Chapter 25
Not Safe
She was finally, finally outside her cage, but Liv couldn’t even feel good about it—and forget feeling liberated, either.
Ignatius, gaunt face masked with drying blood and guck, slumped in the passenger seat of a very expensive, very heavy black SUV.
Erik, splashed with fifteen different flavors of goop, gunk, and bright stripes of blood as well, was in the seat next to her.
Of the three of them, Jake looked the least wounded, but half his face was puffy with dark bruises and he winced uneasily behind the wheel every time he braked or turned.
The engine hummed quietly; she was not just out of her cage but outside the big stone pile as well.
But Liv was shaken with the irrational desire to try to run back into the building because the thought of those things outside and chasing them…
well, now she knew why abused pets often stayed in familiar spaces rather than risk escape.
She’d been turned into a goddamn hamster.
Liv huddled on the bench seat, her teeth wanting to chatter.
Erik had only put her down once on the mad rush to the garage, at the end of a long hall with suits of armor between regular pillars on either side.
It looked just like a movie set, but the armor was all dented and broken in varying, horrifying places, the edges of each rip, gouge, or puncture blackened with age.
Stay here, Erik had said softly, and she had, but not because she wanted to.
No. She’d stayed right where he placed her, tucked behind a pillar, and watched him bolt down the hall, meeting a tide of those horrifying half-spider, half-vegetable things with their bulbous crimson eyes, because she was too scared to move.
Jake had also stayed, a few paces in front of Liv; his gun only spoke once, roar-lighting the entire hall with a millisecond flash that made every bristling hair, every slavering tooth, every faceted gleam of those terrifying, bulbous, utterly wrong eyes stand out.
He’d shot the one that had somehow gotten past Erik.
Even if she’d wanted to run away, she couldn’t have. Her traitorous, cowardly legs had fused into trembling sticks and she simply stared, incapable even of screaming.
Even that wasn’t as bad as the half-seen shapes beside the car as they rocketed down the driveway, the necklace on her chest giving a strobe-flash to illuminate every single one in pitiless detail.
Jake had almost run over Ignatius at the great iron front gates, barely slowing the vehicle enough for the older man to pile inside.
Erik had his eyes closed like Ignatius, and the sudden certainty both he and the grey-haired guy were corpses sent a violent shudder down her back. Her hand flashed out, pawing at the door release; the lever moved obediently, but without any click of opening.
Child locks? Seriously? A cold, jagged laugh boiled behind her breastbone, as whipsaw-hysterical as Mika’s after the car accident that icy long-ago December, both of them just out of college and looking for jobs.
A bad patch of ice on a freeway onramp, a spin, both girls without a scratch even though the front end of the car had folded up accordion-style…
The rancid chuckle rose hot and acid in her throat, sounding suspiciously like a whine.
“Don’t,” Erik said, harshly. “Please.”
Liv stared at him, trying to stop the sound, swallow it, stuff it back inside her chest. Ignatius stirred, a gleaming sliver showing under his eyelids. “Hurt,” he husked, and coughed. “Is she? Hurt?”
Oh God. Liv’s jaw dropped, and the sound died in her throat. Why the hell was he asking about her?
She couldn’t stop thinking about the dry rasping sound the spaghetti-tentacled thing in the window made, the hideous smell, the spraying of thin, weird, greasy blood. And then the spiders, only they weren’t properly arachnoid, not with their bodies studded with horrifying vegetable growths—
“She’s fine.” Erik turned his head a fraction. They were on a two-lane country road, streetlights passing regularly but further apart than in the suburbs. “Physically, at least.”
“The longest night of the year,” Jake said grimly. “Of course.”
“You… both… did well.” Ignatius shifted slightly, and the lines around his mouth deepened. “Following?”
“Not that I can sense.” Erik’s hand, loosely cupped in his lap, twitched like he wanted to reach for something.
“Liv?” It was the first time he’d really used her name, and her gaze jumped from his dirty fingers to filthy face, to the window past him, back to his hand.
“I know you’re scared, but it’s okay. Just tell me, do you feel any more of them after us? ”
How in the fuck should I know? Irritation stung, a welcome heat through the numbness. And scared? Oh, boy howdy, scared was not the word.
Terrified was more like it. She’d read about people’s hair standing up from fright, and the sensation was so much like tiny insect feet all over her that a vision of the spiders reared up inside her head again, their legs bending in the wrong directions and their scuttling in random arcs sending a jolt of pain through her heavy skull.
“She in shock?” Jake let the SUV slow, and the idea that maybe he was stopping made a gush of sweat break out all over her.
“Don’t slow down,” she heard herself gasp, ragged as if she’d been suckerpunched. “For God’s sake, don’t stop.”
“It’s all right,” Erik grabbed her wrist, and Liv realized she intended to scramble forward, between the seats and into the front, because maybe their doors would unlock and she could wriggle past. “Calm down. Calm down, Liv. Stop it!”
