by AJ Larrieu
“I’m just saying. She could be protecting them.”
“Hey,” Jeremy said, turning toward the passenger seat. “They here?”
The person sitting in it twisted into Diana’s line of sight. It was Janine.
Time to go.
There were yards of open parking lot between me and Shane. There was no way I could move without being seen. This close, there was no way she’d miss us. “Shane,” I sent.
“I feel her,” he said.
“Go. I can take care of myself if they find me.” Even as I thought it, my blood thrummed with the thought of pulling from Annette’s hired goons.
“No way,” Shane said. “We take our chances together.”
“It’s you she wants to kill.” And it was my fault we were still here. If I hadn’t run after Diana...
“I’m not leaving.”
Janine looked Diana over. There was a bruise around her neck. Fangs or fingers, I couldn’t tell. She turned to Jeremy and shook her head.
“What the fuck?”
“There’s no way she can’t tell we’re here.” It was far too risky to dip into her head. I curled myself more tightly behind the SUV.
“You sure?” Jeremy said.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I found this one, didn’t I?”
“Look again,” said Alex. “You probably just missed something.”
“You don’t know a goddamn thing about what I do,” Janine said. “I said they’re not here, they’re not here. Can we go now?”
Alex sat back in his seat, muttering, “Just as useless as your worthless son.”
Janine’s reaction was instantaneous. She lunged for him, howling, only caught back by the seatbelt. Diana cowered as much as the space would allow.
“Hey, come on, man,” Jeremy said. “Don’t be a dick.” He shoved Janine back in her seat with one hand.
“Fuck do I care?” Alex said, but he sat back and stopped talking.
Jeremy put the car in drive. “We got the one she wanted. The rest of them can wait.” He pulled out of the parking lot.
I waited until the car disappeared before sprinting to where Shane was waiting.
“What the hell?” he said as I got in.
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t be protecting us. Would she?”
“The way she reacted when he mentioned Ryan...”
I looked at the position of the sun. We had a few hours of daylight left. “Let’s get back to the city.” Whatever was going to happen, there was no going back now.
* * *
“This is messed up.” It was the first time Ian had spoken since Diana had been taken. No one argued with him.
“We don’t hear from her soon, we go in,” Shane said.
I nodded. I was afraid we were already too late.
We’d been driving continuously for hours. If we stopped for any length of time, it would only make it easier for Janine to pinpoint our location. Ian’s phone—the only one that still worked—was on the center console, and each of us glanced at it at least six times a minute. We were waiting for Diana to text.
“We need gas,” Shane said. We’d driven down the perimeter of Audubon Park, and he turned back around.
Ian’s phone buzzed. Shane nearly ran a red light.
We screeched to a stop halfway in the intersection and had to back up. All three of us peered at the phone, nearly bumping heads. There was only one word on the screen: Now.
We all stared up at the red light. It seemed to take forever to turn, but when it did, Shane went flying up the street.
“How long do we have?” Shane asked.
“I don’t know, but it can’t be long. Diana thought not more than an hour until the drugs wear off.”
In ten minutes, we were outside the wall. Shane and I went over it in bursts of telekinesis. Ian flew—actually flew. He managed to blot out his wings and even his body, so he looked like a strange patch of low fog in the fading light. Once we were all over, he made himself visible again and hit the ground.
A couple out for a walk with their beagle saw us and stepped back, staring. I was past caring. We raced down the street and up Annette’s front steps.
The door was locked, but I opened it telekinetically. Jeremy stood just inside the door, but Shane sent him sprawling back with a blast of force and Ian landed on top of him, wings spread, finger to his lips.
“Wait—” Jeremy said, and Ian knocked him out with a blow to the head. I couldn’t stop a yelp of surprise.
“He’ll live,” he said softly, and motioned us forward. I stopped when I saw a trickle of blood coming beneath the door across the hall.
“Cass—” Shane whispered, but he stopped when he saw it too.
I pushed the door open, afraid we’d been discovered, afraid Diana was dead on the other side.
But it wasn’t Diana. It was Ryan.
The room was a bathroom, and he’d clearly crawled there after having a chunk of his arm ripped out. Streaks of blood I hadn’t noticed before marred the floor in the hall. He’d tried to pull himself into the bathtub, but his strength had failed halfway there and he was slumped against the side. As I stared at him in horror, his hand twitched.
“He’s still alive!” I rushed forward, forgetting everything.
“Too late,” Ryan said. The white tile of the floor was streaked with blood. It had pooled in the corners and around the toilet. There was too much of it.
I knelt and lifted him. The last time we’d been this close, he’d been trying in all earnestness to kill me. He was no threat now.
“He’s already gone,” Ian said, standing behind me with his wings flared and his face a flat mask. “Nothing we can do.” His thoughts surfaced in flashes he fought to keep down. Memories of the men he’d killed, lightning strikes of regret.
“He’s right,” Shane said. “We have to go.”
I ignored them and put my blood-slick hands on either side of Ryan’s face. “Diana. Is Diana alive?”
“Don’t know. Been in here...hours.”
“Where is your mother?” It was suddenly more important than anything that I know. “Is she alive? Did Annette kill her?”
