Riot Rules

by Callie Hart

  I don’t know how long I can stay and watch this. I’m still so stunned that movement of any kind feels impossible, but I have to go. Fitz cries out in agony as the wolf bites down, wrenching his head from side to side, gaining better purchase. His lupine, beautiful yellow eyes meet mine, and no magical silent message passes between us.

  He is a hungry wolf, and I am one lucky ass motherfucker.

  I run.

  53

  DASH

  Riot House is closest.

  I sprint through the forest, faster than I have ever run before. I have no idea where Carrie and the others are. I have no fucking clue who was even with her. Mercy, and Elodie, most likely. But who else? They could be back at the house. They could be up at the academy. They could still be in the fucking forest, walking around in circles in the dark. Carrie could really be dead, laid out on the ground—fuck, no, stop that. It doesn’t help to panic. My body is screaming by the time I tear up to the house.

  Yet again, Lady Luck is on my side: Pax is sitting on the steps by the front door, smoking a cigarette. He’s absolutely wasted, but he answers me immediately when I holler at him. “Where are they? Are they here? Carrie? Is Carrie here?”

  “No?”

  “Give me your keys!”

  “What?”

  “GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING KEYS!”

  He throws them into the air, and I catch them without missing a beat. In three seconds flat, I’m behind the wheel of the Charger and I’m burning away from Riot House, doing seventy. Pax can ream me out later. He’ll probably knock out a couple of teeth, actually, given my reckless driving in his pride and joy, but so fucking what. He can knock them all out for all I care.

  Please be at the academy. Please be fine. Please be at the academy. Please be fine. Please be at the academy. Please be fine. Please be at the academy. Please be fine. Please be at the academy. Please be fine. Please be at the academy. Please be fine…

  I cling to the hope that I’ll find Wren and the girl I love, safe and whole at the top of the mountain, standing on the steps that lead up to Wolf Hall, arguing over something pointless…

  That isn’t where I find them, though. I see them in the distance—three figures running along the side of the road. One of them is ahead of the other two, moving awkwardly but still running as fast as the wind.

  Seven hundred feet out.

  Five hundred.

  Four.

  Two.

  The Charger’s headlights illuminate the figures properly at last and my heart does a triple backflip. Elodie and Mercy turn and face the car, their faces pale and blank with what looks like shock. Their hands are gloved in red. And up ahead…Wren, exhausted and staggering…with Carina in his arms.

  “No. No, fuck, no.” I jump on the brakes and race out of the car. In a millisecond, I have her in my arms, and she’s ashen, her eyelids closed, her lips a ghastly shade of blue. She looks dead.

  I’m too late.

  I’m too fucking late.

  But then her hand twitches, and my own death sentence is commuted, for right now at least. However weak she is, she’s still alive for now. And I’m not going to let her fucking die. No way, no how. I lay her on the back seat of the Charger, hating that I have to put her down.

  “Get in the car, Wren! Right fucking now!”

  “I’m okay. Just take her. Don’t wait for the ambulance. Go!” He tries to wave me off, but I’ve done a brief assessment of my friend and it’s very clear that he’s hurt, too. He drops down on one knee, his strength failing, and I see the awful wounds on his forearms—deep, yawning lacerations, oozing far too much blood. I slam the door closed on the Charger, cursing through my teeth. “Get in the fucking car this instant, Jacobi. You’re on death’s door.”

  “I’m—right—I’m—ffffine.”

  I already have him by the arms, so he doesn’t fall far when he passes out. He’s in the passenger seat, and I’ve left Mercy and Elodie by the side of the road two seconds later. Not very gentlemanly of me, I realize, as I speed down the mountain, given the fact that Fitz is still out there. But I have faith that the bastard will be fending off Rasputin for some time to come. With all the blood on the hot night air, it’ll only be a matter of time before the others show up, too—Smoke, Shadow, Snow and Ink—prowling through the night in search of whatever smells so sweet and vulnerable.

