For a moment, nothing happened. Then a shadow rose from the wound, a formless miasma of dark magic. Reese moaned and strained away from it, pushing back into him. “I’ve got you,” he said, over and over again, holding her tightly, the words becoming meaningless. “I’ve got you.”
“Repeat after me, both of you,” Sasha ordered. Her face was gray and drawn, and streaked with sweat.
Michael left the door to come up behind her and grip her shoulder, pouring his energy into her, the same as Dez was doing with Reese. Except it wasn’t the same, was it? Michael and Sasha were both magi and fully mated, bound together by the jun tan bond. Dez could offer Reese only a fraction of what the other two shared. He hoped to hell it would be enough. Damn it, he thought, he would make it be enough. He bore down and took more of the pain, gave her more of his power. They said the spell, all four of them, with Sasha leading, the others repeating.
The mist coalesced malevolently around Reese’s arm, flickering with arcs of luminous green. Dez gritted his teeth as pain came through the blood-link seemingly without end. He smelled blood and the foul, heavy stench of a makol’s evil, the two together overwhelming. Come on, Reese, he chanted inwardly, fight!
Then, unexpectedly, there was a wrenching jolt, and for a second he was inside her, seeing what she saw, feeling what she felt. He felt his own solid grip enfolding her from behind, the stubborn determination that tethered her to consciousness, and the tendrils of sick, evil darkness that had made it beyond the tourniquet to root the poison within her body, holding it there.
More, he sensed her strength fading. And he sensed, for a second, a flicker of green that whispered to her, urging her to let go and rest, not to fight anymore. She was so tired, after all. Everything would be okay if she just relaxed and let things happen.
Don’t, Reese, he projected urgently through the blood-link. It’s a lie!
But his words didn’t reach her. More, he felt the connection grow thinner as the makol’s darkness trickled through her bloodstream, an amorphous cancer of the soul that whispered over and over for her to relax, let go, let the darkness win. Panic kicked through him at the realization that she was losing ground. They both were.
“Take the tourniquet off,” he said to Sasha, and heard his own voice through Reese’s ears, creating a weird dissonance in his mind.
“But—”
“Take it off,” he insisted, then said, “Trust me.” Which was a hell of a thing to ask, because Sasha was one of the ones who still looked at him warily, not yet ready to believe he was reformed.
But she hesitated, traded a look with Michael, then nodded. “Okay.”
“On three, and no tricks this time.” They counted it down and she loosened the tourniquet.
Immediately, the dark mist raced back into Reese, flowing in through the gashes on her wrist. Going on instinct, Dez poured his energy into her, all of his reserves and more. Fight, he told her. Fight, damn it! Don’t you dare run away this time! It wasn’t until he said it that he recognized the truth of it, but the realization was quickly lost as his perceptions wrenched suddenly, and then he was back in his own head, his own body. He wasn’t connected to her anymore, though he still held her hand in a bloody clasp, still felt the buzz of the uplink. “Reese,” he shouted. “Godsdamn it, Reese!”
A long shudder ran through her body, and then she arched against him, trying to pull away from the blood-links. A deep, guttural moan tore from her throat and her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Gods!” Sasha gasped. The dark, wounded flesh rippled, runneling along her arm as though turbocharged worms were writhing beneath the skin, whipped into a frenzy by the poison. Michael’s eyes went silver as he channeled more energy into Sasha’s healing bond, but that didn’t seem to help. Through the last little bit of the uplink, Dez could feel Reese slipping away. Dying.
Panic lashing through him, he shouted “Do something! We’re losing her!”
“Call her,” Sasha said. “Make her come back. If she’s not conscious, she’s not fighting it!”
But he had been calling her, and it wasn’t working. He needed something better, something more. Something that would matter to her. He looked deep inside himself to the place where he normally kept the past locked away, but that had been breached the moment she lunged back into his life, wearing combat clothes and wielding an autopistol like she’d been born a warrior.
