Chapter 24 Zaria
ZARIA
Time seemed to move at an irregular rate.
Zaria knew even as it happened that she would never forget the sensation of splitting a man’s flesh and watching him die.
Her whole body was shaking, the rapid scrape of her breath approaching hyperventilation.
Cleland’s eyes were wide in horror and shock.
Blood spilled steadily from his throat, soaking the collar of his shirt, and he scrabbled uselessly at his neck before dropping to his knees on the cobblestones.
Zaria relinquished the knife with a soft shriek.
It remained there, lodged in his skin, until he managed to wrench it out and toss it aside.
Doing so only spurred a river of crimson, and she watched, frozen, as Cleland crumpled to the ground.
He writhed and jerked in his own fluids for what felt like an eternity before eventually going still.
If you had to, could you kill a man?
She stumbled to the nearest wall and used it to hold herself steady as she dry heaved several times. Her eyes watered, her head spinning, but when she straightened once more, she felt a strange sort of triumph.
I told you, she thought bitterly to her father. I told you I could do it, if I had to.
“Zaria!”
A panicked voice emanated from a short distance away, and it took her a beat to place it as Fletcher’s. She squinted through the darkness and dizziness until she saw him. When she did, her brain struggled to process the scene.
Four bodies lay strewn across the road. Fletcher knelt beside one of them, his face wan. Why he would be worried about the men who’d attacked them, Zaria couldn’t fathom. And where was Kane?
The body beside Fletcher suddenly twitched, propelling him to lean over and press his hands against the man’s chest. “Zaria!”
His cry was serrated this time, and only then did she truly understand what she was looking at. The body Fletcher crouched beside was Kane.
Except Kane wasn’t dead—not yet.
The nausea faded, heart-wrenching terror overtaking all else.
Images of Cleland’s bloody, writhing form fled Zaria’s mind, replaced by profound clarity.
She sprinted over to Fletcher, who had begun to claw Kane’s shirt away from his torso.
In his haste he had ripped the fabric, giving Zaria an unimpeded view of the blood spreading across Kane’s ribs.
“He was shot,” grunted Fletcher needlessly. “Cleland fired right before you stabbed him.”
The man’s preoccupation during his last moments of life suddenly made sense.
Zaria fell to her knees beside Fletcher, seeing with a jolt that Kane was not only still alive, but conscious.
His face was bone-pale, his eyes screwed shut.
There was a sheen of sweat across his forehead, and his teeth were clenched in a grimace, jaw wired tightly enough that the map of veins at his throat stood out in stark, bruise-like relief.
As Zaria watched, he snapped his head from side to side as if trying to escape some unseen attacker.
“Kane.” Her tongue felt heavy in her dry mouth. “Can you hear me?”
He didn’t respond, bucking his hips as he arched away from the ground. A moan rumbled from deep within his chest.
“We need to stop the bleeding,” Fletcher said, ripping his own coat off in one fluid motion and pressing it against Kane’s rib cage.
No sooner had he done so than did Kane let out a guttural, strangled yell, his eyes flying open as he stared unseeing at the sky above.
His legs kicked weakly as he tried to fight Fletcher off, his breath coming in pants.
“Stop it,” Fletcher snapped hoarsely. He used his forearm to push wild, sweaty hair back from his face. His gaze, when he lifted it to hers, was full of undiluted desperation. “Zaria—help.”
Her heart thundered in her ears as Kane arched again, hands clawing futilely at the cobblestones.
Everything about this moment felt nightmarishly wrong.
Kane didn’t show weakness. He didn’t acknowledge pain.
He fought for the upper hand in every interaction, and he sure as hell couldn’t be dying.
Taking a magic bullet to the ribs, though…
that should have killed him already. It should have eaten through his flesh like parchment set alight.
Fletcher swatted her arm. “Christ, Zaria, are you listening to me? I need you to—”
“Shut up,” she bit out. “Back away from him.”
“Beg pardon?”
“I said to back the fuck away, Fletcher!” Zaria’s voice tore raggedly from her chest, and something in her tone must have convinced him she meant business. Fletcher lifted his hands from the coat, gaze tracking her movements as she picked it up and tossed it aside.
“What the hell are you doing?”
