Spencer was having a difficult time not breaking into a full-out run, but I knew he knew better. He would look pretty damn guilty if he suddenly ran away from our police escort.
“Excuse me, officer?” I said, slowing my pace until I was walking side-by-side with one of the two following us. “Some of our friends are still missing. Are we going to be able to look for them?”
“Probably, after we take down all your contact information and maybe your statements. Depends on the captain, really.”
I paled at the idea of giving a statement. That would probably take hours. What if Ronnie was lying in a puddle of her own blood somewhere? What if she was hanging on by a thread, and if I got to her in time, she’d be okay? But because I had to give a statement, I would arrive too late? Spots appeared in my vision as the pain in my head grew.
When we got back to the festival, healing, cleansing smoke was running off of the Great Bonfire in waves. A cloud of white-and-gray smoke rolled over me, and the pain in my head eased. I could see clearly again, and I saw a group of Weres collared and sitting in a circle near the base of the Bonfire. I recognized a few of Jameson’s wolves, and a finger of panic ran up my back.
“Excuse me, sir,” Jameson’s rumbling voice pulled the officers to a stop. “I’m afraid you have a few of my pack members unlawfully restrained.”
“Mr. McKendrick, we have no way of knowing which Weres are yours and which are not,” one officer said.
I was surprised the officer knew Jameson’s name. “That is untrue, and we all know it,” I snapped, unable to contain my anxiety.
“You need to calm down, ma’am,” the same officer said.
Power snapped at my fingers. “Did you just call me ma’am?”
Spencer put a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back.
“She is correct,” Jameson said, stepping in front of me to block my view of the offending officer. “All of my pack is registered with the city. You only need to run their information to verify who they are.”
“And we will,” the captain said, taking over for the idiot who’d called me ma’am. “But until we are able to get all of the Weres and the, uh, well, whatever they are organized, we err on the side of caution.”
Spencer’s hand moved on my shoulder, gripping it a little too tight for my liking. We couldn’t really argue with their logic. In the melee, the police couldn’t have been sure who was who. But none of us liked seeing innocent people in collars. My throat tightened just looking at them.
The next hour was a blur. I was escorted away from the Weres and back down the fairway to the entrance to the park. Collared Weres walked past me, toward the group we’d left, under guard. I supposed they were trying to separate all the werewolves from everyone else to sort things out and figure out who were victims, heroes, and villains. At the entrance to the park, they’d set up a huge police perimeter to keep everyone there. I had never seen so many cops in one place. I squinted against the strobe lights.
The officer escorting me let me sit on the curb, but I couldn’t help looking for Ronnie’s bright orange hair or Joey’s shock of pink. I was sure one of them would stand out in the crowd, but there were just too many people. The officer had to keep repeating his questions because I couldn’t focus. I asked him more than once if I could just go find my friends and give my statement later, but he always said no. Finally he realized my statement was pretty important, and he radioed for a couple of detectives to come interview me.
I groaned and flopped back onto the grass, rubbing my temples, when the detectives asked the exact same questions. It was probably only an hour, but it felt like an eternity before the detectives finally told me I could go but not to leave the perimeter yet. I was already on my feet and running when they yelled that I could expect a phone call in the very near future.
I didn’t care. I only cared about finding one redheaded witch and one pink-haired pixie. I weaved in and out of groups, checking each face as I went. I was terrified I’d miss Ronnie and Joey if I wasn’t careful. I heard people moaning in pain, and I deviated my path toward the sounds. When I broke through a group of tree nymphs, I stumbled upon the makeshift triage area.
All along that stretch of road and sidewalk were people lying on the ground. Some were just dazed and staring into the night sky, but others were much, much worse. Witches and paramedics were working on the worst injuries, missing limbs, and profuse bleeding. I saw one small boy missing a large chunk of his stomach. His face was pale, too pale, but he wasn’t screaming. I wasn’t even sure if he was still alive, but the witch hovering over him kept chanting her healing spell while a pair of paramedics tried to stanch the bleeding. Someone was screaming for an ambulance, but the cop cars were blocking the roads. None could get through.