“Think about the dream,” he whispered alongside her temple, feeling the words rip from his chest. “Think about Montana, all those mountains, and the streams, and the big open sky. I bet you never went there, did you? So fight, damn it. Get your ass back here. If you do . . .” He paused, feeling the churn and burn in his gut, but went for it. “Wake the hell up and we’ll go there together.” His throat closed on the ache of guilt, sadness, and regret that washed through him as he turned his lips to her temple. “Please, baby. Don’t let it end like this.” Please gods.
A long shudder wracked her body and she twisted against him, nearly bowing herself double.
“Shit,” Sasha hissed. “Convulsion. Help me grab her and—”
Energy detonated soundlessly inside Dez, hollowing out his diaphragm and making him feel like his elevator had just hit bottom. At the same moment Sasha jolted, and Michael said, “What the fuck?”
Then Reese sagged, going utterly limp.
“Reese!” Dez surged out from behind her, rose over her with both hands wrapped in her shirt. “Reese, damn it!”
Sasha grabbed his shoulder. “Look!”
Dark mist was churning angrily from the weeping cuts, boiling out of Reese. It formed an angry, pulsing blob that went from black to green as it emerged.
Then poof. It disappeared.
He stared for a second, blinking at her arm. The X-marked cuts still bled and the bite was a dark, angry red. But the blackness was gone and the swelling was abating even as they watched. More, he could feel her breathing grow steady, her body temperature level off. And when he looked away from her wrist, he found her watching him with eyes that were blurry and unfocused, but held every ounce of now-Reese: a mix of the stupidly brave, crime-fighting girl he had known and the woman she had grown into, who dared him, challenged him, stood up to him.
She was back.
His throat closed on a hard, hot surge of emotion. “Hey.” It was all he could manage.
Her eyes fluttered shut, but she whispered, “Montana, huh?” And she drifted off with a smile on her lips.
He let his forehead drop to his hands, which were still clutched in her shirt. Despite what he’d been through with the Triad spell, he still wasn’t all that religious in the worshipping sense. Now, though, he sent a fervent thought-stream skyward: Thank you, gods. And he got, in return, a flare of heat that radiated through him, washing inward to his head and heart. He wasn’t sure if it came from magic, the exhaustion he felt bearing down on him freight train fast, or some celestial source. But it made him feel a little less alone.
Groaning, he dragged himself to his feet, then reached down and gathered Reese to his chest. He felt the pull of muscles as he lifted her, the ache of fatigue as he held her tightly. But neither Nate nor Michael offered to take her. They were mated magi; they knew better.
He fixed Nate with a look. “Is the mansion safe?” Part of him wanted to hit the road again, find some anonymous hotel where nobody would think to look for them. He was never truly comfortable at Skywatch.
But Nate nodded. “We know how they got in.”
“How?” Dez grated the word.
“A delivery van came through an hour ago and set off the ward. JT looked over the truck, didn’t see anything, and figured it was another false alarm, so he waved them through, then reset the system.”
“You’re kidding. He fucking waved Iago and a truckload of makol through the front door?”
Michael’s glower promised dire retribution. “Yeah. They crashed the system from the security hub to get out.”
“Shit.” Dez
needed to get Reese someplace safe. But he also needed to crash. Another few minutes and he wasn’t going to be worth shit. He glanced toward the garage. “I need to—”
“You need to get Reese settled and then get some food and rest yourself,” Nate interrupted. He gripped Dez’s shoulder. “We’ve got your back.” Behind him, several of the others nodded, including Sasha, who for a change wasn’t looking at him with trepidation.
It seemed that for all that he’d worked his ass off to earn their trust, it had taken him stepping up for Reese to win them over. And, oddly, he was okay with that. He nodded. “All right, I’m going. But first, what was with the coyote?” When he got blank stares, he briefly recounted the strange incident, which he would’ve been tempted to think he had imagined, only he hadn’t. “It took off right as you guys got there. Big son of a bitch.”
“We’ll check it out,” Nate promised.
