by Cole McCade
His lips quirked slightly. “I can try.”
She caught his hand, exhaling shakily, pressing her cheek into his palm as she demanded, “Swear it to me. No more killing. No more threats. No more penance. All of this ends here. Swear it.”
“For you, firefly,” he vowed with quiet sincerity, “I would swear anything.”
Willow bit her lip. This…this was madness. This was beyond madness, falling into the kind of surreal, dreamlike unreality that her life had become since the moment she’d stumbled on him in that dark alley. But if she was dreaming…
She was dreaming the promise of a freedom she had never had, and that she’d craved no matter how much she knew she shouldn’t.
“You…really love me, don’t you?” she whispered.
“As much as I can understand love for what it is.” And if he had said anything else, she would have called it a lie. Yet it was the way he spoke, that awareness of what he was, of how broken he was, that made it true—true and deep in a way that resonated so sharply she could have wept again, for how weak she was to want it. For that part of her that craved him, and that thought she might already know the answer, as insane as his own, when he said, “Perhaps one day, you might learn to love me too.”
“One day,” she answered, and offered him a weak, watery smile. “One day. But I can’t love you if we’re both dead.” She made herself let go of his hand, made herself pull back, forcing herself to her feet and refusing to look at the dead body that was there because of her, that had stood silent witness to this strange and trembling pact between them. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere but here,” she said. “Anywhere the road can take us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
WILLOW HAD NEVER THOUGHT OF herself as someone with a high pain threshold, or a talent for suffering. But she’d never thought of herself as someone who could kill a man in a red haze of madness, either, and she was quickly discovering there were many things about herself she’d never known.
The sirens were close. Too close. They had minutes—and she spent those minutes under the watchful eyes of the haunted man in the painting, limping on an ankle that threatened to dump her to the floor at any moment, jarring pain as shrill as discordant notes, as harsh as teeth on raw ceramic, as she flew to work. Binding Priest’s leg to stop the blood flow. Covering the body with a sheet. Throwing anything that looked practical into a bag—clothing, weapons, food, a few of those burner phones, the first aid kit. He directed her to his emergency cache, a strongbox filled with cash and half a dozen fake IDs. Those blue and red lights had gone from distant flashes to bursts like fireworks by the time she let the rolling door up, threw the bag in the back seat, then slipped her arm under Priest and helped hoist him to his feet. She could hardly hold him up. She could hardly hold herself up. But she had no choice.
And she was realizing she could do many things she’d never thought she could, when she had no other choice—with more strength than she’d ever known she’d had.
“I should be carrying you,” Priest rasped as she dumped him into the passenger seat.
“We don’t have time for masculine bravado.”
She dug in his pocket until she found the keys, then slid into the driver’s seat and dug the key into the ignition. She was still covered in blood despite wiping herself off with a wet towel, still wearing nothing but a damned stolen button-down that hung on her like a dress, and in the rear view mirror her eyes were wide and dilated and glazed with shock. But she had a direction. A mission. She’d made a choice.
And she wasn’t backing down from it now.
“Hold on,” she said, twisted the key in the ignition, clutch then shift then gas—and the Firebird leaped forward with a lurching, growling roar.
Adrenaline was a beast sitting on her chest and squeezing her blood through her veins, as the Firebird tore out onto the street and careened across the road. Flashes of light blinded her, and she squinted, swerving, vertigo and dizziness wild and twisting as the car spun out and slalomed out of the path of more than a half-dozen cop cars, arrowing straight toward her. Underneath the sound of screeching tires she heard Priest gasping, cursing, but she couldn’t think about him right now. She wrenched the wheel, dragging the Firebird to a halt amidst the scent of burning rubber and the scream of protesting gears, its ass swinging around to flash tail to the cop cars. She risked a glance in the rear view mirror. She had less than a block’s head start, but this car felt like it was built for speed. For racing.