  Wren stirs back to life, jolting in the passenger seat next to me. I chance a quick sideways look to check on him. I wish I could check on Carrie, too, but I’m going ninety down a sketchy mountain road, and I’m not crashing through a guard rail and killing us all after miraculously finding these guys in time. Wren’s eyes roll in his head. He groans, his breath stuttering.

  “Hey. Hey! Stay awake. Tell me what the fuck happened?”

  He’s lost too much blood to be coherent. “I—I didn’t even mean to—”

  “You did good, man. You got her out of there. Won’t be long now. A couple more minutes and we’ll be at the hospital.” I hope it’s only a couple of minutes. I don’t know how long Carrie has. She was so cold in my arms. Lifeless.

  “I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have fucked with him,” he whispers. “I’m sorry. I’m really…fucking sorry.”

  He’s talking about Fitz. Now isn’t the time to yell at him for his mistakes, though, so I focus on the road, and I try to keep him awake. “Don’t worry about that now. Elodie’s gonna be coming soon. Just stay awake, dude, okay?”

  His head lolls, smacking into the passenger side window when I drift through the intersection that leads into town. It’s nearly three in the morning, and there are no cars on the road. The hospital is a straight shot from here. I put my foot down and I punch it.

  When I pull into the parking lot, there are already people gathered outside the emergency room entrance with a gurney, waiting for us; Mercy or Elodie must have managed to call ahead. The tires squeal when I skid to a stop in front of the well-lit sliding doors. The people in scrubs—three doctors—don’t wait for me to get out. They pull open the Charger’s doors themselves, taking custody of my friends.

  “What happened?” one of them demands.

  “I—I don’t even know! She has a stomach wound. She’s really bad. His arms are all cut up. Please! Help them!” I drove like a psycho to get them here. Now that we’ve arrived, there’s nothing I can do. I’m fucking helpless.

  “Don’t worry. We’ve got them.” All three of them are women. Efficient, calm, and quick. I don’t even have time to get out of the Charger before they have Carina on the gurney and Wren onto another.

  “Pulse is thready. BP’s in the tank,” one of them says over Carina’s lifeless body.

  Relief hits me like a wrecking ball; I was terrified she wouldn’t even have a pulse by the time we got here.

  “This guy’s not much better. No upper body wounds on him, though. Let’s get ’em inside.”

  I try to follow them inside, but one of the women turns around and yells over her shoulder as she disappears with Carrie into the building. “Move the car! You can’t leave that there!”

  “Fuck the car!”

  “The emergency bay needs to be kept clear. Move it now!”

  Cursing violently, I move the Charger, abandoning it in a disabled spot by the entrance, and then I’m in the building, tearing down the hallway—

  “—two ways about it. We’re short. We can’t treat them both.”

  Wild-eyed, I slide on the linoleum, stopping in front of a nurse who’s talking to the brunette doctor. “What? What do you mean, you can’t treat them both?”

  The nurse frowns, ignoring me. “Black Mountain General are driving some over, but that’s going to take at least an hour.”

  The brunette laces her fingers behind her head, her forehead rucked with deep lines. “Okay. Fuck. Give it to the guy. He’s in better shape. Just.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Are you seriously prioritizing one life over another right now?”

  The nurse is alre
ady walking away. The doctor turns and regards me wearily. “That’s what we do here, kid. Welcome to triage. I’m sorry, I know this is hard, but our blood supplies are at nil and—”

  “Wait! Wait! I’m—I’m a whatdoyoucallit. Universal! I’m a universal donor!”

  The doctor stills. “You serious?”

  “YES!”

  “Because we don’t have time to test you. And if we give your friends incompatible blood, it’ll probably kill them.”

  “Yes! Yes, I’m fucking serious! I was here last year. Check! Check my records. I’m O negative, I swear!”

  54

  DASH

  FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER

  “Don’t worry. She’s just sleeping.”

