by Odessa Lynne
A scuffing sound came from beside him and he realized Marcus was backing off.
Then the smell hit him.
“Oh God,” he groaned.
His heart lurched and his head swam and his stomach heaved and he rolled to his side just in time to throw up beside him. Nothing much came out, but he hadn’t had anything in a while; he remembered that.
He pushed up on his left arm, felt his whole body shaking as he did it, then just sat there and breathed in the rancid air.
He remembered that smell too. He spat on the floor a few times, trying to think, but it was so damn hard.
He tried to sit up straight, but couldn’t balance, then realized his right arm was completely immobile—he couldn’t even feel it, although he knew it was there. That weight—it was the weight of his hand pressing against his thigh, he was sure of it.
What was wrong with him?
“Five?” he asked. “I was—where’s Five?”
“I’m really sorry,” Marcus said. “You able to get up?”
“What?” Mason swayed a little.
“Come on, Mace, you’ve got to get up. I’m sorry. But you’ve got to.”
He couldn’t breathe.
Something hard hit him in the back, forcing a gasp out of him. Marcus was looming over him again.
Okay, okay, okay. He could breathe. He wasn’t suffocating. He just… he wasn’t sure what was going on. He smelled smoke. Why did he smell smoke? His chest hurt—so bad. Like a vice clamped to his heart that just kept squeezing and squeezing and squeezing…
Another hard smack landed on his cheek.
“Goddammit, Mason!”
Mason swayed again. “I was shot? I remember—” He looked around, but all he could see was the dark shadows of Marcus’s face and the flicker of fire in one corner of the room, just a tiny fire, smoking like it was trying to burn its way through a pile of wet leaves.
And the bodies. He could see them too.
“Okay, here’s the thing. If you don’t get up, we’re going to die in here. You don’t want us to die, do you? Come on. I can’t leave you here, but I can’t carry you, so you’ve got to get up.”
“What are you doing here?” He actually thought he got that out pretty clear, but the look on Marcus’s face was wrong. So, so wrong.
“They shot everybody. Do you understand? None of them are healing. They’re going to kill them all.”
That caught Mason’s attention, even though it took a moment for his thoughts to fall in order. “Is that what happened?” The smoke was irritating his throat and he started coughing. Then he couldn’t seem to stop.
Marcus scooted close again, rubbing his back. Mason tried to wave him away but he’d forgotten already that his arm wouldn’t move.
He finally quit coughing, but every breath he sucked in felt like it was going to make him start all over again.
“I was shot,” he said, his voice coming out weak and scratchy but clearer than before. “Something’s wrong.”
“Don’t you think I know that? You’re not healing either. I thought you were dead. You quit breathing for more than ten minutes. I counted the goddamned seconds.”
So much tension there in Marcus’s words. Mason tried to think.
Just think. Why couldn’t he think? Maybe… maybe his brain had been damaged. You needed oxygen to live. Oxygen to think. He wasn’t thinking.
The gift. He wasn’t healing. Why wasn’t he healing? Five had told him—told him—told him—what had Five told him?
Five hadn’t told him anything. Five didn’t trust him.
Where was Five?
“Where’s Five?”
“Mason—goddammit. Mace—” Marcus sounded like he was going to cry. “Don’t do this to me. I got the door open. I can’t leave you here, but if we don’t go soon, it’s gonna be too late.”
“It’s okay.” Mason took a breath. “It’s okay. You can go. I’m okay. You don’t have to take care of me anymore. I’ll take care of myself.”
“Please don’t say that. Please…” Marcus grabbed him around the neck and pulled his head in tight to his chest. “Goddamn you.”
He was trying to remember what he’d been thinking before Marcus distracted him. “Where’s Five? I was with him. Why isn’t he here?”
That was what he tried to say.
He wasn’t sure it all came out.
His ear was pressed tight to Marcus’s chest so he heard when Marcus choked back a sigh.
“Where is he?” Mason asked. “Why haven’t you told me where he is?”
