The Last Sanctuary Omnibus

by Kyla Stone

  “I’ll go without a gun,” Gabriel said.

  Silas sneered. “You’ll just get yourself killed.”

  What do you care?” Gabriel snapped back, bristling. “We wouldn’t even be in this situation if not for you.”

  Silas’s mouth tilted in a savage smile. “You have something you need to get off your chest? Wanna take a potshot at me?”

  “Enough! Both of you.” Jericho coughed hard, bending double for a moment before straightening. When he regained his composure, he shook his head. “We’ll go first thing in the morning, and not a second before.”

  Celeste and Horne weren’t her favorite people. That was no secret. But they were part of the group. And maybe Celeste wasn’t as awful as she used to be. Horne was irritating as hell, but there were worse people in the world. “Gabriel’s right. We should look now.”

  Jericho ran his hand over his head and sighed. “Believe me, I hate this as much as you do. But it’s too dangerous.”

  Willow hated feeling sorry for an elite: first Amelia; now Celeste and Horne. But they must be terrified out there, alone and weaponless, maybe lost or hurt or both. She didn’t wish that fate on anybody. “But the Pyros are gone for now. We chased them off—”

  “We can’t go traipsing around in the dark when we’re already exhausted. From now on, we can’t risk being seen. We must be invisible.”

  Willow just stared at him. Dread crept up her throat. She didn’t ask the question. She already knew the answer.

  Silas said it anyway, his expression flat, his eyes hard. “We’re being hunted.”

  16

  Gabriel

  “There’s someone out there.” Gabriel crouched behind the service desk in the hotel lobby. Morning light trickled through the windows, revealing stuffy, antique decor slightly worn around the edges: burnished wood floors, crystal chandeliers, a bank of last generation SmartFlex charging stations, and heavy leather sofas surrounding a massive stone fireplace.

  “What do you see?” Jericho asked from beside him.

  Silas scowled. “Just shoot if it’s a Pyro.”

  Gabriel peered around the side of the counter with the scope of the semi-automatic he’d taken from Mohawk yesterday. Jericho carried both the pulse rod and the gun.

  Amelia had regained consciousness late last night, but her mind was still foggy. She’d had a difficult time walking or talking for several hours, though she seemed to be coming out of it now.

  They’d all spent the night in the same hotel suite. No one wanted to be alone. Gabriel had remained awake, standing watch. The lingering scorched sensation in his throat was a harsh reminder that they couldn’t let their guard down for a moment.

  Gabriel squinted through the scope. A lone figure trudged toward the hotel from the south. He was dressed in black cargo pants and a dark jacket. He limped slightly. A red blotch stained the front of the jacket—blood. The head was bowed, the masked face in shadow.

  Gabriel tweaked the zoom on the scope, narrowing in on the figure’s face. But the person stepped into the street between an SUV and a minivan.

  Gabriel lost his bearings, spinning wildly and seeing only blurred close-ups. He pulled back, reset the scope, and zoomed in again.

  It was Tyler Horne. There was a scrape across his temple and blood crusted along the side of his sculpted features and square jaw. But it was definitely Horne.

  “What can you see?” Micah asked.

  “It’s our favorite person.”

  Silas groaned. “Is the girl with him, at least?”

  “The girl has a name,” Willow snapped.

  Gabriel shook his head. “Alone. No sign of Celeste.”

  He scanned the street, the sidewalks, storefronts, and the surrounding buildings through the scope, searching for movement, for any sign of a tail, of surveillance, or that their position had been exposed. But there was no movement. Nothing.

  “Get him inside before he gives us away,” Jericho said, his voice strained.

  A minute later, Horne was sagging against the concierge desk, bloodied and bruised but still in one piece.

  “What happened?” Gabriel asked. “Where’s Celeste?”

  “Nice to see you, too.” Horne lifted back his hood and ran shaking fingers through his matted blonde hair. “After barely surviving a night of horror, you’d think a more pleasant greeting would be in store.”

