“Yeah, I don’t—” I stop because InTense’s face has morphed into a mask of horror worse than the plastic one propped on his head. “What are you doing!” I lurch a step closer to Ishtar then hold up because getting close is just dangerous. She’s far more powerful than I am. My only real weapon against her is the gun. “Stop it, or I will shoot you, Ishtar.”
“No, Wraith, you won’t.” But she stops drawing life energy from InTense. He coughs and sputters in air, but her hand is still lightly brushing his neck. “On the other hand, I will kill the CTO of Quarry, Inc. if you do not let me walk out of here with him.”
I hesitate—it’s just for a second or two, but it’s enough for her to nod and give me a small smile, like she knows I’m trapped.
“There’s no point anymore to this, my lovely,” she says. “There’s no option for you to stop this attack. Or any of the thousand other things that Moloch has put in play, the vast majority of which you are not even aware.” The normal purr is back in her voice, like she thinks she’s fully in charge of the situation now. “No matter what happens today, Gehenna will continue. It has the force of destiny on its side, an inevitability you cannot even begin to grasp. But it’s still not too late for you to join the right side of history on this. Besides…” She tips her head up, looking as haughty as any drop-dead gorgeous movie star in a midnight-black gown ever has. “If InTense dies, who do you think will be blamed for that?” “
InTense cowers under her hand and gives her a wild-eyed look of fear. I don’t think he saw this turn coming, and frankly neither did I. Why would she kill him? My brain is trying to do the calculus on this, but Ishtar is already spelling it out for me.
“I wasn’t the one who spirited him away from his shining tower,” she says. “In fact, I’m not involved in this at all, as far as anyone else knows. If you let Seth and Moloch die, clearly they can’t be blamed for the murder of Quarry’s CTO either. With Zachariel dying, that leaves you, my lovely. Do you want to take the fall for that? What happens to your precious little life, your pretend life where you masquerade as one of them, when that happens? It will be quite over. And you will have nothing left to do but flee into the waiting arms of Gehenna—the one place where you truly belong.”
Oh my god, she’s serious. Either I let her walk away with InTense or she kills him. Just to keep Gehenna’s plans rolling along. And maybe force me into it? The part about pinning InTense’s death on me doesn’t matter… but tens of thousands of people’s lives do.
“Don’t do this, Ishtar,” I say, my hand shaking.
She smiles. “But you’re leaving me no choice, my lovely.”
InTense freezes up again, his cheeks caving in while Ishtar’s lights up with the beauty of his life energy riding under her skin. She’s doing this because she doesn’t think I will stop her.
But she’s wrong: I’m the one who has no choice.
I pull the trigger.
The sound pierces my eardrums and kicks back my hand, but most of all, I’m afraid I might have missed. Ishtar and InTense both jerk and have shocked faces… but in the next slow, agonizing seconds, it’s Ishtar who crumples to the floor. InTense leans away from her fallen body, like the bullet might be contagious. Then he flicks a horrified look to me, like I’ve morphed into something new in his eyes.
And I have: I’m a stone-cold killer now.
Never mind that I’ve probably saved InTense’s life. I’m sure he knows I don’t give a damn about him. But I couldn’t let her walk away with him or kill him. There are too many other lives at stake—innocent lives, people who did nothing wrong except having the wrong government record at the wrong time. I know it was the only choice, but I can’t look behind me. I can’t afford to see Wyatt’s face as he realizes the same thing that InTense does: I just shot a woman in cold-blood.
“Is she dead?” I ask InTense.
His face twists, like he can’t believe I would ask him to check. But he bends down to daintily touch her neck. I suppose his hesitation makes some sense—she is a debt collector, after all. Was. Past tense.
Maybe.
“I think she’s dead.” His voice is breathy, still caught in the panic of all that’s happened. I’m not sure if he’s right, but Ishtar definitely isn’t moving. Her black dress pools around her, hiding the blood that has to be there, seeping out of her body. Or maybe gushing.
A dullness threatens to clamp down on my mind—a fuzziness that doesn’t want to acknowledge that I just killed her. But I can’t afford that right now. I can’t afford to feel anything until I know that everyone is safe… including the thousands of people still set to die tomorrow.