  The voice makes me jump. I was so fixated on Carrie’s small, fragile frame beneath the thin hospital sheets that I didn’t notice the man standing by the window. Now that I’ve seen him, he’s kind of hard to miss, though. He isn’t Alderman. He’s white, for starters, his hair a sandy brown, or a very dark blond, depending on how the light hits him. He’s wearing a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a pair of faded grey jeans that were undoubtedly once black. He’s my height, but there’s a larger-than-life energy rolling off him that makes him seem so much taller. He smiles when he turns away from the window and faces me, though. No aggression or hostility on his face.

  “My cousin warned me about you,” he says.

  “Oh?”

  The stranger nods. “Said there’d be an English kid with a stick shoved up his ass hanging around Carrie’s room—”

  “I’m not leaving.” The words lack defiance. They are simply fact.

  The stranger smiles. “He said that I had to be nice to you until he arrived. And that I should shake your hand for saving her life. Apparently, you donated a shit load of your own blood? Without you, Carrie would have died.”

  He offers out his hand, waiting patiently for me to shake it while I stare dumbly at him, trying to piece together what exactly is happening. After I fail to learn anything from studying the lines of the guy’s face, I put my hand in his, hesitantly pumping it up and down. “I’m sorry. Who’s your cousin again? Are you…Carrie’s father?”

  The guy laughs. “You know my cousin as Alderman, I think. I’m Jamie. And no, I’m not Carrie’s father. Didn’t think I looked old enough to have a seventeen-year-old kid, but thanks for that. Turns out, she and I actually share an old man.”

  “Wait…so…you’re her brother?”

  He shrugs, his eyebrows lifting in a stunned way that suggests this news is just as surprising to him as it is to me. “My father liked to screw around. A fancy name and a fancy title can get a guy a lot of pussy, am I right?”

  I just look at him. Really? He expects me to relate to that? “If you’re suggesting that I’ve used my ‘fancy name’ to screw Carrie, then you can go fuck yourself,” I snap. “My father disowned me last month. I’m just Dashiell Lovett now.”

  Jamie, Carina’s long-lost older brother, laughs easily. He leans across Carrie’s hospital bed, winking at me. “Dashiell Lovett’s still a fancy name, idiot. I always wanted a sister growing up. Now that I’ve suddenly got one, I have eighteen years’ worth of overprotectiveness to get out of my system. Make sure you don’t do anything to hurt her, or—”

  “You’ll spank my spoiled, titled ass until I cry for my mum?”

  Jamie laughs. “No, dipshit. I’ll pull out all of your fingernails first. Then I’ll give you a bleach enema. Then, I’ll take you out into the desert and bury you in sand up to your neck and let the buzzard’s pluck out your fucking eyeballs.” He says it all so pleasantly, like he’s reeling off the itinerary of a three-day European river boat cruise. “Do we understand each other?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Great. I’m gonna go get us all some coffee. Tell her I’m sorry for scaring her when she stops pretending to be asleep.” He strolls out of the hospital room like he hasn’t got a care in the world. The moment the door snicks closed behind him, Carrie’s eyes snap open.

  She sees me and immediately bursts into tears.

  This is not how this was supposed to go. “Fuck.” She’s so pale, her skin the color of ash, her cheeks sallow, dark circles under her eyes. The crying brings a little color to her cheeks but doesn’t help her overall look. I step closer, automatically going to hold her hand, but then stopping myself. She probably doesn’t want me holding her hand.

  “I’m sorry, Stella,” I whisper. “I’m so fucking sorry. I should…” I stagger back a step from the bed. “I should go.”

  No sooner is the word out of my mouth, than she’s reaching out and grabbing hold of me, closing her hand around my wrist in a surprisingly strong grip. “No! No, I—I don’t—please don’t go,” she croaks. “I was just—I was afraid. I didn’t know who he was. I could only see his back. I thought—I thought he was Kevin.” She has trouble getting the name out.

  “It’s okay, Stella.” I stroke a rogue curl, crunchy with dried blood, out of her face. “Kevin’s dead.”

