Curran leaned toward him. “Then get strong. Learn to be bad enough so others don’t have to die to keep you safe.”
A commotion broke out by the door.
A female voice barked, “You will let me in or I’ll kill you where you stand!”
The door flew open. A muscular woman strode through, a harried expression on her face. Martina, Ascanio’s mother. She saw us and halted.
“You have a brave son,” Curran said. “A credit to your clan.”
Down the hall the door of the emergency room opened. Doolittle walked out, wiping his hands on a towel. I slipped out of the room and marched to him. He saw me. His face wore a tight expression, like he was straining to keep things inside.
Whoever you are upstairs, please don’t let him tell me that Julie’s dead. Please.
I reached him. “How is she?”
“Julie has massive trauma to the shoulder, three rib fractures, and a Lyc-V infection in the third stage.”
Lyc-V infection had five stages: introduction of the virus, beginning of shift, half-shift, advanced shift, and stabilization. Julie was in half-shift, which meant her body was fighting the virus to stay human.
His face was grim. Something bad was coming. I clenched up.
“Julie’s bloom levels are very high.”
My chest constricted. Lyc-V “bloomed” when its victim was under stress, saturating the body in great numbers. Too much, and it would put Julie over the edge. Forty percent of all Lyc-V victims went loup during the fourth stage. Julie was bitten, she was an adolescent, and she was injured. Her stress level was through the roof and her body was flooded with hormones. Her chances of going mad were astronomically high.
Someone asked, “Is she going loup?” and I realized it was me.
“Too early to tell.” Doolittle rubbed his face. “Her transformation came on too fast. In all my years I’ve never seen it happen that fast. She started to transform almost from the moment the virus entered her system. Julie is very magical. Introducing the virus to her body was like planting a seed in fertile ground. The first transformation is always the most volatile. In a case of stable infection, the virus should’ve leveled off. Julie is still blooming.”
Oh no.
“Call to the Frenchman,” Curran said. I almost jumped. He’d come up behind us and I didn’t hear him. “I don’t care what it costs, just get it.”
“Get what?” I stared at him.
“The Europeans have an herbal concoction,” Curran answered. “It reduces the chances of loupism by a third. They guard it like it’s gold, but we know somebody who smuggles it out.”
Doolittle’s face was mournful. “I took the liberty of calling the moment she came in, my lord.”
“And?”
Doolittle shook his head.
“Did you tell him who was asking?” Curran snarled.
“I did. The Frenchman sends his apologies. If he had any, he would immediately deliver it, but there is none to be had.”
Curran clenched his fists and forced them open.
“What now?” I asked.
“She’s under heavy sedation. The main issue right now is to make her feel secure. No loud noises, no alarming voices, no agitation. We have to keep her calm and safe. That’s all we can do. I’m so sorry.”
“I want to see her.”
“No.” Doolittle barred my way.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“He means you’re so agitated, you’ll spike her virus levels by just walking in there,” Curran said. “If you want her to get better, come back and see her when you’re calm.”
Yelling that I was calm, damn it, would only hammer home his point.
Curran turned to Doolittle. “When will we know?”
“I’ll keep her under for twenty-four hours. We’ll try to wake her up. If she shows signs of loupism, we can sedate her for another twenty-four. After that . . .” Doolittle fell silent.
After that I would have to kill my kid. All strength went out of my legs.
I would have given anything for this to be a nightmare. All my magic, all my power, for a chance she’d wake up. “Is there any hope?”
Doolittle opened his mouth and closed it without saying anything.
I turned and marched down the hallway. The Lighthouse Keepers had to have a base. Someone had to have owned or rented that van. Someone supplied them with explosive bolts. The only time I’d ever seen them used was when Andrea put two of them into a blood golem controlled by my aunt. She had to have them special-ordered.
I would find the Keepers. I would find them and murder every single one of them.
Curran caught up with me. “Where are you going?”
“I have things to do.”
He barred my way. “You look like shit. You need a medic. Let Doolittle fix you.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
He leaned to me, his voice quiet. “This isn’t open to negotiation.”
