As I close in on the cemetery, the final rays of sunshine disappear. I see a thin but brilliant bluish white beam of light shooting out from the ground toward the sky. I would know that light anywhere!
I race to the place where the light shines out of the ground, and the implications stun me. There is nothing but dirt there! Surely she’s not buried?
My heart screams as I frantically look around. There are many mausoleums, and I don’t know which one is Blackwater’s. With no other viable options, I desperately start digging at the earth where the beam emerges. I feel like I’m losing my mind at the horror of wondering if Blue is buried alive. With my bare hands I start heaving up huge chunks of dirt when some headlights drive right up on the cemetery grounds.
Gambino steps out of the car. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” He runs to me.
Just then a brilliant flash of lightning strikes, illuminating the cemetery, and a movement catches my eye. Varg’s shiny fur reflects the lightning with an unearthly glow as he runs across the cemetery toward us. I keep digging, unwilling to slow down, but keep one eye trained on him. His nose is low, and he is tracking at high speed. He stops at a large mausoleum and starts clawing the door and snarling. That is all the clue I need, so I jump up and run over to it, tearing the door off the hinges. Gambino pivots and follows us.
Inside I see two caskets. I break the seals and throw them open, one after the other. Nothing but the rotten scent of the long-dead remains. I look to Varg. He is clawing at a break in the floor. I see it’s a hatch, so I rip it open and see a stairway to what must be a crypt below. I practically fly down two flights of stairs at my fastest speed. Gambino follows as fast as he can. Varg is ahead of him.
I run down a long, dark hall, pulling my sword out as I go. I see a light shining from an entrance to the left. Moving faster than the human eye, I enter the room and see what’s happening. The room is awash in a bluish white light. Blackwater has a whip raised over Blue, and she hangs lifelessly in chains. He looks at me, and before he can even open his mouth to scream I have slashed his entire hand off the end of his arm with the tip of my sword. His hand, with his fingers still curled around the whip, drops uselessly toward the floor.
Before it even reaches the ground I have reached Blue. Her heart is not beating. I rip open my wrist and press it to her mouth. I hear Blackwater behind me release a high pitched scream of agony. Then a moment later I feel a rush of wind as Varg flies through the air toward Blackwater with a savage snarl. I hear the sound of fangs slicing repeatedly through skin and bone, and more snarling, and I am glad. I am so glad. I know that Varg has finished Tobias Blackwater. I slit my wrist again because it has heeled already, and I apply it to Blue’s throat.
As soon as Gambino enters the room, his eyes run over the chains still connecting Blue to the ceiling and floor. He sees her lifeless body and me forcing blood down her throat. The look of grief returns to his face. He stops and calls an ambulance.
I slit my wrist again, deeper this time, pumping my fist to keep the blood flowing out. Then Gambino walks around Blue as I continue to work feverishly on her. When he sees her back, his face turns ashen and he steps back, bracing himself against the wall. He turns to the side and starts vomiting.
Just then, Ernesto arrives. He rips the chains off the bolts for both of her arms and legs, careful not to jar her.
I am murmuring, “Live. Live. Please live.”
Gambino eventually looks away from Blue and toward Varg and the remains of Blackwater. Blackwater’s neck is ripped open, and his face is a lacework of gashes. Varg is sitting by Blue, whining softly now.
All of this is happening, and it is registering faintly in my mind, but just barely. My entire being is focused on getting blood into Blue’s system. I slit my wrist yet again, even deeper this time. I must get more blood into her. I am sitting with her in a pool of her blood, spread all over the cement pad beneath us. She has lost so much. I massage her neck, trying to mechanically get the blood down.
When the chains are fully removed, I gently sit her down, careful not to touch her back in any way because there are strips of muscle, barely connected, just hanging from her. I continue pressing my wrist to her mouth and massaging her neck up and down. Work, damn it! Work!
I look up and see her beautiful light in the corner. She is slipping away! Something in my heart immediately springs up, and I reject that completely, with every ounce of feeling that I have. I will not let her go!
