Chapter 38
Death was supposed to be painless. Getting to that stage might be agonizing, but once you actually crossed over, it was supposed to be a peaceful state. An endless sleep. A severing of your cognitive functions; a disconnect from your senses.
Pain was a language. A way for your body to communicate to your brain that something was wrong. Once death set in, it was useless. No one was present to hear the alarm, so it shouldn’t be ringing at all.
Which meant the agony firing through Maya’s body really shouldn’t be there.
Though she felt it all over, it had a primary source. It pulsed from her heart as waves of fire, extending to the very tips of her fingers and toes. A paralyzing sensation that tightened her muscles so much it felt like they were seconds away from tearing.
She couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even open her eyes. All she could do was scream internally, as the harrowing image of Harper’s frightened eyes played on repeat in her head.
Maya had seen her scared before, and even then it was rare. It only happened under specific circumstances. Once the danger had passed and her fight instinct dulled, or when she feared for the safety of the people she loved.
When she’d looked at Maya, pinned under Kieran’s foot, she hadn’t just been scared.
She’d been terrified.
The snow crunched. Someone was approaching. Time was kind of hard to keep track of when every second felt like an eternity of torment, but Maya was fairly sure it had been several minutes since she heard any noise beyond the howling wind.
Harper screaming and yelling. Barked orders and the pop of firearms. Car engines sputtering to life and then fading away.
Now someone was there. Walking towards her. Closer and closer.
“Oh no…” a frail voice said. “No, no, no. This isn’t happening.”
Maya knew that voice. But that didn’t make its presence any less surprising. She’d thought its owner too timid to approach a corpse.
“Okay, don’t panic.” Nell’s voice was trembling. “You can’t panic right now. You have to… have to do something. Anything.”
The footsteps grew rapid. She was walking back and forth, her breathing going shallow despite the self-imposed order of “Stay calm. Just stay calm.”
Maya tried raising her hand. Nothing happened.
A finger, then? Still nothing.
She couldn’t move a muscle, her body feeling more like a cage made of agony than it did a controllable vessel.
She needed to move. She needed to get up and move. Before Kieran fled beyond her reach. Before he acted out that desire she’d sensed the first night she saw him. When he’d pinned Harper against her car and delighted in seeing her struggle.
Her fingers curled into the snow. A movement so slight it probably wasn’t visible, but it didn’t need to be. The monumental effort it took pulled a strained groan from her lips.
The panicked muttering stopped.
“Maya?”
Nell came closer, crouching down, and put her hand on Maya’s shoulder. Her touch felt like it was made of white-hot steel.
“Are you… Are you alive?”
Maya curled her fingers again, producing another pained groan. Nell let out a shaky sigh.
“You’re alive. Thank God, I thought… I thought you were dead.” Her breathing went shallow again. “No, you were dead. He killed you, he… There’s an actual branch sticking out of your back.”
Maya pushed through the agony. When another groan escaped her clenched teeth, she forced it into a word.
“Pull…”
Nell took a sharp breath. “What?”
“Pull… it… out…” Maya managed. Her mind filled with white lights, eating away at her consciousness.
“Oh. Oh, right!” Nell shot to her feet, hurrying around her. She touched the branch, the slight jostling sending pure ruin through Maya’s chest, but it might as well have been a tickle when compared to what followed.
Nell yanked at the branch, pulling it free with a wet squelch. The second the stake was gone, Maya’s eyes flew open, and an airless, silent scream twisted through her throat. She curled in on herself, fingers digging into the snow as her limbs tensed and contorted.
She’d only felt this level of pain once before. When she was freed from that warlock and months of distanced starvation hit her all at once.
A maddening pain. But a passing one this time. With every second, it lessened slightly.
“I’m sorry!” Nell dropped the bloody branch as though it had caught fire. “I didn’t know what to do. I just pulled at it. I should have been more careful.”
“No. You did fine.” Every word was spoken through gritted teeth.
She should be dead. The branch had impaled her right through the heart, which meant she should be dead. There was no way in hell Kieran had missed.
“What do you need?” Nell asked. “Please. Tell me how to help.”
Maya almost couldn’t hear her voice. Her pulse overpowered it, deafening like the boom of a drum.
Maya knew what she needed. But she needed far too much of it for Nell to safely offer.
“Blood,” Maya said. “Blood bags. Lots of them, they’re… they’re in the basement.”
Nell ran off towards the cabin, leaving Maya lying in the snow.
She tried pushing herself into a seated position, but her body hurt too much. Now that the stake was gone, the fiery pain mainly radiated from her shoulder. The silver bullet she’d been shot with hadn’t gone through.
She touched her face, her mouth, her ears. No blood. Other than a few shallow cuts and the injuries to her shoulder and chest, she wasn’t bleeding at all.
But she should be. When vampires were staked, the blood that kept their bodies alive was excreted. It left through the nearest orifice it could find, including your pores.
Maya’s skin was clean. She’d gotten staked and survived it.
