“Dammit! I’m going to die from suffocation in the back of this hunk of junk.”
I kicked the trunk lid, but all it got me was a sore big toe. Anger turned to panic; then panic turned to terror. I was alone in the dark, and my oxygen was running out. It reminded me of being buried alive with Owen while in the Umbra Perdita. Jake had saved me then. He’s not here to save me this time. I was the one that was supposed to be saving him, but I was blowing it.
Calm down, Emily. Conserve your air. Relax.
I took some deep, calming breaths and forced the memories of the Umbra Perdita out of my mind. Once I was calmed down, I tried again.
I heard a ping, and the trunk popped open. I scrambled out of the trunk and was happy to stretch my legs. No matter what happens, I’m not going back into that trunk.
I’d planned for the L.T. to have a ten-minute head start, but my fiasco with the lock meant that it was more like twenty. By the time I got to the hotel lobby, my tribe was under attack and in bad shape.
As soon as I opened the door of the hotel, my nose was assaulted by the smell of body odor, blood and fear. I did a quick head count. There were about twenty of the Dark Mob, but I counted only ten of my tribe. Where’s Megan? Where’s Jake? It was immediately clear to me that it was time to scrap our recon plan and go straight to Plan B: Get Out Alive.
I entered slowly and quietly, trying not to draw attention to myself. If I maintained an element of surprise, it would be easier to gather the Tribe to me and get them out safely. I held my dagger in my left hand, a homemade bo staff in my right. I wasn’t nearly as competent with a staff as I was with a sword, but since I wasn’t supposed to be on the mission, Greta and Rob had taken the only two swords we had.
I looked forward as I eased into the lobby to the left. I hadn’t gone ten feet when I tripped over something. I looked down and saw Sherry’s body sprawled on the floor. She had no aura. That’s one gone to us.
The battle was more farce than fight. My tribe had stood no chance against the Dark Mob. I blamed myself for Sherry’s death. If I had been there, maybe she’d still be alive. More blood on my hands.
I pulled in as much Lucent Energy as I could and put a shield of light energy around myself. I walked forward and found Taisha fighting a fiendish woman who was coming at Taisha with a dagger. Taisha held her off with a six-foot-long staff, but she was tired. I pulled Taisha to me, and when the woman came at us, her dagger bounced off the invisible protection and threw her backward. I didn’t wait to see what the dagger-woman would do next.
“Thank God you’re here,” Taisha whispered. “If you hadn’t shown up, we all would have died.”
“Sorry I’m late. I had some issues with a lock. Stay close to me. There’s very little Lucent Energy here, and I’m not sure how big my field is or how long I can keep it up.”
We walked slowly and kept close to each other. One by one, we picked up our friends, and the Dark Mob followed after us. I saw Heather on the ground behind the fountain. Her light was extinguished too. Heather had been the same age as Megan but larger and stronger. I’d sparred with her, and she was quick on her feet and fought with common sense. I was both sad and surprised to see her down. Another you’ve taken from me, Ciardha.
About ten feet away from Heather’s body, I found Greta and Tristan back to back, each fighting off two attackers. The scrawny black-haired girl came at Greta with a dagger and taunted her. “Come on, Miss America. That all you got?” The girl couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds, but she didn’t have a single gash on her. Her nose was swollen, and her eyes and nose were covered in yellow bruises the color of a ripe banana. Old bruises. Greta swung her sword wildly and missed the girl by a mile. I could see her arms shake with fatigue.
“Greta, Tristan, come to me,” I called. They both looked up in surprise but didn’t hesitate to run to me. I’d tucked my staff into its carrier on my back and used my free hand to pull them in. “Stay close, and walk with me.”
“Nice to see you, Red,” Tristan said. Greta panted and kept hold of my hand.
She’s scared. I squeezed her hand and continued my sweep right. If I saw a person with an aura, I pulled them into my energy field. It was all confusion and chaos, but finally we made a full circle around the fountain that stood in the center of the room. We were about ten feet from the door when someone tugged at my arm.
