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Then it died, like a switch flipped, and the pain, the terrible burning of it, fell to a pulsing ache. His pulse, she thought, one she felt through his arm.
“Do you see me?” She leaned in close. When he nodded, pale, breathless, she laid a hand on his sweat-slicked face. “I see you, brother. The light in you is mortal and human and stronger than any dark. Give him the healing potion, Mom.”
Weeping, Lana lifted his head, brought the vial to his lips. “Drink now, my baby. My boy.”
“Am I moving my fingers? I can’t tell.”
“You have to will it,” Fallon told him. “Retrain your mind to work with your arm. It’ll take time, and it may not function as easily or as completely as it used to.”
“I’ll make it work.” He stared down, obviously puzzled by the leather that covered him from fingertip to elbow like skin. “Is it like a cast?”
“No.”
He looked at Fallon with eyes going a little goofy from the potion. “I got a leather arm now? Cool.”
“Yeah, cool. Sleep now.” Fallon put him under. “We close the circle, then—”
Lana, eyes still streaming, reached out across her sleeping son to grip her daughter’s hand. “I’ve never seen such power. In all I’ve seen, all I’ve known, I’ve never seen anything like what you were able to do. You were hurting him, hurting yourself, and I tried to stop you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. The lack of faith, even just for that second, could have cost him. It won’t ever happen again. I need to stay with him.”
“We’ll move him into the HQ. You can help him work on getting movement back. He’ll get pissy about it, so better you than me.”
“I’m staying, too,” Ethan said. “I can help with the animals, with Colin.”
They closed the circle, gathered the tools. When Hannah as medical, Starr as guard, helped take him to the HQ, Fallon sat on the ramp of the mobile.
“It’s clear as day now,” Jonah said. “It got clearer and clearer during the spell. Life. I think it depended on you, and Colin, on all of you being able to do what you did, so it got clearer and clearer. Then there’s that.”
At his gesture, she looked at the statue of the god overlooking the ice rink. Where the war and black magicks had turned it into a fanged demon, coated the gold with oily ash, Prometheus shined again.
The gods, Fallon thought, had heard, and answered.
He laid a hand on her shoulder. “You look like you could use a little magick elixir, too.” He went into the mobile, came out with a flask. “Not your mother’s elixir, but it can’t hurt.”
She took it, sipped whiskey, let out a breath.
A golden god, a rink of ice, a pulse in an arm.
Her head hammered with the aftershocks of the spell.
“I need to get word to my father, to Travis that he was hurt, but he’s okay.”
“We’ll do that.” But he sat beside her, put an arm around her shoulders.
Though it didn’t surprise Jonah, it did her when she pressed her face against him and wept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Colin, being Colin, did get pissy, especially when Fallon refused to let him back into the field of battle. He managed, after two days, to wiggle his fingers, and after a week to make a loose fist.
Colin figured that was good enough. Fallon disagreed.
“It’s not my sword arm anyway,” he argued, stomping around the room so the beads dangling from his warrior’s braid clicked and clacked together. “What’s the BFD?”
Fallon, marking the latest map, nearly regretted that her brother had recovered enough to be on his feet—and hound her.
“You can’t even lift a cup of coffee with your left hand yet.”
“I won’t be drinking coffee. I’m going to die of boredom, and the goddamn war’s going to be over before I’m back in it at this rate.”
“I wish the second part were true.”
He moved, restlessly, wiggling, wiggling, wiggling the leather fingers of his hand. “We’ve taken Queens, Brooklyn, most of lower Manhattan, all of Midtown.”
“We’ve lost fifteen hundred men, and have another three hundred, including you, medically unfit for duty. We’ve yet to be able to advance above what was Fifty-eighth Street on the west side.”
He paced, now working, working, working the fingers of his restored arm into a fist. “We need to take Central Park. It’s their last real stronghold. Once we do, they’re broken here.”
“I’m aware. I’m working on it. Get battle-ready, Colin, because when we’re secure here, I want you to take a thousand troops and root the enemy out of Pennsylvania.”
He stopped pacing, flexing, scowling, turned to stare at her. “The whole state?”
“That’s right. They’re scattered there, but still a presence. Run them to ground. Vivienne’s troops are going into upstate New York, I’m going to have Mick move into Georgia.”
She gestured him over, showing him her plans on the maps—and intrigued him enough he stopped bitching.
She turned when Arlys and Fred came in.
“I didn’t think you were coming until later,” she said to Arlys. “I didn’t know you were coming at all, Fred.”
“I wanted to see. I’ve got friends riding herd on my herd until tomorrow.” Fred slipped a hand into Arlys’s.
“I can’t believe it’s still here. So much of it’s still here. Even after they got word back to us, I didn’t believe it.” Arlys walked to the window, pressed a hand to the glass. “So much gone, but so much here, too.”
“I didn’t want you to come until I felt we’d secured enough, but Mom kept pleading your case. She knows how much it means to you. She knows what both of you did here.”
“Not alone,” Arlys added. “Jim, Carol, Steve. They could have left, but they stayed. God, I wish we knew what happened to them.”
“They got out.” Fred moved up to slip her arm around Arlys’s waist so they stood at the windows, heads tipped toward each other.
“God, I hope so.”
“I just know they did. I just know they found a way.”
Comforted, Arlys drew Fred with her into the newsroom. “When I first started working here, it was a high point of my life. And I was, by God, going to work my way to the anchor desk.”
“You did,” Fred reminded her.
“Not the way I imagined.” She walked to it now, to where she’d sat for that final broadcast.
They’d cleaned it, she thought as she skimmed her fingers over it. But she could still see the blood and gore, still feel the way that blood had rained warm on her face when Bob, poor Bob, had chosen despair and madness and death.
Had that been what had woken her up? she wondered. Had that warm slap of blood reminded her to dig for the courage to do her job?
To tell the truth.
She looked out now, into the eye of the camera. It was still her job.
“I want to broadcast your victory from here, Fallon, from this same desk, in this same newsroom. I want to tell whoever in the world we can reach we’ve reclaimed New York.”
“Maybe Jim and Carol and Steve will hear it.”
With a firm nod, Arlys took Fred’s hand again. “Or T.J. or Noah, or someone who worked in that shop in Hoboken where you left the thank-you note. We can bring Chuck up—he should be part of it, and he can figure out how to make it work.”
“I can help write the copy.” Fred’s wings peeked out to flutter.
“Damn straight. When you’re ready to declare victory, Fallon, I want to report it. You and me and Chuck, Fred. The three of us are going to close that circle. Then we’ll turn this place, and the reporting done from here, over to someone else. Because we’re New Hope now.”
It was, Fallon thought, exactly what she’d hoped to hear. “Mom said you would. You’re earlier than I thought—and like I said, I didn’t know Fred was coming. Will and Theo are going to be here in about an hour. I can have Eddie come in, too.”