She groaned again. Sunlight sensitivity clearly wasn’t the only vampiric weakness she lacked. It just wasn’t one her dear warlock creator had wanted to test on his single successful experiment.
“I got as much as I could carry.” Nell had returned, dropping a pile of bagged blood next to Maya. “There’s a bit more. I can get it if you…”
Maya extended her fangs. When she bit a hole in one of the bags and started gulping down the contents, Nell turned her eyes away, gagging.
If Maya wasn’t desperate for sustenance, she would have done the same. The blood was thick, cold, and tasteless, but her body needed energy to heal her injuries. Or at least dull the pain from them.
By the second bag, the wounds from Kieran’s claws and teeth had closed, but her shoulder still burned, and her chest continued to feel like it was concaved. That second injury might be one only time could fix, and they didn’t have that at the moment.
Maya wiped blood from her mouth. “What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly. Everything happened so fast, and it… They took Harper. And Evie. One of them hit her in the head, and she fell.” Nell’s hands started shaking. “Th-they shot at me.”
Maya sniffed at the air. No blood, other than the dead kind.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. I tripped right when they fired, and then I just stayed down. Maybe they thought I was dead.” She looked at the tracks the pickups had made, hugging herself. “What do we do now?”
The tire tracks were already blowing away. With this wind, they would be gone in minutes. But she didn’t need tracks. Not with the pull aching in her chest.
The wise thing would be to wait for backup. But Natalya was taking her sweet fucking time getting Aleksander’s forces to the cabin, and there were hundreds of miles between here and Chicago.
There wasn’t room for wisdom in this situation.
Maya clenched her jaw. “Where’s my knife?”
Nell looked around the snowy clearing for a few seconds before finding the weapon.
Maya steeled herself. Her shoulder felt like it was on fire.
“I need you to dig the bullet out.”
Nell’s eyes widened. “You need me to do what?”
“I have to go after them. I can’t do that with silver lodged in my shoulder, so I need you to dig it out.”
Nell looked like she was more likely to throw the knife away than assist with that. The air was so thick with fear that it was a wonder she hadn’t just run away from the scene.
Then she crouched next to Maya. “How bad is this going to be?”
“Really bad. Try to work fast.”
Nell pushed aside Maya’s t-shirt, sucking air in through her teeth when she saw the bloody mess that was her shoulder.
“Oh, this fucking sucks,” she mumbled. Maya just had the realization that she’d never heard Nell curse before when the tip of the knife touched the wound and burning pain clawed through her flesh.
She screamed, forcing her body to keep still as Nell worked. Every time either the blade or the bullet moved, it felt like her blood lit on fire.
About a minute later, Nell sat back, holding the switchblade in one hand and the bullet in the other. Her fingers were stained scarlet.
“Good job,” Maya ground out. She pushed herself onto her knees, muscles screaming in protest, and took the bloody knife from Nell’s hand. “Get my jacket. I don’t know how much time we have.”
“Time to do what? Evie and Harper are miles away by now. We don’t even know where they took them.”
Maya touched her bloody chest. “Yes. We do.”
She delivered the outline of the plan she’d come up with, though it was rough to say the least. The storm was dying. When it passed, there would be nothing stopping Kieran from taking Harper far away from here.
Her absence hurt. Hurt deeper than being impaled through the heart. Every minute Harper spent in his clutches was a minute too long. The thought of what he might do to her, or be doing to her, made Maya feel sick.
Nell didn’t interrupt as Maya talked. When she was done, she hurried back to the cabin, returning with Maya’s leather jacket.
“What about me?” Nell asked as Maya stuffed the remaining blood bags into her pockets. “What do I do?”
“You get inside. Do not leave, under any circumstances. I don’t think these wolves will come back, but if they do, that house is your best defense. They won’t be able to get in.”
Maya expected Nell to run away as soon as she heard that. Her shy, quiet demeanor should have had her scurrying off like a startled mouse, but she remained where she was.
“Please find them,” she whispered. “Please bring them back.”
Tears ran down her face. She couldn’t do anything to help here, not directly. All she could do was look at Maya with hope in her big brown eyes and ask her to bring back her family.
It was an impossible guarantee. But Maya would rather die than fail at it.
“I will. I promise.” Maya nodded towards the cabin. “Now get inside.”
Nell wiped her eyes and did as she was told.
As soon as the door closed behind her, Maya turned and ran. She went past the tire tracks, following a more direct path than the one offered by established roads. Pulled along by the incessant tugging in her chest.
The feeling wasn’t a stranger anymore. She’d let it guide her enough times by now that following it was second nature.
It had happened in St. Louis, when Maya had shown up on Harper’s doorstep with no real explanation for how she got there.
In Chicago, when she’d wandered around and found herself at the Lotus, where Harper happened to be.
At the outpost, where being apart from her had transformed a gentle tug into a tearing, as though her heart was slowly being pulled from her chest.
This was similar. Except now she didn’t have to stop herself from giving in to it. She would let this feeling drag her wherever it wanted. Across state lines, countries, and continents.
She would go anywhere if it meant having Harper in her arms again.