Chapter 15 #2
My feet leave the ground for half a second.
My shoulder takes my whole body weight against the socket, and I hear it before I feel it—a wet, internal pop, the sound a joint makes when something inside it gives up.
The pain is white. White through my whole body, white at the back of my eyes, white in the hollow of my jaw.
I open my mouth to scream and what comes out is air.
He lifts me by the wrist and my body dangles painfully.
"You think you get to touch me?" His voice is wrecked and there is blood still dripping from his lips, teeth, tongue. "You think they let you in here so you could put your witch hands on a Vasreaux?"
He throws me.
It isn't a throw, exactly. It's a shove sideways, hard, and my back slams into the end-cap of the stack and my head connects with the wood and my skull rings like a struck bell.
The impact knocks the wind from my lungs.
The world shears. I taste copper. I taste my own pulse.
Something warm runs into my eyebrow and then into my eye and I blink and the blink comes back red.
His hand is over my mouth before I can scream.
His other hand wraps around my neck—careful, almost—and he leans in and I see his teeth and I understand, in the half-second before he closes the gap, that I have never properly understood what a vampire can do until this moment.
He is hungry. My magic was somehow able to hurt him. He is going to take that hurt out on me, and he is going to do it as cruelly as possible.
His fangs go in.
Sharp. Deep. Wrong. Then he starts to draw, and the draw is worse.
He pulls. I feel my blood leaving me in the rhythm of his throat working against my skin.
My legs are going useless. My free hand pounds at his shoulder and the pounding is weaker every time.
My screams smother in his palm. He doesn't stop.
He has done this before. He is good at it.
And it hurts. It hurts too fucking much for anything to make sense.
My magic detonates inside me and finds nowhere to go.
His hand on my mouth seals me. His teeth in my neck seal me.
The wall behind me seals me. Every direction my power lashes out it slams into a closed door—into the meat of the man feeding on me, into the stone of the wall, into the architecture of my own body which is not built to be a furnace this many degrees hotter than the room.
I feel the magic curl back. I feel it spiral.
I feel the awful curve of pressure-building-toward-release that has only ever ended one way, and I think, with terrible clarity:
I'm going to bring the library down.
I'm going to do it again.
Lila.
A blur.
I don't see it. My vision is going dim at the edges.
There is just—motion. Air. Something arrives in the space behind the vampire's body fast enough that the displacement actually pulls at my hair, and his fangs yank out of my neck.
Not gently. Torn. There is a sound like a wet branch breaking and the suction-seal on my throat ruptures and I am sliding down the wall because the thing holding me up is no longer there.
I hit the floor in pieces. Hip first. Then elbow. Then my head a second time, less hard. The wood is cool against my cheek. I can’t catch my breath.
Above me, somewhere very far away, behind a wall of static and the roaring in my ears, there is a sound I will never un-hear.
It is the sound of a body being undone.
It’s brief.
A wet, structural snap that goes deeper than bone. Something cartilaginous letting go all at once. Then a softer noise—almost domestic, the sound a heavy book makes if you drop it on carpet. Then silence. Then something rolls. Slowly. Across the floor.
I do not look.
A boot, scuffed at the toe, three feet from my face.
A hand braced against the floorboards next to my head. Knuckles split. Blood up past the wrist.
"Hex."
His voice cracks across the syllable.
I open my eyes. It is the worst thing I have done all day.
The light pierces. The blood in my hair has stuck my cheek to the floor.
He is on his knees in front of me—Kage, Kage, dark hair fallen forward across his face, those storm-blue eyes doing something I have never seen them do.
He is pale. There is blood on his hands and blood on his sleeves and blood up past his rolled cuffs, and none of it is his.
"What the fuck were you doing."
Not a question. He is breathing through his teeth. His jaw is locked so hard the tendon at his throat stands out. He is shaking, and the shake is not fear—it is rage with nowhere to go now that the thing he wanted to put it through is in pieces on the floor.
"Kage—"
"You walked back here alone. You walked back here alone and you put your fucking hand on him—"
"Kage, how—"
"You took my blood, witch."
It comes out flat and ugly. He is not gentle when he says it, but I still don’t understand.
"You have my blood in you and now I feel you when you're scared. I felt you scared and the floor went out from under me." He drags a forearm across his cheek, smearing somebody else's blood into his hairline. "I was three buildings away. I came as fast as I could, Hex."