I look straight into her shining, brilliant light, and I start yelling, “Blue! Don’t you dare die on me now. Blue! Come back! Come back! Blue, Varg needs you. Maud needs you. Please! I beg you. I need you!”
Chapter 65
Choosing
Bluebell Kildare: June 3, 2022, Red Ages
Something in the room catches my attention. I see movement and hear a voice shouting a word that I know. I know it, but I can’t remember what it means. It feels like it’s coming from down a long, long tunnel.
I move closer to hear. I think that’s my name. I think that’s what people called me while I was there.
I move a bit closer. I know that voice! It’s Jack! Jack is the good one. The one I can trust!
I can barely see him through my light. He has his hand held over my mouth. Not really my mouth anymore, but the mouth of the body that used to be mine. It sits on the ground now. Jack is supporting it by the neck. The head is lolled back, and his hand is over my mouth. But he’s looking at me. The real me. My light. And he is shouting. He isn’t looking at my body. He’s seeing my soul up above my body in the corner of the room.
He is shouting, “Blue! Don’t you dare die on me now. Blue! Come back! Come back! Blue, Varg needs you. Maud needs you. Please! I beg you. I need you!”
Some of my light fades, and I am able to see the room better. I wonder what Jack is doing with his hand over my body’s mouth. I get closer and see that he’s squeezing blood into it from a wound on his wrist. Ohh, he’s hurt!
I get a little closer. Now he is rubbing the body’s throat, but he’s still looking at me, the real me. He looks straight at me, and I look at him. I look right into his eyes, and he looks pained and happy at the same time. He says, “That’s right, come back to me, beautiful. It’s Jack. Come back to me, Blue.”
I feel a longing to be with him rise up inside of me so I drift a little closer still. Then suddenly the darkness takes me again.
Chapter 66
Hoping
Jack Tanner: June 4, 2022, Red Ages
I pace back and forth in the lobby of the surgery ward while strangers try to piece Blue back together. I’ve seen a lot of carnage in my life, much worse than yesterday, but nothing has ever affected me so much as seeing Blue’s skin missing and the insides of her flesh exposed with bone and sinew in clear view. I would give her my own skin to heal her wounds if I could.
I pull my hands away from my head when I realize that not only am I running my fingers through my hair, but I’m actually tugging on it and pulling some out. I tuck my fingers in my trouser pockets.
Strangers who have no idea how important Blue may be to the supernatural breeds and to all of humanity are putting her back together as though she’s just another person. Strangers who have no understanding of how my life would rip apart. They would lose two souls if they lost one.
I stand before the window. I vow that if she dies on that table, I will hunt down each person in that room and rip them to pieces.
Suddenly I feel a gentle hand on my arm. I turn and see Maud looking at me with grieving, pale green eyes and her wide lips pinched.
“Any word?” she asks.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Not yet. They just started.”
She turns away from me and sits in one of the upholstered waiting room chairs, wrapping a paisley shawl tightly around her shoulders, looking small and frail and all of her age. Her blue hair has faded to a light pastel color, her nail polish is chipped, and her dress wrinkled. I know that her disarray is a
measure of her love for Blue. I sit down next to her and look at my hands. A few strands of my hair are still stuck to my fingers. I gently pull them off and watch them float down to the floor. We must be quite a sight, the two of us.
The hours pass and still we sit together, silently, side-by-side, watching the doorway, waiting for word. A white clock sits on the far end of the room against a beige wall with the stark, black hands ticking interminably forward. Along the wall I’m facing, the paint is old and chipped along the rubber baseboards, three and a quarter inches from the right corner. The floor is made of green and blue speckled linoleum tiles. The third, seventeenth, and fifty-fourth tiles have chips in them and need replacing. I am tracing their outlines with my eyes, listening to the faint sound of the clock ticking over the much louder sound of Maud’s breaths and her rapidly beating heart. Maud smells of roses and lilacs, overlaying the tangy smell of her thinning blood.
