by Laken Cane
Levi pushed himself away from the wall and walked toward her. “Do what you need to do,” he said.
Denim stepped in front of him, Lex at his side. “No,” they both said.
But Levi put his stare on Rune. “I killed a man in cold blood. I beat the fuck out of him even as he begged me to stop. I didn’t give him a chance.”
“No, Levi,” she whispered.
“You can’t protect me from what has to come after.”
“He’s right,” Iris said. “He’s mine now.”
“Rune,” Lex begged.
Rice and Elizabeth watched, waiting.
Rune looked up at the berserker. Her eyes felt too wide, too dry. Her heart was fluttering, beating too fast, hurting her chest.
She was suffocating.
The wounded ops began dragging themselves and their injured down the hall. The dead were left where they lay.
Did she always do what was right?
No.
And she wasn’t going to start with Levi.
“Take him out, Berserker,” she murmured. “Take him the fuck out.”
Strad didn’t hesitate.
He walked toward Levi, and Lex and Denim backed away, leaving Levi unprotected against the berserker.
Lex bent over, her hands on her knees, and her thin sobs beat the air like the wings of a trapped butterfly.
“Are you sure, Rune?” Elizabeth murmured.
“Yeah. I’m sure.” Fucking liar.
Levi pulled a blade, then another. Both hands full of sharp silver, he watched the berserker come.
“Don’t make me cut you, Strad,” he said, his voice as grim and hopeless as the look in his eyes.
Levi needed to be punished. He needed someone to take away the darkness.
Rune understood. She’d been there.
“I’ve got you,” Strad said, and before Levi could decide whether or not he really wanted to cut the berserker, Strad punched him in the temple.
Levi, perhaps with a look of resentful inevitability on his face, went down.
Strad yanked him off the floor, threw him over his shoulder, and strode away.
No one, not even Iris, dared try to stop him.
Chapter Thirty-One
“We’ll fix him. We have to fix him. We have to fix everything.” Lex clenched her fists and paced the large room, not even pausing when her foot hit a chair leg and she stumbled.
Rune frowned at Lex’s sad and uncharacteristic clumsiness, but she understood it. Lex’s mind was cloudy, full of worry. She couldn’t “see” as well.
Ellis bit his fingernails, grimacing when Rune pulled his fingers from his mouth. “I don’t think it can be fixed this time,” he said.
“Bill will call when we’re cleared to go back to the Annex.” Rune took a drink of her coffee, trying to seem calm. She was pretty sure no one was fooled. She was worried about Owen, left in the hands of the Annex while the crew wasn’t there to protect him. Worried about Levi, whose dormant darkness had been awakened by his rape and deepened by Ellie’s unfaithfulness.
Dr. Haas had taken Levi in without a word. She’d assigned him to one of the clinic’s more spacious rooms. She was no stranger to Shiv Crew, and she knew that while Levi was there, some of the crew would stay to guard him. They’d need some space.
Levi watched them from his bed. The nurses had hooked him up to an IV and a monitor, much as Owen was at the Annex. Except Owen hadn’t been restrained.
They’d tied his hands to the bedrails, not to protect others from him, but to protect him from himself.
“He’ll try to kill himself,” Denim had murmured, his face turned away from Rune. “I know he deserves punishment, but I love him too much to care. If you want him to live, restrain him.”
“If they don’t clear us in the next half hour,” Rune told them, “I’ll have to go in and break Owen out.”
“That’ll mean leaving River County,” Raze said. “Probably forever.”
Rune swallowed. “I’ll do what I have to do.”
“We,” Raze said, gently.
“Don’t you understand yet, Rune? We’ll follow you anywhere,” Lex said. “Someplace where the Annex can’t touch us.”
“The Annex has a long reach and a longer memory,” Elizabeth said from the doorway.
Strad, who’d been standing guard in the hall, was at her side. He gave Rune a quick nod, then went back to his post.
