by Jenna Black
“Your taste in women sucks,” I told Anderson. Maybe not the most sensitive observation in the world, but it was true.
Anderson gave me a small smile, one that looked pretty damned forced to my eyes. “She came by her hard feelings honestly. I left her for Emma many years ago.”
Boy, Emma must have been overjoyed that Anderson had called his old girlfriend to come take care of his new girlfriend, or whatever the hell she thought I was. She was probably going to throw a party when she found out I was going to die.
“Her bedside manner could use some work,” Anderson said, “but she did come out of hiding to help you. It was a big risk for her.”
Somehow I didn’t think Erin had taken that big risk out of the goodness of her heart. Anderson had made it perfectly clear when he hired me to look over his records that he wanted to keep track of the people he’d helped—even though keeping track of them was detrimental to their covers—so he could press them into service as needed. I seriously doubted Anderson had given Erin much of a choice when he’d requested her help.
“If she hadn’t identified the virus, we’d have had no idea what to do to help you.”
I swallowed hard, which was quite a feat with my parched mouth and throat. “Letting me die and burning my body isn’t exactly the kind of help I was hoping for.”
“I know.”
Anderson was still stroking my hair, and I was beginning to find the gesture a bit irritating. My skin felt overly sensitive, and even the light brush of his fingers felt like the scrape of sandpaper. I could only imagine what Emma would think if she saw.
I turned my head away from his touch, hoping that would make him stop. Instead, he reached out and cupped my other cheek, turning my face back toward him. I was too weak to resist as he held both hands to my face and leaned down to plant a kiss on my forehead. I was too stunned to say anything, but I hoped that kiss meant he was about to let go of me and give me some space.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered against my skin.
I didn’t comprehend what he was about to do until the very last instant, which I’m sure was what he intended. Just as the metaphorical light bulb went on over my head, Anderson’s hands tightened around my head. I felt him begin to wrench my head around, and then there was nothing.
I had a vague feeling that time had passed when I next regained consciousness, but I didn’t know how much, and I couldn’t even have said what made me feel that way. I tried to open my eyes, but nothing seemed to happen. I was in complete and utter darkness, and though my brain was sending signals to my eyes that they should blink a few times in case there really was some light somewhere and I just needed to clear them, I couldn’t actually feel my eyes doing anything.
I tried to suck in a deep breath to calm myself, but that didn’t work, either. My body remained in absolute stillness, and I couldn’t even feel the beating of my heart. I tried again for the deep breath, but it was no use.
I felt like I had a body—you know, like you know your foot is there even when it’s not moving or touching anything. But I seemed to be utterly paralyzed, my heart not beating, my lungs not working, my limbs ignoring my increasingly frantic orders to move.
I’m dead, I told myself, remembering the feel of Anderson’s hands on my face. He must have thought giving me a quick death was a mercy compared with whatever the mutant disease had planned for me.
My nonexistent lungs demanded oxygen, but no amount of trying would persuade my body to take in air. Terror coursed through my blood, though with no heartbeat, it seemed that should be impossible. I shouldn’t have been able to feel any of this, but telling myself that didn’t stave off the desperate need to breathe. I was suffocating, and there was nothing I could do about it.
But I was already dead, wasn’t I? That meant I couldn’t suffocate. Anderson was probably even now planning the bonfire in which he would burn my earthly body. God, I hoped he was doing it now. The sooner he burned the body, the sooner the magic of the Liberi would cause it to regenerate.
Unless all of that had been a comforting fiction, meant to give me hope when no hope was left.
I’d thought the symptoms of the illness had made me miserable, but that was a walk in the park compared with being dead. Maggie had told me once that dying was a horrible experience, even for the Liberi who knew they would come back.
She was right. More than right.
There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell. Nothing to feel, except for that frantic need to breathe, like a fish gasping in the bottom of a boat. Only I couldn’t even gasp.
At first, I kept mentally talking to myself, trying to keep myself calm, or at least as calm as possible. As miserable as I was, this was temporary. This, too, shall pass and all that.
That worked for a while, though I couldn’t have told you how long, because I had no sense of time. I was still terrified, would have screamed and thrashed and cried if I could have, but I wasn’t out of my mind. Not yet.
But there was only so long I could hold on before the panic took on a life of its own.
Suffocating. Paralyzed. Alone.
What if Anderson and Erin were wrong? What if I couldn’t come back from this? What if what I was feeling now was all there was, all there would ever be, until the end of time? I couldn’t escape death by dying, so there was no reason to believe this would ever end.
Time passed, and every second felt like a year. A year of unadulterated terror.
This was hell, I eventually decided.
This was my punishment for all my years of youthful rebellion, for all the times I’d been an ungrateful bitch to those who’d tried to take care of me.
With no way to move, no way to make any sound, no way to cry, there was no outlet for the terror, and it just festered inside me, growing more and more powerful, until fear was all I knew.
I was going slowly mad, screaming endlessly inside, praying for an end I was convinced would never come.