“Rifton, get up.” My voice is harsh and gravelly.
He pops up from the floor, like he thinks I might shoot him if he doesn’t move fast enough.
I hook a thumb over my shoulder to the server bank next to the holo-cam. I still avoid turning around to look in that direction, because I might see Wyatt’s expression, and that will completely undo me at the moment.
“Can you access the grid from here?” I ask InTense. “Because you’re going to undo that slash, and you’re going to do it now.”
If it’s possible, he turns even more pale. “I can’t.” I can see his body quiver. “I couldn’t stop it now if I wanted to. The records have already been shifted.”
“Come on, Rifton,” I say, my anger rising. “Fix this thing!”
“I swear to you, I can’t! I’m locked out!” He’s pleading with me, hands out, fear whitening his eyes. He thinks I’m going to kill him if he doesn’t fix it—which actually makes me believe he’s telling the truth. Why wouldn’t he, at this point? All his benefactors are dead or dying on the floor, and he was never loyal to them anyway.
I snarl at him. There has to be something he can do. “Then… track down the records that have been shifted. Identify the victims for me. Do something so we can stop the collections.”
“I… I… I’m telling you, it’s not possible.” He looks horrified, not by what he’s done but by the fact that he can’t save his sorry ass by undoing it. “It’s completely random. I couldn’t track them down if I tried—not without a lot of time and a whole team of slashers. The records are just too… massive.” His voice weakens. “It was designed to be unstoppable. In a few hours, the reviews will all be triggered. The collections will start rolling out tomorrow. The vid was going to explain it all.” He says this last part like he’s just waking up to the horror of it. And how pathetic it sounds that such a monstrosity was going to be blithely explained on a vid. As if there were nothing wrong with making a how-to manual for chaos and murder, with his stupid mask and his power games and secret slash tricks.
My stomach heaves, and I lower my gun, which was still up from shooting Ishtar. It’s horrible and awful—and the thing is, I believe him. We can’t stop it. Which means killing Ishtar was pointless. I could have let her kill InTense, and the effect would have been the same. Maybe I would have gone to jail for his murder, maybe not. But that wasn’t why I killed her. I did it to stop her from killing him.
And now he’s worthless to me.
I should have let her walk away.
My shoulders sag, and that fuzziness clouds my mind again. I blink at the floor a few times. It seems indistinct in its spongy blackness. I know there’s something I should be doing, but I can’t begin to think of what it is. Moloch still lays motionless at my feet. I can see the blood now, running along the black flooring to pool at some local depression in the surface. It’s like the abyss has opened under my feet—the one that appears whenever I pay out. It’s popped into reality and is welcoming me into its dark embrace of death. Everything seems… hopeless.
“Ms. Sterling?”
The voice is soft, but it brings my gaze up. It’s the Lifetime director of ops. I can’t remember his name. Wait… it’s Scott.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
No. I’m not all right. But I nod.
“I have an idea,”
he says, tentatively, like he’s not sure if he should be speaking directly to me. Or speaking at all in the situation. But he’s not afraid of me. He’s not looking at me with horror or cringing away from me. I killed a woman for no reason—no reason that was real in the end—but he’s still looking at me with something other than revulsion.
“What’s your idea, Scott?” I ask. My brain is still in a fog. Tickling at the back of my head is the nagging thought that I’ve forgotten something terribly important.
“I think I have a way we can save all those people.” His earnest brown eyes, the hope in his voice, the complete lack of fear… all of it dives straight into my heart and blasts away the fog. It’s a tiny flame of hope, but it burns through everything else and clears my mind.
Then I remember the thing I forgot: Zachariel, bleeding on the floor, waiting for me to pump life energy into him and keep his soul tethered to this plane of existence.
Because he would want to save those people, too.
“Hold that thought, Scott,” I say, strength flooding back to my voice. “I have something I need to do first.”
