by Jenn Bennett
But if he thought he was taking Lon away from me, he could think again.
“Get thee back!” Payne shouted, thrusting the golden snake in front of him like a shield.
“Oh, but I thought you liked serpents. You want to slice open my belly and eat me, too?”
Payne gulped for air and then began chanting something low and quiet. And just as I had in the temple, I felt that same whoosh of sleepiness. No way in hell was I going down again.
One moment I was striding toward him. The next I flew like an loosened arrow. I didn’t even feel the cement beneath my shoes, just the slice of cold wind through my clothes, and I was in his face. The flattened head of the golden snake reared back. I knocked the metal contraption from Payne’s hands. Both it and the snake sailed through air and struck the wooden fencing, which collapsed under the weight and toppled backward as if it had been struck by a wrecking ball.
“Aeyyhhhh!”
Payne stumbled a step, shouting hysterically as his eyes widened in terror. And I might have almost felt sorry for the old bastard had I not caught a glimpse of Lon’s limp body on the diving board. And that just sent me into a rage.
“Holy Light Bringer,” he prayed to the night sky, “protect me from this monstrosity—”
I clamped a hand around his throat and squeezed.
He reached behind his back and pulled out Lon’s gun. The cold muzzle slammed against my forehead. Half a second, and I’d be dead. But half a second was all I needed to jerk my head around and knock it away with my horns.
The shot exploded over my shoulder.
Out of my peripheral vision, I saw the gun swinging back around. I didn’t even think about it. I just let go of his neck and pushed with my mind.
The gun dropped. And Payne sailed backward . . . and backward, until he was flailing in midair over the pool. His disbelieving eyes met mine one last time.
And I dropped him.
The descending scream was muffled by the eruption of snake-filled water that shot several feet up into the air when his body hit the surface.
Let his ill-kept vipers do what they wanted. I frankly didn’t care if the crazy asshole lived or died. All I cared about was wrapping my arms around Lon’s legs and tugging him back to safety. Back to me, where he belonged. But God, he felt so heavy as I pulled him onto the wet cement. So heavy. Not moving.
I barely heard Payne flailing around in the viper pit. Barely heard his gurgling screams. Because I was too busy listening for Lon’s breath. Lon’s heartbeat. It wasn’t there. And something much worse: his halo had faded away.
No breath. No heartbeat. No halo.
And still, my mind fought it.
Lon couldn’t be dead. This wasn’t happening. It was a trick of Payne’s knack. Never mind that I’d never seen a knack do this. Maybe he’d amped it up somehow, with something like Dare’s bionic drug.
And even as my panic-fueled mind was trying to rationalize all this, the frantic splashing in the pool had slowed and finally stopped. Payne was dead. His knack would stop working on Lon.
Which meant . . .
The golden snake had bitten Lon.
But where? Not on his face or neck. Not his hands. I lifted his shirt and saw nothing there. Legs. Arms—
Arm. There. Two ragged holes in his thin leather jacket, just above his left elbow. The pale brown leather was stained with blood.
The jacket was too tight to remove without effort. I reached inside his jeans pocket and fished out his pocketknife, right where he always kept it, next to his car keys. Guess Payne hadn’t bothered to confiscate Lon’s stuff as he had mine. I supposed he’d counted on Lon being too paralyzed to be a threat.
Dare had once thought that about me.
Never assume.
I used the pocketknife to saw open the cuff of his jacket and sliced up the sleeve, splaying open the leather. Jesus. No wonder I couldn’t get the jacket off—the bite was already swelling. Okay, think, Bell. Think. What did I know about snakebites? Only that you were supposed to cut them open and suck out the venom. But what if the venom had already stopped a man’s heart? Removing the venom wasn’t going to help that.
CPR. I could do that. Kar Yee and I had both learned it for the bar. After dropping the pocketknife, I pinched his nose and puffed air into his mouth. Once. Twice. Then I tried compressions on his heart. One, two, three—
What the hell was I doing? Screw CPR, I had something better.