As I begin to count the freckles on Maud’s arm for the third time, Alexis comes rushing in. “No word yet?” she asks, out of breath.
I shake my head as Maud looks up. Maud reaches out her hand for Alexis, and Alexis comes forward, opening up both arms. Maud stands up and silently steps into them. Alexis wraps her arms around Maud and gently soothes her, rubbing her back. After a few moments Alexis pulls back and says, “Why don’t we go get a nice cup of tea from the café and maybe a sandwich.”
Maud says, “I’m not hungry.”
I interject, “Her stomach has growled seventeen times in the last hour.”
Maud turns and glares at me, and Alexis nods at me over the top of Maud’s head. Without waiting for a reply from Maud, she pulls her along and out the door.
The clock keeps ticking, and I add it to my list of things to destroy if Blue doesn’t make it. I’m deep in my fantasy of how I will dissemble and crush the various parts of the object that marked the last hours of Blue’s life when I get a surprise visitor.
Dragomira walks in wearing a beautiful cream dress and an exotic, red embroidered scarf that floats behind her. Always one for the dramatic, that female. Her eyes are a bright blue today. She takes Maud’s chair next to me after surveying the empty waiting room.
“Can you tell me what happened?” she asks.
I wonder absently how Dragomira found us. I never called her. Perhaps she counts clairvoyance among her many skills. “How did you know we were here?”
Dragomira says, “It was on the news.”
Oh. I would be embarrassed, but I can’t bring myself to care.
“Then you know already that Tobias Blackwater was the man looking for the amulet?”
When she nods, I go on.
“He had her chained in a crypt and was flaying her to death. He had already torn through her skin and muscle and was ripping into her spinal bone when I finally found her.”
Dragomira winces.
“Her heart wasn’t beating.”
Dragomira puts her hand on my arm.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “She is alive now. I gave her some of my blood.”
Dragomira looks up sharply at this.
I say, “Of course I didn’t turn her.”
Relief washes over her face. Then Dragomira says, “If you are done answering my questions before I ask them, I would like to know about her light. What happened?”
“Her soul was separated from her body when I arrived, only connected by a very thin strand. Her light was brilliant. She was deep underground, several stories down, but I could see her light through the earth, a thin beam pushing straight up into the sky, going even beyond my eyesight, past the moon. She was leaving this life. I called her and called her and she must have heard me because she started to move closer and closer. Then all of a sudden her heart began to beat, and the center of her light popped right back into her body.”
Dragomira’s eyes shift from vivid blue to a deep purple with a fiery red gleam in their depths. “Do you still need a test to know that she is the Illustrissima? Do you doubt that she is the Bright One, the Shining One we have been waiting for?”
Sadly, I don’t. I hang my head. “No.”
“You did a wonderful job, Jack. You found her and saved her.”
I shake my head and say, “I failed as a guardian. I didn’t even kill Tobias Blackwater. Her wolf did. I should never have put her on this job on her own. She should have had a partner the whole way.”
Dragomira reaches out and touches my shoulder. “No, Jack. There are parts of this journey she will have to travel on her own. You should be her guardian and her partner as much as you can now and watch her closer, but she has much to learn. She will not learn it all under your shadow. Nor will she want to. Just remember, you’re the one who called her back. And what is more important, you’re the person she returned for.”
I look up as she stands to leave. “She will make it, Jack.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
I dip my head back down to look at the speckled tiles again, and I don’t lift it until Alexis and Maud walk back in with Gambino close on their heels.
Gambino asks, “How is she?”
I stand up and shake his hand in greeting. “No word. She’s been in surgery for six hours now.”
Maud and Alexis sit across from us, so Gambino takes a deep breath and sits down in Maud’s chair. Gambino looks rough. His suit jacket is thrown over his arm, and his dress shirt and slacks are wrinkled. His tie is pulled loose. His eyes are bloodshot and puffy, and his cheeks are flushed.
