Quillan’s eyes remained on me, watching me expectantly. “So?”
“Give me a minute,” I said. I started to put the popsicle stick into its mouth, then hesitated and turned to them. “There’s a very real chance this is going to end up bad, so just… be ready, okay?”
“What do you mean by bad?” asked Quillan.
“Angry-magic-smoke-with-a-vendetta bad,” I answered.
Both of them nodded and they each took a step back.
“Okay,” I said, “here we go.”
I slowly eased the pasted part of the stick into the smoke, keeping it just high enough to watch it and see if it would change colors or dissolve entirely. It parted for the stick, as smoke does when it is disturbed, but made no effort to close back around it.
Before the paste could react, the mist burst into flames.
The mist and paste went up in a plume of black fire, sending me, Quillan, and Bram reeling backwards. The stick was still in my hand as I fell away. A second later, the fire was dancing down the wood to my fingers, my wrist, my sleeve, and engulfing me in the dark, smothering flames. My first reaction was to banish it, snapping my fingers and commanding the fire to kindly screw off.
But when I did that, nothing happened.
I snapped my fingers again and whispered the ancient words for banishment and water and cold and death, but none of them did a damn thing.
“Sam!” Quillan screamed as I felt him throwing something on top of me. It was a thin blanket he formerly used to smother the fire. He pressed it down over my face and my stomach before it caught fire too, being swallowed up at once in darkness, darkness, darkness…
It didn’t matter because I wasn’t burning.
The flames rose around me, growing dark as onyx and bright as stars, but there was no heat coming from them. They caught on my clothes, and my skin remained unmarred and intact. They rose and rose and rose until I couldn’t see the walls anymore, and the ceiling was nothing but a huge cloud of smoke.
In a sea of writhing, black tongues, I saw something. A silhouette, a shadow with long hair that was standing over something I couldn’t identify, and something enormous was draped across her lap. She had a needle in one hand, a stone heart in the other, and she was sewing away, stitching something together. Her shoulders shook as though she were laughing.
Then she looked up and a pair of burning red eyes stared right at me before a gaping, white mouth opened up wide, maybe to scream. She pushed the mound off her lap, dropped her needle, stood up, and made a claw with her hand. She raked it down across the air, like she was trying to scratch me out of existence. The scars on my neck instantly burned as if they were only a few seconds old.
Then there was a violent flash of red light, and Meg, the fire, and the black mist suddenly vanished.
“Sam!” Quillan yelled. I was on my back, staring dizzily up at the ceiling, and he was standing over me. I did not fail to see the abject terror carved into his face. “Are you all right?”
“I…” I rolled to one side, pushing the thin blanket he used in his attempts to smother the fire on me. It wasn’t burned either, nothing was, but a faintly ashy taste hovered in the air now, making it hard to breathe. “Did you see that? I… saw something,” I said breathlessly. “I… I saw…”
“Hey, take it easy,” said Quillan. He put one hand on my back and another on my arm, slowly rubbing between my shoulder blades and spoke softly. “Just breathe in and out.”
“I’m… trying,” I said before falling into a fit of coughing. It didn’t feel like there was any oxygen in my lungs, but every time I took a breath, my body rejected the air. I looked at Quillan to see if he was having the same trouble, but he was breathing fine.
Bram knelt beside the body and looked into its mouth, grimacing. “Unstable indeed,” he said. “Was that a portal, do you think? Perhaps it was taking the mist back to wherever Meg pulled it from in the absence of an anchor?” He held up the stone heart, just in case we forgot what anchor he was talking about. “If so, this is most unpleasant news.” He dropped the heart and it broke into innumerable powdery grey pieces on the floor. It soaked up the black blood like Bounty paper towels. “Meg can just keep summoning them over and over and over again; they will never run dry.
But I was barely listening to him. “I saw someone,” I said. “Through the fire. I think…” I coughed when something sharp and cold lodged in the back of my throat. “I think it was Meg.”
