The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  With a roar, Kyle squirmed, thrust out his chest, bobbed his head, rocked side to side.

  Another tremor hit the hospital. It was like the big bad wolf had gotten a fresh lungful. And God damn it if that huge piece of machinery didn’t start to shift. It skidded an inch. And then another. And then a few more.

  And then I saw Kyle’s hand gripping the frame, and I realized that monster truck of a human being was pushing it. He was shouting like he was performing for the WWE and he was about to knock the hospital down with some kind of psycho-seismic event, and meanwhile, he was just fucking strong enough to push a Prius off his chest. Oh. Yeah. And getting thrown through a wall had barely slowed him down.

  I ran.

  A screwdriver drilled toward me, and I yelped and dodged. It skinned the side of my head and stabbed through an overturned chair.

  “Kaden, you little fuck!”

  He popped up from behind the registration desk, rubbing plaster from his face with one sleeve. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

  Like fuck, I thought. Like fuck he’s sorry.

  Temple Mae popped up next to Kaden. Her face was drawn. Her cat eyes were hard and flat. Furious, I guessed. With me, with Kaden, with Kyle Stark-Taylor, maybe even with Jake—with everyone who had brought her to this point where she had to use her abilities, acknowledge who she really was. A bloody scratch ran from the tilted corner of one eye down to her jaw.

  I traced a mirror of the cut on my face as I ran. “Did he get you too?”

  Temple Mae just shook her head and pointed past me.

  Behind me, metal screeched, and then a quake rocked the building. The floor canted under me, and for a moment I was falling toward the registration desk. The quake rocked itself out after another moment, and I belly-flopped onto the desk and rolled across it.

  “Mr. Spencer called us,” Temple Mae said as I slid to a stop next to her.

  “How bad?” I asked as I dropped into a crouch next to them, with the registration desk our only barrier—and a flimsy one—between us and the juggernaut.

  “Bad,” Kaden panted, wiping at his face again with that damn sleeve. “He just keeps coming. Vie, we’re done for. We’ve got to run. We get out of here as fast as we can, and we don’t look back.”

  I turned my attention on Temple Mae.

  Shrugging, she said, “He’s right. It’s bad.”

  I risked a glance over the desk. With a crash like a thundercloud hitting the Vehpese High School band’s brass section, the machine toppled onto its side. ERROR D-187 pulsed one last dim warning, and then the image shuddered into darkness. Kyle shoved a fallen section of wall, and framed drywall spun across the waiting area, clearing chairs and magazine stands like a cyclone. The earth seized; the floor buckled, and vinyl sheeting ripped along glued edges. Kyle dragged himself out of the rubble.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I got a scarf around his neck and dragged him all the way to the parking lot.” Temple Mae gripped the desk; a flush mottled her fair skin. “He didn’t like that, but he just ripped off the scarf.

  “I pegged him in the dick,” Kaden said, squirming up next to Temple Mae. “Right in the dick.

  “Have you tried electricity?” I said. “A live wire? That stopped Hailey for a while.”

  “With a stapler. I got him in the dick with a stapler.”

  Temple Mae shook her head. “I didn’t even think about that.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, right?” Kaden was shooting glances across the desk and then back at Temple Mae. He wouldn’t quite look at me. “We’re going to go. Right now, right? We’re going to get the hell out of here.”

  “Hannah and Tyler,” I said. “He’s here for them.”

  “Then we grab those kids, we get out of here, and we run.”

  “This building is full of people,” I said.

  “They’re evacuating.” Kaden’s eyes ping-ponged between Temple Mae and Kyle, who was kicking a path through the chairs in the waiting area. “This is an emergency. They train for this kind of thing. They’re probably clear of this place already.”

  “This is a shit hospital in the middle of nowhere,” I said. “The hallways are clogged with people trying to get out. If we leave, Kyle might pull this place down on top of them.”

  “He could do it anyway,” Temple Mae said. More of the color had fled her face; she wasn’t looking at me either now, and her gaze was fixed on Kyle.

  “Temple Mae.”

  “He could. He could bury all of us, and he’d just dig himself out and go.”