I unclenched my teeth. “If I don’t hurt something, I’ll lose it.”
“Either you let him mend you now or you’ll run out of gas in the middle of a fight when it counts. You know your body, you know you’re at your limit. Don’t make me carry you.”
“Just try it.”
He bared the edge of his teeth at me. “Is that a challenge, baby?”
I glared at him. “Would you like it to be, darling?”
A hulking figure loomed in the hallway. Mahon.
Thick and barrel-chested, the alpha of Clan Heavy looked like he could step in front of a moving train and force it to screech to a halt. His black hair and beard were salted with gray. He didn’t like me much, but we respected each other and since Mahon was the closest thing Curran had to a father, both Mahon and I went out of our way to remain civil.
Mahon finished maneuvering his massive frame near us. “My liege. Consort.”
“Yes?” Curran asked, his voice rumbling with the beginnings of a growl.
Mahon fixed us with his heavy stare. “Unlike your quarters, this hallway isn’t soundproof. Your voices carry. These are trying times. Our people look to you for guidance and example.”
Doolittle held open a door to a side room.
Mahon inclined his head in a slow half bow. “Please, Consort.”
Fine. Half an hour wouldn’t make a difference anyway.
CHAPTER 18
I AWOKE ON OUR COUCH. MY WHOLE BODY ACHED, deep down, all the way to my bones. Pain was good. Pain meant I was still alive and healing.
Curran leaned on the windowsill, silhouetted against the window, where the dusk or dawn bled crimson onto the sky. The sun was in the east. Morning then. I’d slept for several hours.
Muscles tensed across Curran’s wide back. He knew I was awake.
No matter where I was or how much trouble I was in, he would come to get me. He would demolish the city to find me. I didn’t have to go at it alone.
Several floors below, Julie was sleeping while her body worked to betray her. My Julie. My poor kiddo. Some people awoke to escape their nightmares. I awoke into one.
“Any change?”
“She is still asleep,” Curran said.
“Doolittle sedated me, that old bastard.”
He turned around. “No. He was chanting your wounds closed, and you fell asleep. I brought you up here. Does it hurt less now?”
I shrugged. “How do you know it hurt in the first place?”
“You held your breath when you walked.”
“Maybe I was just pissed off.”
“No.” He came toward me. “I know when you’re pissed off. It’s the way you stand. I know the look.”
He noticed the way I stood. What was I supposed to do with that? “Grendel?”
“He’s in Doolittle’s infirmary. Nothing serious. A few bruises and a sliver of wood stuck in his paw. Andrea returned to the Keep. She says they were eating and he took off on her with no warning. Went through the restaurant’s window.”
Silly poodle. How had he even known we were in trouble?
Muscles played along Curran’s jaw. “We should’ve found Leslie. We’d tracked her all over the city. Her scent was less than three hours old in Palmetto. If we had found her, none of this would’ve happened. You can’t save everyone. I’ve made my peace with that. We should’ve saved Julie . . .”
“I love you,” I told him.
Curran stopped in midword and strode to me. I kissed him, sliding into his arms. “I don’t want to talk,” I whispered. My cheeks were wet and I knew I was crying. My voice didn’t tremble, but the tears kept coming and coming. I’d lost my mother, my stepfather, and now in two days, my kid as well. It was time to pay the piper.
Curran kissed me, his lips sealing on mine. His tongue slid into my mouth, his taste so familiar, so welcome. I clenched his shoulders, pulling him closer, pulling his shirt off. He moved the sheets aside and broke apart from me for the tiniest second to peel my tank top off. I kissed his mouth, my fingers in his short hair, asking for his strength. His hands slid over my breasts, the rough skin of his palms scratching at my nipples. He lifted me to my knees and licked my left breast, the heat of his mouth piercing through all of the pain swirling inside me. I let go of it all and lost myself in him, kissing, licking, stroking, wanting to be one.
