Call Me Wicked

by Jamie Sobrato

  But Lauren didn’t voice her other fear, that whatever had happened to him had been horrific enough to make him block it out.

  “We have to go, please,” she said again. “Come on.”

  “You think someone’s chasing us?”

  “The Order kidnapped you, and I have no idea if they’re watching us right now.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not getting in a car with that guy.”

  Before she could argue with him any further, the sound of a twig snapping in the nearby woods caught her attention, and she turned to it. But she saw no one.

  “Listen, we have to go now. We could all die if we don’t hurry.”

  He seemed to take her seriously then, but a white van screeched around the bend and came careening toward them. Lauren grasped Carson’s hand and pulled him in the only direction they could go—toward the beach.

  The moon had just risen over the Pacific, providing a little light, but not enough to make it an easy trek down the hillside. She heard a crash, the crunch of metal against metal, and she thought of Sebastian. The sound of screeching tires, and a car engine revving reached her, but she was too far away to guess what was happening.

  Soon there was only the sounds of their feet crunching against the dry coastal ground cover, and their ragged breath as they raced toward the beach.

  Toward the scene she had been hoping all her life to avoid.

  Tears prickled at Lauren’s eyes again. This was it. The event she’d been dreading, the place her entire life had been moving toward.

  They finally hit the beach, and they made their way across the dry loose sand—too difficult to run fast on—toward the ocean and the wet, hard-packed sand nearest it. Behind them, Lauren could hear someone else scrambling down the hillside.

  She said a silent prayer for Sebastian, but she suspected he would be okay. He, more than anyone else she’d ever met, was invincible, regardless of the changes in him.

  Carson was looking to her as they ran, trying to say something. “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know, but we need to get off the beach as soon as we can. There’s nowhere to hide here.”

  She regretted now that they hadn’t taken the more difficult route into the woods. After all, she’d never had a vision of herself dying in the woods. She needed to get the hell away from this place, this beach with the moon watching over her death.

  But when she looked over at Carson again, the moment felt eerily familiar, and she knew it had finally arrived.

  15

  THE DEAFENING BURST of gunfire at first seemed like a dream to Carson, as if he hadn’t really heard it. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him. Maybe it had been the crashing surf. That had to be it.

  He glanced over at Lauren in the instant after he imagined the sound. To his horror he saw her falling forward onto the sand. A dark stain was spreading across her light-colored top, and in his confusion he imagined she must have tripped over a rock, that he just needed to reach down and grab her hand and pull her to her feet again.

  His heart was pounding so wildly he could hardly inhale as he bent down, but she wasn’t trying to get back up. She was lying facedown on the sand.

  Another gunshot. And another.

  He dropped to the sand and flattened himself on top of Lauren, stupidly hoping to shield her from the bullets.

  When he looked in the direction of the gunshots, he saw two men who’d been pursuing them, both aiming guns in his direction.

  But in the blink of an eye, one man fell to the ground, and then the other, watching the first man fall, was struck by some sharp flash of metal and fell, as well.

  Carson’s mind could not process the events at once. He could think only of Lauren beneath him, of how to keep her safe. He watched the men for a moment longer, but they lay on the ground, not moving. Then he eased himself off Lauren and saw what he did not want to see.

  Her back was covered in blood. He could feel the dampness now on his own shirt, and he reached out and touched her back as if to confirm that his eyes weren’t fooling him.

  He felt as if he were moving in both slow motion and fast forward at the same time, as if the universe was somehow slowing down as it sped up.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  “Lauren,” he said, but she didn’t stir. “Lauren, please, can you hear me?” he said as he turned her over and found the front of her as bloody as the back.

  She’d been shot. Just as she’d said. He would witness her death. He had witnessed her death.

  But no. He had to save her. Keep her alive.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  He felt her neck for a pulse, but his hands shook wildly, and he couldn’t be sure if he was feeling the right spot. He tried to remember what he’d learned of CPR from being a lifeguard in high school, or what he’d learned about first aid before going on his first backpacking trip, but his brain wasn’t working.

  Finally a coherent thought emerged. He had to stop the bleeding.

  He held his hand over the wound, but then thought of how she was bleeding from the back, too, and he started to take off his shirt, when he heard footsteps coming across the sand.

  He looked up to see Sebastian running toward them. There was a flutter of black from his arm, and the raven flew to Lauren, hovered over her, and then vanished into her chest.

  Carson stared, dumbfounded, unable to process what his eyes had just seen.

  Sebastian, breathing heavily, dropped to his knees beside his cousin. His expression was stricken with grief, and tears dampened his cheeks.

  “I don’t know if that will save her,” he said.

  “What did you do?”

  “I’ve stopped the wound from bleeding any more, I think. I have to get her to a witch doctor right away.”

  “We should call 911. We have to get her to a hospital.”

  “No. I’ll take her to a doctor near here. I can’t risk anyone asking questions about how she was shot.”

  “I’ll help you carry her to the car,” Carson said, knowing by now it did no good to argue with the man. He cared about Lauren almost as much as Carson did, so he had to trust that Sebastian would do right by her.