  “But not while the kids are here. They’re not going to risk hurting them. They can’t take that risk.” And not while I’m in here either, I thought. The Crow boy didn’t want to kill me. He wanted to capture me. I guessed Kyle’s orders were the same—that’s why he hadn’t kicked the hospital over like an anthill already.

  “I just wanted to see Austin,” Kaden said. “It’s not fair. I wasn’t supposed to even be here.”

  “You little fuck,” I said. “You’re upstairs trying to steal my fucking boyfriend—”

  “You guys,” Temple Mae said. Her eyes were narrowed in concentration; out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed chairs whirling through the air and a covey of magazines in flight and what looked like the seat of a toilet and a plastic brochure display that had ripped free from the wall and was trailing a cloud of pamphlets about urinary tract infections. The big machine creaked and wobbled, but it didn’t move, and Kyle swatted aside the UTI display rack like it was a gnat.

  I barely noticed. I was too focused on Kaden, who still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “And then, when I bust you, you come down here and try to steal Jake’s fucking girlfriend—”

  “You guys.” The registration desk groaned. Fissures ran through the particle board.

  Beneath me, the floor convulsed, and I braced myself against the straining, trembling desk. “And you’re such a cowardly little shit that you can’t even pretend to care that Austin’s still in the building somewhere, that—”

  “You guys!” The last word escalated into a shriek as Temple Mae reared back. The registration desk ripped free from the floor, spun, and launched toward Kyle like an Ikea-style battering ram. It hit him, and even over the whirlwind rush of the winged magazines and the UTI pamphlets and the molded plastic chairs, I heard the thud. And I watched as the desk disintegrated, driving into Kyle with so much force that the particle board came apart, splintering and shooting off to either side.

  Not a scratch on Kyle Stark-Taylor. Not so much as one fuzzy eyebrow hair out of place.

  Grabbing Temple Mae by the arm, I scrambled back. “Kaden, do something!”

  His face twisted in concentration, and he crabbed after me. Temple Mae stared past me, past Kyle, her gaze fixed on something in the distance. I kept backpedaling, half supporting her, half dragging. Metal shrieked, and when I glanced back, I saw the drop ceiling twisting apart. Foam tiles drifted down. A light sparked and then popped. Kyle may not have heard the sound; he was still deflecting the chairs and other airborne debris that Temple Mae was spinning around him. From time to time, he batted something—a pair of broken-backed magazines, an orthopedic shoe, an unfurling roll of bandages—out of his way, but for the most part, he just kept walking. He never looked back. I got the feeling ever since he’d gotten his powers, Kyle Stark-Taylor had never once looked back.

  Temple Mae gave a jerk in my arms, and a tiny starburst of blood exploded in her left eye, and then crackling and live and trailing a line of electric discharge, a wire whipped down from the ceiling. It struck Kyle at the base of the neck, and his whole frame went rigid, his body trembling like he was vibrating in a high wind.

  “Come on,” I shouted, grabbing at Kaden’s cardigan, gathering only wool, and still hauling him toward me. His face was still fixed in frozen concentration, but his ass hit the vinyl, and he slid easily enough. “Come on,” I shouted, even though the two of them were dead weight. Shouting m
ade it easier somehow. “Come on, God damn it.”

  Dragging both of them—a fistful of Kaden’s sweater in one hand, Temple Mae drooping over my other arm—I stumbled back, watching as a hundred and twenty volts ran down Kyle’s spinal column.

  And then the juggernaut reached back and ripped the wire out of the ceiling. It fell, dead and dark, at his feet.

  “I hate kids. I fucking hate kids.” Kyle lifted his foot like he intended to stomp Kaden into jelly; for all I knew, he was perfectly capable of doing that. “I don’t got time for this—”

  Whatever Kyle Stark-Taylor didn’t have time for, I didn’t wait to find out. I wrenched open my second sight. My head began to pound, and nausea swept a flood of acid through my stomach. As I reached for Kyle’s mind, I shook Kaden by the cardigan. Whatever he was trying to do, he needed to do it now.

