Forsaken by the Others (16 page)

“Christ. We are fucked.”

I looked over the top of Sara’s head at Devon, who was still holding Tiny up by bracing
his legs and offering a shoulder to lean on. He must have been stronger than he looked
to support the big guy like that.

Then I saw the slight tremble at his knees. I was afraid to let go of Sara, but I
was even more afraid that Tiny might fall down and squash Devon if I didn’t help.
Carefully setting her down, I got to my feet and rushed over to get under Tiny’s other
arm. He shifted his weight a little so Devon wasn’t completely supporting him. Good
lord, the guy was heavy!

“We’re not fucked,” I said between pants. “We’re in a bad place, yeah, but we have
one less vampire and one less necromancer after our butts. This is a good thing.”

“Shia, we can’t leave that thing running around loose on the streets. Look what he’s
done!”

I didn’t bother to argue the point. “Where are we going to go? We can’t carry Sara
and
Tiny out of here.” From the sounds of fighting and gunshots still coming from the
freeway, we couldn’t go back to the car, either. People were starting to gather in
the doorway of the office building, too. “I don’t see any cabs. . . .”

“Uh. This isn’t like New York,” Tiny said. “You have to call for cabs to come to you.
Here, let me sit—”

The sudden shift in his weight nearly sent all three of us to our knees. Devon and
I both had to do some fancy footwork to prevent a spectacular face-plant. Together
we eased Tiny to the ground until the three of us were seated and breathing like we’d
run a marathon.

“Thanks. Give me a few minutes to catch my breath, then we can get out of here.”

Sara was stirring. I inched closer to her, checking her forehead and her pulse—not
that there would be much I could do for her at this point, but it made me feel like
I wasn’t completely helpless. She was still a bit chilled, but not as bad as she had
been when Gideon first stole . . . whatever it was he had taken from her. Ruminating
on whether it was her life force, or part of her soul, or what, was going to be eating
at me for a good long while.

What had happened to her? How could Gideon feed off her energy like that?

I wracked my brain, trying to think of when or how it might have happened. I didn’t
want to think Arnold could have been responsible for it, but it was clearly magework.

Then it hit me.

Sara had always been more elegant in her manner of dress than I was. When we were
working, she had
always
worn long-sleeved blouses for as long as I’d known her. She wore T-shirts and jeans
now and again, sure, but the long sleeves hadn’t become a part of her after-work ensemble
until after I became contracted to Royce.

After the battle with the sorcerer. David Borowsky had kidnapped Sara for the better
portion of a day—a period of time she never talked about. Not even with me.

The kid dealt in the worst kind of blood magic, summoning demons and who knew what
else. It was not a far stretch of the imagination to think that he might have been
using his skills in the dark arts to do something to hurt Sara. And considering how
strong she was, how much she hated being told what to do or how to do it by anyone,
being under some magical being’s control wouldn’t have been any picnic for her.

I knew. I’d experienced what it was like being a puppet to Max and to Royce. It was
one of the most frightening things that had ever happened to me. Even knowing Royce
had no intention of hurting me and wouldn’t do anything to abuse the power he held
over me, those few days of having no conscious choice in when or how I answered to
him had been a special kind of hell to live through.

It had been more terrifying than answering to Max—at least I had known what the crazy-ass
douche-canoe wanted from me. To use and discard me, just a pawn in his games to take
whatever Royce cared about from him.

Royce was still in many ways a mystery to me. A puzzle I wouldn’t be able to solve
until I returned to New York.

As for Sara, I couldn’t imagine how much scarier it must have been to have something
so incorporeal as your energy sucked away instead of something physical, like blood.
Being bitten by vampires was already enough to give me the heebie-jeebies. Having
my soul sucked out with no more than a touch was a thought too horrid to bear.

As much as I wanted to throttle her for keeping it a secret from me, I pitied her
for it in the same breath. The shame she must have felt being used that way was incomparable
to anything. I should know.

