Red Jacket rocked against her, and Lily felt the same resignation she’d seen in the other woman’s eyes take up residence in herself.

Some things you just couldn’t fight.

And then someone came in through the side entrance, fast. Faster than she’d ever seen anyone move in her life.

And it was Gabriel.

He was coming straight at her. In the second she had to realize it was him, their eyes met, and she saw murder in his. She’d never understood what that saying meant until now, but she saw death in his eyes as surely as if he’d been the Grim Reaper himself.

He moved past her. For one confused second, she thought he was a hallucination or something—this was the part of the movie where the hero pulled the attackers off the heroine and smacked their heads together like coconuts, wasn’t it? So what was he doing?

What he was doing, apparently, was being smarter than her … and better at prioritizing. Wrapping a hand around Black Sweatshirt’s throat, he pulled him off the other woman with not a moment to spare; given her attire, her location, and the lateness of the hour, her virtue was likely to be nonexistent, but apparently Gabriel thought—and Lily agreed—that whether she chose to compromise it further really ought to be up to her.

Baggy Shorts gave a shriek, but Lily couldn’t really see what had happened—and then the shriek spiraled up an octave … and up … and up. Then Gabriel shifted slightly to the right and Lily saw he had quite literally lifted the guy up by the crotch of his pants and was holding him about four feet off the ground, body bowed back in agony, long greasy hair just barely brushing the ground. Judging from the screaming, that wasn’t just fabric Gabriel had bunched in his fist. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Lily wondered how well everything was still attached in there.

Gabriel let go and the guy fell in a heap on the ground, crying and puking. Black Sweatshirt, meanwhile, was still immobilized by Gabriel’s grip around his throat.

How is he doing that? she thought frantically.

Then, incredibly, Gabriel picked the guy up and threw him—literally threw him, a good ten feet—against the concrete wall adjacent to them, so hard Lily heard bones crunch. Black Sweatshirt hit the ground as his friend had done, but there was no crying or puking; he was soundly unconscious, and the way the side of his head was dented, it didn’t look like he’d be waking up any time soon—if at all.

The two guys holding her had let go—only about forty-five seconds had passed since Gabriel entered the garage, but you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see whose side he was on, or how badly everything was going for anyone not on that side—and they were both turning tail to run when Gabriel caught Red Jacket on the back of the skull with a roundhouse kick right out of a karate movie.

Red Jacket crumpled, and Gabriel reached out, grabbed Wifebeater by the back of his neck, plucked him right out of his flip-flops, and turned him to face Lily.

“Tell the lady you’re sorry,” he said, and Lily couldn’t even recognize his voice. It had gone deep with fury, and his eyes—

His eyes were red. Glowing. Red.

Wifebeater moved his mouth, perhaps attempting to produce the apology that had been demanded of him, but nothing came out.

From the other direction, there was a rustling sound, and Lily and Gabriel both turned to see the other woman attempting to get the tatters of her clothes to cover her. Gabriel stretched out his arm, put his hand on her shoulder.

The woman went stiff and stopped moving.

Gabriel turned back to Lily.

“Did he put his hands on you?” he asked her, and it took her a minute to understand what he’d asked, the words were that close to a growl.

“Y— Yes—” she stammered. His eyes. What was going on with his eyes?

With the hand that wasn’t holding him immobile, Gabriel reached out and broke Wifebeater’s wrist. Just … snapped it. Like a twig. The man screamed, a long, terrified sound that was cut short when Gabriel shook him like a mother cat shaking a kitten by the neck.

Then he broke his other wrist.

This time, shaking him didn’t stop his screaming, so Gabriel settled the matter by hurling him against the same wall he’d used to dispatch Black Sweatshirt, with much the same result: unconscious would-be rapist in a pile at the base of the wall.

With all four threats removed, Gabriel seemed momentarily at a loss, then he took a step toward her. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Your eyes,” she said. “Your eyes are glowing.”

He closed them, took a deep breath, let it out, opened them.

They were still glowing.

“I’m sure it’s the light,” he said.

She felt a high-pitched, frantic giggle bubble up out of her and barely recognized her own voice.

“They’re glowing,” she said, and shook her head when he took another step toward her. “Don’t touch me.”

He looked sad—how could someone look sad when they had glowing eyes and had just destroyed four human beings in the span of sixty seconds?—and turned to the other woman. She didn’t object when he approached her, so he went in close, speaking softly, putting a hand on her shoulder again, but more gently this time.

Maybe she was too traumatized to notice the eyes thing, or to care about the violence she had just witnessed—but Lily didn’t think so. Gabriel had done something to her, something to make her stand there like a mannequin when by all rights she should have already been a mile away.

Lily could hear him murmuring to the woman but couldn’t make out the words. The growling rumble of his voice seemed to be easing, though; he sounded more like himself every second. The woman nodded, seemed to be listening.

Then she put her face in her hands and started to cry.

Gabriel took out his phone and spent a moment swiping and tapping, then pulled off his coat—a coat which Lily figured had cost something in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars—and wrapped it around the woman, buttoning it at the collar as gently as any mother had ever bundled a child into a jacket.

He finished saying whatever he was saying to her, and tucked her hair behind her ear. She looked up at him and Lily’s heart tripped a little—the naked gratitude was hard to watch.

The two conversed in quiet voices for another minute or two, and then a boxy black SUV with an Uber sticker in the window pulled in and came to a stop beside them. Gabriel opened the back door and the woman climbed in—still wearing Gabriel’s coat, Lily noted. After a brief exchange with the driver, Gabriel shut the door and the SUV pulled back out onto the street.

Gabriel watched it go, shoulders slumped a little, then turned and walked back to Lily’s side. “Let’s go back to the hotel,” he said, softly. “I won’t touch you.”

“What was that?” she said, shaking—still pressed against the wall where she’d almost been violated, because at least it was rock solid. The whole rest of her life felt like it was on shifting sand right now.

“Can we just go back to the hotel?” he said. “We can talk there, I promise, but I’d really like to be anywhere but here right now.”

She looked at the crumpled bodies around them—Baggy Shorts had managed to evacuate at some point, but the other three were still down—and nodded, shortly. “Okay.”

She followed him back to the Bellagio meekly, and didn’t ask any more questions until they were safely back in the suite.

But as soon as the door closed behind them, she swung around and poked him in the chest. “Explain that to me.”

“There’s nothing to explain, Lily,” he said. “I assume you wouldn’t have preferred I just left things as they were?”

And she could see he would dismiss her, and evade any questions if he could.

So she said it, the thing she’d been thinking of all the way back to the hotel.

It was crazy, but she said it anyway: “You’re not human.”