Ryan shook his head, and the movement seemed to be almost too much for him. “Ran.” He tried to gesture with one hand, but he lacked the strength to lift it. “Daylight. Ran.”
I was glad. Thank God, I was glad.
Ryan’s fingers curled in the pooled blood on the floor. A bubble formed where his lips parted. It popped with his breath, and he was gone.
“Cass.” Shane tugged on my arm.
This is my fault.
“Cass.”
“No time for this now.” Ian’s voice. “Beat yourself up about it later. Come on.” He pulled me roughly away, and Ryan’s body slipped from my grasp and fell with a thud to the tile.
“We have to get his body out. When this is over.”
“Cass, come on.”
We moved to the doorway to the parlor and peered through a crack in the door.
Annette lay on the rug, facedown. Diana was curled up in a fetal position in the far corner, crying. Blood soaked her shirt, her hair—it was everywhere, all over the couch and the rug. If her body hadn’t been racked by sobs, I would’ve been sure she was dead. Annette didn’t move.
“Finish it,” I said to Ian, all desire for mercy gone. I ran to help Diana.
I turned her and she moaned, her eyes fluttering as I settled her on her back. I saw the mess Annette had made of her neck and froze.
“Shane, get to Bunny. Get her over here now.”
“Like hell. I’m not leaving you.”
I sent him the image of Diana’s mutilated neck. “We can’t move her. Please.”
He hesitated, looking to
where Ian stood over Annette’s body. Ian kicked her with his boot, rolling her over. She didn’t make a sound. Ian pulled out his knife and put the tip to her chest. Her head or her heart.
She had him pinned before I realized what had happened. His knife flew across the room. One of her boots was on his neck; the other she brought down on his thigh. The sound of the bone snapping was like a gunshot.
Ian made a horrible sound, a roar of pain, and Annette fell on him with her fingers curled into claws. She sank them into his thigh and ripped out a chunk of torn fabric and flesh, brought it to her lips and sucked. She turned to look at Shane where he stood by the door, blood still on her lips. Shane pulled Lionel’s handgun from his waistband.
Bullet after bullet hit her in the chest. One missed and splintered the ornate curved leg of a mauve love seat. Shane stood with both hands on his gun and fired until he ran out of ammo. She was almost on him. He threw the gun aside and pulled the machete out if its makeshift sheath.
I knew what I had to do.
Ian was still trying to crawl forward. His pain hit me in the gut as I opened the connection between us and pulled from him for what I prayed would be the last time.
Power flooded me. In the midst of everything, the blood and the threat of death, the rush was still enough to make me shudder in satisfaction.
I pulled, and I focused on Annette. This time, I wasn’t trying to send her away. I rooted her body to the rug. It took an incredible amount of force, more that it would take to stop an eighteen wheeler. More than it would take to lift a house. She twisted in my grip, but I held fast and raised my left hand.
Motes of light collected in my cupped palm. I looked at Shane.
“Get out.”
“I’m not leaving you!”
“You have to. They won’t make it.” I looked at Diana, still curled on the ground. She was alive, but she was losing her grip on consciousness. Ian had already lost his, but he was still breathing. His city was still strong, and it flowed through him to me, a river of energy. Hundreds of thousands of people and their complex lives, their well-loved homes, their interconnected communities. The ball of light grew bigger, and the color shifted to blue, then to deep, inky purple. The tips of my fingers burned. Annette shrieked and covered her face.
“Go now. There’s no time.”
I couldn’t look at the light anymore. It was too dangerous for anything living to be near the radiation in my hands, but Shane still wasn’t moving. I sacrificed a burst of power to push all three of them, Shane and Ian and Diana, bodily from the room. I sent two couches to brace the door. Shane banged on the other side.
“Goddammit, Cass! Let me in!”
“Too late for that. Go get Bunny. She’s the only hope I have of making it through this.”
A lie. It was going to be too late for me. But she was the only chance Ian and Diana had. I pushed the energy in the ball of light out of the visible spectrum and into ultraviolet.
“Cass!” The door rattled as he banged it. He tried to use his powers to move the couches, but I pushed back against him.
“Shane. Please go. I love you. Please go.”
“I’m coming back for you.”
“Go now. There’s not much time.”
I felt him look at Diana’s unconscious body. I felt him decide.
“Thank you.” I couldn’t tell him goodbye. He had to believe I would survive.
“You won’t be able to stop me,” Annette’s voice grated like a screen over gravel. “You’re just one pathetic girl. You won’t be able to keep this up.” She lifted a foot from the spot where I’d held her. It didn’t matter anymore. I released her and funneled the energy I’d been using to hold her down into the ball of light in my hand. I could barely see it anymore. It was well past ultraviolet. X-rays, gamma rays. Penetrating radiation that went through her clothes and her flesh to fragment her bones. The skin on my cheek blistered and burned, and I pulled my shirt over my face and looked away. It didn’t do much good. Thick chunks of my hair crackled and fell out of my scalp. Annette clawed her way toward me, but I stumbled back, and she grasped at air and fell. Her eyes had paled out to dead white. She was blind.