She couldn’t kick out the back windows with bare feet, but Liv was about to try, pitching violently aside.
“Keep her contained,” Ignatius rasped. “And, Erik?”
“Yes—oof.” He exhaled hard as her elbow sank into his midriff, but Erik had her arms trapped in short order, and she found herself smooshed against his chest. His shirt was in tatters, his armored jacket only slightly better, and the drying creature-blood on him stank. “Shhh, Liv. It’s okay. Sir?”
It is goddamn well not okay! Liv wanted to scream, but she had no air. The panic was back, robbing her of breath and hope, and the stuff on him was blood; it was monster blood.
And now it was getting smeared all over her, too.
“She has an oneiros.” Ignatius wasn’t breathing right. Every word sounded painful.
Erik paused, but maybe that was only because she was still trying to writhe free of his grip. “Made in the old way, sir. For Yule.”
“A traditional gift. Miss Stellack, please…” Ignatius coughed, a dry cricket-whisper, and the thought that he was maybe dying filled her with both unsteady glee and howling fear because nobody should be killed by those terrible things.
Nobody. Not even one of the names on her very short list of Super-Duper Hated Assholes deserved that.
Besides, he had helped fight the things off. Of course, if it wasn’t for these lunatics she wouldn’t be here; she would be safe at home, dreaming of Christmas in a few days and wondering how she was going to pay the heating bill.
“Please, be calm,” Ignatius said in that choked whisper, and Liv went still, but only because more frantic motion would waste energy.
“I hate you,” she whispered. The words came out strange because her cheek was mashed against nylon webbing. Erik had weapons strapped all over him, even at three in the morning. “I hate all of you, and I hate that you kidnapped me, and I hate the fucking monsters.”
The fact that she’d been dreaming of the hideous things right before her bedroom window was smashed was beside the point. Or at least Liv was going to do her absolute level best to pretend it was.
“That’s all right.” Erik wasn’t fazed in the least. “I expect it. Hating us is safe.”
The necklace was a stone egg between them, digging into her breastbone hard enough to bruise. It still felt warm, somehow reassuring—and the tentacle thing had howled each time it flashed.
That probably meant something. Liv just couldn’t think of what.
She wanted to get out of this goddamn car and run screaming down the gently rising and falling road, coming around on a shallow curve she realized was north of Longpoint, like Erik had said.
That meant west of the city proper, out near Statler Farms where she and Mika went each summer to get flats of fruit for Kiki Vannonberg to turn into bespoke preserves.
Glimpsing the long billboards painted with dancing fruit threatened to burn her retinas, an iced-over beacon of sanity lost in curtains of falling, whirling flakes.
It was snowing. At last. Happy White Christmas, deck the halls with monsters.
“It’s all right,” Erik repeated. “They didn’t get you; you’re with us. You’re safe.”
“Let me go,” someone moaned, and Liv realized it was her own voice. “Just let me go, for God’s sake just let me gooooo…”
Jake piped up. “How far’s the nearest active—”
“Three hundred miles, Jacob.” Ignatius made a low pained sound. A strange creaking crackle came from the passenger seat, and he sighed, gustily. “That’s better.” He sounded like his usual dry baritone self now. “Ribs are marvelously designed, but not for that.”
Oh, God, please. “Let me go,” she whispered. “Please.”
“They’d kill you, Liv.” Erik’s chest rumbled under her cheek. “Just calm down. We’ve got clothes packed, we’ll stop in a bit to clean up.”
Oh, sure. Clean up. That’ll be great. “I don’t want—”
“You were dreaming.” His usual diffidence was gone; this Erik was coldly efficient, and the crispness to the words sounded an awful lot like anger.
She tried again to wriggle free, but his arms were immovable. “H-how did you…?”
“You screamed. Nightmare, right?” Each word soft and precise. “Only you woke up and it didn’t stop.”
All the fight gurgled out of Liv, water down a drain. She flat-out felt it leave, arms and legs turning limp, her heart dropping into her guts with a splash. “Shut up.” I want my life back. I want all this to go away.
He did shut up, but he didn’t let go. Liv closed her eyes, and the thunder of his heart, regular steady tha-thumps, filled her ear.
He was covered in guck and holding her too tightly and he was one of her jailers—but he’d also fought off those nightmare things twice now, and his heartbeat kept repeating don’t be afraid, someone else is here, don’t be afraid, someone else . ...
“We’ll stop in an hour or so, around Coringtown,” Ignatius said, finally. “Control has to be alerted. They’ll send backup; they have to. Can you last that long?”
“Yessir.” Jake was now hushed and somber. “Sir?”
“Yes, Jacob.” Ignatius sounded, for the first time, actually weary. “I know. This rather changes things.”
What? What does it change? Liv found out she didn’t want to know.
“Doesn’t matter,” Erik said, quietly. “You’re safe, Liv.”
Doesn’t sound like it. But she just kept her eyes squeezed shut, listening to his reassuring, lying heart, and wished it were true.