  “We’re happy you’re alive,” Jericho said evenly.

  “Speak for yourself,” Silas growled.

  Gabriel grunted. “Get on with it. What happened to Celeste?”

  “I’m clearly wounded. And utterly exhausted. Let me attend to my needs first—”

  Gabriel stepped closer, until he was less than a foot from Horne. His patience had run out. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to remain calm. “Why isn’t she with you?”

  “I’m certainly not her keeper.” Horne gave a haughty sniff. “I had no responsibility for her. She made it perfectly clear on numerous occasions she wanted nothing to do with me.”

  Gabriel wanted to seize Horne by the collar and shake him. His hands curled into fists. He restrained himself—barely. “You both ran out the south entrance just ahead of me. I provided cover so you could escape. You were together.”

  Horne’s eyes flickered warily from Gabriel to Jericho to Silas. He wrung his hands, clasping them together like a prayer. He cleared his throat uneasily. “I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.”

  “No,” Willow said, taking a step back. “No.”

  It hit him like a swift kick to the balls. Celeste was an elite, but she’d managed to survive and live alongside them all these months, in spite of her whining and complaining. She was part of their group, for better or worse.

  The thought of losing someone else after Nadira was too much. He would not accept it. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  Horne shifted nervously. “There was nothing I could do. I swear. We ran as far as we could, but we got disoriented in the darkness and the rain. There were rats, too many of them. We got cornered in an alley. There was a dumpster with the lid closed. I told her to climb on top of it. I didn’t even have a weapon. I jumped in front of her, kicking and punching as many as I could. She fell and…” His voice trailed off. His face contorted and he swiped at his eyes. “There was nothing I could do. Nothing. I barely escaped with my life.”

  Gabriel inhaled sharply. “Where is she?”

  “I…I wanted to carry her, but…she’s infected, now. It was too dangerous.”

  Gabriel spun and stalked across the room. A hot spark of anger flared through him. He couldn’t stand to be near that slimy, self-serving asshole for a second more. There was something in his face, something guarded, some shadow Gabriel couldn’t pin down. But he didn’t like it.

  “You did what you could,” Micah said gently. “What’s done is done. You were lucky to make it back.”

  Gabriel met Silas’s gaze for a moment. Silas said nothing. He slouched against the counter, his fists thrust deep in his pockets. His face was an expressionless mask, his eyes hard as stones.

  Gabriel aimed a savage kick at the stone fireplace, doing nothing but stubbing his toe. But the splinter of pain centered him. It felt like he’d personally lost her. Like he hadn’t done enough to protect them all. That he’d failed his promise to Nadira. That he’d failed himself.

  He pushed his hand in his pocket and felt the soft square of cloth. He turned back to Jericho. “I’ll get her.”

  “What?” Horne said.

  Amelia said nothing, her face tight. Willow and Finn stared at him like he’d grown a second head. But what they thought didn’t matter. “She deserves to be buried. We can’t leave her out there to rot.”

  “Her body is infected,” Horne sputtered.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Jericho said.

  “You’ll get yourself killed,” Horne said. “And for what? She’s already dead.”

  Everything Horne and Jericho said was true. His own mind whi
spered all the reasons this was a terrible idea. Why should he risk himself for an elite, for someone who didn’t even like him?

  But it didn’t matter. None of that mattered. Nadira would have done it, if she were here. In a world of violence and chaos, they needed to mourn their own. Leaving her body out there for the rats…it was wrong. He needed to find her. It was part of his penance. Gabriel felt the rightness of it in his bones. His posture stiffened. “Let me do this.”

  Jericho hesitated.

  “She was one of us,” Willow said.

  “She’s right,” Micah said softly. “Let him go.”

  Gabriel glanced at his brother, relieved that he understood. He clenched his jaw, the muscle in his cheek pulsing. “Give me twenty-four hours. Forty-eight, tops.”