“What?” I snapped.
Ashley tugged again and pointed. I followed her finger and saw a small body on the floor, belly down but with her head twisted to the side. She lay in a large pool of blood that stood out like a beacon on the pale, yellow floor. But her aura was a beacon no more, her light extinguished.
Megan. Another you’ve taken from me.
I wanted to rage at Jake. “You were supposed to protect her!” I wanted to say. But as I turned to snark at him I realized Jake wasn’t with us.
“Has anyone seen Jake?” No one responded. I did a quick head count, and with the three confirmed dead, that left only one unaccounted for.
“Jake!” I yelled.
The Dark Mob surrounded us on all sides. They continued to come at us and hurl foul-mouthed insults. I tried my best to ignore them. In order to keep the protective shield between us and them, I had to keep my thoughts positive.
“Jake!” I yelled again. My voice echoed his name off of the marble walls and floor in the cavernous room. But there was no answer.
I tried to reach out into the aether to feel for Jake’s energy, but it was no good. I didn’t have the strength left to concentrate on both maintaining our protection and searching the Web of All Things for Jake.
There was no time left to think about what to do next. I could make another sweep of the room, hope that we found Jake, and get the hell out of there before my protective shield went down. If I lost the shield, our entire tribe would die.
Or I could get us to the exit and beat it to our cars and get the hell out of there. If Jake didn’t get to us soon, I’d have to abandon him.
I can’t leave him again. I won’t.
But I did. Jake had been right. Leaving him was the only choice I could make. And I both loved him and hated him for being right.
He sent me the most beautiful and bountiful Lucent Energy he could muster with his loving and lusty thoughts. It was like being hit with a warm, salty ocean wave. I let myself be both filled up and carried by that wave. It gave me the energy I needed to blow the Dark Mob off of us and get out the door and to our cars.
I was surprised that Ciardha didn’t come after us or at least send some of his minions after us. Maybe he had what he wanted. Or maybe it was more of his cat-and-mouse game. It was my move. But what move to make?
As soon as we got to the cars, I let go of the energy shield, dispersing the energy into the ground. As soon as I did, I felt faint. I began to fall and caught myself by leaning against the door of John’s van so I wouldn’t face-plant into the concrete.
“You okay, girl?” Tristan asked.
“I’m okay. Just a little weak from keeping that shield up, that’s all.”
“Phew, ’cause we got wounded that need healing,” Tanner said.
“Oh … yes, of course.” I’d wanted to curl myself into the front seat of Greta’s car and let loose a flood of tears. I wanted to go home and cocoon myself in a quilt and eat ice cream straight from the container until I wanted to puke, and ball up on the couch and close my eyes and wake up and realize it was all a nightmare.
But there wasn’t even any friggin’ ice cream. No matter how hard I wished for it, I knew I wouldn’t wake up to find that the Apocalypse had just been a nightmare. Besides, I had wounded to tend to.
Suck it up, Em.
And I did. I forced the sight of Megan’s dead stare and the fallen bodies of Sherry and Heather deep down inside me where I keep nightmares.
“People with bad wounds, with me in John’s van. The rest of you I’ll take care of back at L.T.”
As I opened John’s van door, I
saw Greta throw her keys to Tristan. Just about nothing short of a mortal wound could make Greta give over driving her car to someone else. She held her right side and sort of fell into the passenger seat of her car.
“Greta, maybe you should ride with me. Looks like you’re hurt real bad,” I said.
“It can wait,” she replied. “Get to Ashley first. She’s got a huge gash in her leg.” Before I could argue with her, she pulled the door shut.
I looked at Tristan, and he shrugged his shoulders at me. “See you back at the L.T.,” he said.
I nodded and got into the back seat of John’s van.
In the time before the Apocalypse, we would have driven straight to the emergency room. But there were no more emergency rooms. They had gotten to be so dangerous that no doctors, nurses or techs would show up. And it wasn’t like they would have the antibiotics we needed anyway.
Without sutures and antibiotics, even flesh wounds could be fatal. It was up to me to heal people enough that they wouldn’t die from the cuts and gashes they’d suffered.