A hard breath shook Marcus. “He’s dead, Mason. I think he’s dead.”
Mason couldn’t breathe. “No, that’s not right.”
“He put himself between you and those goddamned motherfuckers. He wasn’t moving. They shot everybody. They’re going to kill them all.”
“No.” Mason drew in a rancid gulp of air. “He’s not dead. He’s going to—he’s—I can’t breathe.”
Marcus was usually right. But Marcus couldn’t be right.
Marcus released him, his fingers dragging through Mason’s hair. “I’m sorry. Come on. It’s time to get up. You can do it.”
Mason’s thoughts kept circling between a vision of Five dead on the ground and the memory of his broken hand. He needed to think. If he could just think, he’d know what was going on. He’d figure out how to fix it. Five was dead on the ground. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
The wolves healed terrible and terrifying injuries. It was why they were so hard to kill. It was why he’d found it so easy to—
Why was Five dead on the ground?
“Where’s Five?”
Marcus shook him. Mason’s head snapped back. “God, Mason, I know it’s hard, but pay attention. We have to leave. You have to get up.”
When he’d broken his hand, he’d healed. So quickly. The wolves’ near-magical gift had healed him. So why was he dying now? And he was dying. He could feel it in his chest—the tight, slow thump thump of a heartbeat that wasn’t quite firing on all cylinders.
Five didn’t trust him. He hadn’t told him what the gift was.
The gift was the key.
Or maybe—maybe not. Something tickled at the back of his brain. Something he couldn’t grasp because his thoughts weren’t coming together.
He needed to think, goddammit. Why couldn’t he think?
Marcus would know. He would’ve been able to figure it out. He was the smart one. But Marcus wasn’t right. Not this time. He couldn’t be.
“I was shot,” he said again. “They shot me. My shoulder—”
“Your shoulder’s not in good shape,” Marcus said, “so we’re not going to talk about your shoulder, okay? Let’s just get through this and deal with that later.”
“They locked us up with the dead people.”
“Yeah, they did. Come on, Mace, there you go.” Marcus had his hands on Mason’s shaking arm—the only thing holding him up. He was trying to wedge himself under Mason’s armpit.
The sudden jostling movement actually caused a jolt of feeling in the shoulder he hadn’t been able to feel until that moment.
Pain, so much pain. He thought he might have screamed.
Marcus was babbling, his voice high and tight and laced with panic. “Don’t you pass out—Don’t—No no no no no no...”
Mason needed to lie down. He tried to writhe away from the pain ballooning through his chest. His heel scuffed the floor, and the sole of his boot hit something soft and heavy. Flies buzzed around them in an uncontained frenzy.
A sharp slap knocked his head to the side.
“Don’t you fucking pass out, don’t you do it.”
“I’m not—it hurts. Goddamn it hurts.” He curled forward.
Marcus grabbed him and held him tight to his body, hands clutching at Mason’s head and ears. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. It’s okay.”
Mason forced himself to breathe—just breathe.
And suddenly he knew. “The bullet—did yo
u get it out?”
Marcus squeezed him tighter, almost as if he were afraid to let go. “I didn’t touch it. Didn’t want to risk making it bleed. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—” He interrupted himself with a choked off laugh that made no sense. “It’s bad, Mason. I fucked up. I got you into this and I fucked up.”
“Get it out.”
“They’re going to kill you trying to get me to talk, but I’ve got nothing to tell. You’ve got to get up now, okay? The door—”
Mason tried to pull free of Marcus’s hold on him but Marcus wasn’t giving an inch. “It’s killing me. I know it is. Get it out.”
Marcus leaned his forehead against the crown of Mason’s head. “If I leave you, they’ll kill you. But I have to go, I have to stop them from—don’t make me choose. Don’t do that to me, okay?”
Mason clutched at Marcus’s shirt with all the strength he had. It wasn’t much.