Quillan frowned, and Bram furrowed his brow. It was then that I realized the blast of fire from the concoction had completely burned Bram’s eyebrows and eyelashes off. And part of his black hair was singed and now smoking.
I couldn’t help but laugh because he looked like a drag queen without her makeup on.
“And what, pray tell, would convince you of that?” said Bram, remaining absurdly calm.
“Bram, your…” I started but then swallowed my words because I figured Bram would find out about his missing facial hair soon enough.
I stared at the abomination and reached up to touch my throat. The grey scars Dulcie gave me when she burned down our office were still prominent. The skin was stinging again when I drew my fingers across them, sharp and thin, like a sudden fever.
“It just felt like Meg,” I answered, clearing my throat and trying not to cough again. “And it looked like Meg, too.” Honestly, to suggest it was anybody else at this point was just plain stupid.
“What did you see?” asked Quillan. “What did you see exactly?”
“A shadow,” I replied. “With long hair, red eyes and she was stitching something together, something huge… and she had a heart in her hand.” I looked at the abomination again, and the black blood oozing between the clumsy, grey stitches. The skin stretched around them as the pieces were pulled apart.
“Oh, dear,” said Bram. He was standing over the abomination, a layer of soot on his shirt, and staring with crossed arms into its mouth. “Forgive me. I believe I have made a grievous mistake.”
“Just the one?” asked Quillan but I quickly shushed him.
“What mistake?” I inquired.
“I believe I know why the abomination at your house did not burst into flames,” Bram said. “And why there was no residue on the heart that turned to dust in my hands.”
“Okay, why?”
“Because this one,” he gestured to the unmoving abomination, “did not have time to vacate the heart before it broke. Due to some glitch in its fusion, perhaps, a disconnect existed between the body and the Darkness that precluded it to self-destructive madness. Without a functioning heart, it was inherently unstable. Eventually, it burst into those strange flames and vanished, most likely heading back to the land from whence it came. The other smoke, or mist or sludge or whatever we agree to call this substance—I believe it saw me coming and hastily abandoned the heart I removed for something else that could contain it.”
“The heart you removed,” I repeated slowly. I went cold when I caught up with him. “Oh, shit.” Shit, shit, shit. My heart started pounding like a bass drum in my chest. “We have to get back there. Now.”
“We should call Dulcie and Casey,” he said. “There was no fire or red explosive light because it did not lack stability. I believe the one we left in your driveway has more than just one heart.”
FOURTEEN
Dulcie
“Okay,” I said, “great. Thanks. We’ll be waiting here.”
I hung up and sighed, staring at the blank black screen on my phone. My hand was shaking, as well as the rest of me from the rush of adrenaline or hunger pangs or possibly, something screwy in my blood. I hoped I was just hungry. The Feds and all their friends would be here in ten minutes, and a debriefing wasn’t exactly the best time to have a magic meltdown.
“Who was that?” asked Casey.
“Agent Madsen,” I said. “Different division, I think, calling for the the Cliff’s Notes version of what happened.”
“Got it.” he paused.
“So, everything good?”
I snorted. “Good? Are you kidding?”
“You know,” he said, “as far as good can be here.”
I shrugged and nodded. “Well, they’re on their way. I told them the basics, but they’ll want a more detailed story when they get here. I think they believe me, for whatever that’s worth.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
Of course it wasn’t. “I’m fine,” I said maybe a little too quickly.
Casey quirked a brow at me. “Fine and good are two very different things.”
“Are they?”
“Sam says they are. And for the record, so do I.” Casey shifted in his seat, wincing as he lifted his arm to rest it on the counter. The bandages were soaked with blood, but Sam would be back soon, and I didn’t trust myself to change them properly. After the night I was having, I feared I’d smell his blood and drink him dry before I could resist the urge. I looked at the carpet and scuffed it with the heel of my shoe.