  She flinches away from my hand, eyes wide. “You—you don’t know about—”

  God, where the fuck is Alderman? Why the hell isn’t he here for this? This whole thing would be a sight easier if he were present to account for his sins. I take a deep breath and tear off the Band-Aid. “I do know about Kevin. I’ve known about him for a long time. Alderman came and saw me months ago. He told me everything—”

  Carina hiccups. Stunned. Horrified. Can’t tell. She looks like she’s both, and a thousand other things, too. She closes her eyes, and tears race down over her temples, running into her hair. “You weren’t supposed to find out,” she whispers.

  “And how was that going to work, Carrie?” There’s a bite to my tone, but I can’t help it. I’m frustrated, not to mention angry. “The future we talked about. College. Coming to England. How were we supposed to build a life together when you didn’t even give me a chance to meet the real you? How were we supposed to create or build anything together when there were so many fucking secrets between us? Did you think I was going to blame you? Think you were some kind of monster for defending yourself?” It’s preposterous that she could ever have believed that. Her fractured expression confirms that this is what she believed, though.

  “You don’t understand. I’ve been so scared. Every day of my life for the past ten years. I’ve lived in a perpetual state of terror since the day my mother brought Jason home with her. I watched him beat her. I watched him rape her. Then he started beating me, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he started raping me, too. Then came Kevin and the needle. And then I was running. I’ve been running ever since. All of this time at the academy, with my friends, with you…I was still running. Running in place. Hiding from the past… petrified of the future. You have…no idea what…that was like.” She fights to speak, pulling down just enough air to get each word out before she has to gasp for more.

  Christ, I’ve never experienced hurt like this before. I’ve never wanted to heal someone else so much that it’s caused me physical pain. “You should have trusted me. I would have burned down the fucking world to protect you, Stella.”

  “But you didn’t!” she cries. “You cheated on me!”

  The agony in her voice is heart-stopping. Quietly, I begin to unfold my lies. This…whew, this is gonna be hard. “I didn’t. I paid Amalie to pretend.” So many explanations flit around inside my head. Elaborate, detailed versions of what happened, that paint me in a better light, or downplay Alderman’s involvement. Those explanations are worthless, though. All that matters are the facts. I get them out as quickly as I can, in as few words as possible. “Alderman didn’t think you were safe with the cops looking at Riot House so closely. He wanted to protect you. He asked me to break ties with you. He suggested the method. I went along with it because…because I was stupid, and I wanted to keep you safe. Amalie never touched me. I made it look—”

  “Stop.” Carin
a’s bottom lip wobbles precariously. “You’re lying.”

  I wish I was. Things would be a whole lot easier if that were the case. The problem with telling the truth is that, more often than not, it makes life harder instead of easier. It reopens old wounds and makes them bleed twice as hard. But I’ve had enough of keeping secrets now. I’m done with living in the shadows of the compromises I have made to protect the people I love. “I’m not,” I say softly.

  Carrie covers her mouth with her hands. In her hospital gown, with flecks of dried blood still peeling off her skin and a cannula jammed into the back of her hand, she looks so fragile and broken. I want to scoop her into my arms. I want to shield her with my body and protect her from all of the words and the people that could hurt her, but it’s already too late for that. All of this time, I’ve been dreading the moment when I confess, expecting her not to believe me. I mean, why would she? It would come across as convenient, after all, that I didn’t betray her trust. But I can tell from the way she’s looking at me now that she does believe me.

  “Get out,” she whispers.

  “Carrie—”

  “GET OUT!” Her heartrate spikes on the monitor, her pulse climbing. The monitor’s frantic beeping is going to summon a doctor or a nurse any second now. I take one last look at her, hating the mess we’ve created together.

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry. I’m going,” I whisper. “But just so you know…I did love you back then. So much. Almost as much as I love you now. Bye, Stella.”

  55

  CARRIE

  TWO WEEKS LATER

  Some stories don’t get a happily ever after.