Gambino shakes his head. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” He looks at me through puffy eyes. “Her muscle was hanging off the bone in strips. Blood all over the floor. Thank God you were there to give her your blood. Do you think she has a chance?”
“She’d better have a chance.”
Gambino asks, “Did you hear that Varg ran chasing after the ambulance as soon as it took off?”
“No. I hadn’t heard. But I’m not worried about him. He’s found her twice; he’ll find her again.”
Gambino nods. “Well, we’ve made quite an uproar at the precinct and the Village Council. The mayor is on his way back from his vacation. The Chief had to speak to news reporters. The story is being heard all over the country. Human rights groups are crawling all over us, as though owning house slaves is a sanctioned activity in our city. The Dilectus Deo are staging protests all over town, using the opportunity to gain new recruits, and apparently ignoring the fact that two of Blackwater’s victims were Gifted. We had a few wackos calling about an alien spacecraft and beams of light. Thankfully though, we are also making a lot of people very happy by telling them that their stolen magical artifacts have been found.”
That raises an alarm in my head. “Have you returned the artifacts yet?”
Gambino squints his eyes and looks at me. “No. Why?”
“Because all of the items were stolen by a Gifted person and all are magical artifacts. The Bureau should be handling that rather than the precinct. I would have an expert come in and do a complete inventory to make sure none of the elements are forbidden. Then I would put several magical tests to anyone who showed up claiming to be the owner. The precinct isn’t capable of handling that. Those objects are likely to be powerful and should not get in the wrong hands. All you will do is check an ID.”
Gambino takes this in and ruminates on it a moment. “I can have the pieces transferred to you.”
“Better yet, I’ll have my men Xavier and Ernesto pick them up if you could please do the paperwork for the transfer.”
Just as I finish speaking, a short doctor with dark frizzy hair and a long nose walks into the room. “Jack Tanner?”
I quickly step up to him. “I’m Jack Tanner.” I can smell Blue’s blood all over him, and my gut clenches.
He says, “I’m Dr. Ziggler. I just finished surgery on Bluebell.”
I look back at the room and see all eyes glued on us. I turn back to Dr. Ziggler. “You can update us all,
Doctor.”
He clears his throat. “Bluebell Kildare has made it through the operation. She’s in critical but stable condition, which is amazing given the condition she arrived in. She is a fighter. She required an emergency skin graft and countless sutures. She will need more surgeries and more skin grafts, but we need to get her strong now. That is our focus for the time being. She is deeply sedated because if she were to awaken now she would be in unbearable pain. We will keep her sedated for several days. For the time being, she is being cared for in intensive care, but if she does well, she may be moved to the burn ward.”
“Why the burn ward?”
Dr. Ziggler says gently, “They have the most experience dealing with skin grafts and missing skin.” Then he clears his throat again and says, “I would bring someone back to visit with her now, but we had a very unusual situation occur during the surgery.”
I can feel the tension rise in the room, and I start glaring at the doctor.
He says, “No, nothing is wrong with Bluebell, beyond the obvious, of course. While I was doing surgery, an animal, either a wolf or a very large dog—it is hard to tell—walked right in the surgery room. I called a nurse in who tried to coax him out, but every time she got near him, he snarled at her. I couldn’t stop my surgery, you understand, so I told the nurse to leave it. He just sat their passively as long as we left him alone. Do any of you know about this animal?”
I think we must have all been smiling a bit because Dr. Ziggler says, “I see you do know this animal!”
Alexis speaks up. “Yes. He is Blue’s animal, and he’s a wolf. He is harmless unless you try to hurt Blue. I think it is a good idea that you just let him be near her. He will get back to her even if you try to remove him.”
Dr. Ziggler’s eyes open up wide, and I can see he is about to protest.
I say, “We will keep someone with her at all times to watch the wolf.”
Dr. Ziggler nods and scratches his head. His frizzy hair bounces to and fro for a minute. “Okay. That will do. Right now only one person can sit with her at a time. If she gets moved to the burn ward, then she can have two visitors at a time.”
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