Her fingers reached for me, curved like talons and bright red. Blisters bubbled under her skin and broke. She screamed, trying to find me with her hands, all senses but touch decayed. Swathes of skin and flesh tore from her body on the rough texture of the floor rug and she howled.
Outside the room, Shane was gone. I couldn’t feel the tips of my fingers anymore. Annette pulled her lips back in a snarl, and I sank to my knees. She wasn’t gone yet. Her skin was blackened and her eyes had shriveled and sunk into her skull, but at the base of her neck, where her shirt gave her some protection, healthy skin regenerated, creeping over the ruined flesh like paint over asphalt. I pulled, and ice formed under my feet.
“Not enough.” Annette’s voice was a hoarse rasp, now. It was almost done.
I hit my knees, and the light ball shrank. I had to keep my eyes closed or lose my vision forever. The side of my cheek was already burned beyond pain, the nerves charred. I’d given up on my left hand. Annette crawled forward and grabbed my shoe with a charred, ruined hand.
It had to be now.
My right hand partially protected with the sleeve of my shirt, I brought Ian’s abandoned knife sliding toward me. Annette’s jaws opened, fangs extended as she reached for the flesh of my leg. Even weakened as she was, I couldn’t escape her grip. There wasn’t much I could do. I let her teeth sink into me.
Needles of pain shot up my leg, but it was nothing, not now. The contact opened a mental connection between us, and the full force of her agony rolled over me. Her need for blood to heal the damage I’d done was more than intellectual—it was a compulsion. The desire raked through her, furious, rampant, barely slaked by the mouthfuls she pulled from my leg. I brought the knife around, my muscles barely strong enough to hold it, and plunged it through her ruined, brittle ribcage to her heart with a jolt of telekinetic force.
Annette arched back in pain and fury, bringing a big chunk of my calf with her. My blood stained her face and spotted the islands of healed skin that dotted her body.
She slumped backward on the ice-covered rug, twitching. I pulled out the knife and struck again and again, making a hole in her chest. She was too weak to stop me, her body too preoccupied with healing the massive damage of the radiation to deal with a simple knife wound. I plunged my hands into the hole, and with an awful, sucking sound like boots in mud, tore out her heart.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was pleasant to be dead.
It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t much of anything, really. It was like the void between places in a jump, only without the breath-sucking vacuum. And it was warm, like floating in the gulf in summer. I was in no hurry to find out what came next. I sank into the warm dark and slept there.
Light flared above the still water. It wasn’t the pleasant glow of sunlight, but something burning and terrible and silver-white. Was this the light everyone talked about, the one that came before you faced whatever happened next? I tried to turn away from it, but it was everywhere.
The pain came next.
My legs, my hands, my eyes. Everything ached, and flashes of bright pain sliced through the ache, making me twist and cry out. An aggressively pungent smell hit me in the nose and I came awake in a panicked instant, gasping for air.
“Whoa, whoa, easy.”
Shane. He was sitting next to me on a fancy massage table. He held a broken glass vial in his hands. For a moment, it was all I could see. Not dead. Not yet. The edges of broken glass reflected the light from above, and it was enough to hurt my eyes. I closed them. The pungent smell faded with every breath I took.
“Cassie? You with me?”
“What is that?”
“So
mething Bunny gave me to bring you out of it.” He threw the vial into a trash can by his feet. “You okay?”
I focused back on Shane’s face as he reached for me. I let his warm hand cover mine. I was naked except for a sheet covering my body, and the table was surrounded by dozens of burned-out candle stubs. Bunny’s spa. She’d healed me.
“How long?” My voice was hoarse. I tried to clear my throat, but it was too dry. “Water.” At least my powers still worked.
Shane brought a glass floating to my lips, and I sipped from the straw. It was pure bliss going down, cool all the way to the pit of my belly. I drank and drank until he took it away.
“You’ll make yourself sick.” He set the glass on a table beside me. “Take it slow.”
I swallowed, and my throat cleared. “How long was I out?”
“Two days.”
“Ian? Diana?”
“Both fine. Bunny healed them in a couple of minutes.”
“Thank God.”
“Cass, there’s something else...” He paused, hesitating, and I started to panic at the possibilities. Annette had survived, she’d killed everyone in the neighborhood to regenerate, she’d burned down the B&B, she’d burned down the entire French Quarter. I tugged at the sheet, looked down at my left hand and froze.
My fingers were gone from the second joint. A web of scars covered the flesh of my palm like frost, creeping up to my wrist and feathering out along my forearm. They were white and shiny, old. The blunt stubs where my fingers had been were the unearthly pale color of healed burns, and the flesh was as lumpy as unkneaded dough.
I stared at the place where my hand had been. I could still feel my fingers, as though my body didn’t know they were missing. I touched the stub of my left pointer finger with the tip of my right.
“What happened?” I stared at my hand. I didn’t want to look at it, but I didn’t want to look away.
“Radiation damage.” Shane glanced down for an instant. “Bunny did everything she could, but...you nearly lost your arm.” He glanced to where the sheet covered my feet. “You almost didn’t make it.”