I ran between the lines of the wounded, searching for familiar faces. I saw people I knew, fairies and vampires and brownies and goblins and witches and wizards, but none of them were the two faces I was so desperate to find. A stitch was forming in my chest and tears were welling in my eyes, but I wouldn’t give over to the creeping defeat. I reminded myself that if Ronnie and Joey weren’t among the wounded, then that was a good thing.
Unless they’re among the dead, an evil little voice in my head said. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, trying to dislodge that little bastard. Before I opened my eyes again, I crashed right into someone, sending us tumbling to the ground and scraping the heels of my palms.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. When I opened my eyes, my vision was filled with a cloud of brown curls.
The girl turned over, and I was looking into the face of Jane Doe, the girl who had tried to blow up my kitchen and had helped in the firefight at the gypsy encampment. Her wide brown eyes bulged when she realized who I was. She tried to scramble backward, out of my reach.
“You!” I lunged forward, throwing my body on top of hers.
But we were of a size, and my weight wasn’t enough to stop her. She struggled under me, shifting until I fell aside. She nearly got to her feet, but I was quick and grabbed her ankle, bringing her back down, hard, on her hands and elbows. She swore and kicked at me.
“You dirty bridge dweller!” I released a small bolt of power, striking her in the leg and making her squeal.
“Help! Help!” Jane kicked and clawed at me. “She’s trying to kill me!”
Those were the perfect words to yell just then. I tried to hit her to shut her up, but hands were on me, pulling me off her. Jane got to her feet and tried to run, but two uniformed police stopped her and held her just as I was being held.
“Ladies, we don’t have the man power for this right now,” the female officer holding me admonished.
“She attacked me,” I wheezed.
“No! She was trying to kill me. You saw her!” Jane was screaming at the top of her lungs, and all I wanted to do was backhand her across her pretty little face.
“Miss,” the woman said to Jane.
I couldn’t help but wonder why I was a ma’am but she was a miss. I mean, we weren’t that far apart in age. Jeeze.
“What are you doing out here anyway? We told you people to stay over there,” the officer said to Jane. She let me go to point at what could only be called a corral. It was full of humans, some still holding their picketing signs, some even chanting their protests.
“We are not the animals here,” Jane said, whipping her body back and forth, trying to break free. “They’re the animals! They should be the ones in cages!”
“Oh, for the love of frogs,” I muttered, shaking my head.
“Ma’am,” the female officer touched my shoulder, and I cringed. “Please head back that way.” She directed me back the way I’d come.
I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from voicing my opinion about why I wasn’t a “ma’am.” It seemed a stupid argument, all things considered. I concentrated my anger on stomping my feet as I walked away, and I almost didn’t hear my name being called.
My head snapped
up, and finally I saw the two faces I had been so desperate to find. Joey reached me first. Her pixie speed nearly lifted her off the ground as she rushed ahead of Ronnie and crashed into me. Her thin arms wrapped around my neck, and she bounced up and down, squealing. Her tiny fuzzy dragon clacked his mouth in protest as his green claws gripped her shoulder desperately.
“Oh, thank the gods,” Ronnie breathed when she caught up to us.
Joey reluctantly stepped back so that Ronnie and I could embrace.
“When the first Moon Stricken appeared, we couldn’t find you.” Ronnie’s voice caught in her throat, and tears shimmered in her eyes.
I felt the bubble of worry in my chest burst. We were all okay, and that’s all that mattered. My horrifying thoughts of finding them dead or dismembered and dying faded, like waking after a bad dream. I held them both, my fingers curling into their wrists to assure myself that they were real and weren’t going to disappear again.
“Spencer is okay too,” I said.
A look of relief passed over Ronnie’s face. I didn’t think she had wanted to ask if I knew about his wellbeing. Maybe she was worried that I would be jealous if her thoughts were divided, but I wasn’t.
