by Chloe Garner
“Huh,” Jason said. “Nuri or Lady Deathstrike?”
Sam thought.
“Is adamantium more or less fatal than steel?”
“More.”
“Nuri would break her,” Sam said. “She’d know she was coming, and she’d tear her to pieces so small she couldn’t regenerate.”
Jason watched the white stripes down the highway.
“Nuri or Abomination?”
“Why are they fighting?” Sam asked.
“To the death. Who cares?”
“He’d have to catch her. She’d know he was coming and he’d never be able to find her. And I expect she’d have some kind of magic that would work against him. He’d show up at the club and she’d pull his heart out of his chest and he’d just stand there looking at it for a second before he died.”
Jason looked at Sam.
“You kind of have a crush on her, don’t you?”
“Not even a little bit,” Sam said. “There’s nothing human about her. I believe she cares about Sam, and I know Sam loves her, but… No, not even a little.”
Jason thought for another minute.
“Nuri or Carter?”
“Carter’s a superhero now?”
“Isn’t he?”
Sam paused.
“I don’t know. There’s a lot of anger going for Carter, but Nuri is so powerful… I don’t know which way I’d call it.”
“And you just asked that woman if you could marry Sam. Impressive.”
“It’s what she would have wanted,” Sam said. “I know it was important to her.”
“And that’s why you’re the good brother,” Jason answered. “I don’t even know if Kara has parents.”
Sam looked at him, eyebrows up.
“Hold on, hold on, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You said it, dude. Not me.”
“Shut up,” Jason said.
They ate in silence, but Sam kept looking over and laughing. Jason refused to meet his eye.
<><><>
They stopped outside of Kansas City, taking a room at a motel when Sam advised against getting Doris and the rest of the family involved. Not this time. Sam carried Samantha into the room and laid her on a bed while Jason brought in their bags.
“Sam,” Sam said, taking her hands. “Come back to me.”
Jason sat down to watch. Samantha was unresponsive, at first, but after a few minutes she stirred. Sam helped her sit up.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Kansas City,” Sam said. “Missouri side. Cassie is here.”
She sat up over her knees and shook her head.
“Who found her?”
“They’re coming. Tonight,” Sam said.
“She called you?”
Sam looked at her hands in his own. Again, Jason was struck by how close they had gotten while he had been gone.
“How much time do we have?”
“A few hours.”
“Will you go get dinner?”
Sam stood and looked at Jason.
“I’ll be back soon.”
He held out his hand for the keys, and Jason took them out of his pocket and paused.
“It’s just dinner, dude,” Sam said. “Chill.”
He gave Sam the keys and watched his brother leave.
“Why him?” Jason asked. “If something happens tonight, wouldn’t you rather…?”
“Because I don’t want him to be here to see this,” Samantha answered, standing on the bed to kick her shoes off. He looked up at her.
“See what?”
“We finish it tonight. If you’re not ready or if you’ve decided you want to back out, tell me now.”
She hopped off the bed and dug through her bag for a minute, then went into the bathroom. She came back out in running shorts and a halter top.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Forward?” she asked. He drew Anadidd’na. He didn’t know why; it just felt like the right thing to do. He understood, but he didn’t understand the drama.
“I’m not backing down now,” he said. She nodded.
“Sit.”
They sat down on the bed, knees to knees, cross-legged. She looked nervous.
“There have been multiple times that I’ve been training you that it could have killed you. You know that.”
“I noticed,” he said.
“This one is the worst. I’ve done it a couple of times, and it never gets any easier. Of all of the ways to graduate, though…” She shook her head, eyes down, then looked up at him again. “This is the best. You do this, you’re one of us.”
He blinked.
“So? Let’s do it.”
She collected his hands and held them over their crossed ankles. Licked her lips.
“I need you to stop your heart.”
He frowned.
“Doesn’t that make me dead?”
She gave him a half smile.
“In some important symbolic ways, yes. Medically, you have a few minutes. Not many, but a few. The problem is, your body tends to try to go into shock. And it hurts. They don’t tell you that. At first it’s just your veins collapsing. They’re used to having pressure, and then they don’t. Then it’s the blood pooling in capillaries and vessels that are lower than the rest. Capillaries rupture. You bruise. Then your cells start dying. It’s like holding your breath, only breathing doesn’t fix it. You’re going to panic. Your body is going to inject huge amounts of adrenaline into your system, and it’s going to be terrible, because it doesn’t flow with your blood. It just sits there at your heart, and the cells… It isn’t important. You’ll panic, and then you’ll be fighting shock. That’s just how it goes. Argo can skip one beat at a time, he’s so practiced at it. I wouldn’t ever want to be that good at it, but… It’s hard. You have to focus. And you have to turn it back on. I can help you, but there’s no guarantee it will work, and if I help, you’ll never get another shot at it. Those are just the rules. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“I won’t leave you,” she said. “Stay here with me. Focus. Right?”
