Read Online Broken Heart 05 Over My Dead Body by Michele Bardsley - Free Book Online Page B

and the ends weren’t touching.”
    “So, either someone’s incompetent or they wanted you to escape.” This observation came from Brady. He locked eyes with Damian, who nodded. Apparently, the lycan had been thinking along the same lines.
    “How did you get here, in Broken Heart?” I asked, repeating Patsy’s second question.
    “Not sure. I saved the giant and then I woke up starving. There was honey, and I went for it, straight into the damned trap.”
    “Did he say giant?” asked Eva.
    I nodded. “Zerina said there weren’t any more.”
    “ ’Tis true,” said Patrick. “The last time anyone saw one alive and walking around was more than four hundred years ago.”
    Hmm. Zerina had been created about that same time. Flet had known she was the outcast, but seemed not to know that the pixies and giants were no longer around. “Flet, where did you live before you came here?”
    “Dorchester,” said Flet. “Though me and mine have lived forever. We were part of the world before it was the world. We settled among the Dumnonii and lived peacefully in their kingdom for thousands of years.”
    “The Dumnonii were a Celtic tribe that occupied part of what’s now Dorset,” said Eva. “There’s a very famous giant there, near a town called Cerne Abbas.”
    “Yes!” said Flet excitedly. “That is where last I lived. The giant rescued me from a spider’s web and I became his for a time.”
    “Wait,” said Patsy. She moved the hand rubbing her belly to her forehead. She closed her eyes and sucked in a breath. “There’s a giant wandering around England?”
    Eva laughed. “No. The Cerne Abbas giant is a chalk outline on the hillside. Many pagans claim it’s been on the hillside since the second century, maybe even earlier, as a fertility symbol. It’s more likely the giant was carved into the hillside four hundred years ago, perhaps representing Oliver Cromwell as Hercules. The giant carries a club and it’s . . . er, naked.”
    “Jesus H. Christ,” muttered Patsy. “I’m so not in the goddamned mood for naked anything.” She patted her husband’s shoulder. “No offense, babe.”
    “None taken,” he said, drawing her into his arms.
    She leaned her head on his shoulder and said, “I’m cranky, hungry, and dragging ass here, folks. Let’s get down to brass tacks already.”
    Four hundred years ago, the last of the giants had disappeared—and one had appeared as a drawing on an English hillside. Around that same time, Zerina had been an alchemical wet dream realized. Three centuries later, all the pixies were gone. . . . All but one. How did it all link together? Maybe it didn’t. Shoot. It wasn’t like I was Sherlock Holmes. Still . . . I narrowed my gaze. Flet flickered backward a few inches.
    Then I asked softly, “What was the giant’s wish?”

Chapter 8
    From the field journal of Cpl. Braddock Linden Hayes
    08 MAY 98
    After almost four months of exhaustive preparation and instruction, we reported at five a.m. to begin the last phase of our training. Four more weeks of busting our balls, and we would finally be deployed to execute our purpose.
    The General marched us to the field outside the barracks. Some poor bastard was blindfolded and chained to a metal post. The General explained that this guy, who looked like he’d wandered away from his IT department, was a vampire.
    We laughed.
    The General ignored our snickers. He said that vampires were real. In fact, he told us that most of the creatures of our childhood nightmares were not only real, but also considered paraterrorists. We had been training not as an elite counterterrorism assassination alliance, but as the first covert paraterrorism extermination team. (Yeah. We were ETAC PETs.)
    We didn’t laugh, not then, but we didn’t believe him, either. I was starting to wonder if the last phase was all about the psych-out. What makes more sense? That they were fucking with our minds or that the schmuck who struggled against his