“Good.” She nodded and tried to sound matter-of-fact. “That’s good.”
I rolled my eyes at her. I knew her better than anyone, and I could tell that all she wanted to do was go running in search of him and see for herself. “They’re keeping everyone separated from the werewolves until they can sort who is who. Otherwise I’d take you to him.”
Ronnie’s freckles disappeared behind a flush. “Of course, sure.”
“Can we find some place to sit?” Joey asked. “Smert is tired.” She was holding her tiny, fuzzy, cream-colored dragon, tickling one of his green tufts with her pointy finger.
“Sure, and you can tell me what’s going on out here.” I led the way to the edge of the sidewalk so we could sit on the curb.
There was no telling how long they would keep us all there. I just hoped they’d let the ambulances through and start shuttling people to hospitals before anyone else died. Pairs of people—fairies, witches, and brownies mostly—moved around, passing out emergency blankets and cups of steaming something. When one couple reached us, I was happy to see the steaming cups held hot chocolate. The three of us each took a cup gratefully. Ronnie and I declined blankets, but Joey took one, draping it over her lap and making a little nest for Smert.
“So what’s going on?” I asked.
Ronnie held her cup between both hands, trying to warm her fingers. “A lot of death.”
I took a sip of the steaming chocolate and savored the sweet, soothing feeling running down my throat. It was the first time all night that I’d felt even a modicum of relaxation. “I saw.”
We weren’t looking at each other. We stared ahead, our eyes fixed on some point in the street. It was one tiny spot where there weren’t any bodies or blood. If I let my eyes relax, I could almost believe that everything else had just gone away. But the occasional wail of pain brought me right back to that nightmare spread out around us.
“Over half of the protesters were killed,” Ronnie said. “So many of the monsters were running around, but it was like they were drawn to the humans—at least the ones who were part of P.E.A.C.E.”
“But not the others? Not the humans who just came to join the festival?”
“I mean, not any more than any other moving body, you know?” Ronnie sipped her chocolate.
Joey picked up the thread of the story. “It was like they were programmed to go after the protestors specifically.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Because so many of them looked like they were looking for something. Only a small number of them broke off and ran into the festival. The rest of them saw the line of protesters and ran right for them.” Joey shook her head, making her soft pink spikes drift back and forth. She hunched over Smert, gathered the blanket around him, and hugged him close.
“Yeah,” Ronnie agreed. “They were sniffing the air, swinging their heads back and forth, and then some idiot screamed. All of them, like twenty of them, turned as if they were all connected by the same string. They saw the humans, and they howled and brayed and ran right at them.”
“How did you see all of this? Where were you? I left you for, like, a minute, and when I turned back, you were just gone.” The panic of losing sight of them resurfaced inside me, and I was torn between wanting to punch them both in the shoulder and pull them close to me.
“So stupid,” Joey said, shaking her head. “I had to pee.”
“What?”
“I knew you’d come back to that spot, and Ronnie knew where we were, so I thought it was okay to run to pee. While I was fighting through the crowd, everything went crazy.”
“I saw her take off, so I followed her, figuring we’d meet you back in the food court in a minute,” Ronnie said. “But then the screaming started, and people were running away from the food court. We couldn’t get back there.”
“We went with the flow of the crowd, figuring when it dispersed, we could run back in and find you,” Joey said.
“But then we were almost at the gates,” Ronnie said, pointing up the hill behind us. “And we saw the, um, we saw…” Her voice was sticking in her throat.
I touched her shoulder lightly. “Them. You saw them.”
She nodded. Squeezing her eyes shut, Ronnie fought the tears and tried to compose herself. “So we were out here when we saw them and saw what they were planning on doing with people when they caught them.”
I nodded, looking back at that blank spot on the road again. “I saw that too.” I tried not to remember the sounds of breaking bones and the slurping and chewing and all the other noises that would haunt my nightmares.
