by Elicia Hyder
Mal laughed. “Yeah. Good luck proving that one, Saphera. I mean, really, do you even hear yourself?”
I wanted to punch her.
She walked toward the plant, pulling out a glass jar from her purse. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take my hypnox and get the hell out of here.” She held the pickle jar toward Ransom.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said.
“We had a deal!”
“I guess lying runs in the family.”
Her mouth gaped. “You can’t back out of this now. Ransom?” She shook the jar at my brother.
“Sorry, Mal. I can’t help you.”
“But you owe me! You made me a promise.”
“And you told me my father was Elias, so . . .” Ransom shrugged.
“What?”
“You heard him.” I squared off with her, toe to toe. “Ransom isn’t Elias’s firstborn.” I cut my eyes. “I am.”
She stepped back. “That’s impossible.”
“And yet, here we are.” I looked back at Essex. “How about obstruction of justice? She didn’t tell Gregg yesterday where the plant was. Surely that’s a violation of her probation.”
“I didn’t know yesterday,” she hissed.
“And how will you explain that?” Mockingly, I shook my head. “Really, do you even hear yourself?”
She glared at me.
“If I can’t send you back to prison for murder, I will find another way.”
She leaned close and lowered her voice. “I hope the nightwalkers tear out your heart.”
“Well, if I’m anything like you, I don’t have one.”
Ransom looked up at the sky. “Speaking of nightwalkers, we probably shouldn’t be so close to this plant. It’s getting dark.”
“Because we might have a repeat of what happened at the Drexler?” Essex asked.
“Exactly. Kush is lucky it didn’t happen to him sooner.” I walked to the plant, and Essex joined me.
He nudged the broken lighter on the ground with his boot. “Looks like he frequented this place.”
“Kush?” Ransom asked. “Is that a person?”
“He’s the John Doe who died in the fire at your hotel.” I nodded toward the poppy. “He’s the one who was bleeding the pods and selling to the Kings.”
Sirens wailed in the distance.
“Backup is almost here,” Essex said.
“Wanna take bets that it’s our guys?” I asked with a smile.
“You think so?”
“I know so.” Since they were all on overtime with Charlie shift, they weren’t assigned to a zone. They’d all be hanging out together, waiting to respond to whatever came across the radio. Each one would have hit the gas as soon as they heard Essex had called in. “I told you, they’ll always get here.”
“Saphera, you can’t let them take me back to prison!” Mal shouted, hysteria rising in her voice.
“Oh yes I can. And I’m going to enjoy it too,” I said.
Mal grabbed my arm. “I can’t go back to that hell hole—”
I wrenched my arm free and looked at Essex. “Do you have cuffs we could put her in? Or a muzzle?”
He chuckled. “Maybe in the car.”
Mal pulled something from her pocket. The shadow blade she’d stolen from Ransom. She grabbed one of the large round pods.
“Stop!” Essex lunged to grab her wrist.
With one swift move, she drove the blade through the pod like she was going for the heart of an attacking grizzly.
Black sludge bled from the pod, unusual for a regular opium poppy. Even in the US, growing a few plants was still legal because a single one yielded such a negligible amount.
This one bled like Mal had gouged an artery.
Essex released her and jumped back, spreading his arms wide to stop anyone else from advancing. Mal threw the knife down and swept her free hand under the cascade of hypnox.
“Geez, Mal! Have you lost your fucking mind?” I stepped in front of my brother as Essex pulled his gun.
“We had a deal, Saphera,” she said again, her words oddly steady and calm as the powerful narcotic seeped into her skin. She took a few steps toward us.
“You know I can’t help you. Don’t come any closer,” I said, holding my hand toward her.
“Stop screwing around, Mal!” Ransom yelled.
Mal stared at the drug oozing between her fingers. “I’m not going back. I’d rather detach and take all of you with me.”
She raised her hand.
Essex aimed. “Don’t do it, Mal!”