Ashley had a nasty laceration to her right thigh that oozed blood down her leg. She was upright in the back seat, but she had her head leaned way back, and her eyes were closed. As John sped us back to L.T., I worked on Ashley.
I lay my hands on her abdomen and focused on being one with her. Ashley’s heartbeat was steady but weak, her breathing shallow. She’d lost quite a bit of blood, and if I didn’t stop the bleeding, she would likely go into shock.
My hands got warm, and I felt the torc heat up on my arm. The delicious warmth of the torc traveled down my arm, into my hand, and I pushed it into Ashley. I could feel her heartbeat strengthen immediately.
I worked my hands down to her thigh. Even with my eyes closed, I knew I’d reached the wound because of the sticky blood on my hands. I didn’t allow myself to think about how gross it was. Instead, I imagined her blood vessels whole and without rips or tears. I asked Ashley’s molecules to rebuild her skin and blood. I felt the flow of blood lessen beneath my fingers as her skin came together beneath my fingers.
I’d done all I could for her. I lifted my bloody hands from her and wiped them on my pant legs, then fell back and let myself sink into the seat.
“Will she be all right?” Tanner asked.
I didn’t open my eyes or move. “I think so,” I said. It came out as a hoarse whisper.
That one healing had taken most of what I had left. How am I going to do this? It’s too much.
“Are you going to be okay?” Taisha asked from the front seat.
“Yeah, I’ll be okay,” I said. “Why?”
“’Cause you’re whiter than you usually are, and your eyes look sunken in your head.”
“I’m just tired. I need to rest for a while. I’ll heal the rest when we get there.”
I drifted immediately into a dreamless sleep. I felt like I’d only just closed my eyes when I woke to Tanner shaking me. I reluctantly opened my eyes, wishing for more sleep.
The others had beat us back to the L.T. Julie had performed triage and had people divided up into three groups. One group included the people that had minor injuries that probably didn’t require me to heal them so much as they needed to rest for a few days. The next group included people that may end up with a nasty infection if I didn’t get their gashes sealed up. And the last group was for those with possibly life-threatening injuries. Greta was the only one in that group.
Tristan sat on the floor, his back against the wall. Greta sat with her back resting on his chest, her head flopped onto his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, and all of the color had drained from her face, but she still had a faint, pink aura around her. She isn’t gone. Not yet, anyway.
I bent down, rested on my haunches, and put my hand to her middle. I tried to pull in as much Lucent Energy as I could. Greta’s flat stomach felt solid beneath my fingers, her years of gymnastics evident. I moved my hands to the side and felt a slash in her shirt. I worked my hands inside and felt the wet of fresh blood on my fingers and the deep gash in her side.
“Her abs of steel may have saved her life,” I whispered to Tristan.
“Can you heal her, Red?” he asked. I looked up and saw the worry in his warm, chocolate-brown eyes. His aura was normally a bright white, but now it was a pale, thin line of baby blue light that haloed his body. I didn’t need to use my telepathy to know that Tristan loved her. His face said it all.
“I think I can. But I need your help.”
“Just tell me what to do.”
“Push as much Lucent Energy as you can to Greta. Can you do that?”
“I’ll try, but I’m not sure I have much of it left is all.”
“You do. Go to your happy place. You gotta think the best thing you can think, not the worst. And when you feel the energy build in you, send it out through your hands and into Greta. You can do that, can’t you?”
“I think so.”
“Good, ’cause I need all the help I can get.”
I closed my eyes and concentrated on Greta again. I asked her blood vessels to mend themselves like I had with Ashley, but I found Greta’s molecules less compliant than Ashley’s. That figures. Even Greta’s molecules like to be in charge.
I kept at it anyway, and I felt a surge of Lucent Energy that Tristan pushed our way. Immediately the flow of blood from Greta’s wound slowed.
With the bleeding slowed, I used my telepathy to ask her body if there were internal injuries. I got a mental image of a laceration to her liver. I had a moment of doubt. I don’t know how to heal a liver.
