I looked up at Cy. “You need to stop,” I said as I watched him take the final snort from the second bag of crimson tiger. Or maybe he was finishing off with the crimson wolf.
He didn’t heed me. Maybe he couldn’t even hear me. He was already bleeding out of his ears. He turned to look down at Blackwell, then grunted. My pen was still sticking out of his neck. He reached up for it, as if he couldn’t remember what it was or how it got there.
“No, don’t,” I said.
Again he ignored me, yanking the pen out of his neck and dropping it to the ground. Blood started bubbling out of the wound.
Ettie was talking to someone in the other room, drawing both my and Cy’s attention. I could hear her intonation but not the words.
I remembered the vision.
Beau. She was talking to Beau.
He was still alive.
Hope flooded through my limbs. Maybe if I could move, maybe if I could get between Ettie and Beau …
I rolled over, ignoring how Cy was vibrating and foaming blood at the mouth beside me. I made it to my stomach. Then to my hands and knees.
I started crawling.
I looked up as Cy stepped past me and Blackwell, who was still prone to my right.
Then Ettie’s father inadvertently ripped the door off its hinges while trying to open it.
The room blurred around me, then came into sharp focus as I realized I was now moving through the first stage of Ettie’s final moments.
Through the door, she was standing in the middle of the lab, looking down at Beau with a syringe in her hand. She turned to frown at her father, who was barreling into the room in a stumbling, demented rage.
Cy’s eyes, nose, and ears were bleeding from the overdose he was currently riding. Blood was pumping out of the wound at his neck.
He grabbed the table that had fallen to its side during Kandy’s rampage, tossing it away so nothing was standing between him and Ettie.
No, not him and Ettie.
Him and Beau.
As in the vision, Cy didn’t know Ettie was in the lab. Perhaps he thought he was just following through with his plan of killing everyone and burning the evidence.
His daughter shrieked in indignation. She still couldn’t see it, still couldn’t understand that he didn’t see her, didn’t know her at all.
He took two steps closer, slowing down as the drugs melted his brain further. But the strength of a weretiger and a werewolf still raged through his limbs.
I kept crawling forward. But I was so, so slow.
Beau sat up.
Cy, snarling, honed in on his good-for-nothing stepson. Blood bubbled across his lips, splattering to the ground.
“Dad …” Ettie said.
“Step left, Ettie,” I cried as I crawled through glass and concrete and blood covering the floor between me and Beau. “One step left, Ettie.” I was on my knees already. I might as well beg.
In a final rally of rage, Cy charged the last few steps across the lab, tossing Ettie aside instead of going around her.
She flew sideways over the counter that held the remnants of her ‘great creation,’ crashing through the window and falling two floors to the sun-warmed asphalt below.
The fall didn’t matter, though. Ettie was dead before she hit the ground. She was dead before her body had cleared the window. The back of her skull didn’t leave any impression on the concrete window frame that her head hit as she smashed through the glass.
Beau slid his back up the wall, standing to meet Cy’s attack. The last bit of Cy’s brain dissolved as he lunged forward. He fell, arms still outstretched to strangle Beau. He didn’t move again.
Beau stumbled to the broken window, passing through the final echoes of the vision as he leaned across the counter to look down at Ettie lying dead on the breezeway.
I made it to my feet. Hearing Blackwell do the same behind me, I turned to catch the sorcerer’s gaze.
He scanned the lab around me, nodded, then brushed his fingers over his amulet underneath his shirt. He disappeared.
I followed Beau to the window, not fully in control of my limbs yet. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and pressed my face against him, seeing echoes of the fulfilled vision as it repeated on the back of my eyelids.
Then I looked out the window.
Below us, Blackwell was bending over Ettie, who was sprawled across the sun-softened, newly paved asphalt between the buildings. The sorcerer looked up at us in the window. He shook his head.
Beau let out a strangled cry, as if he’d been waiting for this confirmation of Ettie’s death. He turned away from the window, sagging against the counter.