“Listen to me. Get it out. It’s killing me. It’s got something to do with—with—with—” He jerked at Marcus’s shirt and dug his forehead in against Marcus’s breastbone. “Why can’t I think?”
“You were dead, for God’s sake! I told you!” In the silence that followed, Mason could hear the harsh rasp of Marcus’s breathing. When Marcus continued, he’d lowered his voice, “You weren’t breathing. I told you that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Don’t be a fucking idiot. Look—”
Marcus shuffled on his knees backward a few inches. “We have to do this quick, okay? But I’ll do it.” With no further warning, Marcus started easing Mason down to the floor. “This isn’t a good idea. I know better than this. You’re going to die and I’m going to know it was all my fault for dragging you into this shit.”
Mason gritted his teeth, the movement sending sparks of pain from the back of his neck and head all the way into the backs of his legs. “Just—shut up. Shut up.”
“Okay, okay—”
“Can you—”
“I can barely see a goddamned thing.”
“Ahhh!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Shirt has to come off.” Marcus made a harsh sound under his breath. A sob, maybe. Mason couldn’t tell. His body was starting to feel like the whole thing had been put to sleep and was prickling with the sensation of pins and needles.
He was dying—he knew it.
Why he’d decided the bullet was the reason, he couldn’t explain, but he knew that too. He knew it the way he knew Five wasn’t dead. He wasn’t—he couldn’t be. They had too much to settle between them.
Marcus yanked and the shirt came off, unintentionally knocking Mason’s head back to the floor.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Just find the—” Mason broke off on a scream. And then another.
Marcus had found something, because he was digging around in the mess of fractured and splintered bone like he was trying to scoop out the insides of a cantaloupe with his fingers.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he kept saying, over and over until Mason thought he would rather lose consciousness than hear another—
A hard slap caught him in the side of the face.
He jerked, his thoughts coalescing with a sudden, painful clarity.
“You passed out.” Marcus leaned close, something in his hand. Metal shone in the flicker of firelight. “I think I got it.” Awe echoed in the words. Then he hissed and dropped the bullet to the floor and started rubbing his fingers. “Shit, that thing’s hot.”
Mason lay on the floor and tried not to notice the stench of rot and decay while he sucked in air. His heartbeat slowed, settling into a steady, even rhythm. His hands stopped shaking, and the terrible pressure in his chest eased.
It was still there, though, and that was enough to give him hope.
Chapter 29
Mason reached up with his left hand and brushed sweat off his forehead. His right arm tingled, but he didn’t dare try to move it.
“Did it help? Do you feel better? Can you get up? We have to—”
“Yeah yeah yeah. It’s okay. I’m okay.” He was breathing a little heavy still, but he wasn’t lying. He was okay. He was feeling stronger by the second.
“Thank God,” Marcus said, staggering to his feet, “because that’s it, we’re out of time. We have to get out of this fuckhole, now.”
“I’m—yeah. Believe it or not, I’m already feeling—”
“That’s great.” Marcus grabbed Mason’s wrist and hauled. “Less talking and more moving.”
Mason rose all the way to his feet with that one aggressive pull, and although his legs were as weak as watered down whiskey, he maintained his balance.
Marcus hauled him in for a tight hug, stealing Mason’s breath, then stepped back with a jerky movement. “My God, you just don’t know. I thought you were dead. I won’t ever forget that feeling.”
Mason gripped Marcus’s shoulder. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Marcus took Mason’s hand and squeezed, then bent over and grabbed Mason’s shirt off the floor. “Here, I’ll help you get this back on.”
The shirt was bloody and the shoulder torn, but Mason let Marcus help him pull it up his right arm before stretching it over Mason’s head.
Mason sucked in his breath a time or two and hissed through gritted teeth another, but the difference between then and earlier was remarkable. The pain was bearable, and within a short minute, he had his filthy shirt back on, clinging unpleasantly cold and wet to his shoulder and chest.