He rose above me, I wrapped my legs around him, and when he thrust inside me, the world took a step back. There was only me and him. We built to a smooth hard rhythm, faster and faster, each thrust lifting me higher, until finally heat blossomed inside me, drowning me in a cascade of pleasure. He shuddered and emptied himself. We stayed like that for a long moment, then he moved to the side, gathering me up to him. We lay, curled up together, as the day uncurled outside the window.
I refused to let Julie go. There had to be a way around it. There had to be something I could do. She wasn’t a loup yet, damn it. There had to be a way.
“We’ll kill them,” Curran said, his voice laced with so much violence I almost shivered. “We’ll stamp them out.”
Yes. “A year from now nobody will remember they existed.” There would be no more Lighthouse Keepers after we were done. It wouldn’t help my kid. But it might keep other Julies from being hurt.
A knock resonated through the door.
“What?” Curran growled.
“Jim is here, my lord,” Barabas said.
I pushed off the pillow.
“Tell him to wait,” Curran said. He turned to me. Gray eyes looked into mine. “I love you, too.”
Maybe he truly did. “Promise me that if we leave, nobody will touch Julie until we return.”
Gold rolled over Curran’s eyes and vanished. “Not if they want to live.”
“Not even an alpha of a clan.” I didn’t know how dark the inside of Jennifer’s head was.
“Not even an alpha. Julie is sedated and restrained in her bunk. The access to her room is restricted, and Derek is staying with her. He’s gotten it into his head that if he and Ascanio hadn’t gotten into it, the bouda kid would’ve put up more of a fight. Jennifer doesn’t have a prayer of getting past him, nor would she try. That’s not who she is.”
He swiped his sweatpants off the floor.
I put my clothes on. “It wouldn’t have mattered about Ascanio. She was a trained render. You could’ve killed her. B. Mahon. Jezebel, maybe. Jim . . .”
“Kate,” Curran said. “And now the entire Keep knows it.”
I stopped with a boot in my hand. He was actually proud of me. I heard it in his voice. Oh hell.
He was looking at me with a smile, like the cat who ate the canary.
“What did I do with my other shoe?”
“You’re holding it.”
“Ah.” I sat down on the couch and put my boot on.
Curran slipped on his T-shirt and went to the door. I followed. Curran opened the door, revealing Jim. His cloak was back on. Andrea stood behind him. The right side of her face was black and blue as if she’d been hit by a five-pound dumbbell. She looked ready to kill something.
Jim’s face was grim. “The Keepers activated the device at Palmetto.”
“When?” Curran snarled.
“Half an hour ago.”
Curran swore.
THE JEEP BOUNCED OVER A METAL PLATE IN THE road, went airborne, and landed with a crunch. Jim drove the way he did everything—just on the edge of reckless but never out of control.
In the front seat Curran rolled the window down and leaned, trying to read a grimy road sign. “Three miles.” He rolled the window up before the roar of the Jeep’s enchanted motor made us all deaf.
The Roosevelt Highway rolled past the window, the trees one long greenish smudge. Next to me Andrea held her crossbow. We didn’t have a chance to talk, but we didn’t need to. We just needed a target.
“The Keepers brought the device in sometime during the night,” Jim said. “The Spring Farm Fair is in town this week. That’s where most of Palmetto makes a good chunk of their money. School is canceled for the week and all the church services are moved to eight o’clock to accommodate the fair. The Keepers set the thing up in the middle of a busy street and bailed. The Fair has two fields’ worth of weird magic crap. Nobody would’ve given Kamen’s device another thought.”
The people of Palmetto had walked right past the ticking bomb and watched it charge. And then it activated and killed them.
“Why not hit the fair itself?” Andrea asked.
“Because they wanted witnesses,” Jim said. “People will travel in for the fair, see a dead town, and rush back to spread the panic.”
“So it’s over?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Jim said. “We had people combing through the town yesterday, looking for Leslie. This morning I sent a man from the Keep to brief them on the Keepers and tell them to clear out. They were on the road to Atlanta when they saw the light behind them. They stayed the hell away from it. From what they say, white light appeared above the town, glowed for several minutes like the northern lights, and vanished. The whole thing took about ten minutes.”
