Page 264 of Tar City
“I’m fucking the best. I just saved you an hour ago.”
“Do you fuck all your friends like that?”
He thinks about it for a bit. “I mean… if they beg.”
I kick him hard.
“Pitfire—” He laughs, rubbing his leg. “Careful. You’re gonna fall off this roof.”
“Your idea to bring a girl high on who-knows-what to a rooftop,” I retort.
“This was actually a terrible idea.” Then his eyes light up suddenly. “I got a better one.”
I look at him, already dreading it. “No. Absolutely not. I’m not letting you take pictures of my feet.”
He laughs. “What is wrong with you?”
“At the moment, or in general? Be more specific.”
“I was going to ask you to let me take you somewhere tomorrow.”
“As a friend or as fuck buddy?”
“As a friend,” he says solemnly. “I promise to keep my dick in my pants.”
I look at him.
“Just this one thing,” he says. “Then I swear I won’t come looking for you again.”
I raise an eyebrow. “A bold promise. And if we bump into each other?”
“I’ll pretend I don’t know you.”
I take one last, long drag from my cigarette, letting the smoke burn my lungs before flicking the butt into the darkness below. “Fine. Now please take me home before I seduce you again and we have to start this all over.”
He just looks at me. “Do you talk to all your friends like that?”
“Only my fuck buddies,” I shoot back.
His smile widens, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “This ‘friend’ thing is going to be fucking torture, isn’t it?”
I push myself to my feet, brushing the dirt from my jeans. “I’m counting on it.”
Seventy-Three
NOW | JAX
By the time I reach the tunnel, the fog in my head is gone, replaced by a hard clarity. I stopped thinking the moment I understood what I had to do. Stopped feeling. Stopped being anything but the weapon that’s going to get her back. I walk into the tunnel with one goal:to finally let the beast off its fucking leash.
My boots echo, each step a nail in the coffin of the man I used to be. I stop where the passage curves, where the stone walls sweat black, the city’s pores oozing the sickness that’s been in my blood for a decade.
The moon is a fucking spotlight, but I don’t need it. I let my vision bleed into the dark, until I can see the energy in the rock, the fear in the stone.
I look down at my hand. No more orders. No more fighting. An invitation. Black liquid bleeds from my palm, hits the ground, slides through cracks, crawling up the walls and burrows into the black veins that lead to the pit. I’m not just a man in a tunnel anymore. I’m a goddamn infection, and I’m spreading.
I let my senses follow it down. The change hits me like fucking lightning. My spine snaps, a loud, wet crack that shouldhave crippled me. My muscles writhe under my skin, my bones grinding, reshaping themselves into something deadlier.
The world explodes. Smell, sound, sight—all of it turned up to a thousand. I can smell the despair on the other side of the city, hear the lies being whispered in bedrooms a mile away. Then it happens: the tar inside me plugs into the main. Power floods my system,a black ocean drowning out the last part of Jax St. Clair.
