Exhumed

by Skyla Dawn Cameron

  And then came right for me.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Hurt

  Oh, bitch, it is ON.

  I cast my shopping bags in the hall and jerked down the zipper of my coat to pull out the remaining Desert Eagle. Fifteen feet away from her and I was running, gun out and pointing, a fresh whirl of adrenalin pushing me. Bullets popped, force jerking up my arm, and—

  I blinked and my feet were dangling, body suspended in the air; her hand was at the top of my chest, just below my collar bone, and pain shot through me. Quiet burning at first then hotter, hotter, agony spiking, and I screamed.

  Pain like that, you expect it to hit a peak and fall, plateau. But white was flashing over my eyes, the terrible pain rising, growing, until I thrashed and jerked. The gun fell but I didn’t hear anything.

  Nothing but Mishka’s voice.

  “Did you really think,” she said in a whisper that rose over the chaos and played against my ears, “that you’d compare with me? I’m his wife. His true love. The mother of his child. You’re just some low-class vampire slut. You were never worthy.”

  My mouth wouldn’t work, wouldn’t let me snark back, and her words sank hard in my brain.

  Her face was twisted, eyes wild and hair flying. But the pain was too great to hear the rest of what she was saying, what anyone was saying, my brain throbbing, unable to pick out any sounds or comprehend more than a din. Figures moved around me but I couldn’t turn my head, couldn’t do anything but jerk uselessly.

  Thoughts stuttering, I prayed for relief, prayed for my head to just give up and lose consciousness, but it never came, agony never ceasing. Lights crackled around me, snapping in the air in blues and purples, an electrical storm. Somewhere, dimly, I thought she might not be able to keep it up forever, that I might hope she’d burn out. But pain stretched time like a drug does and I couldn’t remember what it wasn’t like to hurt—

  A dark shape was in the doorway. Disappeared. Flickered again at my side and fingers locked on my thrashing forearm.

  The pain ceased.

  I dropped, hit the floor, feet sinking first and then my knees folded and I thumped down on one, gasping. Heart was hammering up in my ears, my throat, my chest, everywhere, every pulse throbbing with the aftereffects of the pain. My arms were twitching, muscles pinching like electricity discharging. I blinked, willing my vision back. Tried to focus. Stared at Mishka’s flowing skirt, fanned out, frozen. Air had a thick, swirly quality, foggy with a tinge of rainbow like you see in a puddle of gasoline.

  The hand on my arm yanked me up and pulled; I was still blinking madly, clearing my head, stumbling with useless feet. Muscles burned like I’d run fifty miles, legs like rubber. I glanced around; Peri was frozen in position at Mishka’s side, gun aimed at her sister’s temple, index finger squeezing back on the SIG Mosquito’s trigger. Nic and Ellie were both on their feet, mouths open mid-shout.

  Another jerk on my arm and I was moving through the doorway, out into the smoky night. And the pieces were shifting in my brain at last as the pain remnants faded and I knew what was happening, who had my arm, where we were; I stopped dead on the lawn and yanked my arm from his grasp. He let go easily but I stepped back twice, nearly off balance, needing space between us.

  It could’ve been the fucking Grand Canyon between us and it still wouldn’t’ve been enough.

  Nate turned, storming eyes on me, jaw set. He’d healed—no sign of the burns now—still in a black T-shirt and jeans I’d had for him. Sweat beaded on his brow, tangled with his hair, and he looked half mad again. “What the fuck?”

  Oh. Rich. That was fucking rich. “Guess what, buttercup: you don’t get ownership of the what-the-fucks in this situation—or the goddamn moral outrage.”

  “You tried to kill me and set the fucking house on fire!”

  I smiled bitterly. “Oh, I didn’t try to kill you. Yet. I got you out of the way so I could kill your wife. Unfortunately, she recovered—I’ll have to do it outside of your presence next time.”

  “And you nearly killed my kid!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Please. You don’t know it’s yours.”

  He cut me a look.