Tapping into Payne’s electricity, I found a fat pocket of current nearby and reeled it into my body. It surged and sank inside me like the tide rising over a dry beach. I held it for a moment, letting it kindle my Heka. Then I pressed my palms over Lon’s heart and zapped him.
Electric pain shot through my arms as Lon’s chest seized.
“Lon!” I shouted in his face, as if that would help.
Breathe, dammit! I pinched his nose again, but when I fitted my mouth over his, he jerked and gasped for air.
“Oh, thank God,” I said, silvery tears blurring my sight.
His eyes opened, but he didn’t see me. He was struggling for breath. His body wasn’t moving.
Venom.
Fuck.
I started to slice open the snakebite on his arm. Were you supposed to do this or not? I couldn’t remember! But when I set the blade against his skin, I stopped.
All knacks. I had all of them, including healing. And if I could perform metaphysical surgery on Yvonne to dig out a damn spell, then removing venom had to be possible. Somehow.
Wrapping my hand around his injured arm, I closed my eyes and pushed my consciousness inside him. If I was afraid I wouldn’t know what I was looking for or how to find it, I was wrong, because the venom was as bright as neon in fog. It didn’t belong. And it was everywhere. Unlike what I’d done to Yvonne, I couldn’t just rip this out.
In my panic, the only thing I could think to do was picture my hand as a magnet and the venom as one of those Wooly Willy toys, the one with a magnetic wand that could be used to create a beard or a mustache made of metal fillings over a drawing of a man’s face. If Lon lived, we could laugh about it later.
Come to me, I thought, willing the venom out of him. Leave this body. I repeated it like a mantra, over and over, not giving a good goddamn if it was tipping my crazy scales to be talking to some animal’s body fluid. I cared about nothing but the sound beneath my ear, where I’d laid my head on Lon’s chest to hear his heart. How remarkable it was that I fit so perfectly there, in the dip of his breastbone. I had the oddest feeling of déjà vu. As if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to be lying there on top of him. As if I belonged there.
Please. I’ll do anything, please.
Christ. One kiss and a hand job from the man, and I was ready to give away my soul to keep him alive. But I didn’t have long to dwell on that, because two things happened at once.
Something warm slid against my hand.
And beneath my ear, Lon’s chest rumbled. He was coughing.
“Lon!” I pushed myself up to give him room.
His halo bloomed around the crown of his head. Alive! Most definitely alive. He cracked open his eyes and looked surprised to see me. In a rough voice, he asked, “Where is he?”
“You’re not dead,” I said stupidly. Then I started blubbering like a maniac.
“Hey, whoa.” He strained to pull himself up.
“Don’t move,” I said through the tears. “Your heart just stopped, you idiot. Oh, Jesus, that was—” My hand was tingling. I loosened my grip on Lon’s arm to find blood-tinged liquid dripping off my hand. The venom, hell’s bells. Well, at least it distracted me from crying. I wiped it on the side of my jeans—they were ruined anyway, what with the new tail hole.
Lon reached up to swipe a thumb under my eyes. “Where’s Payne?” he asked again.
“Dead in the viper pool. We’re safe.”
Despite my protests, Lon sat up and inspected his wound. The swelling was already going down. “You did this?”
“Well, not the biting part, but yeah. I just—”
“How did you get out of the temple? I heard glass breaking.”
“I jumped.”
“Cady! Jesus. You can’t do that. Are you okay? Are you feeling any pains?”
“Just my knees. My God, I’m not some precious porcelain doll. I healed myself in the hospital, as you kindly reminded me before you gave me that angry orgasm in the hotel room.”
He made a strangled noise. One hand clamped around the back of my neck. He pulled me close and kissed me firmly. “You saved my life,” he said against my lips.
“Technically, I brought you back to life. Or, at least, back from the brink of death. Not too shabby for an abomination,” I said with a tight smile.
He made a low noise as his gaze moved over my face. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Please don’t make me cry again.”
“Your mother—”
I shook my head. “I haven’t heard her. But I probably shouldn’t stay like this much longer. Tell me how you feel. Are you tingling? I don’t know if I got it all. Should I try to heal you some more? I don’t want your skin to turn black and fall off, and what about your heart? Does it feel right? I’m not—”
“All right, already. Enough with the questions. You sound just like Jupe.”
