Chapter
6
“Your head,” the boy with elf eyes murmurs as he
puts me into a car. Then, “this is, um, awkward.” He can only get me half in. I
hear his steps moving quickly around the back of the car. He opens the opposite
door and pulls me the rest of the way across the back seat.
“Thank you,” I say. I want to touch the blue glow
around him. This will soothe the pain inside of me. Not pain. Hunger. Great,
gaping hunger. I am shivering, still sweating. The strap of my bra has fallen
to my elbow.
“Do we, uh, have a blanket in the trunk or
something, Tarren?”
“Get in the car.”
I hear sirens. They sound closer than they could
possibly be. Just like I think I can hear the boy’s heart thudding in his
chest, but that can’t be real.
“Yeah, it’s a warm night. She’ll be fine.” The door
by my head closes. I flinch at the sound. After a moment it opens again.
“Seatbelt.” He leans over me, grappling with the
buckle under my back. His heart is a drum.
I hear the whoosh of air in and out of his lungs. I smell him, the sweat
on him, the damp of his clothes. Glowing spirals of blue cloak his body like
colored steam. I must touch the color. I am moving my arm, dizzy with even this
effort but desperate. He is so close. My hands grow hot. Something is happening
to them. The skin of my palms is puckering, splitting open.
“There we go.” The boy is gone. The door closes. I
keep reaching up hoping to catch any lingering wisps of the glow. The skin
furls back over my palm, seaming itself up into a dark X across the center. The
car is moving. Every breath smells like blood. I’m giggling like a maniac, but
only in my head. I shove my hands under my body, because this will somehow
help. I’m still burning to death, by the way.
The driver whispers to himself, “We had him. We had
him.”
The one with the backwards ball cap and elf eyes
says, “Look, we got her; that was the whole point.” He turns to look at the
driver. “We’ll kill Grand some other time.”
The driver doesn’t say anything, but the color
ratchets around him, bright along the edges. I close my eyes, but I can still
feel the skin pulling away from my palms again.
“Your eye is swelling up,” the passenger says.
“I’m fine. You?”
“Ankle. Just twisted it a little. I’ll throw some
ice on it whenever. No cops behind us. We need to switch our plates when we
stop. Ditch the guns too. We left shell casings. Damn shame, though.” The
passenger pulls a gun from his belt, hefts it in his hand. “My guy went through
a lot of trouble to get this baby. Not that you care. Anyone can get Glocks.”
“Put that away,” the driver says. “We’ll cover
cleanup later.”
The passenger turns to stare at me. I watch the
delicate shades of blue pulse around him.
“We should probably get her a shirt,” he says. The
driver doesn’t reply, but his eyes flick up to the rearview mirror when we stop
at a light.
After a while, the elf turns to the driver and
asks, “Is there any way this isn’t going to totally fucking ruin her life?”
I can’t stop shivering. My body jerks, so that I
fall back painfully onto the buckle. The fire is starting to separate. There’s
the part ripping up my bones and evaporating my blood, but there is something
entirely different lifting out of the flames. This is an exquisite hurt, all
neural and twitchy. It’s hunger, but not like a hunger I’ve ever known before.
This hunger is cutting me wide open with a song, carving out its own channels
in my brain and snuffing out the human parts of me.
I think that I am going to die, and I don’t want
to, except that I do, because Ryan is dead, at least I think he is, but maybe
he isn’t, because he can’t be. He can’t be.
The hum of the car seems so loud, and the passing
street lamps blaze like sudden flares in the night. We leave behind the highway and then the
street lamps and then the other cars. I cry, but these are silent tears, hot by
the time they tip over my chin. We sail through the night for a long while, and
the tears eventually dwindle. All that is left is the hunger growing louder and
louder in my bones.
Eventually, the car stops. The driver gets out. The
door by my head is wrenched open. He grabs my shoulders and pulls. The seatbelt
digs into my hips, and I cry out.
“Damn,” he mutters. He grabs my wrists in one hand
and pins them against the back of the seat while he leans over and undoes my
buckle. The passenger side door opens.
“Jesus, where are we? You gotta piss?”
The driver pulls me roughly out of the car. I hit
the ground and curl my legs into my chest. There is only the hunger and the
pain and the shadow of Ryan lingering behind the trees that edge each side of
the road.
The driver pulls a gun from his waistband, and I am
not afraid. The amber glow is so bright around him that it looks like some sort
of unnatural fire. Everything is fire. I stare at the scar running along his
jaw and recognize him. The enforcer of Avalon levels his gun at me. The blood
stains across his shirt and jeans are already turning dark. In his eyes I see a
cold that I would never be cliché enough to call arctic except that I can’t
think of anything else. There’s a lot of blood on him.
“Tarren, no!”
Pant legs intrude into my visual field.
“She’s infected. We have to do it now while she’s
weak.”
“One shot Tarren. She only got one shot. She’s
like…a hybrid or something.”
“We can’t take the chance.”
“Yes we can, because, uh, because you could use her
in your research. She could be, like, the key. The hybrids are always the key
in, you know, stuff.”
“We’ll take the body back to Lo’s lab.”
“Cold hearted bastard! She’s blood.”
“His blood.”
“Our blood. She’s our blood Tarren.” The elf boy’s
voice has gone harsh. “She’s our family, and you can pretend that you don’t
care about anything anymore, that you’re suffering the weight of the entire
world on your shoulders, but you’re just afraid. Fuck you. I’m not moving.”
“You done?” The gun doesn’t move.
“Yeah.” The elf takes a shaky breath. “I mean no!
She could help us. Think about it.
She’ll get strong. She’ll get fast. She can fight with us. We can…”
“And the hunger?”
My protector turns and looks at me. I can hear how
fast his heart is beating, the faint rush of blood as he clenches his fists.
The light around him swells. So blue with sudden streaks of lavender lashing
across. The song. They act as if they can’t hear the music flowing in hot
torrents all around us.
“We’ll buy her rabbits,” he says finally.
“She’ll lapse and feed on humans.”
“No, she…”
“THEY ALWAYS FEED ON HUMANS.” The enforcer’s voice echoes into the trees.
He pulls in a deep breath. “You know that. She is Grand’s daughter. He’ll come
after her again and by then she’ll be strong. I’ll take care of it. Just get
out of my way.”
“I’m on fire,” I say for no reason. I lift myself
up to my elbows with difficulty. I don’t know which one I want to prevail. A
bullet would be quicker than this slow burn.
“No.” The legs in front of me step a little wider.
“No,” the elf says again. “We’ve crossed a lot of lines, but I’m not going to
let you cross this one. She may feed on humans one day, maybe not. Until she
does, she’s an innocent, and we don’t kill innocent people. Not today. Not
ever. She deserves a chance; I don’t care who the fuck her parents are. If she
crosses over, I’ll kill her myself, but not today.”
The enforcer keeps his gun steady. “Gabe,” he says.
“I’m not moving.” Gabe spreads his arms. “If you’ve
got to kill her, then do it, but I’m sick of this shit. You kill me first,
‘cause killing innocent people is what bad guys do. I’m not a bad guy, and I’d
rather be dead then see you turn into one.”
I hold my hands out in front of me and stare at the
new dark slits running through my palms.
“Am I a monster?” I whisper. “Is that what this
is?”
“No,” Gabe looks at me over his shoulder. “Well,
kinda, but we’re going to help you. We’re family.”
Tarren lowers his gun. A slow descent.