But I remembered what Madame Wong had taught me about human bodies. She had said that I didn’t need to understand how to heal because the body was born knowing how to heal itself. All I needed to do was talk to her body and tell it to show me what it needed. As I did that, mental images appeared to me. I tried my best to follow the instructions I received.
The repairs were complicated and took a long time. I stayed in trance so long that I began to phase shift. I no longer felt the floor beneath me. My body no longer ached. I was both there, in that room with Greta, and also somewhere else. In that state, time is immaterial and unmeasured. I was happy to stay in that place where my pain and exhaustion receded, where I was more energy than physical being.
A pair of hands pulled on my shoulders and yanked me back from my happy place. “Emily, are you still with us?” John asked.
I opened my eyes and blinked myself back into the time and space my body occupied. I sat back and tried to regain full awareness of my surroundings. At last I asked, “Is Greta okay?”
“She is,” Tristan said.
My eyes were bleary, but I could see Greta still lying back on Tristan, her head still resting on his shoulder. But her face had some color to it, and her aura was brighter. She opened her eyes and raised her head to look at me.
“Thanks, Freak Girl.” A small smile came to her lips as she said it.
“No prob,” I said. “That’s what friends are for.” I took her hand in mine, and she closed her eyes again. “Take care of her, Tristan. Make sure she gets some soft food and fluids. She’s lost a lot of blood, and she’ll need to replenish to heal that liver of hers completely.”
“Got it covered,” he said. “You look like you need the same.”
“I will. Later. Now I’ve gotta go see to the others.”
When I rose, my legs were wobbly and I began to stagger. John took my arm on one side, Taisha the other.
“You need to rest now,” John said. “We’ve got people bandaged up. They can wait.”
“No, I can do this. Taisha, please get me some water.”
“But–” John began.
“But nothing. If I don’t help them, infection might set in and we’ll lose them to a stupid bacteria. That would be the same as if Ciardha’s assholes had cut them down.”
John didn’t argue with me.
Taisha and John followed me from person to person. Taisha wet my parched lips wit
h water, John helped bear me up when I stood. Taisha tried to get me to eat, but I couldn’t. The thought of food made me queasy, and I was so tired, eating sounded like way too much work.
“Later,” I told her and pushed away the bread that she’d offered.
By the time I finished, it was dark outside. I sat down and leaned against the wall for support. I was content to stay there, but Tristan had another plan. I felt his arms lift me up and then felt the soft breeze on my face as he carried me to Greta’s car.
I wanted to put up a protest of some kind, like, “I can walk on my own,” but I couldn’t get a word to come out of my dry throat. I felt the seat cushion sink beneath me as I fell to sleep.
I felt Tristan’s arms lift me.
I’m dreaming.
“Red, where are your keys?” Tristan asked.
Keys? In my dreams, the doors don’t need to be locked.
“Are they in your pocket?”
“Keys?” I croaked.
“I need your keys to unlock your door, Red. Stay with me, at least ’til I get you locked up safe inside.”
“Keys. Neck. Around neck.”
I felt hands around my neck and heard a jingle as the necklace with my master key was taken from my neck. I heard the locks unlock and vaguely wondered if Tristan had grown more arms to be able to hold me and unlock the door at the same time.
I was going up and up and up; then I felt myself land gently on my bed.
I heard a girl voice say, “She needs to drink. She’s dehydrated.” It sounded a bit like Greta, but I couldn’t be sure. I thought Greta was sick.
“Sleep,” I said as loudly as I could, but it came out a hoarse whisper.
“You need to drink and try to eat, Red. Gotta get something inside you to fuel your fire.”
“Sleep,” I pled.
I felt my shoes come off, then the soft warmth of a comforter over me.
“Let her sleep,” Tristan said.
I heard the creak of footsteps on the wooden floor; then I heard nothing. I fell into a deep sleep and cared not if I ever woke.
The Akasha Chronicles Trilogy Boxed Set: The Complete Emily Adams Series Page 62