by Laken Cane
Then she noticed his condition. She stopped shaking him and squeezed his shoulder. “Who has hurt you?” She dropped her fangs and looked at the woman with him.
“I didn’t hurt him,” the woman said, “and the only reason I’m not hurting you for laying hands on what’s mine is because he asked me not to. Because I owe him my freedom, you live.”
Rune stared. The woman was tall, blonde, and a ghoul. And obviously, she was either very stupid, or very powerful, with her careless threats and her cold gaze.
But Rune appreciated her loyalty.
“Who the fuck are you?” Rune asked, but immediately turned back to Gunnar. He’d returned. She really didn’t care about the female ghoul.
“This is Dawn,” Gunnar said, his voice weak. “She is my…”
“I’m his everything,” Dawn said, when Gunnar trailed off. “Which is why he brought me back.”
Gunnar wouldn’t meet Rune’s eyes.
And that told her that Dawn was lying.
Or maybe she was simply misinformed.
The crew gathered at Rune’s back.
“What happened to you, Gunnar?” Levi asked.
Lex shied away, unwilling to touch either ghoul.
Gunnar listed suddenly to the side, and Raze stepped in to catch him. The ghoul’s emaciated arm nearly disappeared in Raze’s huge fist.
“Lean on me,” Raze told Gunnar, his voice growly and angry.
“You are a hero,” Dawn said to Raze.
They all looked at her for a second, then dismissed her and put their attention back on Gunnar.
Gunnar would look only at Rune. “It was not my intention to worry you, or to be absent for so long. Or,” he continued, glancing down almost sheepishly at his battered body, “to take so much damage.”
Rune resisted the almost overwhelming urge to hug the wild-haired ghoul. “Tell me everything.”
“That would be impossible,” Dawn said. “He does not know everything.”
Rune lifted an eyebrow at the strange female. When she looked back at Gunnar, she could have sworn he was blushing. Or he would have been, if he’d been human. “Gunnar,” she prompted.
“I had to show you it was possible, Your Unbalancedness. I would not have you lose your faith when you fear all is lost.” His gaze sharpened. “And you will.”
Fuck me.
She couldn’t breathe. His words and the knowledge in his eyes snatched the air out of her lungs and she could not breathe.
“God,” she finally said. “I knew something was coming.”
And once again, her body started to shake. Some part of her knew what he was saying, knew what he was warning her about.
She looked around, unaware that she searched instinctively for the berserker until Owen stepped up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“Steady,” he murmured.
“Damascus?” she asked, ignoring the wobble in her voice.
Dawn shrieked and covered her face.
Gunnar didn’t even glance at her. “Yes. But not only Damascus.”
“How do you know this?” Jack asked. “How the fuck can you know anything?”
“Because he’s magic.” Lex slid a little closer to Rune. “Just as Rune is.”
“I retrieved Dawn from the clutches of all that is death,” Gunnar said. “Damascus. In her world, she is stronger than you are, Rune. Much stronger. You can’t become…” He frowned, struggling to find the right word. “Careless. You must not surrender.”
“Never give up,” Dawn said, peeking out at Rune from behind her fingers. “Be as I was. Keep a place inside your heart that knows the darkness will not last forever.”
“I liberated her from Damascus,” Gunnar said. “Though it took me a lifetime.”
“I always knew you would,” Dawn said, smiling at Gunnar.
Gunnar glanced at Rune, and then quickly away.
Rune smiled through the horror. “I am so glad you’re back.”
He tried to bow, and had it not been for Raze’s grip, he would have toppled over. He righted himself, heartbreakingly earnest in his obvious regard for Rune. “I have been without treats for quite some time.”
“If you’re able to walk,” she told him, “you’ll find candy all over Wormwood. I brought some every night since you’ve been gone.”
“He will recover,” Dawn said, puffing out her chest, “with me to nurse him. I will take care of him, and I will retrieve his treats.” She nodded at them. “Go away now.”
“Not yet,” Rune said. “Gunnar, are you saying I have to go there?”
“Fool,” Dawn said.
“Rune,” Levi said. “You can’t—”
“Be silent,” Gunnar said, so out of character the crew could only stare. “This is Rune’s path to follow. She will follow it.”
No one said a word.
“Listen to the echoes of Wormwood,” Gunnar said. “Open yourself to them. When you hear them, follow the path. It was always meant for you, Rune.”
“Lead me there, Gunnar,” she said. “If the time comes I have no choice but to go, come with me.”
“I cannot, Your Majesty. I would crumble into dust were I to attempt the journey again. But I have prepared them for you.”
She frowned. “Who did you prepare?”
“Your allies, Rune. You will not be totally alone.”
Then he motioned her to him, and leaned down to whisper quickly into her ear.
“The echoes of Wormwood are inside you. Listen. Prepare. It is time to heed them.”
He seemed suddenly so human, so different, that she couldn’t say anything.
But she understood.
Wormwood echoed.
She had only to listen.
And she was not fucking ready.
Because in her heart, she knew she might never come back.