  “Well, it doesn’t look a thing like the lying cunt. She probably found one that looked like you and stole it.” The words tasted like ash, a lie in my mouth that I spit out. The kid was his. I knew it, he clearly knew it. But I was also willing to bet he didn’t even consider the alternative.

  “Him,” he bit out. “Not ‘it’. Him. My son.”

  “Semantics.”

  “And you did all this...” He threw up his hands, raked them back through his hair, bewildered eyes on me. “Because I left? Because I hadn’t come back yet? Because shit had to be dealt with that doesn’t involve you for once? Or does this go back to me not fucking chasing you after a two story drop?”

  My face flushed and tears rose, clawing at my eyes. I pushed at them with a near physical force, shoving them back because he’d lost the goddamn privilege of ever seeing me vulnerable again. “It was three. And it’s about you,” I thrust my finger in his direction, “being a fucking cheating asshole. I hunted down that house because I thought it was a trap. And that you’d be so goddamn blind, you’d walk into it. And what did I find? You. Alive. With the fucking whore who used you—”

  “She said she did it so she’d have the power to protect our—”

  “Oh, bullshit!”

  “Probably!” His volume matched mine, the pair of us screaming into the timeless mist around us, in a dead world that didn’t hear a word of it. “In fact, definitely! But you don’t think I need maybe a bit of time to figure it the fuck out?”

  “Kissing time?”

  “That’s not what—”

  “I saw.”

  “You burst into today—”

  “Last night.”

  He stared with a look of bewilderment. Said nothing. Was probably wondering precisely how I knew. Well, there was my motherfucking answer then.

  “And you were in bed with her today.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’ve lost your mind and I’m not even going to have this fucking conversation when you—”

  “There’s no conversation to have because you’re a lying sack of shit!”

  “And even if it was what you think, she isn’t some random stranger like you are used to—I married her. She’s my wife.”

  It stung. I’d never been ashamed of myself—of my appetites, of my desire for pleasure, of my behaving the way men had for thousands of years and taking what I wanted. But from him, it burned, like cutting my legs out from under me and knocking me on my ass, below him.

  Why did I have to drop the gun? It sat on the floor in the house, locked in the regular timeline, and I wouldn’t be able to use it until we returned. For a blessed moment, though, I imagined one of those .50 rounds popping a crisp, gaping black hole in his skull and smiled at the thought.

  No gun, but I had words. “She was your wife six years ago. In most countries, since you were both presumed dead, that would be considered over now—and possibly null and void anyway because it was based on false pretenses, such as her giving a fuck about you in the first place.”

  “No,” he said like I was an idiot, “it’s been four months.”

  “Maybe in crazy-try-to-kill-your-girlfriend time, but—”

  “But I was asleep for six years. For me? I was married until four months ago. You think I dealt with anything in that time? No—I was looking for you. I was obsessed with finding you.”

  “Oh, that’s my fault, too? That you didn’t get your shit together—”

  “I couldn’t even talk to Heaven about Mish because saving it to deal with later was easier—and then lo and behold, I find out there isn’t a later. There’s me being attacked by you and then waking up in a fucking box. Insane. To me, I was happily married until four—”

  I seriously wanted to punch him. “Yeah. For like a month in the first place. That’s more than enough time
to get over a quickie—”

  “And how the fuck would you know? You went three hundred years before you were over your shit enough to contemplate an actual relationship, and I’m supposed to have processed everything in four months? Because you snap your fucking fingers and make it so? Oh, right, a world doesn’t even exist outside of Zara Lain.”

  Fuck it—I was punching him.

  I cocked my fist back and slammed it into his jaw, popping him with a perfect right cross. His head snapped to the side, then he stretched his jaw and turned back to look at me slowly, fiercely, otherwise not moving.

  And I hit him again, throwing everything into it. He didn’t flinch when I did, didn’t try to block, just let me follow through. I could crack a mortal’s jaw easily, but then he wasn’t a mortal anymore—had the dense bones, the healing recovery time as I did.

  But I still punched him. Landed most of the hits to his face, a few to his chest. I was damp under my coat, sweat slicking down my spine, into my eyes, and I started screaming as I pummelled, my whole body behind each strike. I landed one on his eye, my knuckle tearing skin on his cheek, blood as crimson as my nails snaking a path.

