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her new voice right then, that voice that seemed to give her strength. Where the hell was it when she needed it most?
    Keep calm. Panic will never serve you well. Always remain calm.
    And there it was. Filtering through her with confidence and focus, her new voice settled her crazed breath and pulses as if it had cast a spell on her. The necessitated calm drifted over her, and suddenly she did feel like that movie heroine spy out to make a smooth exchange of information, keeping her cool in the most dangerous of situations.
    And then the shadow crossed the street toward her and she stopped, squeezing her knees together to quell the sudden urge she had to pee her pants.
    So much for smooth and cool.
    The shadow was on her from one breath to the next, a blitz of movement and sudden streaking through the edge of the light. It glanced off his dark jacket and ominous ski mask, but more important it glanced off the expanse of metal he was slamming in the direction of her belly.
    The sudden stop startled Docia, kept her from screaming like a crazed banshee hopped up on meth at a grunge metal concert. She stared down at the hand that had appeared out of nowhere, large and masculine and strangely bare of any gloves considering it was reallycold, allowing her to see that the very large knife had punctured the palm and run straight through the back of it. As the seconds ground down to infinitesimal ticking instants, Docia comprehended several things. One, the shadow man had indeed meant her ill. For some reason, he had just tried to gut her. Two, a second man she hadn’t even noticed had appeared out of nowhere and thrust himself between her and the knife.
    Then, as if the agony of being run through meant nothing to him, the rescuer grabbed the attacker by the back of his head and yanked him down to meet the upward thrust of his knee. There was the resounding crack of bone smacking into bone, and the attacker fell dazedly to the ground.
    This,
she thought inanely,
is the part where I am supposed to run. Oh, and that screaming thing would really come in handy, too.
    Yet she was rooted silently to the spot, watching with fascination as the rescuer, a lean man about half a foot taller than the other guy, stood over his apparently unconscious victim, reached out with long, bare fingers to grip the handle of the wicked-looking blade run through his flesh, and slowly pulled it free of his punctured hand. He made only the smallest of sounds, like a deep sort of grunt, which sounded far more like aggravation than a pained reaction. The sound of the knife itself, that strange suctiony kiss as metal withdrew from flesh:
That
was a sound she feared would echo in her memory at odd moments in the future. She watched with peculiar fascination as he shook his own blood from the blade and onto the unconscious man, then spat something out at him, some kind of foreign invective that she suspected put a curse on him and all his offspring to come.
    Docia felt herself shaking in her own skin as she looked up into what she could only describe as goldenbeauty. He was gold of hair, a dark and white, uneven blond that rested in ghosts of curls around his head, just light enough at the tips to give him a nimbus effect, like a living savior stepped free of a fresco painting. His eyes were mesmerizing in the way they matched his hair almost perfectly, that rich gold with a halo of lighter gold around the rims of his irises. It was a compelling color, a fascinating one that was framed by long, gilded lashes teasing on the cusp of being too pretty … if not for the hardness and depth of life she could see beyond those superficial accents. The hardness with which he was looking at her now. He was assessing her, just as she was assessing him. But all he was seeing was a puffy coat two seasons too old, almost a size too small, and a rather frumpy girl stuffed into it who looked as though someone had beat the living Christ out of her.
    Well, how convenient, then, that