Her hand sliced sideways through the air as Essex fired. His bullet struck her in the chest. Mal fell back, landing hard on her side, but not before slinging the tar-like substance across all of us.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Shit, shit, shit!” I threw my jacket on the ground and stripped down to my sports bra, using my shirt to wipe Ransom’s face. It was splattered with black specks.
Behind him, a black line of hypnox was slashed across Essex’s neck, jugular to jugular. He was panting and staring open-mouthed to where my mother had fallen.
“Tyler, your neck. Get that shit off!” I yelled as I uselessly tried to clean my brother’s face. It was like scrubbing sticky molasses. If anything, I was only spreading it to make more contact with Ransom’s skin.
“It’s on you too,” Tyler said.
“I don’t think it matters with me, but it can kill you and Ransom. You have to get it off.”
“Nyx . . . I . . .” Ransom stumbled forward, and I caught him. His pupils tightened, his jaw slack as he stared through me. “Nyx,” he whispered, blinking slowly.
“Ransom, hang on!” I eased him onto the ground.
Still upright, Essex wobbled sideways.
“Tyler, sit down.” I was trying, and failing, to stay calm. When he sat, I crawled toward him and grabbed his cell phone. The station was the last dialed number, and dispatch answered on the first ring.
“This is Corporal Saphera Nyx, car number three-oh-three, on scene at Sapphire Lake Memorial Valley on Sanctuary Drive. Shots fired, officer involved. I have a female with a gunshot wound, condition unknown. Myself and two others have made skin contact with hypnox. We have located the hypnox plant. Request additional units, narcotics, a supervisor, and EMS immediately.”
I smacked Essex’s cheeks. “Stay with me, Tyler!” His head jostled from side to side with each smack, his breaths slowing on every inhale. Terrified tears streamed down my face. “Stay with me!”
“Nyx.” Essex blinked a few times. “I can’t . . . feel my face.”
I cupped his cheeks. “Please, hang on.”
Leaning sideways across the bluff, I checked Ransom’s pulse. It was there, but it was faint. Too faint.
“Nyx.” Essex reached for me.
The instant I touched his hand, he slumped sideways onto the grass. I cradled his head in my arms, jostling him. “Tyler, stay with me. I need you to breathe.”
His breath hitched in his throat. His eyes rolled back.
“Tyler!”
His whole body shuddered, and his spine arched unnaturally off the ground as all the air was forced from his lungs. Then he fell flat and silent, staring into nothing. Immediately, his body temperature began to plummet.
I sat back on my heels. “Tyler?” I searched the sky. “Tyler, if you can hear me, touch my hand.”
A flash of cold shot through my arm, and I cried out.
I stood at the edge of the cliff, grabbed the crystal around my neck, and screamed, “Orion!” My voice ricocheted around the valley, echoing back with the faint wail of sirens.
A rattling wheeze came from behind the hypnox plant. Mal’s leg twitched.
I stormed across the clearing. Blood mist covered my mother’s face. The bullet had pierced her left lung, a dramatic injury that was (unfortunately) survivable with modern medicine.
I grabbed a fistful of her hair. “How do I detach?”
She laughed, and blood gurgle
d behind the sickening sound.
“Mal!”
I dropped to my knees, made a fist, and shoved the point of my middle knuckle into the bloody hole on her chest. She cried and writhed beneath the pressure. “Tell me now!”
“Maybe . . . I would”—she wheezed and blood dribbled down her chin—“if I . . . had a heart.” She cackled until a coughing fit choked her.
With an angry and terrified huff, I pushed myself up. Mal caught my arm. “Listen.” She closed her eyes.
I heard nothing but sirens too far away. Shoving her hand away, I stood. “Ransom?” I called out.
Nothing.
“Tyler?”
A chill prickled my arm.
I spun all the way around but didn’t see anything. “There’s some way you can detach me. I need you to try.”
A cold hand settled on my shoulder.
“My throat. Go for my throat!” Tears streamed my cheeks.
Cold permeated my neck. Nothing happened.
“It’s kind of like a Vulcan nerve pinch!” I jabbed my own fingers into the space above my sternum. “Here! Press here!”