And if the necromancer could draw from her, too, that meant there must be other things
she was vulnerable to that we hadn’t counted on. I wondered if Arnold knew that. I
wondered if that was why she hadn’t thought it would do much good to talk to her boyfriend.
He had to know—and, oh, did it burn me that Arnold had known about the runes before
I did—but that also meant that he must not have any way of fixing the damage.

Which also made me wonder if he had ever used her for energy the way the necromancer
and sorcerer had.

If that Borowsky kid hadn’t already been dead, I would have hunted him down and murdered
him all over again with my bare hands.

I wanted to chase after Gideon, to beg and plead for him to do something for my friend
to make this awful thing that had happened to her go away. If Gideon knew how to remove
the runes, then that meant it was in our best interests to make sure that Clyde was
deposed as the master of Los Angeles.

This was a drastic change in plans for me. My earlier ruminations about the morality
of informing Clyde about Fabian’s plans be damned. Clyde had nothing to offer me anymore,
whereas the necromancer’s survival and success was of vital importance.

Royce wouldn’t like to hear it, but then, he wasn’t here to deal with this mess. The
complications were tremendous, and I hated that I had so little say in any of it,
but Sara’s health and well-being mattered to me far more than the life of a stranger
who had forced us into dealing with his mess at the first opportunity.

Damn Clyde, and damn Fabian, and damn Royce, too, for sending us out here.

For the moment, all I could do was hold Sara’s hand and wait. Tiny was too weak to
walk, and there was no way Devon and I could drag him
and
Sara. I would have to be cool, calculating, and as devious as the vampires if we
were going to make this work.

And it had to work. I
had
to fix this for Sara. It was my fault she had been hurt that way, my fault she was
a living battery for magi to suck the life out of at any given moment. Without Arnold
here to protect her, God only knew how safe she was. Considering how easy it had been
for Gideon to use her, probably not at all. As far as I was concerned, her survival
mattered more than any vampire’s, no matter the cost. If we couldn’t make it back
to Arnold for a while, then I needed to do the best I could to take away as many of
the dangerous threats to her health as possible.

I turned to Devon. “We’ve got to make sure Fabian and Gideon win. If they don’t, Gideon
can’t fix what’s wrong with her. Damn it, Devon, I hate this. I hate that there’s
no right answer, that every choice I’ve had to make since I got here has just made
things worse for somebody—maybe even long before I got here. But there’s got to be
some way we can round up the White Hats who are left and get them to help in this
fight. I need that necromancer to fix . . . whatever those are.”

Devon and Tiny were both looking at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was.

“Girl, you are nuttier than a squirrel turd under an oak tree. You want to let that
thing
have control of LA? What do you think he’s going to do once he’s won?”

I shook my head, frowning severely at Tiny. “I don’t know. I don’t really care. What
I do care about is fixing that,” I said, stabbing a finger in the direction of the
runes on the inside of Sara’s arm.

Devon spoke gently, like he was trying to keep me from storming off or doing something
equally stupid. “You’re not thinking straight, Shia. Of course you’re scared right
now. We all are. But we can’t let that monster win.”

“You don’t understand,” I snarled.

His tone grew sharper. “Yes, we do. You’re afraid of losing her. So are we. But we’re
more afraid of losing our city to something that could destroy us all if we give him
a chance. I know you want him to fix what’s happened to Sara, but you have no guarantee
that he will, even if he wins.”

I didn’t want to consider that. Shaking my head again, I rose to my feet and started
pacing, though I stayed close to Sara. It felt like the hairs on my arms and the back
of my neck were crackling with static electricity, standing at attention. My vision
was feeling a little funny, too. Something was wrong with me, more than just the overdose
of adrenaline pumped into my system from the buildup of terror while facing down the
zombies and the necromancer.

This was what Sara had been talking about when she said I never thought things through.
The thing was, I
didn’t
want to think them through. Not one bit. I wanted to go rampaging through the streets
until I found Clyde and destroyed him.