There was blood on my laces. Lots of it.
“Well,” I said absently, “Sam’s not usually wrong.”
“In my experience, she’s never wrong,” said Casey, smiling.
“So you two are doing fine?” I asked, before he could ask again how I was doing. Casey was a sweet guy, and I was really happy for Sam, but right now, any pity from either of them would have been most unappreciated. I already felt small and powerless, I didn’t need another well-meaning friend to put me in the panicked-little-kid box.
“We’re fine,” he said.
“Fine’s not… oh, fuck you,” I said, but I kept smiling.
“See?”
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. I’m still sticking with “fine,” though. “Good” wasn’t a word I thought I’d be able to use again for a very long time. Not referring to myself, anyway. “But seriously, are you guys happy?”
“Very,” he said. His smile got a little wider, he sat up a little straighter, and his arm didn’t seem to hurt him so much. The whole day seemed to melt away as I spent a long minute staring at his face, imagining him looking at Sam with those big, blue, puppy-dog eyes. It was a refreshing, uplifting thought, better than I’d conceived for a while. In the back of my heart, it stung me too. As unexpected as a bee sting. Casey’s face shimmered, and for a second, I saw Knight sitting there with his arm wrapped up in gauze, shirtless, and staring at me with the glowing eyes that proved I was strong enough to be his mate. I remembered when he claimed me, what it felt like to be taken and bound to somebody after receiving the cosmic confirmation that our relationship could work. The thought made me nauseous the way lost precious things do, and I got really close to crying. My eyes watered, primed for the slightest signal and a little whimper or even a hiccup could have started the waterworks.
I had a growing hunch that I was becoming a super depressing person. Then I thought that as long as I kept my depression on the inside and didn’t let it show, I’d be fine. And no one would know, right? Only me.
That turned out to be the emotional equivalent of storing gasoline and matches with fireworks in the same small, poorly ventilated room—but I never claimed I was good at this.
So I smiled and replied, “That’s nice to know,” trying to keep my smile genuine. I could already feel it fading, the stress and fatigue overwhelming me and sapping all of my energy. I suddenly felt like I was being pulled underwater, sinking deep down into the dark where light and air no longer exist and nothing but bubbles come out when you scream.
I leaned against the couch and closed my fists over the plush white fabric, digging my nails into the fake leather despite the chance I might leave permanent imprints, or actually tear it open. My heart felt hollow and as if it were inside my throat, thumping quietly. My lungs expanded and contracted slowly, like breathing through a straw, and my skin felt too tight. My tongue seemed extra large and my ribs began collapsing like a house of cards over my heart, pressing down on it like an elephant crushing a watermelon with its foot…
Hades, Dulcie, what happened to the happy thoughts?
“You good, Dulcie?” Casey asked.
My face twisted into a grimace. I tried to straighten it out but only managed to unfurrow my eyebrows. “No,” I said. “But I’m fine.”
Casey nodded. He rolled his bloody shoulder and we both heard something pop between the joints.
“Oof,” I said, and he nodded, grinding his teeth.
“Yeah,” he said, “that’ll hurt in the morning.”
I snorted. “It doesn’t hurt now?”
“Not even a little,” he said. “So when will the Feds be here?”
“About twenty minutes. There might be a few other people coming first to get a look at the… thing…” I waved my hand vaguely towards the door, and the feathered monstrosity outside it. “But we’re not under attack anymore so it’ll be a hot minute.”
“As opposed to a cold minute?”
“Yeah.”
I looked down at the carpet and Casey tugged on a loose corner of his bandage before tucking it between the folds of gauze. An awkward silence descended, like an incompetent guardian angel, making us cough and wheeze, until our own breathing became an effort.
“So,” I said, hunting for something to talk about that didn’t involve the shambling clusterfuck that had become all of our lives.
“Do you golf?” I asked.
Casey laughed his surprise. “Um… no? Why?”