She ignored him. If her hunch was correct, then Kane wasn’t going to bleed out anytime soon.
Gently, she probed beneath the ragged edge of his shirt, peeling it back when she located the bullet wound.
Kane continued to jerk and tense beneath her fingertips, his chest rising and falling so rapidly, it was unnerving.
“I think he’s dying,” Fletcher said, a note of hysteria in his tone.
Again, Zaria didn’t reply. She used her sleeve to wipe the worst of the blood away, making Kane claw at the spill of her skirts. His teeth ground together so aggressively that she heard his jaw pop.
“He’s not dying,” she declared, having confirmed her suspicions. “Cleland shot him with a magic-infused dart. It’s still lodged in his skin.”
Fletcher’s lips parted, his face frozen somewhere between relief and dismay. “Oh, hell. Okay. This has happened to him before, you know. He was shot with one on a job a few years ago.”
“And how was it dealt with?”
“No idea. Ward whisked him away the moment he heard, and the next time I saw Kane, he was good as new. I never asked him what he’d undergone.”
Zaria fought to keep her voice level. “Well then, that’s not exactly helpful, Fletcher, is it?”
“I’m just saying, he’s survived this before. Still, those guns aren’t very common—more trouble than they’re worth. How did Cleland get his hands on one in the first place?”
“No idea,” she said, knowing the question was rhetorical and not particularly caring. “But the dart is intended to cause an immense amount of pain, and it fractures the moment it comes in contact with a target. Each individual piece will need to be removed.”
“And if they’re not?”
“Then his body won’t be able to handle it. He’ll either have a heart attack, or he’ll go into shock and his organs will shut down.”
“Great.” Fletcher clambered to his feet, complexion paler than ever. “Then get those things the hell out.”
In another scenario, Zaria might have offered an angry retort, but stress was beginning to fracture her shield of emergency-induced clarity.
She bit her lip hard enough to taste blood.
The reasonable course of action would be to take Kane to a physician.
The problem, of course, was that they were unlikely to find one at this hour, and even if they did, the average physician wasn’t familiar with alchemological weapons.
They wouldn’t have a clue how to deal with this.
Zaria, on the other hand, was well acquainted with the type of dart currently lodged in Kane’s ribs. But she wasn’t a surgeon, and she didn’t have any sort of medical training. There was the distinct possibility she could cause damage and make everything worse.
“Zaria.”
This time it wasn’t Fletcher who said her name. Shocked, she glanced down to see Kane turning his head toward her. His voice was scarcely audible, his chest still heaving, and there was a horrible gray tinge to his skin.
Zaria blinked, unable to force an answer past her dry throat. He was lucid—that was something—but fury twisted the planes of his face. Kane’s hazel eyes glittered, never leaving hers. He spoke through clenched teeth with considerable effort.
“End. It.”
“What did he say?” Fletcher was there in an instant. He reached out as if to grab Kane, then withdrew his hand just as quickly. “Kane, what did you say? Talk to me.”
“Fucking—END IT,” Kane snarled. His head snapped to the other side as he unleashed a roar into the night, his body arching off the ground a final time.
Zaria stood on shaking legs. She had made her decision. “We need to get him back to Cecile’s.”
Fletcher nodded, mouth set in grim determination. “I’ll carry him. Are you going to be able to…”
He didn’t finish the question, yet Zaria could guess at how it ended. Cecile’s apartment contained some alchemological supplies, but whether it would be enough—and whether they would be helpful—remained to be seen. “I don’t know. Hopefully.”
“God help us,” Fletcher croaked. “I suppose that’ll have to be good enough, won’t it?”
Of all the ways Zaria had imagined she might someday kill Kane Durante, this particular method had never crossed her mind.
More to the point, it had become abundantly, inconveniently clear that she didn’t want him to die at all.
The idea of it had panic twisting her stomach into knots, and she didn’t want to think about what that might mean.
Instead, she busied herself with what she’d been able to find of Cecile’s tools, a glass of alcohol at her side to act as a disinfectant.
Her heart seemed to have taken up residence in her esophagus as she watched Kane shudder on the sofa before her.
He was more coherent now that she’d removed several tiny shards of metal, careful not to touch them with her bare hands, but he still looked fairly wretched.
His face was drawn, his complexion corpse-like.