  The psychic connection only lasted an instant. As soon as I touched Kyle’s mind, a wave of memory crashed over me: a knife sliding into flesh, and Austin’s eyes huge and wide, and then the way his whole body rippled around the steel, and he coughed and blood darkened the corner of his mouth, and—

  The force of the memory, its pure, raw, vividness, caught me. If I hadn’t been half-expecting something like this, if Emmett hadn’t been smart enough to think this far in advance, it would have ended right there.

  Even with Emmett’s preparation, though, I barely managed to retreat into my body. I rolled sloppily, slowly, and still fighting to keep the horror of that memory—fake, I told myself, it was a fake, he was psyching you out—from paralyzing me. Kyle’s foot came down, and a square yard of the hospital floor collapsed under the blow. Cement dust devils whirled around Kyle’s boot.

  So much for my theory about wanting to keep me alive.

  “Now, Kaden,” I shouted, scrambling back. “Whatever you’re doing, now!”

  Kaden let out a grunt, and the far wall of the waiting room exploded. A lot of the wall had been given up to the sliding glass doors at the entrance to the emergency room, and doubtless that had something to do with how easily the whole thing collapsed.

  But a lot of it had to do with the three tons of American steel that launched toward us. I had about half a second to process the vision of a GMC Sierra spinning through the air like a goddamn discus, and then it hit Kyle, and it was like tossing a rag doll in front of an oncoming bus. The Sierra hit Kyle without slowing. The force of its movement carried Kyle with it, and they crashed through the next wall, and the next, and I lost sight of them in the cloud of splinters and broken plaster.

  I sucked in a breath. I tasted my own flop sweat, and the fresh-cut wood smell of the splinters, and something that I associated with ozone, something that burned the hairs inside my nose. Kaden was on his back, his eyes rolled up, his chest rising and falling in shallow breaths. I shook him, and he didn’t move. Temple Mae’s eyes were wide open, and that was worse. She was breathing, but that starburst of blood in her left eye—that looked bad.

  Then metal screeched, and I froze. My head spun toward the hole that the Sierra had punched through the wall.

  The sound came again.

  A long, twisting shriek came next.

  The goddamn Sierra. He was pulling the damn thing apart just so he could get out from under it. He was still alive. Fuck me. For all I knew, that hadn’t hurt him any more than it would hurt me to do a somersault.

  I got to my feet. Every inch of me throbbed. That white star-point between my eyes burned out my vision for a second, but I staggered in the direction the truck had gone: through the emergency room wall. Toward the exam rooms.

  Hannah. Tyler.

  I kicked my way past a door that had fallen out of its frame. I climbed over a toppled cabinet, its files spilling out like a hundred paper tongues lapping at the floor. I got around the corner, and I saw it: the Sierra, banged to hell, leaking a black shimmer of motor oil. But no Kyle.

  Voices. Shouts.

  I ran.

  As I reached the door to the exam room, I heard a familiar voice.

  “You can’t take them. I don’t care who you are, I’m not letting you—” It was a woman’s voice. A familiar voice, although I couldn’t name her. “I won’t let you.”

  A terrified voice.

  When I stepped into the room, I recognized her: the Park Avenue poise; the elegant silver hair; the drooping eye. Diana Fossey, the doctor who had known, somehow, that I was involved in the madness running through Vehpese. The woman who had offered to help. Behind her, Tyler was curled into a ball, his arms wrapped around his head. On the exam table, on a crisp sheet of paper, Hannah could have been taking a nap.

  Kyle took a step forward. Dr. Fossey looked like an aspen leaf, trembling in his path, a medical chart in one hand and a scalpel in the other. She sliced once, caught Kyle’s hand as he reached for her, and the blade bounced along the skin like it was steel. He laughed.

  Her eyes shot to me.

  Kyle flicked her head like a kid shooting marbles. It split from her neck. It hit the wall like a bad grape.

  I shouted something. I ran straight at him, and he backhanded me, and the next thing I knew, I was spinning on my stomach across the vinyl. I hit a cabinet. Came to a stop. And I watched as Kyle kicked a hole in the wall. Sunlight came in. And the smell of the high prairie. It had stopped raining, a dazed voice in my head noted. I felt a breath of cold, dead spring.