"Oh..."
It is the only word my mouth can make.
His hand finally lands. Not gently. He braces his palm against the side of my face—too rough, too much pressure, the way a man steadies something he wants to shake—and I feel the blood on his skin tacky against my temple.
His thumb finds the cut above my eyebrow and presses, hard, and the pain whites me out for a second and brings me back sharper. I hiss.
"Stay with me. Don't close your eyes. Are you hearing me?"
"Yeah—"
"Where else did he bite you?"
"Just—just the neck—"
"Just." The word comes out like he wants to spit it. He looks down at the bite. His mouth twists. "Just."
The magic spikes.
I feel it the way you feel a sneeze coming, the whole-body inevitability of something my muscles are about to do whether I authorize it or not.
The spiral didn't stop just because the suction did.
The pressure curve is still climbing. My power has been screaming for an exit for the last forty seconds and now that one has opened—air, finally—it is going to take it.
Sparks blink at my fingertips. Tiny. White. Wrong.
Kage sees them. His face changes.
"No no no no—Hex."
"It's coming—"
"Yeah, I see that, hold it, hold it—"
"I can't—"
"You can. You did it last week with me, you can do it now. Down. Down, witch, into the—"
"Kage, get back, I don't want to—"
His hand is in my hair.
Not gentle. He fists a handful at the back of my skull, tilts my face up so I have to look at him, and his eyes are very close and very blue and very pissed off.
"Listen to me." His voice is low and rough and absolutely level. "I am not leaving you on this floor. Try to push me back and I am going to stand here and take it. Understand?"
The white sparking of my magic is at my elbow, slowly taking over all of me.
"Kage—"
"You are not bringing this building down. Not today. Not over that piece of shit waste of space."
I am crying. My face is wet and my mouth tastes like blood and the white is at my shoulder.
"I don't know how to—"
"I know."
His other hand comes up. I see him make a fist. I have time to flinch. I have time to throw whatever's left of my magic at him to push him back. I have time to do any of a hundred things.
I don't.
I look up at him through the blood in my eye and I see his face—the fury in it, the apology underneath the fury, the fact that this is the only thing he has—and I decide not to fight him.
"Sorry Hex," Kage says.
His fist meets my temple and the world goes—
∞∞∞
White.
For one bad second my whole body locks. No. The fail-safe. They did it, they kept it on, they're going to keep me under until they figure out what to do with me, until they ship me back—
The white resolves. A ceiling. A ceiling I don't know.
It's older than the cottage ceiling. Higher.
The plaster is split along one edge in a hairline that runs out toward a brass light fixture.
The fixture is on. The light is warm. The room smells like antiseptic and lavender and something herbal underneath that kind of reminds me of Odette's shop.
Not the facility. The facility smelled like industrial cleaner and chemical air.
This smells like a place where people are taken care of.
The infirmary. It has to be.
My brain finds the word and lets out a sound that is almost, not quite, a laugh.
I try to move my right arm. The world fluoresces white again—different white this time, the embodied kind, structural—and my breath stops. My shoulder. The sound it made.
Fuck. I grunt a very unlady-like sound.
"She's awake."
Zeva. Somewhere to my left. Her voice is the flattest I have ever heard it.
"Don't move your right side, Miss Dellaby." A different voice, older, female. A nurse, somewhere by my feet, doing something with a chart. "Your shoulder is in a sling. We'd like it to stay there until the swelling reduces. Are you in pain?"
Of course I am in pain. "I'm… managing."
I'm lying. Everything fucking hurts.
"That is not what I asked."
"I'm—" I swallow. The swallow drags through my throat and finds the bandage there, and underneath the bandage the place where teeth went in. It throbs in time with my pulse. "Eight."
"I'll bring you something. Don't try to sit up."
She moves out of my peripheral vision and through a door that clicks shut behind her. I close my eyes. I open them.
Aamon is in the corner of the room.
Just standing there. Arms crossed. Back against the wall opposite my bed.
I don't think he has moved an inch since I opened my eyes.
All in black like he is always in black.
Sleeves rolled to the forearms, those angular lines of his tattoos visible.
His face is doing something. Or not doing something. From here I cannot tell which.
Like a damn statue. A pissed-off, stone-still statue.
His thumb is pressed against his bottom lip.
That's new.