“Piece of cake,” he said, feeling his heart rate pick up at the thought of it. He wasn’t sure if the information she’d given him was going to help or hurt. Mostly it just made him expect the worst. She nodded.
“In your own time.”
He sat with his hands in hers, his knees pressed against hers, and her eyes on him as he considered.
Was it worth it?
“Why now?” he asked.
“Because I’m going in with Cassie. I need you to be as strong as you can be, first to keep her from hurting you, and second to keep her from hurting Sam, if anything happens to me.”
She squeezed his hands.
“If anything does happen to me, go to Nuri. She’ll know what to do next.”
He shook his head.
“We’ve got a rule against ‘if anything happens to me’ statements.”
She squeezed his hands again.
“In your own time.”
He took a few breaths, forcing his heart rate down, just like trying to take a tough shot with a rifle. Let his body be still, felt the weight of it, the balance of it. His heart beat and the way it triggered small motions in his limbs and his core. Felt his heart beat in his chest, the throb of it, keeping time.
It was surprisingly easy to shut it off.
He wondered how he hadn’t done it by accident a hundred times before.
And then the reality struck him. His body stiffened, in surprise and fear, as that central pulse failed, and Samantha rose up on her knees to catch him and rotate him onto his back, laying him on the bed.
“Focus, Jason,” she said.
He could breathe. Lungs filled, emptied. There was a strange whooshing noise. Where his heart should have been. Where his heart should have beat.
His hands shook and his stomach hurt as he felt the blood draining through his body, aimless. It wasn’t right. His bra
in lurched away, refusing to acknowledge it. It couldn’t be. His eyes slid closed, and he struggled to remember what he was supposed to do next.
There was a next step.
It was dark in his brain. Safe. Nothing bad was happening. It would work itself out.
His body felt empty. And then there was a sharp stab of pain in his chest, growing, radiating, sharper. Vague, dull pain along his back and his hips, and slits on his arms, but the sharp pain, like the point of a needle broken off in his chest.
Dark, numbing unawareness beckoned.
“Jason,” Samantha said. It might have been loud. He wasn’t sure. Everything was too quiet, and hurt.
His heart was gone.
They’d taken it.
Bastards.
Hands squeezed his shoulders, and he tried to react, but his body didn’t seem to be his own any more. He was watching from the tower of his mind, in darkness. The pain didn’t belong to him. All he had to do was turn away, and it would be gone.
He had died before.
Brandt had killed him, in sport, and in science.
But his heart had raced, then. Fear and animal instinct to fight, snarled in a ball ricocheting off his ribs. Now he felt empty. Death wasn’t an animal fight against the inevitable, but a dark bath, lukewarm and quiet.
Pain intensified everywhere, and the sharp pain went numb from overexpression. He was running out of time.
What was he supposed to do? He couldn’t fight. They’d taken his heart.
He growled.
Bastards.
He wanted it back.
He stepped aside, the way he had learned to do, to operate his body like a machine. The pieces were all still there, he found. His heart, a pointless blob of muscle in his chest, sat pressed against his lungs dully, but still present.
He braced himself.
She hadn’t told him the worst part, but he could feel it.
The first beat was going to hurt more than any of it.
Flipped the switch.
His chest convulsed with pain as the chambers of his heart squeezed on nothing and drew full again. Twice the muscle twitched hard against empty space, and he clutched his chest willing it to be over, but then it took. He rolled onto his side and fought the scream as veins popped back up and capillaries exploded under unbalanced pressure. He was laying with his head in Samantha’s lap when Sam got back.
“What happened?” Sam asked, dropping the food and drinks onto the table and crossing the room in long strides.
“He’s fine,” Samantha said, brushing her fingers through his hair. “He’s one of us now.”
<><><>
Sam called Kelly. Jason called Maryann. Two hours later, they showed up to find Samantha sitting in Sam’s lap, head against his chest. Quiet. Jason polished Anadidd’na, eyes distant.
“It’s time,” Sam said.
They offered her the front seat, but Samantha chose to sit in the middle in the back, angel on one side, demon on the other. Sam had sat on the bed while she armed herself, vials of potion, knives, a gun, Lahn. Everything where it went. She wouldn’t bring her backpack with her. Either she was ready or she wasn’t.
They reached the convention center, a new building, still under construction, as Ian and Argo stood arguing.
“That’s your phone,” Sam said. Jason got it out and answered on the first ring.
“Yeah, we’re here,” he said. Peter looked up and hung up the phone. Samantha spared herself a smile at his shock. The mage approached.
“She’s in there,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“She waved at us from the door?” he answered. “No one will go in.”
“Where’s Lindsay?”
“She went home.”
“And Bane?”
“Walking around it, finding the doors.”
She looked up at the huge building. Lange was leaning against the doorway, cleaning his nails with a knife. Argo and Ian had fallen silent at her arrival. The rest of them were there, scattered around the entryway, various degrees of anxiety and anger. Spake lay on the ground, counting something above him.
“No one will come with me?” she asked, louder. Heads turned.
