*Preacher – the story and all related characters – belong to the writers, cast and crew of the show. I claim no ownership or association to the TV series titled Preacher, based on the comic of the same name.*
Chapter 2
A Bleedin' Tasmanian Devil
"Why should I trust you?
Why should I trust a lying,
junkie vampire who thinks
everything's a joke?"
– Jesse Custer
Preacher, S02E05
The sound of blood pounding in her ears told her she was awake.
Holly Nelson came up out of the dark, scrambling desperately for information. A bad taste coated the inside of her mouth. She'd been sedated.
That she remembered clearly.
The sting of a syringe. Muscles straining against her restraints and then the fuzzy heat tingling all through her body. She'd known what was happening to her, could do nothing to resist the pull of chemical sedation.
Her mind sank; the darkness closing over her, and it felt very much like drowning. Pulled inexorably down into a crushing depth. There hadn't even been dreams. There were dreams now, though, disjointed thoughts like bursts of light.
Despite the drugs still swimming through her bloodstream, Holly woke with the presence of mind to take inventory. The first thing to register was the scent of smoke, wafts curling around her nostrils as if begging to be inhaled.
Her mouth was dry.
The foul taste coating the inside part dehydration. She'd been unconscious for a long while. Coherence returning too slowly, it was hard to pull her mind from the haze. So easy to sink back into uneasy sleep . . .
Holly let her eyes fall open, wincing at the sunlight spilling through curtains drawn against the dawn. Too bright. Her head pounded. Her stomach heaved and she turned her face away, nausea rising bitterly into her throat.
She would not be sick.
She would . . . not . . .
Holly curled her fingers into her palms, fingertips tingling like static on an old TV. A lack of circulation coupled with the damage done to her shoulders; her rotator cuffs overextended, having been forced too far back and held that way for too long.
She was supposed to be dead.
She could still feel the bite of the knife digging into her throat, that hard, swift cut that drew only a little blood. Shallow wound. It wasn't intended to hurt her, only frighten with the promise of greater pain and the burst of rage like lightening in White's glacial eyes when she held his stare.
Defiant.
Holly felt the sting of hot sweat at the memory.
When they'd slid the needle into her arm, this fuzzy warmth like cotton filling her mouth, dizziness and then nothing . . . she had been certain they were euthanizing her. Had screamed, then, and fought for all the good it did.
She had not expected to regain consciousness.
Not ever.
Why, then, was she unbound, lying fully clothed on a bed? She wiggled her toes and felt the rub of socks on her feet. The scent of smoke curled tantalizingly, harsh in her lungs but familiar.
Tobacco.
Holly turned her upper body around, warbling gaze finding her captor. He sat on the floor, rolling a joint between deft fingers and the ease of long practice. A cigarette hanging almost daintily off his bottom lip.
He was not what she expected; not one of White's men for sure.
A rough carpet of stubble shadowed a lean jaw. Tired eyes. A thatch of dark hair, the ends spiked stiff with drying blood. His t-shirt hung off a thin frame, doing nothing to mask the hard cut of lean muscle beneath.
Blue jeans, frayed and worn as the man wearing them. He sat with his legs hiked up to fit between the bed and the wall.
A chill worked its way down the centre of her back.
He had to be a solid foot taller than her. At a minimum. Holly was no wilting flower – with her background and the training that background entailed, she had faith in herself. She could, could win, but she'd been overpowered once already and that . . .
She'd been captured and summarily executed.
It didn't seem to matter that no, she wasn't dead. She'd believed she was being killed, believed it as the needle pierced her skin. As the darkness swept over her, through her, suffocating heat and the memory of that terror had shaken her to her very core.
Now she was awake. Alive. Breathing in cigarette smoke, head pressing on a pillow that stank of old sweat and weed, she had been left with one man to guard her and it was a struggle to pull all the scattered pieces of herself together.
He reminded her of a wiry coyote, a scrapper and she . . .