And all she had to do was get out of the city limits, and into the next county. It wasn’t far, from the edge of the Nests. City and county jurisdiction would only slow the cops down for minutes, but those minutes would be all she needed to find the back roads and get them thoroughly lost on their way to nowhere.
She slammed down on the accelerator. Almost joyfully, the Firebird surged forward, its snarl defiant and loud, the smoke it spat up in its wake obscuring the road behind her.
“I thought,” Priest ground out, “the point was not to die.”
“We’re not going to die.” The city shot past in a blur as she shifted gears again, demanding more speed. More heat. More fire, as the sirens faded behind them, those lights as distant as the lights of a city on a far forgotten shore. “I know what I’m doing.”
He laughed, weak and raspy and yet oddly sweet, husky, free. “Where did you learn to drive like this?”
“I told you. I like taking things apart and putting them together again, and knowing how they work.” And she couldn’t help a grin, one that felt savage and feral and entirely unlike her. “That includes cars.”
She took a hard turn, fingers digging into the wheel until they hurt, and tore around the corner and onto the highway paralleling the Corvus River. No flashers in her rear view, but they wouldn’t be far behind. They’d call to intercept, too—she could count on it. She’d have to watch for it, listen for it, backup units called in from other precincts to cut her off and maybe, just maybe, end this before it even began. Maybe they would die. Maybe not. Maybe they really were Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed and doomed to love too quickly and die too soon. But for once in her life, she wasn’t going to quit without trying.
But she wasn’t going to leave without saying goodbye, either.
She shifted up and forced the Firebird into another wild burst of speed, until its wheels barely touched the road and its scream was deafening. “Give me one of the phones.”
Priest lifted his head, watching her. He was pale, so pale, but holding stable. “I could have sworn cellphones while driving were illegal.”
“So is murder, aiding and abetting, and resisting arrest, but now isn’t the time to be funny.” She pried one hand from its deathgrip on the steering wheel and held it out. “Phone.”
Priest arched a brow, then dug in one of the bags with an amused sound. “As my lady commands.”
He dropped the phone into her palm. She flipped it open, taking her eyes from the road for only a second to tap in a number before lifting it to her ear—and barely looking up in time to swerve around one of those honking soccer mom vans like the one she’d driven for Jacob van Zandt, and wished like hell she could have driven right up his pompous, abusive ass. She understood, now, why women like Leigh went crazy.
She understood, now, why women like her mother ran away and never looked back.
The phone trilled sharply in her ear, then picked up after two rings—and her heart bloomed with a vicious burst of pain and warmth and aching loss as her father’s voice came over the line.
“Hello?”
“Dad?” she gasped. “Daddy?”
He made a strangled, inarticulate sound of shock. “Willow?” Something fell on the other end of the line. “Willow, baby—ohthankGod. Where are you? Are you safe? Are you hurt? I’ve been so—”
“Shh,” she soothed. The panic, the fear, the ragged strain in his voice…could she really do this to him? But could she really go back,
as she was now? “Shh. I don’t have much time to talk, Daddy. I need you to listen.”
“But I—”
“Listen!” she begged, as she caught lights in the side view mirror. Fuck. Fuck. Two patrol cars tore around the corner of a cross street a few blocks back. She leaned hard on the wheel, nearly spinning the Firebird out as she shot the car toward a feeder road toward the Corvus River Bridge. “Please, Daddy,” she panted into the phone. “I need you to listen.”
“Okay. Okay, sweetheart. I’m listening.”
But she didn’t know what to say. Especially when those whooping sirens were growing closer, louder, cutting into her brain, cutting into her heart, cutting her emotions to ribbons. But finally she managed, “I can’t come home. Not now. Maybe not ever.” At his sharply indrawn breath, she shook her head sharply, as if he could see her, then caught herself and fiercely wrenched the car back from its drift. “It’s not like Mom. I swear to you, it’s not. I love you and I don’t want to leave you, but it’s…it’s life or death, and I have to choose. You have no idea how much I love you, Dad. I just…have to go away for a while. You always told me I was your fearless girl, and now I…I guess I have to live up to that.”