That was my clue that not all was kosher in my head. Had the necromancer messed with
my mind somehow? Or was it something worse?

Feeling sick, I stopped my pacing, hanging my head and taking deep, steadying breaths.
When my gaze fell on my hands, those deep breaths caught in my throat. The veins under
my skin were clearly visible.

Black. Not blue.

Fuck me sideways. Was
nothing
going to go right for me?

I closed my eyes and fought off the looming panic attack, forcing myself to take deep,
steady,
slow
breaths. No hyperventilating. No rushing off to attack things with my bare hands.
No succumbing to the corruption in my blood.

Once the worst of the desire to rush off and attack Clyde with nothing more than my
teeth and nails subsided, I focused again on Devon and Tiny. That odd haze to my vision
had cleared up somewhat, though the two hunters were both watching me warily now.
Were there other visible signs of the change? Was I starting to turn Were? That thought
cooled my ire faster than anything else.

“No matter who wins, we all lose. My only hope at this point is to find something
I can give to that necromancer to make him fix what’s wrong with Sara.”

“He can’t fix it,” Sara muttered, one hand lifting to her brow. My attention shot
to her, and I quickly knelt by her side again.

“How do you know?”

Her eyes fluttered open. She tried to sit up, but couldn’t quite manage on her own,
so I gave her a hand. Once she was sitting up, she addressed the three of us, her
voice soft and features twisted in a grimace of discomfort.

“Arnold checked every source he has at his disposal. There’s no cure for this, Shia.
I’m going to end up living with these things for the rest of my life.”

She might as well have told me her parents had died all over again. My heart ached
for her in a way I couldn’t put words to. All I could do was wrap my arms around her
and hold her close.

There was no way I could ever be sorry enough for what had been done to her. Knowing
it was my fault was like having a dagger buried in my gut, twisting and turning and
digging its way all the way up to my heart. David never would have taken her if she
hadn’t been connected to me. Helping me fight his plans to make the Others of New
York his slaves. Who would have thought some puny human women would have the power
to stop a mage who had control over the will of New York’s most powerful Others? The
sorcerer had obviously felt threatened by me at the time—threatened enough to drag
Sara into my mess and hurt her when he couldn’t get to me directly.

And the joke was on him. I was alive. He was dead. All that mattered now was finishing
cleaning up the mess he’d left behind.

A small part of me wanted to hope that Gideon hadn’t been lying—that he had some way
of making this right again.

The rest of me knew it would be stupid to take anything he said at face value, and
that if Arnold said there was no way, I should leave it alone.

Still, I wanted to give him a chance. Just once. Just to see. Maybe this would be
the one epic fuck-up in my life that I could fix.

Sara pulled back from me, running a shaking hand through her hair. We all looked like
hell, covered in gore, tired, shell-shocked. Tiny somehow managed to stagger to his
feet first, his hands braced on his knees as he bent over to catch his breath. Devon
soon followed, then me. I helped Sara get to her feet, though she did take my unspoken
offer to lean on me for support once she was up.

“Look,” I said to the White Hats, as we all limped toward the exit together, “you
told me yourselves that you want to see Clyde dead. There will be no better opportunity
to see that happen than to help Fabian and Gideon get rid of him. But”—I added hastily,
cutting them off as they opened their mouths to protest—“if we let them win, then
they’ll be weak and vulnerable, and that will put us in a better position to get rid
of them, too. Maybe we can get Gideon to tell us what he had in mind for Sara first.
He might know something that our mage friends in New York don’t about how to get rid
of those scars.”

No one seemed very happy with the idea.

That was okay. I wasn’t either.

“I guess that might work,” Devon grudgingly agreed.

Hallelujah. It was the least I could ask for, and the best possible outcome.

Now, if only things turned out the way I hoped they would, then everything would be
golden, and I would have an honest shot at atonement.