I’m kneeling by Zachariel’s body, already flushing life energy into him. Seth’s body is nearby. Just looking at either one of them, you wouldn’t be able to tell if they’re alive, but I know Zachariel’s still tethered, still holding on. My hand on his cheek is heating with the fast rate I’m shoving life energy into him, but more importantly, past the transfer point, I can feel he still has a tiny pool of it. Except that everything I throw into the pool just laps the edges and drains away.
I look up at Samil, who Wyatt is still holding at gunpoint. I’ve successfully avoided Wyatt’s gaze so far, and I don’t plan to change that anytime soon.
“If you’re still here when I count to three,” I say to Samil, “you’ll get to join Moloch on the floor.”
His eyes jerk even wider than they already were. He takes a hesitant step back.
I throw a glance over my shoulder to InTense, who is still cowering by Ishtar’s body. “You too!” They both start to move, and whatever they’re doing, I cease to care.
All my focus goes to Zachariel.
“You’re… you’re one of them.” I hear Scott’s voice, but I ignore it. The Lifetime director can deal with the fact that one of his board members is a debt collector on his own.
“She’s saving his life,” Wyatt says.
It’s just four words, but it reaches inside me and stirs things around. Things I can’t think about right now because I need to save Zachariel. I close my eyes and try to envision the cage that Lirium talked about using when he localized his healing. Only I don’t really understand what he was talking about. Maybe it would help if I was flushing directly into Zachariel’s wound. I know that made a big difference when I was paying out to the man in the hospital with the surgical site infection. Only Zachariel’s wound isn’t an infection: it’s a gaping hole that’s tunneled through his body.
I bite my lip and tear open his jacket with one hand, even though I don’t want to see what Moloch’s bullet has done to him. Except I can’t unbutton his shirt and still keep skin contact—and I’m afraid if I don’t keep flushing him with life energy, he’ll slip away.
I look up to Wyatt, and tears jump to my eyes with the soft concern and pain in his face. “I need help.” My voice warbles, rough with too much emotion swimming below the surface.
Wyatt drops to his knees. “What can I do?” he asks quickly.
“Unbutton his shirt. I need access to the wound.”
Wyatt sets his gun down. He doesn’t bother to unbutton, he just takes hold of the two sides and rips Zachariel’s shirt open. The buttons pop off and fly around his body, but it gets the job done. His chest is smeared with blood, and the bright pink spots where Seth tortured him and Lirium healed him still show through, but it’s easy to see where the bullet made a black, puckering hole in his shoulder.
His shoulder. I think that’s good. It’s not over his heart or his lungs… maybe.
Blood pulses out of it as I watch, so I grit my teeth and place my hand over the hot stickiness of the hole. I try again to envision a cage of life energy reaching into his body and forming around the wound. I can feel the edges of death tearing through his body, making a tunnel of destruction through the living tissue. It stretches from the entrance hole, through his body, to the exit wound… which is much larger. And gushing not only blood but life energy as well.
I try to form the cage, but I simply don’t know how.
I open my eyes and glance at Seth’s body a foot away. “Bring him closer,” I say to Wyatt, reaching my other palm toward Seth’s limp, upturned hand.
Wyatt grabs hold of Seth’s arm and drags him close enough that I can reach his palm. Seth doesn’t move during the whole thing, and I’m not surprised—there’s a large pool of blood he left behind when Wyatt dragged him over. Wyatt must have shot him at close range, given how Seth was hovering over him most of the time—the hole is small in front, but I’m sure the back is not. When I press my palm to Seth’s and reach past the contact point, there’s only a whisper of life energy.
I know what that whisper is. Seth is watching us, floating somewhere above, not feeling the pain of his wound any longer, just the eternal weightlessness that comes from being liberated from the burdens of life. But he’s still tethered to his body, still tenuously holding on. I wonder if the afterlife is any different for someone like Seth—someone who’s tormented and outright stolen the lives of so many people, all in a bid to live forever. Will it be the same for him as it was for me? I’m not sure what I would have found, if Zachariel hadn’t saved me, and I had floated farther and farther away. I hope whatever’s waiting for Seth feels much worse than a balloon drifting on the currents of the universe.