Rune shuddered as a sense of foreboding hit her. “Elizabeth. Tell me.”
“Eugene is flying in. He’ll be at the Annex within the hour.”
“Why are you here?”
Elizabeth’s gaze went to Levi. She sighed. “Iris decided to have me killed. If it hadn’t been for Bill, I’d be dead right now. I’ll return when Eugene calms her.”
“If he calms her.”
“He’ll control her. Iris has no doubts about Eugene’s power.”
“Maybe,” Jack said, “but it was her son who was…who died. She won’t be easy to appease.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “She will not.”
“The Annex might decide to come after us,” Raze said. “We killed one of theirs. Then we killed a dozen Annex ops.”
“You didn’t kill Gustav,” Levi said. “I did.”
No one disagreed.
“You are one of theirs. And you didn’t murder operatives,” Elizabeth said. “They attacked you. You defended yourselves.” She sat down and folded her hands, then looked at Rune. “Let’s wait and see. Eugene wants you on his team. He’s not going to take a chance that you’ll run off and join the Shop or the Next.”
“He’d kill her first,” Denim said, finally speaking.
“No,” Elizabeth disagreed. “Worse—he’d lock her away. But let’s wait and see what he has to say.”
“He’s not going to do anything to me,” Rune said, folding her arms.
“Don’t underestimate him, Rune. If he wanted you controlled, I’m not sure he wouldn’t succeed.”
“We need to get Owen out of there.”
Elizabeth’s cell rang, her ringtone a terse, hushed chirping. She glanced at the display, then put the phone to her ear. “Yes?”
Rune tapped her fingers on her coffee cup, her stomach churning.
Elizabeth listened for a few more seconds, then clicked off without saying another word to the caller. She stood.
Lex left her place at the foot of Levi’s bed. “He chose us.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “He chose you. He wants the crew back to work. You’ll not be attacked.”
“Not a trap?” Rune asked.
Elizabeth’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. “No.”
“And Iris?”
Elizabeth looked at Rune, her face too blank, her eyes too dark.
“He had her killed,” Rune said. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Good,” Lex said, then clapped a hand to her mouth. “I didn’t mean…”
No one said a word.
“He chose you,” Elizabeth said. “Gather your crew and come back to work. Levi will not face retribution from the Annex.”
“I guess I have a little of my mother in me after all,” Lex murmured, and without a goodbye to Levi, she followed Elizabeth from the room.
Rune wasn’t quite ready to leave the twin. She went to his bedside and stared at his beautiful face and his glittering, strange eyes. She leaned over to hug him as Denim watched from his place by the wall. He hadn’t moved since they’d arrived at the clinic.
Ellis stood alone on the other side of the room, as though he didn’t deserve to be close to any of them.
“Levi,” Rune murmured. “You have to come back to us.”
He said nothing for a long, long moment, but kept his gaze glued to hers. “I don’t know how.”
She nodded and caressed his ravaged cheek with the pad of her thumb. “We’ll help you.”
“Right now,” he said. “Right now I want to hurt you. I want to kill you.”
“
No, baby. You want to hurt you.”
Ellis bolted from the room.
“God,” Rune whispered. “What did that fucking monstrous bitch do to you?”
Levi smiled, and though Rune was familiar with the demons that could live inside a person, that smile shook even her.
“We’re stronger than she is, Levi.” She ignored the gooseflesh that arose on her skin. “We love you more than she hated you. And we’re not letting her win.”
“Feed me,” he said. “Before you go.”
Rune hesitated. A monster peeked from those eyes, and she didn’t want him tasting her. Didn’t want his lips clamped over her flesh as he sucked the life from her.
Jack took her arm and pulled her from the bed. “Not right now, buddy.”
Rune might have fed him anyway, but Strad strode into the room at that second. “Let’s go, Rune.”
She snapped her head around at his tone. “What happened?”