“But—”
“I’m a little light-headed, and my arm hurts like a motherfucker.” He rotated it and flexed his fingers. “But I can move it, which is something I couldn’t do about ten seconds after Payne forced that damned snake to sink its fangs into me. Where the hell is that thing?”
“Somewhere over there.” I gestured toward the downed fence. “Payne took my phone. Do you have yours?”
“I’ll tell you if you get off me.”
“Oh,” I said, slightly embarrassed, as I rocked away from him and teetered on one knee.
“Don’t be. I like you on top. And for the record, it wasn’t an angry orgasm.” The corners of his mouth quirked up in a dirty little smile that made me fall backward onto my ass. Which hurt. In a weird way. It took me a second to realize I was sitting on my tail.
He lifted a brow.
“I . . . better shift back down,” I said.
His face sobered. “I think that’s a wise idea.”
My sight and hearing returned to normal when I concentrated and pushed away the Moonchild body. Meanwhile, Lon found that he did, indeed, have his phone. “A million and one texts from Jupe,” he murmured. “And it’s almost midnight? Jesus fucking Christ. We lost hours.”
“Half a day,” I confirmed, looking around the pool. I searched the dark water for Payne’s body and couldn’t find it. That gave me the creeps. I didn’t want to dream about his bloated corpse popping out of the viper pit.
Lon grunted behind me. He was having trouble pushing himself up to stand. I helped him to his feet and encouraged him to lean on me.
“Maybe we should find a hospital,” I said.
“I’m fine,” he said in a weary voice. “Just a little woozy. Need to rest.”
Which probably meant he was about to die again but was too stubborn to admit it. While helping him keep his balance as we skirted the wretched pool, I spotted Payne’s abandoned coat and shirt on a nearby patio table. My phone was there, too. And Lon’s wallet. I grabbed both, then remembered something and peeked inside Payne’s jacket pocket. Jackpot. The gilded frame with the parchment fragment was still there. I snagged it.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said, eager to get to a safe place where Lon could rest and I could do a little old-fashioned magick. “I’ll drive.”
* * *
It only took a few minutes to get him into the SUV, and a couple more for me to change into an extra pair of not-ripped jeans. And while we argued the pros and cons of making an anonymous report to the police about Payne—from a pay phone, we decided—I drove us to the nearest decent-looking hotel in Twentynine Palms. It was somewhere between acceptable and shady, but on the plus side, it was clean and quiet, with an all-night diner across the parking lot.
“You need to sleep inside the ward,” Lon mumbled after I’d checked in.
“What?”
“The canvas tarp. You can’t fall asleep outside it. Not after what you did tonight. How long were you transmutated?”
“A while.”
“If your mother noticed, she’ll know you aren’t in a coma anymore and might try to tap into you when you’re asleep. It’s a wonder she didn’t while you were hypnotized.”
Yes, I supposed he had a point. And he sounded frustrated with me that I’d put myself in this situation, but I couldn’t fathom why. I wanted to say, “Hello, I saved your life, dumbass,” but I didn’t. We both knew it was the only choice. And the tarp might be an inconvenience, but if it kept my mom out of my head, I had nothing to complain about.
After helping Lon into the room and calling to check in with Jupe, I soon discovered that being passed out for several hours under Payne’s hypnotic knack didn’t count as actual rest. We both felt as if we’d been awake for two days straight. I grabbed a first-aid kit from the SUV and cleaned up Lon’s snakebite, which was definitely better, thank God. I also fetched us something to eat from the diner. When I got back to the room, Jupe called.
He reported that Priya had noticed my transmutation in the Æthyr. Big-time. The Hermeneus spirit had unfortunately lost track of my mother, so he didn’t know if she’d also noticed. But I guessed it had panicked him so much that he’d immediately appeared to Jupe and told him. Jupe had been freaking out that he couldn’t get in touch with us. Poor kid sounded frazzled, and this made me miss him. And made me wish something fierce that we were back home.