I pull out the last of his life energy and pump it directly into Zachariel’s body. I can feel when Seth’s tether snaps and there is only nothingness left. Goodbye asshole, I think. There’s no regret, no remorse. Just the certainty that, no matter what awaits Seth on the other side, he’ll no longer be able to hurt people on this one.
I drop his hand and wipe mine on my suit jacket.
I look up into Wyatt’s wide sky-blue eyes. “Bring me Moloch.” My voice is leaden, but only because I’m not looking forward to touching the architect of Gehenna, either.
Wyatt hurries over to Moloch’s body, hooks his hands under his limp arms, and drags him across twenty feet of spongy black flooring. Scott hangs back, watching, clearly aghast at what’s happening. He’s probably still recovering from the shock that I’m a debt collector.
I couldn’t care less.
Moloch’s palm isn’t as clammy, and he still has a reservoir of life energy in him that, if he were conscious, he would use to drown me. I quickly pull down as much as I can, praying he doesn’t actually wake in the process. But his wound is pulling just as much as I am, draining him fast and hard. At the same time, I’m pumping that life energy into Zachariel. I’m just a channel for this tsunami of life energy, flushing through my body on the way to Zachariel’s, but the high is outrageous. My head is floating as if I’m the one who has died and is barely tethered to my body. After a minute, I slow the gush into Zachariel. Not because I’m running out of energy from Moloch—that’s still surging into me—but because I can feel the drain from Zachariel’s wound is slowing. I don’t know if it’s the massive flush of energy, or if I managed to accidentally form the cage inside him after all. I don’t think so—I’ve simply dumped an immortal’s worth of life into his body. Now it’s brimming with energy, much like the pink fleshy battery that Dr. Brodsky had me fill. Perhaps I’ve made Zachariel’s entire body into a cage, filling it with so much life energy that it simply started to heal itself.
Like Lirium’s cage writ large.
Zachariel moans, shakes his head a little, then contorts his face, like he’s trying to open his eyes but can’t quite. I slow the transfer into him even further: his body is humming all by itse
lf, and even with the reduced rate, it’s no longer leaking like a sieve. I can hardly believe it, but I think I might have actually healed him. Or at least patched him enough that his wound is no longer draining the life energy out of him at a life-threatening rate.
Zachariel opens his eyes and frowns at Wyatt hovering above him. I can’t help but smile through the tears gathering at the corners of my eyes.
“Wraith,” he says to Wyatt, his voice thick. He doesn’t seem to realize I’m the one with the hand on his shoulder, still trickling a small amount of life energy into him.
“Still here,” I say.
His gaze swings to me, and he lifts his head slightly. He grimaces and smiles at the same time then lets his head flop back down. His eyes close again, and I almost panic, but he’s still smiling. Then a small chuckle shakes his chest under my hands.
“Just couldn’t wait to get my clothes off, could you?” he asks.
“You wish.” But I’m laughing through the tears that are leaking down my face. I think we’re both ridiculously buzzed out with all the life energy transferring.
“Had enough yet?” I ask, but I can sense he no longer needs even the small amount I’m still feeding him. “You’re kind of a life energy hog here.”
Zachariel sucks in a breath and lets it out slowly. “Yeah. I think I’m good.” His voice is back to serious. I’m sure it still hurts him, but I’m not really helping him at this point. His own body is doing the work of healing the damage done. I pull my now-bloody hand away from his chest—I expect to see the wound healed, yet I’m still amazed. The hole has closed. It’s a mess of bright pink flesh, not unlike the other ones pock-marking his chest… but it’s closed. I’ve never seen anything like it. At least not outside of Lirium’s care.
I’m still draining Moloch. Now that I’m not feeding life energy to Zachariel, the years start to pile up inside me. Moloch had more decades than I could count left in him, even with the gunshot wound. I’ve flushed a big fraction of it into Zachariel, and I’m still pulling at insane rate. It only takes a minute before Moloch is at the same barely-tethered state that Seth was just before I killed him. Because I know that’s what cutting the tether truly is: killing. Irrevocably. Finally. Wyatt may have fired the gun, but I’m the one who is ending their lives.
The Debt Collector (Season Two) Page 35