“Rice just called. They found an abducted pregnant Other.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Rune stared through the glass at the terrified girl, clenching her fists so hard she broke the skin. When the wet heat of blood gathered in her palms, she clenched harder.
“Let me in there,” she told Bill Rice.
“I can’t.”
“Open the door, Bill.”
“Rune,” Elizabeth said, putting a hand on her arm. “He can’t. His prints won’t work on level three doors.”
The girl screamed again, her voice dragging on and on. Her screams were muted, but Rune’s hearing was too sensitive for it to matter.
And she could see her. She could see her pain.
Hugely pregnant, her arms and legs restrained, the girl was in so much agony she was losing her mind.
“Why isn’t she being given something for the pain?” Rune put her hands on the glass. “The birth is going to kill her.”
“Everything is being done that can be done,” Elizabeth said. “The pain meds aren’t working.”
“No shit. Do we know who she is?”
“She was wearing a plastic bracelet with the word nine written on it,” Elizabeth answered.
“Nine,” Rune whispered.
“You’re bleeding,” Rice said, almost absently.
Her palms had left smears of blood on the glass, but that wasn’t what Bill was talking about. Her stake wounds were seeping. A lot.
“Shit.” She pushed her hand against the wound.
“Rune?” Elizabeth asked.
“I’m fine.” She looked at the laboring Other. “Who found her? And how?”
“Eugene sent ops to collect her when one of his contacts in the police department called him. The contact said a couple of hikers stumbled across a very sick, very pregnant Other in the woods of Eastern Kentucky.” She paused. “Near Reverence.”
As they watched, a nurse stepped to the girl’s side and hung another bag on the IV pole.
Nine turned her face toward the nurse, opened, her mouth, and projectile vomited a heavy gush of blood.
The nurse jumped back but gathered herself with admirable quickness. She wrung out a washcloth in the basin on the table and began cleaning the Other with a practiced efficiency. Her touch was gentle, and she ignored her blood-spattered uniform as she cleaned the agonized girl.
Nine screamed again, and Rune shuddered. She hated the girl’s pain. Hated it. The Other was little more than a child. What hell the girl had been through might never be known, because Nine was too sick to talk.
Rune and Elizabeth turned to watch as Eugene strode down the hall. He had four operatives at his back.
“Do you want to go inside?” Eugene asked her.
“Yeah. I do.”
“Come on. We’ll talk in there.”
He didn’t offer to allow Elizabeth and Rice inside, and they didn’t ask. He gave a terse order to the ops to wait in the hall, and then put his fingertips against the pad beside the door.
It made a loud click and he pushed it open, motioning her ahead of him. “This is the work of the Shop, Rune.”
“Tell me,” she said, and strode to Nine’s bedside.
“Leave us,” Eugene ordered the nurse.
“Wait,” Rune said, as the nurse tossed the washcloth in the basin and turned to leave. “What’s your name?”
The nurse opened her mouth, then darted a quick look at Eugene. He nodded.
“Jenna,” she said, her gaze curious.
“You’re a fucking angel, Jenna,” Rune said.
Jenna blushed, then smiled. “It’s what I do.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“Thank you, nurse. Leave us now,” Eugene said, but his voice was gentler.
Jenna opened a door against the far wall and slipped into a room that Rune imagined contained medical supplies.
“The fetus inside her appears to be around twelve weeks.”
“That’s impossible. She’s huge and ready to deliver.”
Nine groaned, then screamed, her agony like hot nails piercing Rune’s brain. Eugene waited patiently for her to quieten before he spoke.
“The growth of the baby is accelerated somehow. She’s been pregnant for a few weeks, yet the child is full formed and ready to live outside the womb. I wanted you to see her, Rune, so you’ll know some of the things we’re up against.”
Rune scowled. “I have always known what we’re up against. It’s why I lead Shiv Crew.”
