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“Hang on, Eilahn.” I grabbed the couch throw and pressed it to her chest to try and stop the bleeding. “You’re gonna be fine. I’ll call an ambulance, and you’re gonna be fine!” I fumbled my phone out of my pocket but her hand seized my wrist.
“No. No time for that,” she rasped, and my gut clenched at the bubbles of blood in her mouth.
“No, no, no, it’s just blood,” I gabbled. “If it was fatal you’d be…you’d be leaving.”
She gave me a wavering smile. “It is coming. I can sense it. I am sorry I cannot protect you in what is to come.”
“I’ll summon you back,” I said fiercely. “You can’t get out of this that easily!”
She gave a small nod. “It will take time before I return to my world. But when I do, I will find you. You will not get rid of me so easily, my friend.” Her grip loosened on my wrist, and her arm dropped to her side.
“Stand back, Kara,” Eilahn whispered, then her head sagged to the floor. I looked down to see that the bleeding had stopped, and light was beginning to stream from the two punctures. I retreated a couple of feet, breathing raggedly as the light increased to near-blinding levels. A few seconds later a ripping crack filled the room, and she was gone—even the blood. Nothing left but a smell of sulfur and ozone and a faintly discolored patch on the carpet.
I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at that dark patch, but it was probably only seconds later that Ryan burst in, gun at the ready, gaze sweeping the room.
“He’s gone,” I said. I swallowed. “Eilahn’s gone too.”
A heartbeat later I heard the sound of splintering wood from the back door, and then Zack was there as well. His eyes went to the stain then widened. “Fucking hell.”
“What happened, Kara?” Ryan asked. “Are you all right?”
“What happened to you?” I demanded, rounding on him. “Didn’t you hear us? What happened? He shot her! She’s gone!” I was shouting, and the next thing I knew he’d holstered his gun and had grabbed me by the shoulders.
“We didn’t hear anything,” he said, face twisted in pain. “The signal grew garbled as soon as you went inside. Zack and I were coming up to the house to abort the mission when suddenly there was some kind of…surge that knocked us flat.” His hands squeezed my shoulders. “I’m sorry. We got here as soon as we could.”
I let out a shuddering breath. “He threw a rock…some kind of…fuck, like an arcane grenade. Made me puke, but she could barely move. He said he needed me alive, but not her.” I fell silent, and when I spoke again my voice shook with anger. “He shot her. Didn’t even hesitate.”
I pulled away from him. “And now we’re going to tear this fucking house apart.”
I took out my rage on the walls, smashing through the drywall in the living room with a sledgehammer I’d found in the garage. As much as I wanted to gut the house into a pile of rubble, my strength gave out before my fury did, and after about ten minutes I let the sledgehammer drop while I panted for breath and swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand.
Ryan leaned the sledge against the wall then drew me into a hug. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice low and rough.
“For what?” I muttered, petulant and depressed. I leaned my head against his chest, listened to the steady thump of his heart.
He let out a soft sigh. “I’m sorry you lost Eilahn. I’m sorry you have to go through all this. I’m sorry you seem to be in constant peril. And I’m sorry I can’t fix it all.”
“It’s okay,” I said, then pulled back and swiped at my eyes again. “Thing is, all that shit sucks, but y’know what the worst part is?” I didn’t wait for him to say anything. “The worst part is that I don’t trust my judgment anymore. I’ve been wrong over and over, and I’ve been wasting time and energy chasing down hunches and suspicions. I even thought Roman was a summoner.” And I’d liked Tracy. Jill was wrong—I wasn’t a hunk magnet. I was a men-who-would-fuck-my-life-up magnet. “And now my stupidity got Eilahn shot.”
“You did what you thought was best,” he said, giving me a chiding scowl. “And you’ve made progress. You found out that Tracy was the summoner, yes? Now, are we going to simply tear this place apart, or do we have some sort of idea of what we might be looking for?”
Straightening my shoulders, I did my best to throw off the cloud of despair. “Anything that might give me an edge in finding him and figuring out what this is all about,” I said, gaze sweeping the living room. “I figure that when he ran away he took his grandparents’ notes or books and stuff.”
“Or maybe he came back for all of that after his dad died,” Zack suggested.
I nodded. “Either way, I want to find any notes or papers or anything that we can. If I know what we’re up against, we might stand a chance of being able to stop it.”
“And you don’t think this unknown thing we’re facing is something nice and tame, I assume.” Ryan’s mouth twisted in a sardonic smile.
“Call me a cynic,” I replied.
We started searching again, this time with a touch less rage. First was a quick search through drawers and closets, but, as I’d expected, Tracy hadn’t left any useful information out where anyone could easily find it. But I’d been on enough search warrants to know that there were a lot of places to hide stuff, especially if the stuff was only papers or a notebook. I let the guys bash walls in, and I focused on pulling every one of his books out of the bookshelf and riffling through the pages.
Two hours later there were holes in all the walls, the books were all over the floors, the mattresses had been slashed, and we were still completely empty-handed. And exhausted.
Ryan looked around as we slouched on what remained of the couch, a slight frown pulling at his mouth. “Sure hope he’s not renting this place. If so, I don’t think he’s getting his deposit back.”
I burst out laughing. “Sucks to be him!” Then I stopped and frowned. “He’s not doing his summonings here. So where the hell is he doing them?” I straightened and looked to Zack. “Ask Jill if she can check the property tax rolls to see if Tracy owns any property in the area.”
