Page 50 of Obey

I WAS NUMB WITH SHOCK and horror when Mandy reached me and grabbed my hand. She started yanking me forward like her life depended on it, but I resisted, thinking that nothing could be important anymore now that Knight was gone. Nothing had any meaning. No place was safe.

Nothing had any meaning.

Then I realized that she was talking to me. She’d turned back to me, her eyes intense and her mouth moving as she shouted something. I fought as hard as I could to get my brain to come out of the fog into which it had descended. If Mandy needed something from me, if she had something to tell me, I should probably make an effort to pay attention. But my ears didn’t seem to want to work. I couldn’t remember how to turn them on. Couldn’t remember how to use them.

Damn, were they broken? Had something happened to me in the blast?

Then the world started moving again and the sound came back on, all at once. I shook with the shock of suddenly hearing again, and for a moment, I couldn’t separate Mandy’s voice from any of the other noise.

Then I heard her shouting at me.

“Saraya!” she screamed. “Come this way! Saraya!”

“What?” I asked, dazed and confused. “What do you mean? Knight, he’s—”

“He’s there!” she screamed, pointing back toward the clubhouse. “He’s there!”

What?”

I looked to where she was pointing, confused. The last time I’d seen Knight he’d been in the middle of the street and heading right for me. The clubhouse was on the other side of the street, and far from where he’d been. It was at least five hundred feet from where I’d been crouching.

What the hell was Mandy talking about? Knight was there?

How?

I let her jerk me forward, and then jerk me again, and soon we were running to where she was pointing, both of us sprinting off the street and toward the clubhouse that had been their home for so long.

I kept my eyes on the spot ahead of us but I couldn’t see what she was talking about. I saw several cars lined up against the sidewalk and a number of bikes, most of them still in one piece but dented and scratched from everything that had been going on.

Not that it matters, I told myself firmly. Who gave a single fuck about the bikes and what kind of shape they were in?

Where the hell was Knight in all that mess?

Then I saw him. Twisted and crammed in between two of the bikes like some giant had picked him up and thrown him there, and he’d come down broken.

Oh, my goodness.

My pace increased and my heart started to sing, and then cry. His eyes were closed and his face was completely still, and I couldn’t tell from here whether he was alive or not. He was there, yes, and that meant there was a chance. He wasn’t just vaporized like I’d thought he was.

He wasn’t a smear on the concrete like Devil.

But he was so twisted and damaged, the clothes on his body burned away and his skin red and blistered underneath, that I didn’t know how he would have survived it, either.

“Knight,” I gasped. “Dammit, Knight.”

Mandy ran faster as well, her steps matching mine blow for blow as we raced toward the man we loved—her as a friend and me as the partner of my heart. We ran in tandem like we’d somehow planned it, our eyes on the twisted and broken man tossed in among the bikes like they were standing sentry around him until we could get him to safety.

It was poetic and beautiful, if you were looking at it that way, and I resolved to tell him that the bikes had stood around him like guards when he needed them. If he was still alive.

If he survived for long enough for me to tell him anything at all.

I got close enough to get down to the ground near him and slid on my knees until I was right next to him. “Knight,” I breathed, laying a gentle hand on his forehead. “Please be alive.”

It was both a plea and a demand. A fervent command to still be with me.

I bent and put my forehead to his. “Please,” I moaned. “Don’t leave me. I can’t live without you.”

I closed my eyes and tried to send him all the life in my body. Everything good, everything breathing and feeling and loving. I sent him every piece of my soul, praying that it would be enough. Though he was so twisted and burnt that I didn’t think it could be.