“Willow, what happened to you?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Whatever it is, we can fix it. We can take care of it and you’ll be all right, just please, baby, come home—”
“I can’t.” The river. The bridge, a gray rainbow arching over the glitter of the Corvus’s deep and still and treacherous waters, and she wondered with a broken ache if anyone had ever sighed as they crossed this bridge, and realized they would never see their loved ones again. “You’ll be okay, Daddy. You will. I’m sorry if I ever…if I ever treated you like you were less, I’m sorry if I…”
“I don’t care about me! I’ll spend the rest of my life in a hospital bed if it will bring you back!”
“But you don’t need to.” This time when the tears came, she let them. She’d always hated the feeling of crying, the weakness of it, but right now she needed that cleansing flood. And somewhere in her she found it in her to smile as she said, “You have Wally—and Daddy, he loves you even though you said those terrible things to each other. He loves you, and I know you love him. And you have Maxi, and Dev will help. I should have asked him a long time ago, but I was too proud.”
“Willow,” Priest warned softly.
She stole a glimpse in the rear view mirror. The entire road behind her was a solid wall of lights flashing in alternating colors over the shells of police cars like angry, buzzing, black and white insects swarming toward her. She caught Priest’s eye and nodded, breathing out heavily and cutting another turn across lanes so sharp they rocked on two wheels, and flew—and she was THE AMAZING FLYING WILLOW for a trembling breath; for just that breath she was her mother’s daughter, and understood what it meant to leave the earth behind. Then the car crashed down, jouncing onto the on-ramp for the bridge.
“My pride fucked a lot up,” she whispered into the phone, and hoped that silence meant her father was still there. That she hadn’t lost him. “I don’t think I ever stopped being that little girl who thought she had to do everything by herself. I was too proud, and I was so used to it being us against the world that I never stopped to see that the world wasn’t against us because we were loved, if I would just stop thinking I wasn’t worth being loved long enough to let people. Let people love me. Love you.” She blinked hard, rapidly, fiercely, shaking the beads of tears from her lashes and sniffling hotly. “You have so many people who love you, Daddy. You don’t need me.”
“You’re my daughter,” he said, and when his voice choked she realized he was crying, too, cracking her down to the deepest part of her with his tears. “I will always need you. Not to take care of me, but because I love you and no one else can take your place in my heart.”
“I wouldn’t—”
She broke off at a strange crack-zing popped overhead, and then another; her stomach dropped out. She ducked instinctively, peering up at the roof. The crows lining the road, arranged on the power lines like preachers in their pews, took off with shrieking, braying caws in a cloud of black wings and a storm of feathers. Priest swore, glancing back before fixing a dire look on her.
Bullets, he mouthed. They’re shooting.
But they were almost there. Almost. And she punched the accelerator into the floor, grinding her bare foot into it, and rocketed onto the bridge.
“I don’t have much time,” she said, the phone trembling in her fingers. “One way or another, I…I’m running out of time, Dad. But I’m going to need you to keep that place in your heart warm for me, for a while. I love you. I’ll try to let you know I’m okay, but…I can’t come back.”
“Willow…” he pleaded, and all the heartbreak in the world was in her name.
“Please. I need you to accept that. I need to know you aren’t hurting yourself looking for me. Promise.”
He didn’t answer. Not for long, horrible moments when she had to listen to her father cry, listen to the broken sound of his voice, and yet still know she’d made the right decision no matter how much it hurt, because she couldn’t bring this trouble home when it could hurt her father in very real, irreversible ways. She couldn’t let her father know what she’d become. She couldn’t let him know her this way; better he remember her as his sweet, soft girl—though part of her wanted to pour everything out, lean on him, beg him to be her father and make everything better again.
