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We’d made it. Holy shit.
I doubled over to catch my breath. The pain in my lungs told me the moment was real—safe. We were safe.
“You okay there, Flash?” I stood up and met Val’s grin.
God, I wanted to kiss him.
I was still smiling when the street grew a sun.
A fierce white ball bloomed behind Val. Heat fluttered my clothes, my face, my skin. Ashes and shreds of material whirled and scuttled past.
Bomb.
I staggered as Val shoved me sideways into an alley where I fell, crashing to my hands and knees in the alcove of a doorway and grazing skin. More pain. Still Real.
No.
I looked up, Val’s mouth was moving, he was screaming something, but my ears only rang—the light drowned out everything.
The glare intensified and then it ate Val, snapped him into its jaws until all I could see was a shadowed blur spinning and flying down the alley.
Everything stopped in the silence that followed—the world. Time.
Slowly, the sirens roused me.
I let them pick me up and carry me like a doll into the back of the ambulance. My lungs hurt as the paramedics fed me oxygen but the rest of me had gone numb. I had nothing left.
I watched as they worked on Val. A quiet swarm of desperation as they moved about their work. He was nothing but a husk.
Bloody.
Broken.
Burnt.
I read their lips when they shouted that he was coding.
The little teddy bear lay across my knees, some fur had melted, but mostly the critter was intact. It’d flown from his jacket and landed yards away. Absentmindedly, I patted it.
He’d saved me, pushed me to safety. The buildings had shielded me. I was alive. I’d survived.
Not again.
I was tired of this game.
“Live. You have to live.” A bump in the road rattled my voice loose in my throat. “Bastards don’t get to die.”
CHAPTER39
Zara
The hospital was,like most hospitals, a maze of people doing their jobs while the lost visited their loved ones—everyone in their own worlds, because illness tended to narrow your focus. Even the caregivers followed well-worn paths.
No one bothered me as I sat in Val’s room—I’d said partners, they’d assumed fiancé. They’d contacted no other family; I was beginning to wonder if the name and ID he’d had were real.
For two days I’d split my time between a cheap hotel room and here. The news had called the bomb another terrorist attack. Some people interviewed on the news mentioned a couple warning about the bomb, but nobody seemed to agree what they looked like, all thanks to the panic and fear. I got that; I understood what fear looked like, tasted like, smelled like. I felt it in here, in the waiting.
Neme kept me company, as did the remaining faery. The red wolf lay in a quiet corner of the room and watched. The creature was blurry in my eyes and a little transparent. That I could see them at all was inexplicable. If there was something in the C’s memories that would explain it, I didn’t look. I was more focused on finding something, the smallest thread of anything that could help Val.