  What other choice did he have?

  “First,” Sebastian said, looking at him coldly. “Help me dump those bodies into the ocean.” He nodded at the men lying on the ground nearby.

  Carson looked down at Lauren’s face, deathly pale in the moonlight. The rotting scent of sealife in the ocean air made him want to vomit.

  This could not be happening.

  But it was.

  The two men went to the dead bodies, and Sebastian bent and pulled a knife from each of their chests, wiped the blades on his jeans, and inserted them back into leather holsters inside his boots. Carson winced at the sight of the wounds, but said nothing.

  He helped Sebastian lift each of the bodies and carry them to the surf, where they heaved them as hard as they could into the cold dark ocean.

  “Help me with her now,” Sebastian said, and Carson followed along, a zombie helping to carry the limp body of his lover up the hillside.

  They lay her in the backseat of Sebastian’s car, and the man closed the door and turned to Carson.

  “I should kill you now,” he said. “I was going to, but you tried to protect her. I can see that.”

  Carson nodded, saying nothing, his throat constricted at the realization that he had failed miserably. He glanced one more time at her face, too still and too pale and his throat seized up again.

  “I loved her,” Carson said, much to his own surprise. But once the words had exited his mouth, he understood that they were true.

  She wasn’t an addiction. It was a feeling of having found the one woman who made him feel whole like no other. She was his cure for a life of numbness. She was his everything.

  And now she lay in the back of a car dying. Or, perhaps, already dead.

  “Never speak of these events again,” Sebastian said. “Do
you understand?”

  Carson nodded.

  “Lauren was right that there are some elements of fate we can’t change. Just remember that,” he said, and he got in the car and sped away.

  Carson watched the car’s taillights quickly grow smaller, and then the car rounded a bend in the road and was gone. And here he was alone, at night, somewhere on Highway 1, with a bloodstained shirt, a head wound, and no idea how he’d gotten here.

  He looked up at the full moon, at its lonely glow, and knew that this was real. He was here, Lauren was probably dead, and two men’s bodies floated in the ocean down below. The gash on his head began to throb as the adrenaline drained from his body, and he reached up and touched it gingerly, trying to guess the extent of the damage.

  Hard to tell. He was still up and walking around. But he had no recollection of the hours or days or however long it had been between the time he’d walked toward his apartment after work, and when Lauren had found him limping along the side of the road here.

  Other aches and pains began to register, and he was starting to get the picture that whatever had happened to him hadn’t been good. It had been, most likely, painful enough that he’d blocked out the memory of it.

  Standing at the edge of the road, he looked left, then right. San Francisco was to the north, judging by a sign up ahead that said Carmel was in thirty more miles. So he began walking in that direction.

  SEBASTIAN WAS NOT SURE he had made the right decision in letting the mortal live. Hell, the guy looked bashed up enough that he might very well not have made it back to civilization before collapsing dead himself.

  But when the moment had come that he should have pressed the blade of his knife into Carson McCullen’s neck, he could not make himself do it. He had thought of Maia, of loving someone he couldn’t have, and his heart had rebelled at the thought of doing the same thing to Lauren, if by divine grace she somehow survived.

  So he left the matter of their fates to chance, and abandoned Carson on the side of the road. Only time would tell if he had done the right thing.

  He was a romantic fool.

  As he turned into the driveway of the witch doctor’s Carmel estate, he blinked back tears. He had never been so scared in his life as he had when he saw Lauren fall to the ground from the gunshot wound. Not even in Bretagne as a little boy, hiding in the woods from the witch hunters.

  She had told him over and over that it was her fate to die there on the beach, but he had only realized as he saw it happen how much he had refused to believe it was true.

  He still refused to believe it was true.

  He had failed his cousin by not saving her, and if by some miracle the part of him wedged inside her chest, attempting to keep her alive, did save her, he would not have to look into her eyes and tell her that he had killed Carson.

  So, a fool he was. But he owed her that.

  He slammed on his brakes when he reached the end of the driveway, killed the engine, and honked the car horn several times. Then he hurried to the backseat and lifted Lauren into his arms.

  He’d already called ahead to their distant cousin Dmitri, to let him know they were on their way and to be ready to tend to Lauren’s wound, and as he reached the top of the stone staircase at the entry to the house, the large door opened, and Dmitri stood there already dressed for surgery.

  “Bring her downstairs,” he said. “Does she have a pulse?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sebastian said, his stomach revolting at the words. “I can’t feel one.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, they reached a room that was brightly lit. Inside, there was an operating table, and a woman Sebastian didn’t recognize was preparing instruments for surgery.

  He lay Lauren on the table, and Dmitri cut open her top and looked at the wound, his expression grave. “The bullet may have penetrated her heart,” he said.

  Sebastian felt as if the air had grown thinner, and he needed to sit down.

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

  “You should wait outside,” Dmitri said. “You don’t look well.”

  “I shape-shifted to stop the bleeding,” Sebastian explained. “I’m getting tired from doing so, I guess.”