“She’s waiting for you,” Mitch said. “We all know it.”
“She is your responsibility. She came for your dragons,” Argo said.
“You guys are pathetic,” Jason said. Samantha looked at Peter. He met her eyes, unashamed.
“We aren’t a team. We don’t fight together. It was always going to be like this.”
“I know. Bind the building. Keep her in there.”
He nodded.
“We’ll do what we can.”
“You’ve done well.”
“So have you.”
She nodded to him, then started for the door.
“What the hell?” Jason said. “You’ve got the most powerful demon killers in the country here, and you’re just going to let them stand around while we go fight her on our own?”
She stood in front of the doors.
“Jason, give me the odds that they actually fight her and not each other.”
He looked over his shoulder where Ian had said something rude to Mitch, then shrugged.
“Screw ‘em all. I’m going to kill her.”
Samantha pushed the door open and there was a strangled noise behind her.
“I can’t come with you,” Kelly said as she turned to look. He stared up at the doorway. “I’m sorry.”
She sighed.
“I should have guessed. Try to keep them from killing each other, okay? We’ll be right back.”
The angel took a long last look at the door frame, then turned, shoulders drooping, and walked away.
“There’s no way around it?” Jason asked as they went on.
“No,” Samantha said. “Wash all the doors, find where she marked them and clean it off, but… no, nothing other than that.”
They went down a long hallway, turning a sharp corner to make their way deeper into the building. Two turns later, Samantha stopped dead.
“What is it?” Sam asked.
“We turned together,” she said. Something was wrong, but it took several seconds to figure it out. She swore a string of curses in hellspeak and looked at Jason.
“You need to get out of here.”
He had a strange look on his face. He nodded.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It wasn’t for him,” Samantha said. “It was for you. The park. The crossroads exchange magic. It’s intended for you, and it’s here, too.” She paused, mind reeling. “We turned together at the mall, too. In Houston. We always knew which way to go.” She shook her head as Jason took a step away. “She put a hellsgate on a crossroads pattern. You need to get out. Now.”
He nodded and took another step, looking torn.
“Go, Jason. This is how it was always going to be.”
“You knew,” he said, brow furrowing. “If you already knew, why did you…” He looked at Sam, then shook his head. “No. I’m not letting you go in there by yourself.”
“She’s not going in on her own,” Sam said. Maryann squeaked.
“I am,” Samantha said. “Go, Jason. Now. If anything happens, you’re his best chance.”
He shook his head again, but backed away.
“You’re one of them, now,” Samantha said. “Do what has to be done. Go.”
With a last look, he turned and left. Samantha drew a breath, feeling the pressure hard on her chest.
“Mistress, if you ask it of me, I will go with you,” Maryann said. Samantha turned to look at the girl with compassion. She took her hands.
“Beloved, I would never ask suicide of you. You aren’t a warrior. Go. You know the information I need, better than I do. Find it and bring it to me, as you always have.”
Maryann knelt, bringing Samantha’s hands up to her forehead, then vanished.
“You aren’t going in there alone,” Sam said.
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She went to stand against him, tipping over her toes to let her weight ease onto him.
“Sam,” she said quietly as he put his arms around her. “Can you see her?”
There was a pause. She knew he already knew the answer. This was unwillingness to say.
“No,” he answered. “But you can fix it.”
“Probably not. I’m not willing to take the risk. She’s had all the time in the world to pick a spot, and she knows you. They kept you away from Jason. They kept me away from Jason. I’m not underestimating her. And I’m not letting you go in there blind.”
“You’re saying I can’t even help you from out here,” he said. She nodded.
“I am.”
Something flickered, and she reached up to take off her hair pin. He stayed her hand.
“She knows we’re here,” Samantha said, easing her wrist through his hand and pulling the pin out of her hair.
“How?” Sam asked. She jerked her head up toward a security camera halfway down the hallway.
“The old-fashioned way. She’s watching.”
He looked.
“Oh.”
There he was. The heat of him felt more intense, being able to feel his reaction to her body through his mind. He was worried.
Deeply worried.
She was prosaic. She sent him a wave of calm. What was going to happen was already decided. There were seeds of worry, deep underneath everything, for what would happen to Carter, to Abby, to Sam and Jason, but she glided on faith. The worst thing she could imagine could happen, and it would all still be okay.
She didn’t want to die.
It had hurt, the first time. She still remembered. And it was terrifying. Even knowing O’na Anu’dd, this time, those last few moments as her brain flickered out, the unknowing and uncontrol. She pushed the thoughts aside, having acknowledged Sam’s fears and the legitimacy of them, taking another breath to calm herself again.
“I wouldn’t go if I didn’t think I could win,” Samantha said.
“How?” Sam asked. She shook her head.
“How do we win any fight? Train hard, prepare well, and trust it in the clinch.”
He sucked on his cheek, not willing to look at her, but certainly not letting her go.
“There is something you can do.”
He looked at her, and she gave him a playful smile.