. . . she would probably throw up.
Granted, projectile vomiting all over him would make for one hell of a distraction.
Holly cast a furtive look toward the only door, white paint chipped and flaking.
"Wouldn't try it if I were you, luv. If you run," he said, the words running together through an Irish accent so thick she could have poured it over coffee "we both die."
Was that a threat?
Holly held herself still, hardly daring to breathe though her chest ached to fill with air. She'd frozen at the first sound of his voice. Her eyes narrowed as the man finally glanced up. He sucked on his smoke, the end of it flaring angry red.
It was the heat, not the smell, that did her in.
Sweat needled the back of her neck, forehead, arms and legs.
Moving faster than Holly's warbling vision could process, the man dropped his joint and plucked a plastic garbage pail from the floor. He had her head shoved on top of it, all in the time it took liquid to rocket into her throat.
Head whirring with dizziness, she threw up. Too miserable to care that a stranger, her captor, possibly her murderer had her long hair clutched in a fist. Keeping the sweaty strands from falling into her own mess.
Holly heaved again, shoulders arching, fingers clenching around the side of the mattress.
"Yeah," the man muttered. "Yeah. That's a shit feeling."
Sticky tears blurring her vision, Holly lifted her face from the pail and sucked in clean air. He wasn't standing over her, but crouched unsteadily down at her level. She met a pair of hazel eyes narrowed in what might have been sympathy.
Might have been a lot of things.
A shiver of sick rolled up her spine and Holly clutched the side of the mattress.
Everything seemed like it was moving. The pitch and sway of the bed beneath her. Night table. Dresser pushed up against one wall. Narrow window and the buttery yellow rays of the rising sun defused through the curtain.
Pull yourself together, she thought numbly, the voice in her head sounding suspiciously like that of her instructor back at Quantico, You're not helpless. Look around. What d'you have?
Her stomach gurgled.
The man lifted the pail again.
Holly's shaking fingers closed over cool ceramic. A bulbous lamp plugged into the wall at the head of the bed. She caught it up in one hand, the awkward weight slipping, and slammed it into the man's skull.
He yelped like a struck puppy, the sound almost comical given the situation. Her stomach gave another dangerous lurch but Holly was already off the bed. Shaking, weak, sweating. Door! Where was the door!?
She heard the man topple into the window, the clatter of a curtain rod pulled off the wall. Clear morning light spilled into the room. The man cried out again; real panic this time and pain.
Holly plowed dizzily into the bedroom wall, trembling fingers sliding off the doorframe. Down, lower, to the cool brass of a dented knob. She twisted hard, heart pounding as she braced to feel the cut of hard fingers on her shoulders.
Nobody touched her.
She yanked the door open, nearly swinging herself back into the room. Ahead of her, a dimly lit corridor. Behind? She cast a single frantic look back and saw the man wrapping himself up in the collapsed curtains.
What?
Holly stumbled from the bedroom.
"Wait! No, wait, come back!"
The man's voice chased after her.
One foot in front of the other . . . it shouldn't have been this hard but Holly could barely get her trembling body to cooperate. She felt cold. She felt hot. Feverish. Her gaze swung, training having conditioned her to check doorways while the dizziness had her crashing into them instead.
A chipped and peeling bathroom to her right. Door open. Empty. She nearly pitched inside, both hands reaching to steady herself on the wall and . . . missing . . .
Dark metal glinted, stark against her brown skin.
Surprising enough that it stopped her. A pattern of whorls and what looked like twigs etched into the icy metal of the slim gray cuff.
Hand clutching a doorframe, knees threatening to buckle, Holly lifted her other arm to check for its double – her first thought having been that this was some sort of shackle – but there was none. The bracelet clamped around her wrist, tight enough so that she couldn't slip it off, could have been a handcuff only there didn't seem to be any way to open it.
There was another bedroom. Not empty; a woman lay on her stomach on the bed, paging through a magazine. Tight black jeans hugging an equally tight ass, hair cropped short. Pretty face under a bruise browning high on her cheek.
