Cheat the Grave (11 page)

“More than anything.”

Caine's nails snapped louder, and I glanced down to see the black bone tattooed on his forearm flex with his fingers. I didn't think he was doing it consciously, but the motion proved mesmerizing. In the dim room I could almost be
lieve the bone moved, inky against the skin, defined and liquid all at the same time. Looking up, I saw his nostrils widen, opening and closing like fish gills, seeking to discover exactly what sort of monster Mackie was. He was also sensing Mackie's destructive rage in a different way than I ever had.

One, I thought, looking back down, I'd never even conceived of before.

The bones on Caine's body continued a sinewy, almost sexual dance that traveled up and then back down the length of his body. Yet all the energy was derived from and concentrated in his fingertips. They vibrated finely, black nails banging into each other like wooden wind chimes. He almost appeared elegant, feeling out the world not through sight like everyone else, but through little implosions of movement on the air. I tested the theory by waving my hand at my waist, as if motioning him away. His pinky darted in my direction, taking on an unnatural angle before twitching and falling back into the reading rhythm of his other fingers.

His head was still upturned, but if he had eyes, they'd have been closed. A moment later he finished this vibrational reading and dropped his arms to his sides. “Oh. He's
new
.”

Why'd he have to sound so damned impressed?

“No, he's old,” I said on a long sigh. Mackie's head shot up, his long neck craning from the destroyed car like the tourists in their moon roof limos. His feral grimace went wide and he snarled into the air. Rabid wolves might make that sound. People didn't.

Caine raised his brows. “You may want to call the police. Tell them vandals have your car.”

Shaking my head, I pulled out my single-use cell. “He'll mow down the mortals.”

Warren could very well take care of this. I'd saved his ass enough times, and besides, he'd told me to let him know of any other rogues. “I'm calling the Light.”

“Wait!” Caine reached out, no longer elegant as he scrambled to grab at my wrist. I still didn't understand the purpose of the nails. They seemed more of a hindrance than help. “The attention from the mortal population will be enough to scare him off. He'll want to remain under the radar as long as he can. Besides, other than Tekla, your former allies have never been mine.”

Other than Tekla?
I drew back, distracted that this man would know the powerful Seer. It made sense, I suppose, as they had the same gift. But
how
did he know her? “Aren't you Shadow?”

“Born free, here in this valley. Same as you.”

Not exactly an answer, thus all the answer I needed. I stepped back. Despite his blindness, he smiled. At least I now knew what we had in common. “A rogue,” I said harshly.

“I prefer the term ‘independent.'”

“So do I,” I said, and turned away. I had what I'd come for. I'd exit the wooden house, guns blazing, punch holes in Sleepy Mac while he was gnawing on the steering wheel, then run like crazy. If he caught me? Well, maybe it was a blessing. Maybe a girl wasn't supposed to spend her lifetime on the run.

“Please,” Caine said as my hand hit the door. “Remember why you're here.”

Protection. Armor. Help.

I looked down and considered the phone, still clutched in my other hand. I'd asked those same things of Warren and he'd turned his back. “The mortal police are no match for Mackie.”

“That's why I'm here. Destiny has provided me with this choice. Our choices bring us relevance.”

I laughed bitterly, and Mackie heard all the way outside. A homicidal cry spiraled into the air. “I'll settle for surviving the night.”

“I can give you that wish.”

Wishes don't mean shit.

True. You must take action.

I put the phone away and squinted across the room, the meager light colorless against all the room's shadows. I didn't know what Caine sought from his destiny, but he waited, a motionless monster, for my answer. Just waiting. Letting me have a choice, when choices had been a diminishing commodity in my life, was almost too much responsibility to bear.

But Caine did see me. Despite his blindness, or because of it, he was offering his power to me now, when Warren and everyone else refused to give even an inch of respect or acknowledgment. How could they not know, when this man clearly did, that it was all anyone really wanted out of life?