  His hands came up, locked on my upper arms, and I jerked back and forth but he held me in place, meeting my angry glare. “I get it. I fucked up—”

  “Fucked up? You fucked another wo—”

  “—and if it’s too much to ask that you cut me some fucking slack considering everything that happened, fine. Hit me. Beat me. Throw me out a goddamn window in the sun as much as you want. But never raise a hand to my kid again.” He had me close enough to still smell the sunlight on his skin, lingering like an accelerant.

  I bared my teeth in a feral grin. “Oh, he’ll be the last to go.”

  Nate frowned, lips parted to question, but I anticipated it.

  “Of anyone remaining that you love. The people I’m going to kill.”

  “Jesus, if you’re pissed at me, fine, but he’s just a—”

  “A child?” I scoffed, holding still in his arms though my skin crawled and I wanted to run, to bolt into the nothingness around us and disappear. “You know what I am. What I’m capable of.”

  “But why would you—” he whispered, searching my gaze, as if honestly struggling to understand, this concept so foreign to him. Bastard that he was, he couldn’t conceive of a real monster, apparently.

  But I’d fix that.

  “First I’ll kill Mishka. Over time, of course—weeks. And I’ll send her back to you in pieces. I’ll track down everyone you’ve ever known—every girlfriend, every buddy, everyone who was ever nice to you—and I’ll kill them. And then I’ll follow your kid for weeks and kill his friends. His friends’ families. His teachers. Their families. Until death upon death piles up and you know what’s coming next. Then after I kill little Nate Junior, it’ll be you.”

  Nate’s grip had loosened, staring at me like he didn’t even know me, and maybe he didn’t. Maybe all this time I thought he saw all of me, accepted all of me, and he didn’t. It took him so fucking long—no matter the evidence he was faced with—to believe the things Mishka did to him. It shouldn’t surprise me that he believed better of me too.

  And it shouldn’t have surprised him a moment later when I jerked my knee up into his groin. But apparently he didn’t see it coming. He doubled over, dropping his hands from my arms, and I kicked him in the head, hard, knocking him on his back. The Bowie was out of its sheath and in my grip in an instant, my knees landing on either side of him, left hand on his shoulder, right holding the knife up to his throat.

  I straddled his chest and met his gaze. “I’ll take requests, though. Should I kill him easily? Quickly? Have a weapon preference?”

  “He’s a child—”

  “He’s yours,” I said in a low voice, leaning in, my lips curling into a smile again because I was riding the high of rage and it was easy. The blade of the knife held steady on his throat, nearly pricking skin.

  Then he moved, just as fast as I could, flipping us over. Hands pinning my wrists up by my head, knife still in my grip but not going anywhere, him sitting on my hips, holding me down with more strength than a mortal, more force than I’d thought non-crazy him capable of. He stared down at me with a mixture of horror and bewilderment, pain and guilt, and of all the fucking things to flash in my head, it was him a few nights ago, post-fucking, pre-Mishka, on top of me on the couch, saying he loved me.

  Jesus Christ, why the fuck couldn’t I just wake up from all of this?

  I thrust back everything that wasn’t rage. “Is this really such a shocker? You sat there ‘four months’ ago and heard Peter talk all about me so it should be pretty goddamn clear. What I did—”

  “You fed on their children because you just woke up. I tried to kill you when I woke—it doesn’t—”

  I shook my head and the hornets were buzzing around there again, slipping me back to when I walked the halls in my blood-soaked dress, creeping into the bedroom... “Peter missed a rather important detail. Pavel and Ecaterina had a new baby.”

  His face was ashen, colour seeping away, horror in his eyes stinging me even though that was the whole goddamn point and I knew it. Fingers slackened slightly on my wrists but I didn’t fight him to get loose.

  “You wanna know what I did? I’ll tell you. I remember. Very, very clearly. Sure, I wasn’t entirely me. But I knew what I was doing. That child was his and everything of his had to be taken from him. Annihilated. I am a fucking monster and don’t you ever forget it.”