“Rochelle.” He shuddered, pressing his hand over his eyes. “Is that it? Is that all you see?”
“I see you, Beau. I still see you.”
His shoulders shook. Sobbing silently, he sank into a crouch next to the counter. I wrapped my hand around the back of his neck. He pulled me to him and pressed his face hard — too hard — against my belly. Heat boiled off him. He was sick, fighting the effects of the drugs.
Blackwell appeared in the room. His white dress shirt wasn’t so pristinely clean and pressed now. His neck was badly blistered from the stun gun. He cast a grim gaze around the destroyed lab, taking in Cy, Kandy, and the marshal on the floor.
“Damn,” he said. For a moment, I thought he might be concerned about Kandy and Henry. Then he added, “I’ve got the girl’s body cloaked for now, but we’re going to need witches to clean up this mess. Which will put me in debt to the Convocation.”
“Make it my debt,” I said.
“Our debt.” Beau lifted his face away from my belly to speak.
Blackwell eyed us. Then, nodding, he pulled out his phone as he spun back toward the door. “Stay away from the werewolf until you know she’s okay. And Rochelle? If you insist on calling attention to yourself in this manner, it will be more difficult to protect you.”
“Protect me from who?” I called after him.
Blackwell didn’t answer as he walked away.
Beau pulled away from me. After a series of deep but shaky breaths, he managed to cross over to Kandy. He was too weak to continue standing, so he sat down hard next to the wounded werewolf. Then he pulled her awkwardly into his lap.
“Rochelle,” he said. “Check the marshal.”
I hadn’t realized I was clinging to the counter for support. It took me a second to force my hands to let go of the edge.
Beau’s eyes glowed green as he rocked Kandy in his arms.
“Beau,” I said as I stumbled around Cy’s body to kneel by the bloody marshal. “You’ll hurt her. What if … anything is broken?”
“It’s not,” he said. “We’re pack. Kandy, and I, and you are a pack. I say it’s so. I claim it to be.”
I wasn’t sure what Beau was talking about, but the marshal needed my attention more than I needed to unravel whatever magic he was trying to access.
Henry was badly wounded. He was clawed and cut and covered in his own blood. His skin was hot, as if he was also burning off the drugs, except I didn’t think he’d been exposed to any. I stood up and started looking for something to staunch the massive bite wound at his belly. I found his cowboy hat first, though, putting it on my own head so I wouldn’t lose it.
“We’re pack. We’re pack,” Beau murmured over and over again as he rocked Kandy. “My strength is your strength. We are pack.”
I found some kind of absorbent cleaning cloths under the counter. As I crossed back to press them to Henry’s belly, a tiny breeze brushed by me … some touch of magic transferring between Kandy and Beau.
The werewolf groaned, opening her blazing green eyes. Then she violently pushed away from Beau to throw up all over his feet and the marshal’s shoulder. She pressed up onto all fours. Her mousy brown hair fell over her strained face. She threw up again.
Beau rubbed his hand on her back as Kandy continued to purge the drugs from her system. The handcuffs were still tangled around her
ankles, though not locked. He tugged them away with his other hand.
“Damn,” the werewolf growled. She spat out another mouthful of bile. Then she lifted her glowing green eyes to look at me. I froze under her fierce gaze and looked away. But instead of ripping out my heart, she dropped her chin to look at the sorcerer dying on the floor before her.
“I bit him,” she said.
“You did.”
“Ah, fuck.” She crawled forward, brushing my hands away to lift the towels from Henry’s belly. Then she swore. And swore again.
Unsteady, she gathered the marshal in her arms, dropping him twice before she managed to lift him fully off the floor. She tried to stand while carrying him and fell again.
Beau gained his feet, reaching for Henry.
“No!” Kandy snarled. “He’s mine. My responsibility.” She struggled to stand again. Then, carrying the dying sorcerer, she slowly walked out of the lab.