“Fine. I'll allow you, a
rogue
, to be my protection.” Then I pulled out the saber and pumped its attached firearm. “But I'm going to do it armed.”

 

Of course Caine was a Shadow. He said independent, yet everybody came from somewhere and had an individual lineage as clearly drawn as the lines on their palm. But when up against something as destructive as Mackie's blade, those things ceased to matter. Race riots were quelled when it was the entire human race thrown into the fray.

A Shadow helping me.
I shook my head as I backed into the center of the room, giving Caine access to the door. It was an awkward thought, like someone poking me in the brain.

“So don't think about it,” I muttered to myself as Mackie's war cry ricocheted up the staircase. Just aim.

But the building shook under Mackie's ascent, and when his blade pierced the wooden door, I wished I'd run. Then I thought of Luna, eyes moving within a ruined body, and widened my stance. The scent of my defiance made Mackie squeal louder.

I waited for Caine to get in front of me, but glanced over to find him peering back out the window instead.

“The problem is over here, Skelator.” I probably shouldn't let my nerves—and thus my mouth—get the best of me when someone was actually trying to help, but what was he doing by the boarded-up window? He couldn't even see the moon he was gazing up at!

“A lovely evening, really,” Caine said, like we were meeting for a midnight cocktail. He stuck his fingers through the slats, palms disappearing out the window, as if feeling for the night. “I can smell the spines on the yucca.”

A scrabbling on the floor, like Mackie was trying to sneak underneath. But when I whipped my gaze back, his blade was still actively sawing through the door's center. “Caine?”

“I love the tarry wood scent of the creosote bush.”

“I don't fucking care!” More scrabbling, more cutting. Caine was playing touchy-feely with the night sky and I was trapped inside a collapsible fire hazard across from someone who made him look sane!

Glancing at the floorboards as the sounds ran along the scarred planks, I wondered if Mackie was down there. For all I knew, the blade imbued with his soul energy could cut all on its own. I backed up, heard more scrabbling behind me, and altered direction. It was like playing hot potato with the floor, trying to avoid getting burned.

Until I tripped over something and fell on my ass. Pushing to my feet, my fingers slipped alongside something abrasive, like an exposed extension cord. Odd, I hadn't seen it before. Usually hyperaware of my surroundings, especially in a battle, I knew my mortal eyes had failed me again.

Gaze and gun focused on the knife at the door, I used my foot to tap out the dark space on the floor. I found that strange ridge again, and followed it backward…all the way to Caine. More specifically, to his foot.

“Ew!” I jumped again. Mackie howled in the hallway. Caine continued to lean against the wall, breathing in the moonlight, hands outside. I bent, squinted, then my eyes widened as I held back a squeal. Caine's talons had lengthened into black spears that cut shavings into the floor as they slithered all around the room. I followed the one I'd first encountered back to the room's center, realizing it had cut a path around me on its way to the front door.

Caine
was
standing in front of me, I realized. At least, his toenails were. And what allowed all that forward extension? I lifted my gaze to find the tattoos on his body pulsing like individual hearts—two hundred and six of them, I bet—one for each bone in his freaky body. I also realized I was having trouble seeing, like the skeleton drawn atop that malleable skin was pulling in all the light. Opaquely, the tattoos burned.

A tremendous crash sounded at the door, then Mackie's howl slid around the frame. I shook and fired off a round, wincing from the sound and in belated anticipation of losing a limb. Yet the conduit didn't misfire, and after another cry from Mackie—this one steeped in pain—I knew my bullet had struck home. I aimed again.

“Please don't put holes in my door,” Caine said calmly. “I've got it from here.”

And he did. His ten nails had made their way across the entire floor like roots, planted like they were born of the wood grain. By now they'd disappeared beneath the door's frame, and whatever they were doing, Mackie didn't like it. With a furious grunt, the knife disappeared, and then the pounding began. The building shook with each blow.