“And remind Lucius there’s still one more artifact out there. If we can—”
“Go.” Sasha pushed him toward the door. “Turn it off for a few hours. We’ve got this, and you’ll be useless until you recharge.”
This was part of being a member of a team, he realized suddenly—not just having the others trust him, but trusting them in return. Which he hadn’t done before. He nodded slowly, letting the others see that he got it. “Okay. Thanks.”
Sasha followed him to the residential wing, ostensibly to make sure Reese’s condition stayed stable but also, he suspected, to call for help if he went down flat on his face. He stayed on his feet, but just barely, hesitating at his own door and then continuing down the hall to the apartment Reese had claimed for herself.
Their suites had the same footprint, with a main room, small attached kitchen, two blocky bedrooms and one bath, but she had given hers more character in a handful of days than he had in more than a year. She would probably call the maps tacked to the wall “research” and the huge bulletin board and the smaller wipe board “practical necessities,” but to him they were, quite simply, Reese. So, too, was the fat pottery jar in the kitchen, which he would lay money contained cookies. The air was lightly tinted with a spicy floral scent he suspected was her chosen shampoo—as opposed to the No-Tell Motel’s finest they had been sporting the past few days—and a hint of coffee.
He carried Reese into the main bedroom. There was a pile of research books on the nightstand, a pair of silver-toed cowboy boots in the corner, and a trio of potted cactuses on the windowsill. One was blooming.
“Do you want me to get her cleaned up and changed?” Sasha asked from the doorway. But what she was really asking was: Do you want to take care of her yourself? How close are the two of you?
“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.” Because he didn’t dare put his hands on her while his defenses were shot.
So he set her down on the bed and retreated to the main room to raid a kitchen that was high on carbs, low on protein. She had Diet Mountain Dew, though, which surprised him because it had been his drink, not hers.
A few minutes later, Sasha appeared in the bedroom doorway. “All set. And her vitals are looking good.” As she crossed the main room, headed for the hallway, she shot a look at the half-eaten cookie in his hand. “I’ll have the winikin bring you some protein.”
“I’d appreciate it. Carlos and Tomas know what I like.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know how a guy with amplified senses can eat what you do.”
“It’s a guy thing?”
“It’s a you thing.” But her expression softened, just a hint. “Get some rest, Mendez. You did good back there with her.”
“So did you. I owe you one.” He could have left it at that, but when she made an “I’ll take off now” gesture, he said, “So, we’re cool? You and me, I mean?”
He kept it vague so she could duck if she wanted. But she winced. “Shit. Sorry. I thought I was hiding it.”
“I’m sensitive to vibes. And the one between you and me has always been off.”
She hesitated, then nodded. “At first I told myself it was because you remind me of Michael when I first met him, back before he got control of the death magic. But that’s not it, really. It′s . . .” She shrugged apologetically. “To be honest, you make me a little nervous. Not in an ‘I’m in danger’ sense, but in a ‘this guy is going to shake things up’ kind of way.” Crossing to him, she stretched up to squeeze his shoulder. It was probably the first spontaneous reach-out between them. “Seeing you with her . . . it helps.”
It shouldn’t, he thought but didn’t say, because a cold, hard knot had formed in his gut at her words . . . because Sasha was Strike and Anna’s little sister, and prescience ran in the royal jaguar bloodline. “Are you a seer?”
“Gods, no. My talent is tough enough to manage, I wouldn’t want to be an itza’at. I’ll leave that to . . .” She trailed off, then shook her head. “No. You just weirded me out, probably because all I knew about you beforehand was that you’d been in jail and your winikin disappeared right around the time you got out.”
He relaxed a little. “My reputation precedes me.” It wasn’t a vision, then. Nothing he needed to worry about.
“I’m over it. And I’m sorry that I’ve been flinchy around you.”
“Don’t be. I’m a scary guy.”
“Terrifying. So much so that I’m leaving you here with Reese, who I consider a friend.” She patted his shoulder. “Eat. Rest. And don’t stay uplinked for too long. There’s too much shit going down for you to be drained hollow.”