  Kyle grabbed Tyler in one hand. Hannah in the other. He stepped out of the hospital.

  And that was when the quake hit.

  The tremors came one after another, a series of seismic thunderclaps that seemed to have no end. I’d never been in an earthquake; I had nothing to compare this to except the earlier shakes and rattles that had run through the hospital. This wasn’t anywhere close to the same league. This was a distant cousin. This was at the complete other end of the family tree.

  Rolling through at that speed, the individual tremors were hard to tell apart. I fell almost immediately; my battered nose whited everything out except the grit of the vinyl under me, and I knew I was still falling. I hit something—a wall, a filing cabinet, God, please, something that wouldn’t topple over and crush me—and bounced. Blinking, gulping air, I shook the snow-spin from my vision.

  The building bounced like a funhouse. Where Kyle had kicked his way through the outer wall, the weakened structure began to give. A window on an upper floor must have shattered because glass mixed with the dust and wood and plaster and steel that shot out of the wall. I scrambled toward the opening. It was a damning, furtive movement—a rat scuttling for its hole. In that one instant, animal instinct dominated everything else, and I didn’t care about Austin or Kaden or Temple Mae. All I wanted was to be outside, under the spring sky, and safe.

  I stopped myself and changed directions. Tremors continued to rip through the building, but their frequency was slowing, and I lurched from one spot to the next between them. I didn’t know much about earthquakes. Scratch that. I knew nothing about earthquakes. I jagged right as the building trembled again, and a row of cabinets sagged on the opposite wall, doors swinging open to spill medical supplies across the floor. I stumbled on a brick of shrink-wrapped scrubs, slid, and caught myself on a wheeled rack. The rack and I rolled a few more yards, and then another wave hit the building, and I caught myself on the wall. Cracks webbed the plaster; when I shook my head, dust sifted down from my hair. Deep in the building, in its bones, I could hear supports squealing. I didn’t know a goddamn thing about earthquakes, but I was willing to bet that when this building came down, it was going to come down hard and fast and all at once. I just had to get Kaden and Temple Mae first.

  I skidded a few more yards and came to the opening that the Sierra had plowed through the building, and then I hopped through the ruined series of walls. Temple Mae was sitting up, her hair and face white with dust except where a fresh cut to her cheek bled in a long, fanged curtain down to her jaw. Kaden was still out. I tried to ignore
the part of me that recommended leaving him here.

  “Gotta hurry.” I snagged double fistfuls of Kaden’s cardigan; the fabric stretched and ripped as I pulled him into a sitting position. The squeal of the metal supports. “Can you help me? Hey. Temple Mae, I need some—”

  The squeal became a scream. It was happening. It was happening right now, the whole place was coming down, it was . . .

  But it wasn’t. Temple Mae stared at the ceiling, and blood leaked from the corner of her eye in a muddy tear track, and behind me, the exam rooms vanished as the building collapsed. But not here. Not for this heartbeat. And another.

  And fuck, I was wasting time.

  I got Kaden over my shoulder, and then I caught Temple Mae under the arms and dragged her. If she knew what I was doing, there wasn’t any sign of it. Her eyes were locked on the ceiling, and that bloody tear track was a goddamn river, and all around the oval that Temple Mae was supporting, a waterfall of steel and glass crashed down.

  We were halfway to the hole in the front of the hospital, that big saw-toothed opening that the Sierra had blasted through the front doors when Temple Mae seized. Her whole body convulsed. A miniature earthquake ripped her brain apart, and then she went still.

  I kept going, Kaden on my back, dragging Temple Mae. Gravity was going to pull this whole ruin down on me now that Temple Mae was out, but I wasn’t going to stop. My back ached. My head spun. That spot between my eyes was like the North Star, so bright it was blinding me, so hot it was cold. But I wasn’t going to stop. I didn’t want to die like a rat, didn’t want to die without telling Austin I was sorry, didn’t want to die without seeing Emmett one last time. I coughed a laugh and tasted copper and that burnt electric taste. The rubble overhead shifted. A dangling light fixture worked its way free of the debris and fell, shattering ten yards to my left. Gravity. What a bitch. The whole place was going to come down, the whole place.