“He's cutting them,” Caine said unnecessarily. I refrained from telling him I thought they could use a good trim. The lacquered bone-nails were the only thing keeping Mackie from this room. Caine leaned against the wall like he had a listening glass pressed there, and I heard a sinuous slide making its way over the roof and the building's sides. “It's okay. My fingernails are almost there.”

Mackie seconded that with an infuriated howl.

“Are you hurting him?” Not that the idea bothered me. But if those nails turned into spears, it was something I needed to know.

Caine angled his head once in negation. “They grow too slowly for that. I've often wished for a nice swift jab, an exact thrust. Alas, it's not my gift.”

“So…you're just holding him there?”

“No, he can move, but it takes effort. Every time he frees himself from one nail, two more replace it.”

Or
nineteen
I thought as the building shuddered over and over again.

“It's like trying to escape an octopus. Mind, it's pure defense, but it allows me to touch others without them ever touching me.”

“Awesome gift.” Minus the foot fungus.

“He's fast, though.” Then he muttered to himself. “Can't crush this one…”

“It's the blade.”

Caine nodded. “Let me lead him away from the door. Then you can run for it. Mind, I can hold him the night, but no longer. And he won't fall for the same trick twice.”

So I waited, marking Caine's progress by the scrabbling of nails over the rooftop and the occasional blade piercing the rotted wood. I wanted to run when Mackie hit the apex—I wanted to pump the entire round of glowing ammo into his stomach, but Caine asked me to hold my fire until I was outside, and it was the least I could do. This was his home, and despite the sparse interior, I got the feeling he'd been here awhile.

Finally, Mackie was entrapped in the web of nails on the house's side, Caine pulling him near, ostensibly so the new growth could reach Mackie quickly every time a nail was cut. The nearness to those long, strong fingertips also increased the likelihood of crushing the raging man. I began relaxing, readied by the doorway, when something unexpected happened.

“Ouch.”

For a moment I thought I'd misheard. But Caine's face was black with wild and soundless shock, and I squinted at him warily. “Ouch?”

“He touched me.”

That was a severe understatement. Caine pulled his right hand—the higher one—back inside to reveal bloodied fingers…cleaved at the first knuckle. Blood poured down every digit, causing a macabre bracelet to appear on his wrist, but the nails continued to grow from their centers, black coils unfurling like licorice. Mackie, now close to his captor, had launched another, apparently new and untried assault.

“Never felt that before,” Caine said with a disturbing lack of concern. Then, inexplicably, he stuck his hand out the window again. Though anticipating the next blow, he jolted when Mackie struck, and I jumped with him.

“I—I could just run, you know.”

“Not yet.” He licked his lips, the slow swirl of his tongue at odds with the grunts coming from his throat. Mackie was relentless. “He'll catch you.”

But these were like Tripp's wounds. Something in that blade infected the agents Mackie struck, so while mortals died, agents were left wishing they had. “You have to cauterize it,” I said, remembering Tripp's work at the jewelry shop.

Caine sniffed, nostrils going so wide it seemed he could take in every mote in the air. His nose was angled toward his outstretched arm, though, and after another moment—and three more strikes—he shook his head. “It won't help.”

And yet he held his hands out there still. He even leaned closer, turning from me to press the front of his body against the wall. “I've never been touched in this way before.”

And suddenly I got it. He wasn't offering protection from Mackie from purely altruistic purposes. No. He wanted to see what Mackie's blade felt like. It had nothing to do with
my fate, or our commonalities—few that they were. He didn't feel a kinship with me beyond the here and now.

The bones atop his body seemed to sharpen with my realization, the full body bleed of tattoo work now making sense. So did the piercings along his ears and brows and spine. And the eyes. Oh my God. The
eyes.
This man had a love affair with pain.

“But what if I need you again?” I meant only to think it, but somehow whispered it aloud.

Caine's head alone swiveled, ecstasy etched on his pained, pierced brow. “All you needed from me was imparted once you walked in the door. Walk out with it, and in a way, I will too.”

He knew he'd die here, hugging the wall in this crumbling shack, another victim of Mackie's poisonous blade. “I'm sorry.”