It was a given that he would be linking with Reese to feed her as much energy as he could. She was over the worst of the makol poisoning, and Sasha’s healing had helped close the wounds on her shoulder and lower back, but she would need his help to recover. The magi could make do with IVs of saline and glucose; humans needed more. He shrugged. “She can have whatever she needs from me.”
“Don’t drain yourself,” she repeated. “King’s orders.” But they both knew that Dez would make the call himself. Although the ancient writs placed the needs of the gods, the king, and the end-time war far above those of lovers and friends, the modern magi tended to put their mates and families first, starting with Strike’s decision to break the thirteenth prophecy to save Leah. And although Reese wasn’t Dez’s mate, she was his lover. Or at least she had been, for one perfect night.
Chest tightening, he took Sasha’s hand, gave it a squeeze. “Thanks for being there tonight. If you hadn’t been . . . well. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Now get some rest.”
Later, showered, changed, and fed, Dez lay down beside Reese in a darkness that was lit by outdoor floods, warning that all was not well at Skywatch. He had his .44 on the nightstand, an autopistol on the floor, and felt the subsensory hum that said the others were sacrificing blood to strengthen the ward surrounding the compound. He and Reese were safer in the mansion than they would be outside, he told himself. And that would have to be good enough.
When he took her hand and folded it into his, aligning his palm scar with the scabbed-over slash on hers to form a touch-link that let his energy wash into her, she shifted and turned toward him, murmuring, “That helps. Don’t let go.”
“I won’t.” He tightened his grip. But as he let her warmth seep into him and relax him one muscle group at a time, he found himself thinking that he hadn’t planned to let go of her the last time, either. Yet he had. As he went under, he heard himself whisper, as he had done to bring her back, “Think about Montana . . .”
And he slipped into a dream, taking her warmth with him.
After nearly an hour zigzagging through the tunnels and backtracking to make sure the Cobras weren’t still after them, Mendez led the girl to his current flop: a one-roomer in a condemned apartment building that had been boarded up a couple of years ago and scheduled for demolition, but had then apparently been forgotten by the wrecking ball.
Squatting rights were held by a foul-mouthed weasel of a man, nearly albino
, who ran girls, drugs, and whatever-the-fuck else out of the first floor, and “rented” the other rooms. Dez wouldn’t be able to make rent another week unless he did something drastic—which didn’t matter because the Cobras would be gunning for his ass now. But he was probably okay there for the night, at least. Or rather, they would be okay. Because suddenly it wasn’t just him anymore.
In the light of the smoky lantern he had made out of an old soup can and fueled with leftover cooking grease that smelled like apples this week, the girl was thin and dirty, but he could see why she had caught Hood’s eye. She couldn’t be more than sixteen—maybe even less. Her chin was narrow and pointed, her wide-set eyes an interesting shade of rusty amber. And the dirt and ragged denim couldn’t hide her long curves and the high bumps of her breasts. He didn’t know what had drawn him toward Warehouse Seventeen that afternoon, or why he’d gone toward the sounds of a fight when he normally would’ve headed the other way, but he knew one thing for certain: She wouldn’t last much longer on the streets without someone looking out for her.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
She opened her mouth, hesitated, and then said, “Reese Montana.”
He snorted. “No, it’s not.” For one, she had stalled. For another, it sounded made up. Then again, “Snake Mendez” wasn’t exactly a winner in that department.
“It is now,” she said.
That he got. Most of the street rats he knew had run away from more than just a location, and many of them changed their names to avoid being scooped back up.
Something mean and nasty worked its way through him at the suspicion of what she was running from. For a mid-upper-class suburban kid—he got that from the way she talked and the oldest layer of ragged clothing—without an obvious attitude or drug problem to be on the streets like this . . . yeah. A hundred bucks said there had been a family member with grabby hands. He was going with that over outright beat-you-’til-you-bleed because she didn’t have that flinch-when-touched response. He should know.
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