I looked at Beau. An utter dread of what was to come, what I couldn’t see coming, settled deep into my belly. Now Beau would leave. Just like everyone left me. Because of my magic … because I could see, but not accurately, or … or …
Beau was staring down at Cy’s body. “Let’s get the Brave and just leave. Leave and never, never come back.” He didn’t look up from the bloody corpse of his stepfather.
“I didn’t stop it, Beau. I’m not sure … maybe I could have … but … I … I wasn’t strong enough. Or smart enough.”
He looked at me then. His eyes were blazing green, as Kandy’s had been. His cheeks were streaked with tears. “We all make choices. Including Ettie. Then there’s everything else we can’t hope to control.” He reached for me. “You and me. Beyond luck, you said.”
Aware that I’d underestimated him again — that I’d maybe even underestimated myself — I twined my fingers through his.
“I would give anything to just leave this to Blackwell and the witches and run away with you,” he whispered.
“But …” I sighed. “But … your mother.”
He nodded.
Someone had to tell Ada that her husband and child were dead. In the grand scheme of doing things the proper way, I was fairly certain that responsibility fell to Beau and me.
Not that I had any burning desire to be proper, just … human? Humane?
If that was even possible in this case.
Ada wasn’t going to take the news well. Maybe it would be even worse for her coming from Beau. For some reason, that made my heart heavier.
∞
Running away was a good, perfectly selfish plan. One that I could really talk myself into if I tried hard enough, especially with Beau limping beside me and putting so much weight on my shoulder that I was having a hard time walking in a straight line. Get the Brave and screw off, leaving everything to Blackwell to sort out. Hide away and let Beau heal, physically and mentally.
Except Kandy had apparently collapsed halfway down the gray-painted concrete stairs that led to the first floor. Henry was still in her arms. She didn’t look like she’d be getting back up on her own. At least not doing so and text messaging at the same time, as she appeared to be attempting to do.
Her clothing was all but shredded, but my phone had survived. Nice.
“Stop staring,” she snarled as she caught sight of us hovering on the stairs above her. “Rochelle, get your ass down here. Take my keys and pull the SUV around. Beau, go back upstairs and collect everything resembling drugs or blood before Blackwell gets his hands on it.”
“He’s calling in witches,” I said lamely.
Kandy snorted. “Burn it if you don’t want to touch it.”
Beau nodded. His face and shoulders were once again tight with tension. Apparently, we weren’t getting away from here so easily. He brushed his fingers against my palm, then turned back the way we’d come.
“He’s injured,” I snapped at Kandy as I jogged down a few steps, then climbed over Henry’s legs to grab the keys she was holding up to me.
“We all are,” she snapped back. “Deal with it. If witches are coming, we need to get Henry out of here. He won’t survive their scrub session.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, other than the idea that the witches would rather dispose of Henry than heal him, which didn’t seem right. But maybe I was missing some vital piece of information. Kandy wasn’t exactly in a chatty mood, though, so I kept my mouth shut.
I walked down the remainder of the stairs, then turned back to look up at her. Kandy looked like a completely different person without her green hair. But as I gazed up at her as she stared down at Henry, I wondered if it was more than just the hair.
“He’s going to be okay, right?”
Kandy didn’t take her eyes off the marshal, whose upper body was slung across her lap while his lower limbs sprawled across the stairs below. “Maybe,” she said through gritted teeth. “If the bite heals quickly. Then … if his magic is strong enough … and adaptable. Go, Rochelle.”
I turned, stumbling out of the warehouse and backtracking to where we’d parked the vehicles. Feeling suddenly exposed to the world in the blistering sunshine, I kept an eye out for any curious onlookers. Hopefully, my dark clothing would hide most of the blood it had probably picked up. Any injuries I’d sustained probably hadn’t had time to bruise yet.
I didn’t see anyone. Apparently, we were damn lucky that the commercial neighborhood was in the final stages of construction.
Blackwell’s sedan was gone from the parking lot, but I doubted the sorcerer was just going to disappear. Not until the witches showed up at least.
