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I shake my head, trying to clear the fog of hysteria closing in on me. I have to focus. I have to find some way to save him. I steal a glance over my shoulder at the blood dribbling from the side of Callum’s skull. Someone shot him in the head. But who? And from where?
On instinct, I curl my body around Kain’s, no matter how useless it might be. If someone is going to try to finish him off, they’ll have to get through me first.
Seconds pass, then minutes, but no more shots ring out. I relax for a heartbeat, and that’s when movement catches the corner of my eye. There. By the tree line. Something—someone charging toward me in a full sprint.
I’m about to hurl some baseless threat their way, but then the light catches the side of that pitch-black oval, and it dies in my throat.
“Ghost,” I breathe, fighting the urge to rub my eyes and make sure that’s really him. How is he here? Why is he here?
“Is he still breathing?” he asks, the question coming between short bursts of breath.
I nod, not having the heart to check and make sure that’s still the case. “I think so.”
That oval nods, and he crouches down, slinging a backpack I hadn’t noticed onto the ground in front of Kain. Ghost pulls out a pack with a red cross on the front and rifles through the contents.
“Here.” He tosses a large square of packing gauze onto Kain’s chest, and I give him a seething glare. “What? He’s got five in the chest. A little gauze isn’t going to do anything.”
A feral urge to claw his eyes out takes hold, but I push it down. There are more important battles to face right now.
On autopilot, I pack the gauze into the wounds, not bothering to think about how little this will do for him now. It’ll hold for now. Until we get him to someone who can help.
I jump when Ghost places a hand on my shoulder. I can’t see his expression, but his energy is almost… sympathetic. It’s awkward, and that gloved hand still feels like snakeskin against my arm, but I’m grateful.
“What-what are we going to do now?” I whisper, my mind screaming that I don’t want to know the answer. Even with Ghost’s help, there’s no way we can move a man of Kain’s size, not without doing more damage to his failing body.
“Ghost?” I turn to him, numb to the tears falling down my face. “He has to live. I don’t know what I’ll do if he—”
The hand tightens on my shoulder. “It’s all been arranged. Just a little longer.”
As soon as the last word crackles from the mask, another sound pricks my ears. An engine. Then tires against a gravel road, growing louder by the second.
I raise my brows with a silent question, but Ghost doesn’t have to speak because a moment later, a massive black pickup truck swings into the driveway. The tires screech, leaving twin black lines on the freshly paved driveway as it barrels toward us. It stops so close that I can see my reflection in the obsidian paint, and if I wasn’t holding Kain’s head in my lab, I might have recoiled from the sight alone.
“Fuck, Orion. Cut it any closer?” Ghost seethes, slamming his palm on top of the hood. “Get out here and help me get him in the bed.”
A lean, dark-haired boy jumps from the cabin, his eyes rolling heavily. Wordlessly, he grabs a large blue tarp from the bed and lays it on the pavement next to Kain’s body. I shift to the top of his head, supporting his neck while Ghost and Orion shift the rest of him onto the makeshift stretcher.
“Get in the bed. I need you to help us slide him in.” The black oval nods in the direction of the truck bed, and I don’t think twice as I clamber over the side. We manage to get him in without too many bumps, and I crawl back up to his head, holding him in my lap like before.
Orion gives me a curious look. “You shouldn’t ride in the—” His voice cuts off at the feral glint in my eye, and Ghost just shakes his head at the boy.
“You’re not getting her away from him. If she falls out of the back, it is what it is.” A shrug, and Ghost turns, sliding into the driver’s seat with a wave for the younger to follow.
Orion spares me one last glance. “Ghost drives like a maniac, so hold on tight, okay?”
My throat bobs, but I give a steely nod. “Where are we going?”
Orion doesn’t bother answering. He merely shrugs and hops into the passenger side. I look down at Kain’s face, practically gray with the amount of blood he’s lost.
Wherever we’re headed, I hope it’s close. I don’t know how much longer he can hold on.
The drive is short. Short and treacherous.
As soon as we turn onto the main road, Ghost speeds in the opposite direction of the city. At first, I think we might be heading to the small emergency room just outside the county line, but then he veers into a small clearing of the forest just off the highway and starts barreling deep into the brush.
There is no road, nothing except a set of overgrown tire tracks to signal there is a way through at all. Just when I suspect Ghost is bringing us out here to dispose of us, the tree line breaks, giving way to a circular clearing with a four-walled structure in the center.
Ghost pulls to a stop outside a termite-rotted porch, and I take a minute to survey what I now realize is some kind of bunker. Its hickory siding is dilapidated, held together mostly by the tendrils of the vines covering the majority of the structure. What was once a window is crusted and fogged so much you can’t see through. Although, seeing as this is someone’s secret hideaway, that might be by design.