“I mean with the Shop and the Next. When they figure out they can’t kill or capture you, they’re going to try to recruit you.” His stare was sharp and probing. “You have to be on guard.”
She looked away.
“They will try hard,” he continued. “They will lie. They will use your friends, and innocents, and deceit to get what they want. What they will want is you.”
She inhaled deeply, regretting doing so when Eugene’s expensive scent mingled with Nine’s sick one. “I’m not likely to join the enemy.” She tried to make her voice dry, slightly amused. She was pretty sure she didn’t succeed.
“You’re not always going to be clear on who the enemy is.”
Nine screamed again, her voice one long howl of agony, and Rune flinched. “You have to do something for her.”
“We’re nearly finished with our tests.”
She frowned. “What the hell does that mean?”
It was his turn to avoid her stare. “When we’ve figured out exactly what that is inside her, our surgeons will take the child if it doesn’t come on its own.”
She rubbed her arms, suddenly cold. “What’s inside her?”
“It doesn’t appear to be…normal, whatever it is. It won’t allow her to shift. I’ll tell you everything we discover as soon as I can.” He looked at the Other. “Let’s let her rest.”
“She’ll get no rest.” But standing there wasn’t helping the girl.
She patted Nine’s skinny arm, but had no idea what to say. She doubted the girl would have heard her anyway. She was lost inside the red pain of her mind.
“Let me know as soon as you can,” she told Eugene, and almost panting, she stood at the door waiting for him to let her out.
The room was enormous and mostly empty. Cold, stone floors with a huge drain in the center, plain white brick walls. The room was too huge and too empty for her to be claustrophobic, yet she was.
Something bad was happening inside the Other. Something horrifying. She hadn’t really needed Eugene to tell her that. It lay like a wicked heaviness in the back of her mind.
She fled the room, the girl’s screams chasing her all the way down the hall.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The days and nights always blended together. Sometimes she lost track of when to eat, when to sleep, when to do anything other than wait for her cell to ring so she could put it to her ear and listen as a voice told her who next to kill.
Ellie fixed that.
As soon as he got the green light, he took over her household
. Over her health. When she walked in the door that night, he was waiting with dinner, coffee, and a list of things he wanted to get for the house.
“You keep me sane, Ellie,” she told him.
And she was fucking ecstatic.
Still, the peace was short-lived.
She sat at the table, watching the berserker as Ellis bustled around humming one tune or another, and she thought for a second she could get used to that.
If only she could heal Levi’s brokenness, make Owen better, wean everyone she’d touched off the drug that was her blood…
When her cell buzzed, she didn’t, for one long moment, want to answer it. The crew watched her, waiting.
Finally, she snatched her phone off the table. “Yeah?”
It was Bill Rice. “Rune. Zombies are attacking the town of Reverence, Kentucky.”
There was something strange in his tone. “Fuck.” She jumped to her feet. “It’ll take us too long to get there if we drive. Have Eugene send us in helicopters.”
He hesitated. “Eugene ordered me not to call you in on this.”
“What is it?” Lex asked. Denim was at the clinic with Levi, but Lex had needed to come home. “Levi?”
“No, Lex,” Rune said, and held up a finger. “Why not?”
She could almost hear Bill shrug. “He wouldn’t mind if zombies helped the crew wipe out some of his competition.”
“Then why are you calling me?”
“For Elizabeth.” He cleared his throat. “I think we’ve discovered where they’re holding Fie.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You guys don’t know who has that kid?”
“Annex ops took her. She was going to be protected, and trained. But…something went wrong. Halfway to headquarters Annex ops were stopped by the Shop or the Next—we’re unclear. Fie was taken.”
“Fuck you,” Rune whispered. “Why didn’t either of you tell me?”
He sighed. “No one thought it was a good idea.”
“You mean Eugene and Iris didn’t think it was a good idea.”
“Yeah. But Rune,” he said, his voice impatient, “We think we know where she is now.”
