion of daemons amassed above.

She nodded and watched as the two men, one on each side of the Volkswagen, moved Ryan into the passenger seat.

Dianne, who’d stood with her arms crossed scanning the environment for danger, realized with shock that it hadn’t taken them more than a few seconds.

When they’d finished, she asked them about Trnbusi, though she wasn’t sure what answer she expected to hear if they didn’t speak English. To her surprise, one of the men smiled and gestured back toward the church. Was that Trnbusi? Relief flooded her.

She tried to warn her saviors not to head north, sure that the scene of the earlier attack would still be a mess, but they only smiled again.

One said, “We go to battle evil.” And then the other said in a voice that Dianne felt inside her chest, “Dianne, May God bless you many times today.”

Dianne’s jaw dropped. How did he know her name? She wanted to ask, but her throat closed against the question.

The men smiled again, waved, got into their car and headed north against Dianne's advice.

In the time it took her to get into the driver’s seat and look in the rearview mirror, the car carrying the two men had vanished. That’s when she noticed that the tunic that Ryan had insisted that she wear glowed softly. Premonition moved through her, but of what, she couldn’t say.

Closing her eyes, she inhaled and said aloud, “Please God, help me. I can’t do this alone.”

She didn’t know what else to say or ask, so she put the car in drive, checked over her shoulder, and then backed up until she could pull out onto the highway.

Trnbusi turned out to be a small collection of white-stone houses with red-brick roofs two minutes’ drive south of the church. Even though Dianne drove slowly through the village, she saw no helicopter. She had no idea where one would put down anyway.

Ryan did, however, stir enough to groan and open his eyes halfway as they drove through a deserted intersection.

Dianne glanced at him, fear spiking at how pale he looked.

He’d seemed so strong, so vital on the ship and later during their running battle against daemons .

Now he seemed smaller and less intimidating somehow, even though the seat barely contained his massive bulk.

She wanted more than anything to take care of him, to make sure he was safe and could heal.

“Hey,” she said. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been hit by a truck. A tractor-trailer,” he said, the humor in his voice undercut by its weakness.

He lifted his head to look around. She could see the strain it caused him to do that, something so simple as hold his head upright. He let it relax after only a few seconds and closed his eyes. “Where are we?”

“Trnbusi, but I don’t see a helicopter anywhere.”

“Guess we’ll have to keep going then. How are you to drive? I need a little more time.”

“I can drive,” she said, studying him. “For as long as necessary. But we have to stop somewhere. You need medical attention, and I don’t think it can wait until we get to Fushe-Arrez. I doubt there’s a hospital there anyway.”

“Negative. We can’t draw attention to ourselves.

The daemons targeted Germaine and Mihàil, but they would have taken us if they could have.

They just didn’t have enough human foot soldiers there to throw at us.

” He paused, inhaling and holding his breath as if he held pain back with it.

“You’d be surprised at the state-of-the-art private clinic your sister and brother-in-law funded. ”

“Do you have a cellphone to call my sister?” she asked, looking back at the empty road, her terror for Ryan warring with her terror about the daemons hunting them. “I looked in your backpack but didn’t see one.”

“In my pants’ pocket.” His voice sounded weaker. “Just get me some chocolate. I’ll contact Olivia once I’ve eaten it. If we have to drive all the way, we can stop at the Shkoder safehouse for medical supplies. How do you feel about learning how to suture a wound?”

His question ended on a groan.

Panic gripped Dianne. She squelched it. She’d left the chocolate she’d tried to feed him in the center console.

Even if it had made her feel better after being battered by vicious daemoniacs , she doubted it would dull the pain she’d cause by her clumsy stitching of his torn flesh.

But it would certainly calm her nerves to give it to him.

In answer to his question about suturing his wound, she said, “About as happy as you sound,” as lightly as she could.

Reaching down, she picked up the loose square from the chocolate-paprika bar and held it out to him. He leaned over on another, deeper, groan and held her wrist with shaking fingers while he guided her hand to his mouth.

He stopped midway to look at the ring on her middle finger. “That’s an interesting design,” he said. “I’ve never seen a ring with a skeleton key on the bezel of a ring before. It almost looks like it can be used to unlock something.”

After he’d managed to get the chocolate square with his lips, Ryan sighed as he chewed.

Dianne brought her hand back to the steering wheel and gazed ahead, though she kept darting glances at him as much as she dared while driving.

They’d driven in silence for several minutes before she finally found the courage to confide in Ryan. “It does unlock something. The key, that is. It unlocks my cousin Emily’s diary. I had it made into a ring to remember her. She died when I was sixteen.”

“I’m sorry.” He sounded sincere.

She looked at him. He also looked less tense and pale. “Thank you.”

Before Ryan pulled out his cellphone, they came to a three-way intersection and had to choose whether to go left over a bridge or right around an outcropping of rock. No sign indicated where the latter headed, but Ryan seemed to know where they were.