  Jericho finally nodded. He swiped his SmartFlex and studied the map of the city. “We can’t stay here, it’s too dangerous. We have to move, and we have to do it quietly and carefully, slipping from building to building if we have to.”

  He pointed to three different dots. “Within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, I expect us to reach one of these three points. Silas scouted the High Museum of Art and this office building, here. It appears to be clear. I’ve saved the GPS coordinates. Take my SmartFlex. The charge is low, but hopefully it will last you. I’ll use Amelia’s.”

  Gabriel nodded, every muscle in his body tightening. Jericho handed him the cuff, and he slipped it over his right wrist.

  “We can’t wait for you.” Jericho’s eyes were black and hard as obsidian. “I can’t endanger the group for one person. Getting Amelia to the Sanctuary is our most critical mission, even more than saving Elise from the Headhunters, more than saving any one of us.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less.” He didn’t want anyone endangering themselves for him. His life wasn’t worth it. As long as Amelia, Micah, and the others were safe, that was all that mattered.

  He would find Celeste’s body, bury her, and find his people again while avoiding aggressive rats, infected humans, and the Pyros, all on a deadline. He knew he was capable. He could do it.

  He turned to Horne. “Tell me everything you remember about where you were.”

  17

  Amelia

  When she awoke, Amelia couldn’t remember where or who she was. She was floating in a liquid gray haze, drifting in and out of consciousness. Over the next few hours, she remembered her mother and father but didn’t recognize the faces peering down at her.

  They were strangers. Her own mind was a stranger to her. Everything was distant and unfocused.

  Memories rose through the mist. She tried to grasp them—the bright spotlights blinding her eyes as she performed at one of her father’s galas; the way her mother brushed her hair, one long stroke at a time; Silas chasing her through a grand house of grand rooms filled with grand furniture that still felt empty; her shaking hands as she chopped off her own hair, the way the tendrils swirled like silk ribbons on her lap.

  Some memories turned solid in her hands; others fell through her fingers, slippery and insubstantial as ghosts.

  By the next day, she remembered Micah and Gabriel and Benjie and the Grand Voyager and Sweet Creek Farm. She remembered she loved dark chocolate and classical music and that ocean blue was her favorite color.

  And then Kane came back. And Simeon and her father and Gabriel. The Hydra virus. The Headhunters. Nadira’s death and her mother’s capture.

  Her muscles were shivery and weak. Her brain felt bruised. Her mouth tasted of copper, no matter what she ate.

  But she was alive. She held onto that as tightly as she could.

  She drifted off again, and this time, Kane invaded her dreams. She awoke gasping, drenched in sweat even in the bitter cold, her heart a frenzy inside her chest. She lay shaking, blinking back the awful images of his thick, meaty fingers reaching for her, clawing her neck, choking off her breath, that bone-crushing fear clamping over her throat.

  It wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. He was a ghost, a demon from the past, a stubborn memory that wouldn’t fade. Slowly, the day and time and place came back to her in bits and pieces.

  She was wrapped in a heated blanket on the floor of the High Museum of Art. A museum once visited by millions of people, people all dead now. People with no more memories to make, no memories to lose.

  The light wood floors echoed with Benjie’s muffled laughter as he dashed between life-sized marble sculptures from Greek myths. The high white walls held famous paintings, photographs, and holo prints, two- and three-dimensional artwork hung in antique gilt frames.

  Looters had slashed much of the art on the first and second floors, knocking over statues, pissing in corners, and doing whatever damage they could. But they must have gotten bored or tired, because little had been touched up here.

  She stared at the painting on the wall across from her—Claude Monet’s Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil. Her father had a Monet in his collection. Not because he’d particularly loved art, but because he could. Because he liked to own beautiful things. He liked to control them. She looked away.

  In the two hours since they’d taken shelter at the museum, Willow had brought her food, Benjie showed her magic tricks with an old quarter Micah had found for him, and Finn cracked his usual goofy jokes, trying to get her to laugh.

