The Law of Nines

With his thumb he flipped it open. Jax snatched his wrist before he could dial. She used the tip of the bloody knife in her other hand to flip the phone closed.

“You’re not going to alert anyone. The last thing we need is the authorities giving us trouble. We already have enough trouble. We need to get out of here, and we need to get out now.”

He tried not to take too deep a breath, because the smell of blood was gagging him. “But the body is going to be found sooner or later. When it is, the police are going to think that I murdered her. I’ve got her blood all over me.”

With a finger and thumb, as if to prove his point, he lifted his blood-soaked shirt away from his body for her to see. He wanted the sodden shirt off of him. He needed to change it. He needed a shower.

“If I run it will only make me look guilty. Attractive women who end up dead are usually killed by their husband or some other man in their life. The police will naturally think that I murdered her.”

Jax glanced down at the body. “Did you really think she was attractive?”

“Yes—no—” Alex raked his fingers back through his hair. “Yes, she was obviously attractive, but no, I wasn’t attracted to her.”

“Calm down, Alex.”

As he gathered his thoughts he realized that she was right. Calling the police would be a problem. What was he going to tell them? How could he possibly explain it?

“How in the world are we going to get rid of her body—and not be found out?”

“I’ll take care of it,” Jax said.

“There’s blood everywhere!” He swung his arm around at the room. “You can’t possibly clean up all this mess. The police have ways of finding even the tiniest speck of blood. They have technology that makes blood glow in the dark so that they’ll still find the tiniest specks of blood that you miss no matter how well you clean it up.”

“They’re not going to find any blood, even with their technology.”

Alex didn’t think that she grasped how good technology could be or the way it was going to look to the police. He had dated Bethany. People had seen them together. She had been killed in his bedroom. She was naked. What else were the police going to think? He certainly couldn’t tell them the truth, and lying would only get him in deeper trouble.

“Jax, they will find traces of blood, and then what am I going to tell them? That she was from another world? That she wanted to have sex with me so that I would get her pregnant with my Rahl heir and then she was going to kill me? They’ll never believe me. I’d be lucky if they thought I was crazy, but they won’t. They’ll think I murdered her.”

Jax gripped his arm. “Calm down, Alex. Let me handle it. I know what I’m doing.”

“Let you handle it? In five minutes you’re liable to vanish again.” How could he tell her how much he feared being locked up? “You’ll be gone again and I’ll be left here alone to handle it.”

“Not this time,” she said in a somewhat haunted voice.

Alex looked up. “What do you mean?”

She gazed into his eyes for a long moment. “If I hadn’t gotten here in time you would have been lost.”

“Lost? You mean I would have been killed when she was finished?”

“Yes. I had to get here as fast as possible. I wasn’t able to take certain . . . precautions.”

“Precautions?”

“I had to forgo the procedures I used before.”

“What procedures?”

“I didn’t have time to establish a lifeline this time.”

“A lifeline . . .” Alex paused a moment. “Do you mean that you can’t get back to your world?”

Her gaze broke away. “Not for now.”

He suddenly realized the magnitude of what she had done in order to save his life. His worry about everything else evaporated in his sudden concern for her. “When will you be able to get back to your home?”

“You let me worry about that. For now I’m stuck here.”

“For how long?”

“Maybe a day or two.”

“But maybe longer?”

She swallowed. “Maybe forever.”

The lightning died out again, plunging the room into gloom lit only by the faint glow of streetlights, but it was enough to see the worry in her eyes.

“It’s all right, Jax. You won’t be alone. I’ll help you.”

She gestured with her knife to the still body on the floor. When lightning crackled again a flickering rectangle of light coming in the window fell across the curve of Bethany’s naked hip. “Yes, I can see that you have everything well in hand.”

Despite everything, Alex was able to smile just a little.

“Do you think your friends will send anyone to help you?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Because right now I’m the only one able to undertake such a journey. We’re on our own.”

He let out a deep breath. “Jax, I need you to know how sorry I am for the way I treated you the last time.” He discarded the speech, the excuses, that he’d rehearsed in his mind a few hundred times. “You came to help me and I didn’t listen. I didn’t mean to belittle what you and others have done. I just didn’t understand. It was so hard to—”