Back at Lon’s home, I mean. Not mine. I got that weird rush of déjà vu again and continued to feel unmoored, even while I gathered some random supplies from the motel room and began assembling a servitor.
Servitors are Heka boomerangs, roving balls of focused magical energy that I can shoot out into the world. They’re able to perform small, mindless tasks: remote viewing and spying, information gathering. And in this case, I hoped it could track down a single sheet of paper.
I needed a physical vessel to anchor the Heka. Back at home, I kept a supply of crudely sculpted clay dolls for this purpose. Since I had no clay dolls at my disposal, I used Lon’s pocketknife to carve a small bar of hotel soap.
“You sure that’s going to work?” he asked.
“We’ll find out.”
While he ate, I broke open Payne’s gilded frame and removed the parchment fragment.
If my mother had stolen the parchment this fragment belonged to, I was hoping a servitor could find it. No way in hell she would have gotten rid of something that valuable, especially if she used it to rework the Moonchild spell. I hoped that finding it would finally give me some solid insight into the Moonchild spell.
Which would, in turn, shine a light on how I might reverse it.
Using the parchment fragment as a “scent” for the servitor to track, I performed a simple life-giving spell on my crudely carved bar of soap. The resulting servitor didn’t look like much, just a loosely humanoid shape made of light. Once charged, it emerged from the soap doll like a fairy light and floated on its merry way to track down the original parchment . . . and maybe the Moonchild spell.
It might take hours, it might take days, but if the other piece of the parchment existed, the servitor would find it and come back to show me where it was. I allowed myself to be cautiously hopeful about this prospect.
And it was the only real lead we had, other than the last line from Wildeye’s diary page: “3AC 1988.” Lon and I had puzzled over this since we left Golden Peak, trying to see how—if—it fit together with my Arcadia Bell alias, but to no avail.
As I wrapped the servitor soap doll inside a washcloth and tucked it into my overnight bag, I thought about everything Payne had said in the temple, all his crazy beliefs abo
ut the Serpent and Sophia. After all of that, I really didn’t know if it got me any closer to understanding what my parents had planted inside me during my conception. Was I half human, half demon? Or some sort of Frankenstein creation that was greater than the sum of my parts?
One thing I was sure of: all that garbage about Sophia being Mother of Wisdom was a crock of shit. Which probably meant the whole Mother of Ahriman thing was likely an inflated title of no value. All that time spent with Payne, with Rooke, chasing Wildeye’s ghostly trail, only to be sent all the way back around the proverbial game board with no real gains: go directly to Jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Weary and frustrated, I stepped into the bathroom to wash remnants of soap off my hands. When I’d finished, I came out to find the anti-Enola canvas spread over one of the beds. Stretched on top of it was Lon, fast asleep. His shirt sat in a heap on the carpet with his belt, and the top button of his jeans was unbuttoned, but it looked as if that might have been all he could manage before he gave up and passed out. He still had his shoes on.
I watched him for moment. I wasn’t worried; his halo was bright, and his chest rose and fell in a comfortable, steady rhythm. I’d have been content to watch him all night. Mainly because he was alive and okay. But the longer I watched him, the more I found that assessment taking a decidedly nonsaintly detour as my eyes followed the line of golden hair bisecting a very fine chest straight down to the unbuttoned button of his jeans.
Damn.
After tugging off his shoes, I stripped down to my T-shirt and pulled the sheet over both of us. He didn’t even wake up. At least it gave me a chance at a closer peek. Just a little harmless perusal. Or lustful ogle, whatever. My gaze wandered over lean muscle. Really nice arms. Really nice everything. Oh, and there was something I’d seen before: the scar over his ribs where his ex-wife, Yvonne, had stabbed him the day they got divorced. And on his neck, the scar he’d gotten at Halloween from Duke Chora’s blade. I’d never seen so much blood.
Christ. I’d been through a lot with him.
Gingerly, I reached for the scar on his neck and traced it with the tips of my fingers. A thin silver chain stretched above it. Funny. Lon wasn’t one to wear jewelry. Whatever was on the chain had swung to the other side of his neck and was buried in his hair. I arched my arm to retrieve it, careful not to wake him as I slid it to the front of the chain.