To the left, four hyenas, two wolves, four jackals, and a weremongoose burst from the brush and flanked the car. Barabas, Jezebel, and others. The entire bouda clan howled for blood.
“Our source says the device can’t be moved by a water car,” Jim called out over the engine’s noise.
Good call not mentioning Saiman by name.
“He says it kills the enchantment in the water. And they can’t carry it—too heavy. They have to move it by cart and horse. There are four roads out of Palmetto. Used to be five but Tommy Lee Cook Road is shut down. There is a gap across it a quarter of a mile wide. I have people on every road. The machine pulls magic in a circle starting from the perimeter and going inward. The perimeter of the blast zone is clearly visible. They aren’t getting out.”
“Can we enter the zone after the blast?” Andrea asked.
“The source said he walked through the blast of the first prototype. He seemed no worse for wear,” I told her.
An old billboard loomed from between the trees, advertising some gun show.
Jim stood on the brakes, spinning the wheel. The engine sputtered and died. The Jeep’s tires squealed and the vehicle veered left and screeched to a stop. Fourteen bodies lay across the road. Men, women, children, dressed in good clothes. To the right, a church rose, its doors wide open. A preacher lay on the stairs, his Bible still in his hand. On the other side of the road, in a wide enclosure, carts waited for the owners who would never come. Horses snorted and whipped their tails at flies.
“Dear God,” Andrea whispered.
They must’ve been Seventh Day Baptists, going to church for the Saturday-morning service. Whole families. Adam Kamen was right. If you had enough magic, the shock of losing it killed you.
Why? Why the hell were the Keepers doing this? What the hell were they hoping to achieve?
A naked man ran out from behind the church and made a beeline for us. Short brow
n hair, lean build . . . Carlos, one of the rat scouts. He came to a stop next to us and bent over, out of breath. “Can’t go into it in a half-form. Turns you human or animal. You’re weaker, too.”
Carlos strained. Fur sprouted along his back as bones snapped. A moment and a wererat stood in front of us. Carlos opened his long jaws. “Thank Goshhh. I wash worreed.”
A distant wolf howl echoed through the air.
“South.” Curran pulled off his clothes. His skin split. Muscle boiled, fur sprouted, and he dropped to all fours, dark stripes like whip marks over his pelt. Jim shrugged off his shirt and a jaguar in warrior form landed next to Curran.
The monstrous lion head opened its jaws and Curran’s voice rolled forth, the words perfect. “We’ll cut across the fields, along the edge of the blast zone.”
“I’ll take the car.”
Jim threw the keys at me and I snapped them out of the air.
“Don’t break the device,” I said. “You break it, it explodes, we all find our wings in a hurry.”
Curran growled. “Later, babycakes.”
Babycakes. Asshole. “Good hunting, sugar woogums.”
I jumped into the driver’s seat. Andrea pulled a rifle from under the passenger seat and hopped in to ride shotgun.
Curran dashed into the field, powerful muscles carrying him off. The shapeshifters followed him in a silent flood. I turned the key and the gasoline-burning motor purred in response. No magic. Right.
I made a wide circle around the bodies and stepped on the gas. The vehicle shot forward, picking up speed.
“Whoa.” Andrea rubbed her face. “It’s like somebody put a bag over my head. I can’t hear that well. I can’t smell anything either.”
“What happened to your face?”
“She made me leave,” Andrea said through clenched teeth.
I glanced at her.
“Aunt B. We needed to have the talk. Oh no, she couldn’t wait to have that talk. She had to have it right away, so she could explain to me in detail how I needed to become one of her girls. I shouldn’t have gone, but I wanted to avoid a fight in front of the children. We sat at Mona’s and ate pie, while the render tore the kids apart, so her ego would be satisfied. I told her this. You know what she said? She said it was my fault because if I had run over like a good little bouda when she first called me, we wouldn’t be in this mess. So I slapped her.”
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