NINE
I jackknifed into a sitting position, dragging in a breath so huge it was a wonder my lungs didn’t explode. I immediately sucked in another, the air rasping through my throat.
My heart was back online, that was for sure, my pulse racing, adrenaline flooding my system as my hands rose to my throat and I tried to take about three breaths at once.
“Easy,” said a feminine voice, and in a moment, Maggie was sitting on the bed beside me, holding my wrists, keeping them away from my throat. I think I’d been about to tear open my trachea to get the air in faster. “You’re back now, and it’s going to be all right.”
I was not convinced. I didn’t know how long I’d been dead, but it had felt like forever and a day. I had so much residual panic stored up it was a wonder I stayed conscious.
I burst into tears, frantic sobs that made my chest hurt and my nose clog up. Maggie put her arms around me, rocking me and murmuring soothing nonsense like I was a baby in need of comfort. It shows just what bad shape I was in that it never even occurred to me to object.
It took a long time before rational thought returned. I gently extricated myself from Maggie’s hug, then fell back limply onto the bed, utterly exhausted.
I felt like I was in recovery from the world’s worst case of flu, and I was frankly surprised I’d been able to scrape up enough energy to sit up in the first place. Amazing what existential panic can do. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing, loving the feel of oxygen flowing into my lungs even though my throat and chest hurt from my previous attempts to hyperventilate.
The good news was that there were no aches and pains in my joints and no throbbing in my arms and legs where I’d been bitten.
“It worked,” I said in a small voice, barely able to comprehend what had just happened. I’d died. My body had been burned. And yet here I was, alive again.
“It did,” Maggie confirmed, and I opened my eyes to see that hers were all shiny.
“Why are you crying?”
She smiled thro
ugh the tears. “Because we didn’t know if it would or not.” She reached up and dabbed at her eyes. “When you’re immortal, you get used to thinking that your immortal friends will never die. It’s one of the perks, especially when you’ve outlived anyone you ever knew from your mortal days.” There was a wealth of sadness in those words. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to see everyone you loved die. One day, I, too, would know the feeling, but I shoved the thought aside.
“I didn’t like the idea of losing you,” Maggie concluded.
I was touched by her care, which brought a few tears to my eyes, too. We hadn’t known each other for very long, but I had the distinct impression she’d been starved for female company before I came along.
“How long have I been … gone?”
“Four days.”
My heart gave a thud in my chest. “Four days? Jamaal came back in a few hours!”
“Jamaal didn’t have to generate a whole new body from scratch. It’s time-consuming. Now, stop asking questions and get a little rest. When the others find out you’re back, they’re going to storm the room and won’t give you a moment of peace. Especially Steph.”
I didn’t want to rest, not after what I’d been through. But I was running on fumes, the supernatural effort to come back to life having stolen every drop of my energy. The power of suggestion was too much, and I found my eyes drifting closed despite myself.
Maggie wasn’t wrong about the storming-my-room thing. It seemed like practically everyone in the house came by to welcome me back. The whole thing felt pretty surreal. I mean, I’d only known these people a handful of weeks, and I didn’t think most of them liked me all that much. Why should they, when they’d all been together for years, and I’d only come into their midst by killing one of their friends? Maybe they were just freaked out by the idea of a mutated supernatural rabies virus so powerful it could kill Liberi and they wanted to assure themselves I was still alive.
Steph, naturally, was beside herself. She’d always been more comfortable with tears than I was, and she cried plenty of them when she came to see me.
“I couldn’t believe you would come back,” she told me. “No matter how much everyone assured me you would, it seemed impossible.”
I probably would have felt the same way in her shoes, despite having personally seen Jamaal come back from the dead twice. That didn’t make me squirm any less at the tears. I never knew quite what to do with them.
“What was it like, being dead?” she asked. “Were you … aware?”
I fought down a shudder. I’d have given anything not to have been aware. But Steph’s question told me that no one had mentioned to her how unpleasant dying was. If she didn’t know, I saw no reason to enlighten her. Not to mention that the last thing in the world I wanted to do was talk about it.
Another shudder rippled through me as I wondered if I’d experienced death as regular humans did. Would my sister and my adoptive parents find themselves in the same state someday, with no hope of it ever ending? The Glasses were Christians, their faith low-key but there nonetheless. They believed in the afterlife, but if what I’d experienced was the true afterlife, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
It was a thought too terrible to contemplate, and I added it to my ever-expanding list of taboo subjects. I shook my head at Steph, silently lying to her. I would never, ever tell her what had happened to me when I’d died. If I had indeed experienced the fate that awaited all mortals, I didn’t want Steph to know anything about it. Not until she had to.
By the time Anderson came to see me, it was nearly dinnertime, and I’d been wondering to myself if he was too chicken to face me after having killed me. He’d done the right thing, and I knew that. I’d have died anyway, and who knew how long the disease would have made me suffer before putting me out of my misery?
Actually, not putting me out of my misery, just condemning me to a whole other level of misery. I’d still have been dead, still would have had to spend four days in Limbo, or wherever the hell I’d been. But it would have been nice if the choice had been mine, rather than his.