  He leaned in, not so much gripping my wrists as putting his weight on them, pushing me into the ground and I wished it would just fucking swallow me whole. His face was six inches from mine, hair near enough to touch my face, and this close, this near, I couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t handle looking at him, thinking about him, feeling anything. Panic clawed up my chest, emotion rising past the walls I had in place, strength draining as moments in this timeless dimension stretched on.

  “What do I need to do?” he whispered. “I will not abandon my son, but tell me what I can do to—”

  “You can’t. There’s nothing left.”

  “I love you.”

  I flinched like I’d been slapped. “You hurt me!”

  It was the last thing I expected to say—the very last thing I wanted to say—but there it was out on the table, the crux of the matter. The truth. My eyes burned but I didn’t blink because I felt like if I lost the battle and closed them, I’d open them again and be crying—and he’d lost the goddamn right to see me cry. I ground my teeth together, tried to calm my jackhammering pulse.

  “And there are consequences,” I continued darkly, “to breaking my motherfucking heart.”

  When I started to struggle, he released me instantly, falling back on his heels while I scrambled up. I didn’t threaten with the knife anymore because I wasn’t going to hurt him now. Not yet. Not until I’d done some other damage first. He held my gaze a beat longer, sitting there on his knees, then climbed up to stand before me, tower over me.

  “You touch my son, I’ll stop you.” He didn’t threaten. Didn’t even really warn. Just said it softly, honestly. Matter-of-factly.

  “You’ll try.” I stalked for the house, over the lawn and the poor damaged begonias, through the swirl of fog, back inside.

  The scene, of course, hadn’t changed, world frozen in place. Nate walked behind me and I hated that I still didn’t worry about him at my back—not like I should. Not like he would have to worry if I was at his.

  I took a long look at Mishka. Then at my knife. I’d’ve loved to slide the blade into her ribs, let her come to with a fucking Bowie angling towards her heart, but I was pretty sure stabbing people was in the column of stuff we couldn’t do while time was frozen.

  A strong hand touched my shoulder, and an instant later the force slammed me against the opposite wall as the world jerked back into motion; colour seeped in, sound clashed, like being dropped into pure chaos. I blinked, and
Nate and Mish were gone. The bullet from Peri’s gun fired into empty air, slamming through the wall two feet from my head.

  Peri’s eyes widened and she had the gun still raised, swinging it around. “What the fuck. What the fuck?”

  “What is going on?” Nic wasn’t looking at me, though—her gaze was on Persephone, and I didn’t think it was specifically about Mishka breaking down their door, attacking, and then disappearing that she questioned.

  Headlights shone through the broken doorway, a car door slammed before they’d even cut off, and Ryann was bursting through the door, a heavy knapsack thumping on her back. More steps followed, the thirtyish Demon Hunter Abel at her side, and frowning at the whole scene. Voices took up from all directions, shouting, arguing, the din rising until it was like the buzzing in my head, the memories descending, the chaos driving me mad.

  “Why was she screaming about a kid?”

  “Zara, what did you do?”

  “So he does have a kid?”

  “Did you know she was going to attack them?”

  “How could you hurt a child?”

  The knife slipped from my grasp, clattering on the floor. My jacket was pulling on me, confining, and I was sweating under it, maybe the hot summer air finally getting to me—maybe the time freezing—fuck if I knew. I tore my arms out, tossed it aside. My back hit the wall, knees buckling, hands shaking. Slumped down, crumpling. The room went blurry, eyes boiling, hot tears streaking down my cheeks. I’d crashed, hard, and I couldn’t stop, couldn’t get myself together—couldn’t fucking remember who I was anyway, couldn’t feel anything but pain.

  All the screaming continued, the accusations—the world carrying on around me. I dragged my hands back through my hair, digging my nails in.

  I love you.

  An arm came down over my shoulder, human smelling of whiskey. The shouting ceased, not abruptly, but petered out and I felt them staring at me, hated myself for being vulnerable, for losing it in front of them, but I couldn’t stop.