Marcus started for the door. “They shoved me in here and threw you in after and I couldn’t see a fucking thing when they shut the door. Took me a few minutes to calm down, but when I did, I was able to remember everything I saw.”
Mason could hear the heavy rasp of Marcus’s breathing. He followed carefully. It was less than twenty feet to the door but he remembered the state of the floor, and he didn’t want to end up on his ass because he’d stepped in something he was better off not thinking about.
“I don’t know about you,” Marcus continued, “but my memory is so goddamn sharp these days I could recite the lyrics to that song Gillie was singing the day Brecken spilled milk all over the kitchen floor.”
The memory of that moment came to Mason, a crisp, clear thought full of detail he shouldn’t have been able to recall: Brecken had been wearing a white shirt, stained at the collar, and when the milk had puddled under the leg of the table, Brecken had looked up with that wide-eyed “what did I do?” look on his face that he’d been perfecting for the last two years. Gillie had stopped singing for two seconds and then picked it right back up as if nothing had happened.
There’d been nothing special about that day, nothing that made it inevitable he’d remember it so perfectly weeks later. But just as his vision had sharpened, his memory had too. Only he hadn’t noticed any of it happening, because he hadn’t known there was anything to notice.
“I used my memory to find what I needed to start a fire so I could see,” Marcus said, stopping in front of the door. He took a breath as if bracing himself. Maybe he was. He would have had to feel his way through the pitch black room until he had a fire to give him some light. “That’s all that matters.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Pocketknife. Clothes. They burn as easily as anything else.”
“They gave you your knife back?”
“Don’t you have yours?”
“No. They didn’t give mine back.”
The identical pocketknives had been two of the last gifts their father had given them. Mason intended to get his back, but it seemed pretty goddamned unfair that the wolves just handed Marcus his and left Mason without anything.
Instead of dwelling on the unfairness of it all, Mason changed the subject. “You said they wanted answers from you? What do you know that they want to know?”
“I destroyed the lab. You probably saw it.”
“Yeah.” Mason watched Marcus fiddle with the
panel by the door. “Go on.”
“In a sec. Let me—”
Marcus quickly pulled the panel away from the wall. It had already been detached but left in place, probably to fool anyone who looked at it.
“When they caught me, I figured playing dumb was the only way to keep from ending up tortured for the information they wanted. I told them I was you, just doing what you’d asked me to do. I’d already ditched my phone so that couldn’t give away the truth. Then you showed up, Stan stabbed me and took off after you, and I knew I’d fucked up. They thought you were me. I thought I’d probably gotten you killed until I saw you show up here again.”
The confession stunned Mason. He thought back over his confrontation with Stan, Rock, and Lavi, and with a clarity that amazed him he was able to recall every word Stan had said to him before he’d died.
You’re dead, Waters. Gonna blow your fucking brains out myself after we get what we want out of you.
You sorry yet for what you did?
That brother of yours sounded sorry enough.
Nothing that had happened proved Marcus wrong. Stan had thought Mason was Marcus, and he’d thought he was proving something to Marcus by killing his brother.
“You shitbrain,” Mason said.
“I know.” Marcus let out a tight little laugh that had absolutely no humor in it and lowered the panel to the floor. “God, do I know. I didn’t think they’d kill you that quickly. Thought they might try to use me as leverage, thinking you were me, and that it would buy me some time. Stan might have been a goddamned sociopath, but he wasn’t stupid. Or I didn’t think he was. I have no idea about these people we’re dealing with now. I’ve never seen most of them before.”
He stopped talking as he took out his pocketknife and flipped the blade open with his teeth.
“You said this was bigger than just the—”
“I know. I know what I said. And it is. Somebody supplied the research for this shit. These goddamned motherfuckers were smart, but not one of them was smart enough to figure out what this place was hiding and come up with a way to get the equipment they needed to turn it into a weapon. Someone shipped it in and you know how goddamned expensive that is. Stan doesn’t have that kind of money and resources. But he was the one in charge for as long as I was around.”