I climbed into Kandy’s SUV, barely needing to adjust the seat to reach the pedals. The werewolf was tinier than she appeared. Attitude added inches, apparently. Then I drove the block and a half back to the warehouse.
Beau and Kandy were waiting just inside the steel-and-glass front entrance. A discreetly sized, printed metal sign hung to the right of the door. Harris Industries. The sign was so new that Cy or Ettie hadn’t even removed the protective plastic when they’d hung it up. Maybe they’d been planning on doing a grand-opening ceremony or something.
And now they were dead.
Remnants of the now-realized vision floated to the forefront of my mind. I shoved the images away to focus on Beau’s face through the SUV windshield.
Harris Industries had brought this all on themselves. Cy and Ettie had been responsible for deaths and … Kandy’s possibly lethal psychotic break … and … I … I still couldn’t shake the memory of their lifeless bodies …
I parked sideways so that I blocked the door with the massive SUV, though I still didn’t see anyone else in the immediate area.
Beau and Kandy lifted Henry into the back seat, then Kandy crawled in after him.
I climbed out of the driver’s side and crossed around the vehicle to pass the keys to Beau. As I did so, I was hit with a sick desire to peer around the corner of the building to see if Ettie’s body was still lying on the asphalt. I ignored the impulse and climbed into the passenger seat.
“Where to?” Beau asked as he adjusted the driver’s seat all the way back to accommodate his long legs.
Kandy didn’t answer.
“We can’t go to a hospital, right?” I cranked around to look at Kandy and the marshal, who was once again slung across the werewolf’s lap.
Henry’s face was ashen. He looked younger and more vulnerable without his cowboy hat, which I was still wearing. He looked as if he really needed a hospital. As if he needed an ambulance, actually.
Kandy’s phone pinged. She fished it out of her back pocket, glanced at the screen, then answered the text.
My butterfly tattoo stirred on my left wrist. I pressed my right hand over it. Then, following an impulse, I looked out my side window.
Blackwell was watching us from the door of the warehouse. He met my gaze, then lifted his own phone and nodded toward the back of the SUV.
He wanted to be updated about the marshal.
I nodded, but I wasn’t fooled. Henry was a useful tool, not a friend of Blackwell’s. Just like the rest of us.
“Your mother’s place,” Kandy said.
“What?” Beau asked.
“You heard me.”
“I thought … the pack … in New Orleans. Doesn’t he need —”
“He needs an Alpha. He has you and me for pack.”
“But —”
“Desmond is coming.”
Beau fell silent, gripping the steering wheel as if he was thinking of refusing.
“Drive.” Kandy’s voice was pitched low and edged with steel.
The steering wheel creaked beneath the pressure of Beau’s grip. All the muscles in his arms flexed, his flesh rippling.
“Beau …” I whispered.
He started the engine, pulling away from the warehouse to circle back to the highway.
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” he muttered.
“It never is,” Kandy said. “The aftermath is always a bitch. Your mother needs to hear the news from us.”
“We were already heading that way,” I said snidely. I wasn’t going to be schooled by a werewolf.
“Fine. Go, then,” Kandy said. “That’s our responsibility whether we want it or not. And so is Henry.”
Beau didn’t offer any further protest, but the hair on his arms had taken on an orange sheen. I reached over and stroked my fingers playfully over this thin pelt. Beau removed his left hand from the wheel and touched the back of my hand lightly. The orange sheen faded as he relaxed.
“What did you mean when you said Henry will only survive if his magic is strong and adaptable?” I asked Kandy.
Beau glanced up at the rearview mirror. “You think he’ll change? From a single bite?”
“I can barely remember it,” Kandy said. “But I was in some sort of crazy, amped-up version of my half-form. Right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So it depends on what the drug does when an Adept takes it,” Kandy continued. “Does it actually create some sort of magical boost? Or just the illusion of it?”
“No way Cy was suddenly that strong just because he thought he was,” Beau said.
“Then Henry is doomed. He might have been anyway, because it was … me who bit him.”
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