But she couldn’t. She’d always thought strength was about being bold and daring and fierce and even violent; about being fearless and wild. But now she knew:
Strength was making the hardest decision she’d ever made in her life, and standing behind it to the end even when it meant leaving behind the things she loved.
Her father. Uncle Wally. Devon. Roan, the brother she’d never get to meet now when he’d been behind bars as long as she’d known he existed. And that little collection of colored glass, whose light seemed a projector for all the good moments in her life, all the times she found a reason to smile even when her life was falling to pieces—and she couldn’t help touching the pendant around her throat, with its blood amber shining around the firefly within.
“I promise, baby,” her father said. “I promise. Just promise that one day I’ll see you again.”
“One day,” she promised, the second time she had made that vow—while bullets pinged off the roof of the Firebird and the car crested the rise of the bridge and barreled forward, only inches from crossing that line into freedom. “I love you, Daddy. Tell Uncle Wally I love him, too. Goodbye.”
Then she snapped the phone closed and tossed it out the window, and as it spilled over the side of the bridge and tumbled into the river, chased by the zing and plink of bullets like the sting of angry hornets…
She said goodbye to the life she’d once known, and the self she’d once been.
* * *
CROSSING THE BRIDGE WAS LIKE crossing from dreaming into waking, and shedding the wild frenetic chaos of a dream’s emotions. The gunfire stopped. The sirens slowed, then halted, and when she looked in the rear view mirror the far bank of the river was nothing but a line of black and white, blue and red, like cattle caged behind a fence waiting to stampede the moment the call came down to drop the corral gates.
She took a few sharp breaths, trying to calm her nerves, but they were fire and lightning and wouldn’t be quelled, her insides shrill and screaming and ready to vomit. She swallowed hard and glanced at Priest as she curved the Firebird toward the highway. She’d go northbound to start, but double back as soon as she could and tear west to throw them off. They’d have to ditch the car, or cover the hood and change the plates; it was too flashy, too recognizable, and they might as well wave a red flag and scream come get me.
Practical concerns. Practical concerns, because if she didn’t focus on practicality she’d start screaming again and never stop, and right now
Priest was too pale, too shaky, to hold her down until she calmed.
She licked her lips, and returned her gaze to the road. “We’ve got a few minutes while they negotiate jurisdiction and call in the cavalry. Technically this is state trooper territory, until we cross the line into the next town over.” She downshifted, slowed down. They couldn’t risk a speed trap right now when the police had probably put out a county-wide BOLO, already lighting up the wires. “We need to get lost.”
“Back roads?” he asked softly.
“Yeah.”
“You’re shaking.”
And then his hand was there—resting on her thigh, offering warmth, comfort, and fuck her if she didn’t need it. If she didn’t need him, even if he frightened her as much as he enticed her. He frightened her not because of what he could do, but because of what he drew out of her; because of the things he’d found in her and breathed to life, when she’d done everything she could to bury them.
To bury herself.
Those piercing eyes were on her again, touching her with their acid yellow stare, knowing her the way no one else ever could. Knowing her in the way she trembled; in the way her hands shook on the steering wheel; in the way she kept her gaze fixed straight forward and her jaw locked tight so she could hold herself together; in the way she touched the firefly pendant around her throat, tracing its filigree edges. Knowing her so well that she couldn’t even think of lying when he asked,
“How do you feel?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly, and pried one hand from the steering wheel to rest her palm over his. “I know that I’m not okay. I won’t be okay for a very long time. But mostly I’m just…sad.”
His fingers shifted to twine with hers, interlacing in between. “Is there no joy to be found in this at all?”
“Joy? No.”
She glanced down for a moment. Glanced at her red-stained hand enveloped in the strength and warmth of his, and wondered that they fit together so well…and after a moment, she squeezed his hand, before returning her gaze to the road. The sparse trees that ran from the banks of the Corvus to the highway were starting to fill in with heavier foliage, cover that would hide them from aerial search and that promised a dozen hidden roads that could take them anywhere.