Chapter Eleven
“If you find a way in, you have to let us go in with you. We’re addicted,” Denim said, later, standing outside the Annex. “Without you, we’ll suffer until we die anyway.”
Fuck if he wasn’t right.
What could she do? Take them to almost certainly suffer and die, or leave them where they would unquestionably suffer and die, and maybe in an even worse way?
As Strad, alone in his addiction, would be suffering?
Berserker.
“We’re the original Shiv Crew,” Raze said, pointing at himself, then Jack. “There is nothing for us here. We belong at your side.”
“I would rather die than be left behind,” Ellis said, resolute. He’d been waiting outside the Annex doors when they’d arrived.
He squeezed the tiny bulge of the fang hidden beneath his shirt. “You’re my best friend. You’re my life. Levi is my life.” He released a quick sob. “The crew is my life.”
Owen shrugged. “I just like to travel.” He grinned at her.
But his eyes were dead serious.
Not one of her crew was willing to let her go running off to some other world alone, even though none of them believed she should go. And despite her fear that they’d die there, that she would be taking them into a Damascus-laden trap, she nodded.
She needed her crew.
Her friends.
So she nodded.
“Okay then,” Jack said. “Now how do we get there?”
“You heard Gunnar,” she said, walking with her crew into the building.
“Yeah, but he made no sense. Echoes? Paths? I need something I can see and feel. I can’t grab hold of some echoing shit.”
“Not you,” Lex said. “Rune. And she’ll lead you there. We will lead you there. Exactly like when we walked through hell to get to the lab.”
“I have a feeling that was a sweet little stroll over a pretty pink bridge,” Jack said, “compared with what we’ll face this time.”
Rune agreed. “If I’m not snatched up by the witch and taken there, we’re all staying put. I’m not losing you because Damascus is calling.”
Lex
grabbed her arm and pulled her around. “Don’t enter Wormwood without us.”
“I won’t go there without any of you, Lex.” She put her hand over Lex’s.
She felt anxiety coming from all of them. They weren’t worried about what was waiting for them once they left their world. They were worried she’d go without them. She looked around at them. “If I’m forced to go, and if it’s within my power, you are going with me.”
“Then don’t take any chances,” Levi said. “Stay out of Wormwood until we’re all with you.”
“I won’t go into Wormwood without you,” she repeated.
She explained to Eugene, Bill, and Elizabeth exactly what was happening. Neither Bill nor Elizabeth argued when she told them she might suddenly disappear to go fight a personal battle in...wherever the hell Damascus was.
Maybe they just didn’t believe her.
Eugene, though, was not happy. “Your first duty is to this city, Rune. When I call, I expect you to come.”
“If I’m not in another world,” she said, dryly, “I will do my job here.”
And she would.
Fucking echoes.
Maybe she’d been hearing them all her life, but hadn’t understood what they were.
She was pretty sure that when she heard them, now that she knew to listen, the sounds would be as familiar to her as the constant sensations of her pain.
“Any updates about the Other sickness?” she asked him.
He steepled his fingers and sighed. “Not yet. I have two of the master’s bite junkies and two sick vampires. Once the infection is isolated, we’ll know more. I have to find out who cooked it up, and you know I’m going to need you here to help with that.”
She frowned. “You think someone deliberately created it to destroy Others?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “There are no naturally occurring viruses that Others can contract, Rune. You don’t get sick like humans. Of course this one is lab created. And it’s bad.”
When he said “You” instead of “they,” she took a second to acknowledge the fact that she only felt a tiny twinge of humiliation. And that was simply from habit.
She’d accepted her monster.
I am my monster.
And I’m proud of the little bastard.
“What’s funny, Rune?”
“Sorry?”
“You were smiling.”
“Nothing. How fast can your people create a cure?”
“I doubt they can. But they’ll work on an antidote—Others not yet sick will be able to get inoculated against this virus, we hope.”
“Like a flu shot.”
“Yes. Like that.”
“The ones already sick?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know if we can help them. At least not in time. We’re working on it but it’s going to take time. Rune…”
“I don’t know if I’m sick. I don’t know.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“If the vampires can’t feed from humans, they will die.”
“And if they feed from infected humans, they will die.”
They studied each other for a long moment. “What’s going to happen, Eugene?”
“It’s too early. I don’t know.”
She got up. “Who do you think created it? The Shop? COS?”
He stared up at her for a long, long moment. “I think it was the Next.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“I’m not completely sure, but it’s…” He stood as well and began to pace, his fists clenched. “They’re the only group I can think of that might be capable of this particular nasty. I have to fix this,” he muttered. “I have to fix this once and for all.”
He wouldn’t tell her anymore. Honestly, she was surprised he’d told her that much. And five minutes after she left his office the speakers blared, directing Shiv Crew to Monitor One for a run.
Not Ellie’s voice—he was back at her house safe and sound, busy doing shit that kept her and her household running. Her stomach tightened and a dark lump of dread took up residence in her heart when she thought about leaving him.
Leaving Ellie.
She wasn’t sure she could.
But she was nearly certain she’d have to.