“Take a right,” he said, his voice sounding more normal. “We’ll get on the A1/E65 toward Trebinje in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s a bigger highway, which may be a problem if the daemons find us. But now that we’ve left the others behind, I think it’s a better option.”

“Copy that,” said Dianne, echoing his earlier response to Olivia as she turned.

Ryan looked over at her, a smile quirking his mouth. “Thanks for helping with the Molotov cocktails back there in Split. We make a good team.”

Dianne couldn’t believe how good it felt to hear that. “I knew those long hours bartending in college would pay off eventually,” she said, grinning at him.

“I guess facing a bar lined with drunken frat boys isn’t too different from facing a line of jihadis ,” he said, humor clear in his tone. “They come in hot and take shots at a beautiful woman who’s captive behind the bar. You probably got pretty good at defending yourself.”

Beautiful woman . He thought she was beautiful. Now she felt downright giddy.

“More like drunken dads and husbands on vacation with their families,” she said. “But yeah, I learned a few moves, starting with befriending the bouncer.”

“Bet he expected a little quid pro quo for his services,” said Ryan, his voice rough with something more than annoyance. Jealousy, Dianne realized, and she latched onto it.

She shot a glance at him, trying to see if her read of him was right. He was staring out the windshield, his jaw clamped, and his eyes narrowed. His clenched hand on his thigh told its own story. He didn’t look like he was going to pass out again any time soon.

“What if he had?” she asked.

He looked at her, his eyes still narrowed. “That’s not part of the job,” he said, his jaw muscles working. “It makes him worse than the guys hitting on you. It makes him a bully and a manipulative asshole who uses women for sex.”

“I never said the bouncer propositioned me or that I took him up on it,” she said, holding his gaze, but her heart was pounding. His observation came way too close to describing her cousin Emily’s ex-boyfriend. “He didn’t, by the way.”

“Not my business.” Ryan looked away, but Dianne noticed that his hand unclenched and his battlefield glare disappeared. But then he looked back at her and said, “If he had, I’d beat the shit out of him if I ever met him.”

“Good to know,” she said, secretly pleased. She was also convinced that Ryan would be more than a match for the bouncer, who’d been large but soft and pudgy.

No guy had ever threatened physical violence on her behalf, but she realized she liked the idea of having her own personal defender. Too bad it had to end once they reached her sister’s house in Fushe-Arrez.

Or did it? She decided to see how he’d react to her next words. It wasn’t the kind of thing you told someone over cocktails. But something about the way he looked at her—quiet, steady, no trace of amusement—made her want to try. Just to see if he’d flinch … or lean closer.

She took a breath before saying, “Better than you beating the shit out of me.” She used his words on purpose—not as an accusation, but to signal something raw, something she wasn’t ready to name out loud.

The change that came over Ryan’s features took her breath away. She imagined the lightning in his gaze could strike someone dead. It was in sharp contrast to the granite of his jaw.

When he spoke, his cold voice sent chills down her spine. “Any man who lays hands on a woman is less than a man. A beating is too good for him.”

“You’d just love Jai then. He strangled my cousin Emily to death six weeks after she graduated high school.”

Silence descended like a thunderclap. Dianne had no idea why she’d dropped that conversation bomb. Maybe it was to quell whatever crazy feelings had started to brew inside of her the longer she was in Ryan’s presence.

Finally, Ryan said in a quiet voice, “That explains a lot.”

Dianne glanced at him before staring straight ahead, her heart beating so fast she thought it would break out of her chest. She felt vulnerable, exposed in a way she couldn’t explain. Somehow Ryan understood her. She said nothing else, and Ryan didn’t press her for more.

After several moments, he continued as if she hadn’t just unloaded too much information on him—TMI as her friends would say, laughing. “By the way, how did you get me into this seat?”

She glanced again at Ryan, now studying his cellphone. “A couple of guys came along, from the local church, I think, and moved you.”

“Lucky for us,” he said, giving her a critical look. But he didn’t say anything else. Instead, he held the phone up and squinted at the black screen while squeezing his thumb on the power button on the side. The screen remained blank.

“Damn.”

“What? Forgot to charge your phone on the ship?”

Ryan shook his head. “No, I never forget that.”

He reached back for his backpack, dragging it into his lap before pulling out a black cord from the front pocket. He plugged it into the USB port on the console.

Dianne waited, dread crawling down her back.

Finally, Ryan sat upright. “The battery’s not empty. The phone has been fried by the massive harmonic disruption this morning. Looks like we’re incommunicado until we get to Shkoder. Better hope we don’t cross paths with any daemons on the way.”

His hard gaze caught and held hers. “Because I’m not exactly up for a firefight.”

And saying this, he held up his hand to show her his side where blood had soaked his black T-shirt and pants all the way down to his ankles.