  “I will take care of her from here. You return to your full form and go rest for a while.”

  Sebastian closed his eyes and willed the raven back to his arm. He could feel the strange sensation of slipping from the inside of Lauren’s chest, and he could see the dark red of her blood and tissue, and then it was all gone. The tattoo was in its place again.

  He glanced at his cousin’s pale deathly face as he left the room, and he could not let go of the thought that he had failed her.

  Hours later, when Sebastian awoke, drenched in sweat and his heart racing, in a warm room lit by sunlight, he could not say how much time had passed. He did not recognize his surroundings, but the luxury of the linens and the bedroom reminded him that he was at Dmitri’s estate, and then the memories of the night before flooded his head.

  He had slept fitfully, dreaming awful nightmares and reliving the events at the beach. He did not know how the surgery had gone, he realized now, and he shot out of bed to find out.

  The house was quiet except for a few servants moving about performing their daily chores. Sebastian stopped a maid and asked if she knew where Dmitri was, but she didn’t.

  He went downstairs to the room where he’d taken Lauren the night before, but the door was locked, and no sound came from within. Muttering a curse, he went back upstairs and wandered around until he found Dmitri in his office.

  “What happened?” he said, even though the older man was on the phone.

  “I’ll call you back,” Dmitri said to whomever he was speaking, then hung up the phone and regarded Sebastian. “Good morning. It doesn’t look as if you slept well.”

  Sebastian looked down at himself and saw that he was still in his clothes from the day before. He probably looked like hell.

  “What happened?” he asked again. “Is she okay?”

  “The bullet passed through her chest cavity and exited from the front. There was damage to her heart. I repaired the tissue as best I could, but please keep in mind I’m not a heart surgeon.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “Her heart stopped beating for a while—I’m not sure how long. We were able to get it beating again, but she’s not awake yet. If her brain was deprived of oxygen for very long, she could suffer severe damage.”

  Sebastian closed his eyes and tried to form a coherent thought. How would he live with himself if he let Lauren die? Damn her stupid vision and her freaking claims that her death was for a good cause. She was too young and vibrant to die.

  “When will we know anything?”

  “Her body has suffered a major trauma. With some luck, she’ll awaken soon and we can tell if she has suffered any permanent damage to her brain.”

  “And without luck?”

  “She may remain in a coma, or she may never be the same again. Or, she may die from the trauma. We should prepare ourselves for any of these eventualities as we hope for the best.”

  Sebastian took a deep breath. He would have to call her family and tell them the news. But not yet. “I want to see her,” he said, and Dmitri nodded.

  His cousin led him back downstairs to the room that had been locked. He inserted a key and led Sebastian into the darkened room, where a monitor registered Lauren’s vital signs. A slow steady heartbeat blipped across the screen.

  The man flicked on a light, and Sebastian saw that a nurse sat at Lauren’s bedside, making notes on a clipboard. “Can you give him a few moments alone?” Dmitri said to the woman.

  She nodded and left the room.

  “Why was the door locked?” Sebastian asked.

  “Just as a safeguard. I have to protect myself from the possibility of a police search. If I’m ever caught performing surgeries here, I will be put in jail where I won’t be able to help the clan at all.”

  S
ebastian nodded.

  “Let Anna know when you’re finished visiting, and she’ll come back and wait at Lauren’s bedside again.”

  “Is it necessary to have someone with her all the time?”

  “With witches who’ve undergone surgery, it is a wise idea. Our supernatural powers can go haywire when we’ve suffered a major trauma. It’s rare, but I’ve seen witches accidentally harm themselves while in a coma or while recovering. I’m just covering all the bases.”

  “Thank you,” Sebastian said, and his cousin left the room and closed the door.

  He turned to Lauren’s body lying on the bed in the middle of the room, and he forced himself to look at her face. She still looked as if she was dead. The color was gone from her features, and her pale skin was a stark contrast to her dark hair.

  Sebastian pulled the chair close to her bed, sat and took her long delicate hand in his. It was cool and lifeless.

  “Lauren, I hope you can hear me. It’s me, Sebastian.”

  He watched her face for some sign that she’d heard, but there was nothing.

  “I did everything I could to save you,” he said. “And I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know that you got hurt. I know you’ve got that damn theory about how your death will be the thing that makes Corinne straighten up and learn to control her powers well enough to lead the uprising, but I think you’re wrong. I think we need you here, too, if we’re ever going to be successful.”

  He stopped and stared at her hand in his. She’d been his closest friend when they were kids, and he’d always imagined that someday, they’d each have kids who would grow up playing together, being best friends. Tears flooded his eyes at that thought.

  He never would have admitted to a soul what a sentimental fool he was, but if anyone knew his true nature, it was probably Lauren. Which made the fact that she was lying here nearly dead hurt even more. If she died, a part of him would die, too.

  “Listen Lauren. If there’s any way you can pull yourself out of this enough to hear me, you have to do it.”

  He paused again and squeezed her hand, desperate for something—anything—to get through to her.