Chapter Twelve
“You might be sick,” Jack said. “He fucking left you to figure out his own shit and you might be rotting into a pile of—”
“Dammit, Jack. Shut up,” she ordered.
But once again the crew was full of anger and stiff with betrayal, and she couldn’t defend the berserker from it. Didn’t even want to.
Only Lex stood firm in her loyalty for Strad Matheson. “He has his reasons. He loves Rune,” she said, once, and then kept quiet on the subject.
Rune feared that Jack, when—if—he saw Strad again, was going to pull his gun and blow the berserker away. He was that pissed.
It had just taken a little while to sink in.
A little while for them to realize he’d really taken off.
And the entire time she argued and fought and thought and worried, she listened.
Listened for the echoes.
Terrified she’d hear them.
She and the crew had been called to a werewolf versus vampire battle in the Moor, just a mile or so from Rune’s house. By the time they got there, the fight had broken up and only a small group of homeless people remained to tell the crew what had happened.
“Wolves were winning,” one woman said. She grinned, creating one deep dimple and faded blue eyes so full of mischief that Rune couldn’t help but grin back.
“Any humans?” she asked.
“Twelve,” the woman answered. “The vampires carried off twelve dead humans.”
Rune lifted an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of dead humans.”
“Weren’t no damn humans,” another of the homeless said. A man, his face a little more lined than the woman’s, his clothing a little shabbier.
He held his hands out to a trashcan fire that lit up the night and burned with crackling merriment. “And were only a couple of Others. You’re a fucking liar.”
Rune didn’t like the way he ran his cold stare over the homeless woman’s body.
“How long have you been out here?” she asked the woman.
“Just found my way to this spot tonight,” she answered, and pushed her red hair back under her fuzzy knit cap. “I was in the city but…” She hesitated, then shrugged. “I had to move on.”
“We got room for you here,” the man said. “Long as you keep your fucking mouth shut and…” Again, his gaze roamed her body.
The woman backed away just a little, her hands clutching at the bag she held. She glanced behind her into the shadows of the night, as though looking for an escape route should she need one later.
Rune didn’t like it.
Something about the woman was vaguely familiar, and it took her a few minutes to understand what it was. The homeless woman reminded Rune of her adoptive mother.
The clothes she wore, the knit cap with the faded pink flower on the front of it, even the gray sweater with the deep pockets.
And the red hair.
“Rune?” Jack asked. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she whispered.
Raze stepped forward, sensing a threat, and drew the woman’s attention. “You sure are a big one, mister. What’s your name?”
Raze stared over her head and said nothing.
“Do you know what the fight was about?” Denim asked her.
She gazed at him for a long, silent moment before looking at Levi. “You are a lucky woman,” she told Rune. “To answer your question, pretty boy, no, I don’t.” She shook her head. “It was hard to figure out what they were upset about. But they dispersed almost before they assembled.”
Another man at her side cleared his throat and gave the woman a look Rune was unable to decipher.
“What?” Rune asked him.
He scratched his chin and refused to meet her sta
re. “We don’t need to be volunteering information to the law, is all.”
“I’ll need you to volunteer your names.” She glanced around at the rest of the vagrants. “Do any of you have anything to tell us?”
“We didn’t see nothing,” one of them said, tossing a disgusted look at the woman who’d talked. “Nothing at all.”
“Of course not,” Levi said.
“I’m Jill,” the talkative woman said. She nodded toward the man who stood beside her. “And I think this one’s name is Lou.”
Lou eyed the crew. “You ought to pay us for our information.”
Rune lifted an eyebrow. “I’ll send someone back with a bag of burgers, dude.”
“We’re not drunks,” he said, and spat at her feet.
“Hey now,” Jack said, giving Lou a warning shove. “You don’t want to do that.”
“Fuck off, you one-eyed bastard,” Lou said. “And keep your fucking burgers.”
“Shut up,” one of the quieter men said. “We’ll take them burgers.”
Rune gave him a nod. “You got it.”
“Rune,” Owen said, glancing down at his beeping phone. “It’s from the Annex. Eugene wants a meeting.”
But she wasn’t ready to leave. “Jill. Come with us. I’ll put you up in a hotel until you get things straightened out.”
“There’s nothing to straighten out,” Jill said, quietly. “Go mind your business, you and your team. I’ll make out okay. I always do.”
And in the end, Jill refused to budge and Rune had to leave. But she handed Jill a card with her phone number on it. “You need me, call me.”
How awful it was to leave a woman who could have been her mother on the cold streets of River County. How hard.
But Jill wouldn’t budge.
Rune stood in front of Lou for a long, long moment before finally, he looked away from the flames and into her eyes.
She dropped her fangs.
He stumbled back, away from the fire and almost into Jill. “What,” he said. “What?”
Rune stepped closer to him. “You hurt her, and I will feed you your dick as you scream and beg me for mercy. I swear it.” And she moved closer still. “Do you believe me?”
He nodded, fast and hard, his eyes wide. “Yeah yeah,” he said, wheezing. “Yeah yeah.”
She looked around at the entire group of vagrants. They’d fallen silent and watched with fear in their faces. “She’s under my protection. No one touches her. You got it?”