I sighed and shrugged. “No reason. I just figured most humans like to do that sort of thing.”
“Are you being racist in that query?”
“Probably, but the question still stands.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Okay… No, I don’t. Do you play golf?”
“Does miniature golf count?”
“Sure.”
“No, I don’t.”
He laughed through his nose, smiling and shaking his head. “Does Sam play golf?”
“Not really, but you could probably get her to play miniature golf if you bought her an ice cream first. Or some cotton candy. Anything sweet.”
He nodded. “Duly noted.”
The silence resumed as the ceiling fan in the living room rotated slowly. Every now and then, the little silver chains beneath it would click together and the air conditioner powered on, making the whole house rumble softly, like a snoring bear.
“Has she texted you?” I asked.
“No,” said Casey. “But I’m sure she’s fine. Bram and Quillan are with her.”
“Quillan?” I asked, obviously surprised. I didn’t realize Sam called him. I thought she was talking to Bram.
“Yeah, Sam asked him to come. She didn’t want Knight…” He cleared his throat. “She called Quillan to help her look at something Bram found.”
The lie hung in the air like a bad smell, but I figured out why. Sam didn’t want to bring Knight here and put us in the same room together. She also didn’t want to leave him alone. Knight would have hated the idea of having to be chaperoned and I wasn’t sure how that was going over. If it was going over. If they’d been able to find Knight. If he wasn’t already dead...
Knight’s not dead, I swore to myself. Instead, I made myself think about the exchange Bram and Knight and Quillan would be having right about now. Somehow, and I wasn’t sure how, the thought brought a smile to my face.
I wondered what they’d choose to fight about first.
Me, probably, I guessed.
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Did you ever meet Quillan?”
“No.”
I paused. “And there’s still nothing from Knight?”
Casey shook his head. “He’s not at the office and not at his house. But I’ve got people looking everywhere; don’t worry.”
I swallowed hard as a fresh wave of panic started up again in my gut. I had to take a few deep breaths to calm down. Not that my breathing did all that much. I nodded, kneading the stuffing in the couch with my thumb and forefinger, pulling it
out and flattening it. “Yeah, right. Cool. Thanks, I guess?”
“I’m sorry. I know this is weird for you.”
I nodded again. “Maybe he’s just out for a walk,” I said, deliberately ignoring his comment. “Or a ride.”
“This late? Does he regularly do that?”
“I don’t know, maybe.” Maybe not. When Knight was stressed, he worked. He didn’t go roaming through the city like a depressed ghost, and he never rode anywhere just for the hell of it, not unless he was with me.
Or somebody else, I thought. Maybe he had a new riding buddy I didn’t know about. I imagined someone on the back of his motorcycle, her arms wrapped around him, laughing as the wind whipped her hair around her face. I had to stifle the urge to throw up.
Don’t be stupid, Knight wouldn’t do that. He didn’t replace me when I broke up with him before, and that was for much less valid reasons. There was no way he’d do it now, no way at all. Maybe. Probably. But what if…?
Hades, I hated my brain for its incessant thoughts sometimes.
“He’s fine,” said Casey. “Knight can take care of himself.”
I remembered him writhing underneath Meg and I clenched my teeth, thinking, Oh, can he?
Casey’s phone rang and I jumped before a startled, high-pitched whine came out of me, originating deep down in the pit of my stomach. “Sorry,” I said.
Casey smiled reassuringly and answered his phone. He really was an attractive guy, not so different from Knight. Piercing blue eyes, square jaw, and strong arms corded with muscle over more muscle—which made sense, given the kinds of creatures he was now obligated to wrangle. He wore glasses, and the square black frames hung crookedly on his nose, held together only by a strip of blue painter’s tape. He seemed almost bookish at first glance, nerdy even. And he was also what every nerdy guy in the world dreamed of becoming—big enough to scare the bejeesus out of anyone stupid enough to give him any shit.
What Screams May Come Page 17