Page 55 of Obey

“You’ve been causing trouble, I see,” she said, pulling herself up and trying to look stern. It was awfully hard for her to do, considering she had tears running down her face and couldn’t seem to stop smiling. But she made a go at it. “In here acting like you don’t need the medical equipment anymore.”

She gestured to the machines next to me and the arm that no longer had an IV in it, and lifted an eyebrow.

“Where, exactly, did you think you were going to go?”

I reached out and pulled her back against my chest. “To find you,” I muttered. “No one would tell me where you were.”

I felt her soft huff of air. “Probably because you’ve been asleep for two days and they wanted to ask how you were first,” she noted.

“Hard to ask when he wouldn’t let us get two words in,” Mandy broke in. “He was so busy shouting about you that he wouldn’t have heard us even if we told him where you were.”

At that, Saraya laughed outright and sat up again. “You always did think you needed to be in charge of everything.”

“Of course I do,” I said, surprised. “I’m the president. Now tell me what’s going on. What happened back there?”

She gave me a long look, like she was wondering whether I was actually ready to hear it, and I frowned. Of course I was ready to hear it. I needed to know what had happened so I could plan for the next steps.

I needed to be ready to protect my people.

But then she started talking and I forgot about anything else. She talked about the fight with Devil—which I now started to remember more fully—and then the explosion.

“I remember that part,” I said. “I saw him hold the pin up and I knew exactly what he was doing. I turned to run. All I could think of was getting to you, protecting you. But I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I knew I didn’t have enough time.”

Her eyes filled with new tears at that and she reached out and brushed my cheek softly. “You didn’t make it,” she said. “The world exploded and I went to the ground, trying to protect myself. It was so hot I thought the skin was melting off my bones. I thought I was dead for sure. And then when I stood up and couldn’t see you where you’d last been, I was positive that you’d died and left me behind.”

I reached my one good hand up and brushed the hair off her face. “And when I woke up here and you didn’t come in with everyone else, I thought the same of you.”

We just stared at each other then, a million words and feelings flowing between us. The knowledge that we had both thought we’d lost the other, that we’d both thought the other had gone on without us. The pain and desolation that had brought raining down on our hearts.

The knowledge that we were both still alive, and still together.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Not by a long shot.

“What happened then?” I asked.

Saraya’s eyes slanted to the side. “Mandy and Gem found you, all tangled up with some of the bikes. You’d been thrown there by the explosion and the bikes were standing guard around you, like they’d set out specifically to protect you. We didn’t know how bad you were but we knew you were breathing, so we got you into a car to get you to the closest hospital. They patched you up... but we knew we couldn’t stay.”

Of course they couldn’t. The cops would have been all over that place in no time flat, and they would have arrested all of us for the war. Despite the fact that their own people had helped to initiate it.

She saw my face as I registered the truth of the matter, and nodded. “We had to get out of there. They didn’t want to check you back out again, but we gave them some... motivation.” A quick smile flitted across her face, and I wondered whether that ‘motivation’ had been money or a weapon.

Not that it mattered.

They’d stuffed me into the car again, she said, and ran for the border. They’d needed to get far enough away that our local cops wouldn’t follow us, and with luck, wouldn’t even know where we’d gone. They’d left orders to destroy the clubhouse and everything left in it and the Banshees had scattered into the wind. Gone into hiding as outlaws.

And, I hoped, managed to start setting up new lives for themselves.

Speaking of which...

“So what happens now?” I asked. “What are we going to do?”

This time, her grin was all joy and excitement, her eyes shining and her hands twisting together with suppressed energy. “Now,” she whispered, “we get to start over again. We get to stop running and fighting and worrying that we’ll die at any moment, and start actually living. I think the ‘what happens now’ is a long story, my love. But we have all the time in the world to get to tell it.”

My heart started to sing at the thought of it. All the time in the world. No more running or shooting or planning the next move.

A normal life. A normal life with the woman I loved.

“Where are we?” I asked, finally putting voice to the question I maybe should have asked first.