“So what happened? How did it stop?” Joey asked. Smert had fallen asleep in her lap and was snoring. It was a soft sound that almost sounded like a cat purring.
Thoughts of Artemis filled my mind, and the only thing in the entire world that I wanted was to go home and scoop him up and rub my face against his smushed one. Guilt slammed through me. He was probably hungry and worried about me. Being my familiar meant that he was metaphysically tied to me. If I spent too much time away from him, we both suffered.
“Mattie?” Ronnie’s voice cut through my worried thoughts. Her hand was on my shoulder, shaking me to bring me back to the present. “Do you know what happened to stop everything?”
“Oh, right, yeah, I do.” I told them about seeing Tollis and his talk about taking the world from humans, the supernaturals rising up like some superior race. I told them about Fletcher trying to come to my rescue and binding Tollis. I told them about lighting the Bonfire and finding out exactly why Jameson truly was the city Alpha.
“Whoa,” Joey said after I finished explaining Jameson’s transformation and feeling his power rush out of him, forcing so many wolves to shift smoothly and painlessly.
“Exactly.”
“So Tollis is collared?” Ronnie asked.
“Yes,” I said, draining the rest of my lukewarm chocolate. “They’re back there now, trying to figure out who is part of Jameson’s pack and who is part of Tollis’s and who was just a victim of the Madness.”
“Do you think the people who were Stricken were the humans Tollis kidnapped? The ones he was feeding that potion that Whelan told you about?”
“Yes, I do.” I nodded.
“So he figured out some sort of potion that would transform a human into one of those things when the Samhain full moon rose.”
“I don’t get it,” Joey said. “I mean, it’s the full moon. Why not just have his wolves do this? Why use humans to attack other humans?”
Ronnie and I shared a look when Joey’s words sank in.
“He was always talking about humans oppressing us because they think we’re animals and abominations,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Maybe he was trying to prove that humans could do t
his kind of thing to each other.”
Ronnie nodded. “And if it’s humans killing humans, then he’s protecting his pack. They won’t be charged with these crimes.”
“Sonnovahobgoblin,” I swore, getting to my feet so fast my head spun. I needed to get home and get some sleep soon.
“Where are you going?” Ronnie asked, gripping my pant leg to keep me from leaving.
“I have to tell the cops what Tollis was doing, or they’ll release his pack and arrest all those innocent people.”
“No, they won’t,” Ronnie said, tugging on my leg to get me to sit back down. I tried to shake her off, but Ronnie was as stubborn as I was sometimes. “Mattie, Jameson knows what Tollis was doing with those people. He’ll tell them.”
I looked up the hill at the entrance to the ruined festival. There were wooden sawhorses and uniformed police in riot gear standing behind them. They didn’t look friendly or interested in hearing the ravings of one exhausted witch. Reluctantly, I sat back down. I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.
“It’ll be okay,” Ronnie said. “If we’re wrong and they do arrest everyone, we’ll go home, get Whelan, and take him to the police station. He’ll tell them what happened to him, and you can tell them about the kids you dropped at the hospital, and they’ll have so many witnesses they won’t be able to ignore it, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, nodding slowly. I wasn’t really sure it was, in fact, okay, but I didn’t believe I could get back to the captain and Jameson right then anyway.
The sun was fully in the sky by the time they let people leave. Ronnie, Joey, and I were all fighting to stay awake when officers moved through the crowd, making sure they had everyone’s contact information before giving them permission to go.
Walking home was one of the hardest things I’d ever done in my life. My legs were heavy with exhaustion, and I couldn’t walk in a straight line. I was glad all the city cops were tied up at the park because I would’ve gotten arrested for being drunk in public. I think I passed out on the elevator ride up to my floor, because Ronnie had to shake my shoulder and push me out of the deathtrap, telling me she’d call in the evening.
Samhain (Matilda Kavanagh Book 2) Page 21