  Jericho checked her forehead and fussed over her, his perpetual frown always on his face. She remembered his frowns, his sternness, and the concern that lay beneath his tough veneer.

  Silas was around, but he spoke little, prowling the halls of the museum like a frustrated ally cat instead. She knew this, too. How hard and cold he was, always keeping things inside, lashing out at everything and everyone.

  Then there was Micah, always hovering nearby, but never overwhelming or irritating. He was simply there. He was the one who carried her through the cold and snow for hours as they made their slow, painstaking way through downtown. She’d been groggy through much of it, which was a blessing. She hated the thought of someone cradling her like a vulnerable, needy child.

  When she was awake, he sat beside her, reading from a book of poetry or a novel, but always reading. He leaned against a magnetized, floating bench decorated with antique Coca-Cola bottle caps, a ratty paperback in his hands.

  She pushed herself into a sitting position against the wall and groaned. Her head still ached. Her whole body ached. Her muscles felt weak and watery. Kane’s vicious, viper eyes were still in her head. She needed a distraction. “What are you reading?”

  “My favorite. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.” He smiled shyly at her, tucked a bookmark to neatly mark his place, and set down the book. Only Micah would care about bookmarks in the apocalypse. “Welcome back. How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she said, half-lying. “Except for the ball of fuzz between my ears.”

  “Your memories aren’t back yet?”

  “Most of them. I think.” She tugged the leather thong from around her neck so she could hold the diamond charm bracelet. The cold metal was comforting. It had been a gift from her father for her thirteenth birthday.

  A memory flickered: a bunch of important senators and business tycoons smiling down at her, her father boasting about the quality-sourced diamonds, her brother kicking her beneath the table and rolling his eyes.

  She couldn’t remember her mother. Hadn’t she been there? She closed her eyes, focusing with all her limited brain-power. Her mother was in her memories, but it was like she’d been blurred out. Amelia couldn’t make out any distinguishing features, couldn’t recall her smile. “I can’t remember my mother’s face.”

  Micah gave her hand a squeeze and quickly let go. “Maybe once we rescue her and you see her face, then everything will come back.”

  “Maybe.” What if she’d lost some memories forever? What if she’d lost some elemental part of her?

  With every seizure, part of herself wouldn’t come back. What if next time she forgot how to walk or ta
lk or how to play the violin? What if the next time she woke up, she was no longer herself? To lose yourself piece by piece was the most terrifying thing in the world.

  And how long until the next one came? Six weeks? Six months? Every seizure was potentially devastating. How long until she was permanently brain-damaged? A paralyzed vegetable? Dead? “I feel like I’m grieving for something that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Don’t give up hope,” Micah said. “The doctors at the Sanctuary will help you at the same time they find the cure.” He picked up his book and held it out to her. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

  She’d heard it before. She’d liked it then, but now she held it in her mind like a lifeline. “What’s it from?”

  “It’s a Dylan Thomas poem. It’s about the beauty and tenacity of the human spirit, about fighting against the inevitability of death. We know it will take us, but we’re going to fight until our dying breath anyway. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.”

  “It’s lovely.” She suddenly felt very self-conscious. Embarrassment flushed through her. And shame. Micah had seen her at her worst, helpless and ugly and disgusting. “Thank you for…being there. When it happened.”

  He jabbed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his finger. His dark wavy hair was a little unkempt, as always. His face reddened slightly. “It was nothing.”

  But it felt like more than nothing to Amelia. It felt like everything. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “Vulnerability isn’t a weakness,” Micah said quietly as if he could read her mind. “It isn’t something to be ashamed of.”

  She flushed, grateful for his words even if she couldn’t believe them yet. The suffocating shame her father had drilled into her over the years—she was defective, and her defect was ugly, revolting—was hard to shake. She pushed the point of the violin charm against the pad of her pointer finger until it hurt.