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When I returned a few minutes later, I was ready…again.
His eyes bulged and Jacob whimpered as I swung my tenth-century,Kissaki-morohatanto knife high. It was poised above his heart, and I gripped a pair of heavy-duty garden secateurs in my left hand, in reserve.
“You’d better not hurt my knife, you asshole.” I plunged it downward.
* * *
CASSIUS
Groaning, I sat up, aware of the doctor beside me but too overwhelmed to care. I buried my face in my hands, rocking, acclimatizing to an immense pain that bored through me in so many places on my body. The pain pulsed and expanded, shrank, shrank some more. A moment later, the pain was gone.
Instead, I felt whole yet surreal—distorted in some way.
“What the fuck?” I addressed that partly to myself and my hands, partly to the doctor. From what I could see of the floor, my eyesight was going in and out of focus like a badly adjusted camera. My skin prickled all the way to inside my head. I groaned again and gulped back nausea.
“Good. It worked on you. Her. I don’t know. The guy is dying,” he whispered those last words, then stood and took two long paces. Efficient as a robot, he ripped away four zip ties from anchor points on a table, then pulled a bloodied body off the table to the floor. It hit with a dull thud and a sharper noise as the head connected. Was that Jacob?
I’d been shot? Hadn’t I? I checked my chest, patting it, and found holes where the bullets had entered cloth…and my blood, but my skin beneath was perfect and painless. “He shot me?”
“This one did.” Doc hauled a weakly protesting guard onto the table and began to ruthlessly tie him down. Blood dripped from the table, leaking in drizzles, leaving a pool below.
I, too, was sitting in thick smears of blood. “Fuck this.”
The doctor was busy, maybe he needed help doing this…whatever.
What was he doing? Beneath the table, far across the other side, my eyesight finally decided to show me Charity on her back, with the knife sticking up from her chest and shaking as she breathed.
“Oh fuck. Not you too.” I rose and stagger-sprawled her way, almost tripped.
“Bring her to me, gently. I don’t know if this will work.” His voice was torn, and almost a sob. It was not a sound I’d ever heard the doctor make.
I reached her and went to one knee and scooped her up. My balance was improving. I was careful not to topple and drop her. I turned to go to the doctor. He’d brought some antique knife high, looked ready to plunge it into the guard.
“Bring her! Leave her near me, Cassius. Unless you prefer to let her die?” He lowered the knife a tad, hand shaking. His forehead was corrugated with apprehension and maybe doubt.
“That’s a real question?” I asked as I approached.
“A real urgent one. I gave Jacob’s life energy to you. This man is for her, but this dooms you both, to forever needing more.”
“Really?” More deaths. More victims like these bastards. I placed Charity on the floor. Her eyes were closed, and she was unconscious, or near to it. Did I have the power, the right to make this decision?
“She stabbed herself to distract the guards,” he explained. “It’s how I got to where we are. She knew what I could do.” And yet still the doctor looked as if he thought he had one foot in Hell.
“She trusted you to save her. She wanted to save us all.” I locked eyes with the doctor. “Do it.”
“Run to the wall. Don’t speak at all. Don’t move until I say to.”
I nodded and ran, kept myself facing the huge window of angels and demons this room seemed named for. The symbolism was so perfectly apt.
I heard the thud as the knife met flesh.
I really hoped I was right.
32
CHARITY
My awakening was nothing like an awakening should be.
