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Those were the doctor’s words again, and I turned to listen.
“Not her. I need your special girl for the ritual.” Jacob was pointing at me.
Oh shit.
Cassius turned and lunged for the Betrayer. A shot erupted from his gun and went past Cassius’s ear, judging by how he’d deflected the barrel. He somehow ripped the gun from the man’s hand, eliciting a scream as his hand broke. Cassius shot Betrayer, and he turned…
And the other two guards gunned him down. The gun skidded across the floor.
Shit… Again.
Open-mouthed, my heart crying out, I stared at my lover, bleeding on the floor in a twisted heap. He was breathing, but those were his last ragged breaths, and everyone in the room knew it.
“Not him either,” Jacob added. “Sorry.”
I reached over and yanked the dagger from the woman’s chest, then I marched toward the nearest guard, Guard One.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Jacob sounded exasperated. “Get that off her but do not injure her, much.”
“You can’t use her. You don’t need to. Anyone will do.” My doctor sounded desperate.
“Sorry. I know you killed rarely and only selected victims. I ran the data through a computer looking for matches, reasons, similarities.”
“I killed killers.”
“Really? Half were women.”
Mistakes were the mother of mayhem. No idea where that came from, but I knew Jacob had made one. I’d known it since I realized that a ritual was the reason for the doctor’s immortality. The reason I knew? Trust. The big badTword.
By then the guard had reached me, and I’d reached him, because I’d run. It wasn’t easy disarming someone with a knife unless you had protective gear or a gun. I knew this.
How confident was this man? I thought I had a good hunch as to how this would play out.
I slashed at him; he leaped back. Then he raised the gun and shot me in the upper leg. The kick from that, the agony blew through me.Fuck.I hated being proven right was my thought as I spun with my leg collapsing, and I fell.
I’d always been a determined woman. Even as I heard the doctor’s anguished, “No!” I reversed the dagger.Don’t move your hand! Don’t!My chest hit the dagger and it sank in, my full body weight slamming me downward onto the point. Gravity sucks.
I screamed. I rolled, my mouth torn into the shape of pain, my arms out as if in plea to some unknown god, and I was hearing Jacob’s “No!”
There were gunshots: four of. My view was that of unfocussed floor, and then a wave of nothing came creeping into my mind to silence me.
My last thoughts were of hope:he was a soldier, once, or a hundred times. If not, if I were wrong, I’d fail. If this was death, perhaps I deserved it for my mistake.
I should have looked.
31
DOCTOR H. ROMANUS
As soon as Charity turned the dagger on herself, I knew what she was doing. Forewarned, I was ready, or readier than they were. That millisecond of uncertainty when she was shot and fell and stabbed herself, when Jacob launched himself upright, shoutingno, because his sacrifice was dying—it was enough. The guards looked to her then to Jacob, while I dropped to my knees and scooped up the gun dropped by my bastard guard.
My little Charity had banked on me remaining calm and being able to do this, to shoot methodically when my whole world lay burning at my feet, with Cassius bleeding out, with her sobbing in agony and rocking on the floor with a knife in her chest.
First, I shot the guard next to her, he’d bent over her, as if to extract that knife. Headshot, chest shot. He was gone, collapsing. I turned, gun arm extended. Three more shots swiftly placed in the guard turning back to me with his gun coming to bear. One to the chest, two more to the leg. I approached them both, carefully but fast.
First was dead, but I kicked his gun away. Second was alive. Jacob was reaching into his jacket.
“Don’t! Hands high!”