Holly met the woman's cool stare, holding it just long enough to send a fresh surge of panic through her.
A brothel.
That's what White had done; delivered her to a brothel. Left with a guard but not tied down and that chilled her to her core. There would be no reason to restrain her, if there was nowhere to go. The woman swung her legs off the side of the bed, coming for her –
Holly slammed the bedroom door closed. To hell with that. The apartment wasn't large and it was a straight shot down one dimly lit hall to freedom; she could see it. A front door. She felt sick down to her bones but couldn't stop the forward momentum. Not now when she was so close . . .
He caught her just as she burst into the kitchen. Two strong arms closed around her midsection.
She screamed and without thinking that she should, even remembering that she could, Holly cracked her head sharply backward, the back of her skull connecting with the man's face. She heard the crunch of cartilage. The shout of surprised pain, quickly followed by a string of cusses too heavy for her to make out.
More importantly, Holly felt the iron bands around her waist loosen.
She turned in his arms, not attempting to pull free and brought her knee up.
Anticipating her maneuver, the man twisted his hips and she missed his groin by a mile but that was fine. She hadn't been aiming for it. Instead her knee drove solidly into his kidney and the man oof-ed! She followed through with the palm of her cuffed right hand, driving it into the mess of meaty blood that used to be a nose.
Or she tried to.
He used his body. The entire length of him pressed to hers, forcing Holly back into the sharp side of a refrigerator with enough force that the heavy appliance rocked under her. He caught her flailing wrists.
"Aye! Enough. Gah, you're like the bleedin' Tasmanian Devil."
His eyes were hazel brown, flecked with blue and green, his face pressed too close to her own. Holly held his gaze. Trembling. This near to him, she could smell the blood leaking from his nose. Feel his breath hot on her skin.
The man had the lacy, off-white curtain from the bedroom wrapped around his head like a shawl. Tassel ends falling over his forehead down to his brows. He looked ridiculous. Out of her peripheral she saw movement.
It was the woman from the room, sauntering down the hall.
"What the hell, Cassidy. Leave you alone for ten minutes an' she beats the crap out of you."
The woman sounded more entertained than concerned. The man – Cassidy – turned his face away to respond, a slight frown creasing between his brows –
– Holly lifted her feet off the floor, surrendering her weight to her captor.
His grip on her wrists tightened reflexively and she drove the heel of one foot into his knee, feeling that leg buckle while her other foot slammed back down on the ground. Holding herself upright in the second it took for Cassidy to collapse.
The girl dropped him like a goddamn navy seal.
Cassidy pulled himself off the floor, ears ringing, a grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. She was fast, fierce, a wildcat . . .
. . . and she had training.
The kind that didn't come from some strip mall dojo.
Tulip vaulted over the chair thrown down in front of her and charged after the fleeing woman to drag her ass back. Not to the apartment, but to him.
Scared, she ran from them, but she didn't understand.
She was going to die.
The rush of blood in Holly's head thickened.
She made it out into the hall, upending a chair to stumble the woman who gave chase but that wouldn't stop her and the corridor outside confirmed Holly's suspicion that she was in a building.
Yellow light lanced through an opening at the very end of the hall. Sunlight. Was that sunlight? It had to be because if not, she was dead. Holly moved quickly, numbered doors blurring in her peripheral and managed a short distance before pain tore up her arm with such ferocity she thought the flesh must have been shredded into ribbon.
A flurry of spots danced across her vision as Holly careened first off a wall, then into a doorway. The cool metal of the hoop locked around her wrist grew hot. Hotter. Scalding where it pressed into her skin and yet she felt that distantly.
The bloody, meaty thickness – like pressure building inside her skull – moved from her head to her chest. Her heart. Oh, god, her heart seemed to swell inside her. The weight of it incredible, beating. Beating. She was having a heart attack.
At twenty-three?
Yes.