A second later, the cemetery swirled away, and when I opened my eyes, I could see clearly in the dark.
Tyler was wide eyed and staring at me. “Nyx!”
I grabbed him and hugged him. “Oh my god.” In all the shit we’d been through together, I’d never seen him rattled. Now, he trembled in my arms.
I looked around for my brother. His spirit wasn’t anywhere, though his body lay still on the ground. “He didn’t detach,” I said, walking toward him.
“Why?” Tyler asked.
“Who knows? Maybe all his past drug use.”
Screeches fluttered through the atmosphere. I froze.
“What’s that noise?” Tyler asked.
I swallowed. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Nyx?”
I shook my head.
“They’re . . . coming,” Mal panted with a bloody smile.
“Shit.” He understood. “Nightwalkers?” His voice scratched.
I instantly regretted all I’d told him the night before. Sirens wailed around the corner, and blue lights lit up the valley.
“Look at me, Tyler.” He met my eyes. “You have to go back into your body. Remember what happened to Kush.”
His eyes searched mine. “I’ve tried. I don’t think I can.”
“You have to try harder. Lie down.”
When he did, I grabbed his ghostly head and tried forcing it back into his body. I willed and pushed. And focused. And cried.
“It isn’t working,” he said, more calmly than I felt.
I held both sides of his face and leaned my forehead against his. “I’ll figure this out, I promise.”
“Don’t . . . make promises . . . you won’t . . . keep.” Mal coughed behind me. “That’s what . . . your father . . . used to . . . tell me.” She laughed and coughed harder.
I jumped on her again and grabbed her by the throat. “How do I save my brother?”
She twisted beneath me. “You . . . don’t.”
Shouting echoed through the woods, and Baker crested the hill first with a portable defibrillator in hand. Horror flashed across his face as he grabbed the radio on his shoulder.
“Delta Two, I have multiple casualties at the cemetery. Nyx, Essex, and two unidentified individuals, all unconscious.”
As Baker descended the hill, another figure appeared behind him. Jones.
And another. Rivera, who’d even said he wasn’t working overtime.
They ran to the closest body first, Essex. Jones checked for a pulse. Baker listened for breath sounds. “Rivera, check the others!” Baker yelled.
Rivera went to my body and checked my pulse. “Nyx is unconscious, but she has a heartbeat and steady breath sounds.” He went to Ransom next, who was clearly more critical.
“Nyx?” The fear in Tyler’s voice zapped all the hope in my heart.
I followed the direction of his worried eyes.
A black spot was growing at the base of the poppy, and hundreds of black tendrils creeped from it, like vines twisting and crawling across the grass.
“What the hell?” I asked, backing up.
Another black spot bubbled up near my body, and another on the hill. The ground rolled as something from beneath pushed to break free.
I rose slowly, pulling the dagger from my calf holster. I sheltered Essex behind me and raised the blade.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
My eyes widened as the ground splintered. “The nightwalkers are here.”
A head pushed through the first black spot by the plant. The skull, covered in what looked like stringy black putty, had no eyes or nose, but a mouth was fighting to open. Its jaws parted, and the dark flesh stretched until the opening began to shred apart.
The head rolled from side to side, pulling and straining the fibrous tendons holding it up. One shoulder pushed through the surface, but its arms were still trapped. If I was going to make a move, this was it.
Sucking in a quick brave breath, I sprinted forward and dropped to a knee, into a perfect baseball slide, toward the monster. The outstretched dagger sliced its throat, sending a bone-chilling shriek through the atmosphere.
I barely rolled out of the way before a long and slender arm ripped free of the ground, slamming down inches from my face. Like the neck, the arm was more a collection of tendons and veins than bone and skin. Its hand had four fingers—or claws—that were nearly as long as its forearms and needle-sharp at the tips.
It wasn’t dead, far from it, but the injury had slowed it down. The reprieve wouldn’t last as its friends were coming through the ground right behind it.