I still wasn’t close to full strength, but I’d at least found the energy to get up and take a shower. I hadn’t bothered getting dressed, though, so I was sitting around in plaid flannel pajama bottoms with a utilitarian camisole when Anderson came in. My hair was still wet from the shower—blow-drying it would have taken way more energy than I had—and I glanced down at the cami to make sure there weren’t any embarrassingly revealing wet spots. Either that, or I was glancing down to avoid Anderson’s eyes—take your pick.
I was sitting cross-legged on the bed, feeling bone-tired, as if I’d just finished running a marathon. I would have lain down, except I was afraid I might fall asleep again. Besides, I didn’t much like the idea of closing my eyes and triggering memories of the smothering darkness. Hell, if I had my way, I’d never sleep again.
Anderson came to sit on the edge of the bed, resting his back against one of the massive wooden posts. “How are you feeling?”
I found my courage and looked up to meet his eyes. There was an uncomfortable amount of understanding and compassion in his gaze, and it pissed me off. He didn’t get to be Mr. Nice Guy after he’d broken my freaking neck.
“Like someone who’s been dead for four days,” I said with a stubborn lift of my chin. Even saying the words sent a chill through me, and I fought off memory as fiercely as I could. I was going to have to come to terms with what I’d been through someday, but I planned to put that off for as long as possible.
Anderson didn’t flinch from the anger in my voice. “There wasn’t any other way to save you.”
“You could have warned me!” I snapped. “Or, hell, I don’t know, asked me before making a unilateral decision.”
He cocked his head. “Would your decision have been different from mine?”
“That’s not the point!”
“I didn’t think knowing about it in advance was going to make it any easier. I did what I thought was best for you at the moment.” His calm, reasonable voice scraped against my nerves, though it was silly of me to expect wailing and gnashing of teeth.
My first instinct was to lay into him some more, but I took a deep breath and went in search of my self-control. I knew Anderson too well to think I’d convince him what he’d done was wrong. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t entirely sure I was convinced it was wrong—just that I didn’t like it.
“How’s Jamaal?” I asked instead, hoping Anderson would let me change the subject. Jamaal was the only one who hadn’t come to see me, and I hoped that didn’t mean Anderson had evicted him for his lack of self-control at the cemetery.
“He’s … struggling.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I never should have sent him to spend several hours in a cemetery.” Anderson might not have felt particularly guilty about breaking my neck, but the look on his face said that this he felt guilty about. “It gave the death magic too much power, until Jamaal couldn’t control it, no matter how hard he tried.”
I was still mad at Anderson for what he’d done, but I didn’t see that he had any reason to feel bad about sending Jamaal to the cemetery with me. “Did you know that was going to happen?”
Anderson shook his head. “I’ve never known that to happen before, but Jamaal is the only descendant of Kali I’ve ever spent any significant time with.”
“If you didn’t know he’d react that way, then you couldn’t have known it was a bad idea to send him to the cemetery. If you’re going to beat yourself up about something, at least do it about something you could have changed. Like, say, breaking my neck.”
He gave me a reproachful look but failed to pick up the gauntlet I’d thrown down again. “I should have known. Should have at least considered the possibility. He was stabilizing, but now …” His voice trailed off, and the look in his eyes was troubled.
I sighed. “If you’re going to toss blame around, toss some my way. I
noticed that Jamaal was acting strange, but I didn’t do anything. Hell, throw some blame Jamaal’s way, too, because he knew something was wrong long before his control snapped. He could have fessed up and gotten out of there before things went to hell.”
A small smile played around the corners of Anderson’s mouth. “Oh, I’m not taking all the blame, don’t worry. I’m not holding you responsible, because you aren’t experienced enough to have guessed what his loss of control meant. Also, you never in a million years would have been able to talk him into leaving. He is an alpha male, you know.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“You’re right that Jamaal should have recognized he was having a problem and how dangerous the problem was. He’s been spending his time in the basement ever since, though I’m inclined to release him now that you’re back with us.”
In one of the makeshift prison cells, he meant. Not that those cells could hold Jamaal, unless he allowed himself to be held. At least Anderson hadn’t imposed a more draconian penalty, as he had the last time Jamaal had lost it.
I wasn’t able to stifle a yawn. Amazing what dying and then coming back to life can do for your energy level.
“You should get some more rest,” Anderson said as he rose to his feet. “You’ll feel much better tomorrow, as long as you don’t overtax yourself tonight.”
“What about the case?”
Anderson had already turned for the door on the assumption that the conversation was over, but I wasn’t about to let him go that easily.
“We can talk some more tomorrow,” he said.
“What have you found out about the victim? I assume you had Leo do some digging while I was gone.”
He turned back toward me with a quelling look. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“Today is Wednesday, right?”
He nodded cautiously, as if afraid of agreeing with me.
“That means we have two days before the killer strikes again. We don’t have time to wait until I’m all better.”
