This was not a safe race. This was a race for fools that needed fantastic risks to feel alive. There weren't often fatalities, but there'd been a few. Easy come, easy go.

Guess Dullahan classified as a thrill-seeker. Though I wasn’t sure if immortal creatures counted. Maybe he came to enjoy seeing mortals in peril, crashing and burning, blazing out in drama and stupidity before their deathly demise. He probably took great pleasure in it.

I could feel him like a dark cloud, slowly approaching from behind—a hurricane approaching the shore, primed for mayhem. The loud cry of his living bike sounded like the thunder of hooves for the briefest moment before the engine growled again. I bent down lower on my bike and took the next turn fast, my bike leaning a scant inch from the pavement as I compensated in the opposite direction with my body. No one could take turns like me. Most people would end up with a mouth full of gravel and torn-up clothes at best. A closed casket at their funeral at the worst. This was a tough crowd though.

A smile finally tugged at my lips as I finished the hard turn and came back fully upright, zooming forward and putting everyone else behind me.

Except that wasn’t right, I realized. A black tire sprung into the side of my vision and my head jerked in shock to see someone right beside me.

My mouth dropped open and my entire body burst with electric awareness to see Dullahan beside me. Terror washed over me immediately. The bike was bad enough, being just as gruesome as I’d been warned. It was made of inky black metal that shone like grease and bones--human bones. A macabre display of someone soaked in death.

The man himself did not disappoint. His eyes were dark as the night and aimed directly at me as our bikes pressed too close together. Each inch I lost between us made me suck in another breath of cold fear.

Dullahan could never be mistaken for a normal man. He was bigger than a normal person but proportioned appropriately—if threatening slabs of hard muscle on every inch were appropriate. He was some quasi-giant, fierce and powerful. His bike was at least twice the size of mine and if I had to guess, he was over seven feet if he stood up.

Dullahan’s eyes were menacing. I could feel hatred seething out of them at me, making it hard to swallow. He looked at me as if it was personal, despite never seeing him before in my life. What the hell crawled up his ass?

His lips peeled from his teeth in a sneer and it dragged my attention to the scars that went from both sides of his mouth to his ears as if someone cut him a smile ear to ear. That had me looking at his neck. There was a jagged scar in a line running across his neck that seemed to go all the way around.