A symphony of sirens echoed around the cemetery, and red-and-white lights joined the blue down below. More backup was here. So was EMS.
Plenty of my friends for the monsters to feast on.
The defibrillator hooked up to Tyler’s chest beeped, and a robotic voice said, “Evaluating.” A second later, “Shock advised. Administering shock. Clear. Three . . . Two . . . One.” I heard the pop of electricity travel through Tyler’s chest, then, “Begin CPR.”
I looked back as Baker started chest compressions again.
Essex’s spirit was sitting, staring dumbfounded at his lifeless body.
“Tyler, put your hand on your forehead to go back in!” I shouted.
He obeyed. “I’m trying!”
Even over the hissing and screeching of the nightwalkers, I heard Tyler’s ribs cracking and popping under the compressions.
The nightwalker on the hill was free. From what I could make out in the moonlight, it was eight or nine feet tall with a human-ish shape except for extra-long arms and legs and a short torso. It appeared to be inside out, with its bones and tendons covered in something that looked like black crude oil.
Darkness, I realized.
The nightwalker was clothed in darkness.
With its giant claws dragging the ground, it crept slowly toward Mal. As it neared, she began to hyperventilate. “Nyx!” Mal dug her heels into the grass, pushing herself backward. Her left shoe came off, and she slipped on her elbow.
The beast bent over her.
“Don’t hurt me! Don’t hurt me!”
Its massive mouth opened, and a long snake-like tongue slithered out. At first I thought it might eat her. Instead, it licked the wound in Mal’s chest.
What the fuck?
She looked as stunned as I was. “No! Shew! Get them!”
Its sinewy face whipped toward us. The nightwalker crouched, and I readied my dagger as it launched into the air.
Boom!
Something landed so hard in front of me it shook the ground. White light sparkled around the bluff, and the nightwalker burst into flames midair.
Mal shrieked like she’d been set on fire.
A man was on one knee in front of me.
Orion.
His bright blue eyes turned tow
ard me. “I leave you alone for a few minutes . . .”
I exhaled for what felt like an eternity.
“You all have to get back to your bodies,” he said.
Shit. I’d been so preoccupied with Essex and Ransom, I hadn’t stopped to consider I was a liability too. But between me and my body, the third nightwalker was almost free of the ground.
Orion stood, and a new panic pulsed through me. This magical man had zero qualms about taking human life for the greater good. Tyler’s body was now an open gateway Orion would want to shut.
So was mine.
As if reading my mind, he looked past me to Tyler’s body on the ground.
I splayed my hands on his chest. “Give him a chance, Orion, please.”
Orion looked back at the demons.
Rivera tore open a pack of Narcan with his teeth and shoved its nozzle into Ransom’s nose. My brother bolted upright like he’d been shot from a cannon. “What—where—what the fuck happened?” he shouted.
“Calm down, man. You OD’d on hypnox,” Rivera said, trying to push Ransom back down.
My brother’s frightened eyes landed on my body. “Nyx!”
“We’ve got her!” Rivera yelled, holding him on the ground.
Orion pushed past me, heading straight for Essex.
“Please!” I screamed, grabbing his arm.
Orion grabbed Tyler’s spirit by the throat with his left hand and hooked his right arm under Tyler’s thigh. He lifted him into the air and body-slammed his spirit back onto his body.
Nothing happened.
Tyler’s spirit sat up.
“No,” I whispered.
Orion swore and stood. I threw myself over Essex and his body. “Please don’t!”
Orion stepped over us, and I sat up.
The nightwalker closest to my body was free. Snarling and dripping black sludge from its mouth, it stood over my face. Even across the clearing, I could feel its hot rancid breath on me.
I jumped up as Orion ran to my body, but he didn’t get there fast enough.
The nightwalker sprang forward. I flipped the dagger around to grab the blade and hurled it across the clearing, burying the blade into the beast’s forehead. It stumbled back and fell between two headstones.
Orion looked impressed. “Nice throw.”
“I thought you said the dagger would kill them.”
