Chapter 21 #2
He grips my hair in his fist and yanks. The world goes white-hot. My scalp feels like it’s being peeled off. I twist, aim wild, and squeeze the trigger.
Click.
Nothing fires. The gun bursts.
What the hell?
Heat slams into my hand, a shockwave ripping through my fingers like fireworks detonating in my palm.
The muzzle spits smoke and metal shrapnel instead of a bullet.
Pain rockets up my wrist. I drop the gun on instinct and clamp my other hand over the burn.
My skin is already searing red. A thin line of blood cuts across the base of my thumb where a splinter of metal nicked me.
The man screams. He’s on his knees now, clutching his face. The blast caught him worse than it did me. Blood trickles down his cheek, and when he jerks his hand away, there’s a dark scorch mark near his eye. Tiny shards glitter in his skin, like someone pressed ground glass into flesh.
Did the dirt jam the barrel or something? I don’t have time to figure it out. I kick the ruined gun away and shove myself up. My vision pulses at the edges as I stagger backward, half-running and half-falling toward the van.
I need to free the girls. None of this matters if I don’t free the girls.
I scramble to the cabinet, my burned hand throbbing like it’s trapped in a vise. Inside, everything swims into a blur of metal and plastic until my good hand finds what it needs.
Wire cutters.
“Oh, shit,” Hailey gasps.
“Hold still,” I rasp, dropping beside them and forcing my shaking fingers to work. The cutters squeak against the plastic, and I almost miss with the first bite.
The tie around Hailey’s wrists snaps, then Lila’s.
The second the last one breaks, a sound rolls through the van that turns my blood cold.
A wet, guttural grunt.
I spin.
The man’s already up.
Blood streaks his cheek, one eye swollen and gleaming with something rabid. His hands are empty for a heartbeat, and then he surges forward and slams me into the side of the van hard enough to dent the metal around my shoulder.
The air tears out of my lungs in a sharp, strangled sound.
“You bitch!” he snarls, spittle flying, his breath rancid as his hand clamps around my throat. Pain blooms, my vision prickling with stars.
I claw at his wrist, kick, twist, but nothing breaks his grip.
Hailey screams. Somewhere behind me, Lila scrambles and something metal clatters. They do not help me, and I cannot blame them. To them, this disgusting psycho must look like the devil himself, the monster who trained them to fear him.
His thumb digs into my windpipe, and panic floods me as the world narrows again, breath by breath.
“You think you can take me?!” he roars.
I can’t.
The edges of everything begin to blur. My lungs seize, my legs thrash uselessly against the dirt, and he shoves me down harder, pinning me beneath his knee. He presses until I can’t even force out a sound, until the fight becomes nothing but silent, frantic movement trapped inside my own skin.
It’s a cruel joke. The whole thing is one big, cruel joke.
I’ve been here before, and I know how this ends.
I’m going to die.
I hate the way my body feels, how it keeps trying even when it has no right to.
I’m giving one hundred percent. No, more than that.
I push past the point where muscles are supposed to stop obeying.
Adrenaline surges through me, fear drives me, and I claw at him with everything I have because I’m fighting for my life.
But it’s still not enough.
My mind splinters. In the dark behind my eyes, I see the glow of my scythe and Pain’s eyes watching from somewhere I can’t reach.
Accept it.
That was what Pain told me, wasn’t it?
You need to accept that you’re already dead.
It’s the last thing I want to hear in the middle of a battle for survival, but it comes anyway, loud and clear. It cuts through my very panic.
Stop fighting. You are already dead.
So I do. I stop struggling. The fear drains out of me like water through a crack, and everything else dulls with it. The sounds flatten, my heartbeat quiets, and I stare past his shoulder at the slice of sky above us and think, Fine. Take me, then.
Maybe this is the end of my second run at life, but I will not finish it scared.
It’s been good.
It’s been nice.
Maybe now Death will have to find someone else to do his bidding for him.
The man tightens his grip.
Then something hits.
THUD.
His eyes roll back before I can even make sense of it. His weight collapses onto me, crushing the air from my chest in a different way, and for a split second, I think I’ve lost consciousness. But then hands grab him, drag him off, and cold air rushes into my lungs like a shock.
I blink up at the face of an angel standing over me. Call him an angel of death, because his hands are locked around a baseball bat and the wood is already streaked with blood. Burnt-orange hair, two mismatched eyes, a face twisted into a snarl.
“I’m going to kill this motherfucker,” he snarls.
“Talon,” I rasp.
“Skye.” He squats down and immediately cups my cheek, careful with the spot just beneath where the gun burn seared my skin. “Are you okay?”
He looks half-mad, half-relieved, and entirely feral. The veins in his neck stand out, his chest rising and falling like he ran here from hell itself. Dirt and blood streak his clothes, and he’s breathing like he’s been fighting since dawn.
“I’m okay,” I manage, forcing the words through my throat. “I’m okay. Are you?”
“Now I am.”
He lifts me like I weigh nothing and pulls me tight against his chest. His breath drags raggedly through my hair as he holds on, swaying a little, like he needs the motion to keep himself upright.
And then I see him.
Cassian.
He’s running toward us through the trees, wild-eyed and half-dressed.
His whole chest is bare except for a single bandage slapped over his shoulder, and there’s a dark red bloom spreading at the center of it.
His eyes look glassy, too bright and unfocused, until they land on me.
The second they do, something inside him breaks.
“Skye,” he chokes out.
He reaches me before Talon can even think about letting go.
He shoves past him and grabs me like he’s terrified I’ll vanish if he blinks.
He buries his face in my hair and inhales like he’s trying to lock the scent into his bones, and then he starts kissing me everywhere at once.
My forehead. My temple. My jaw. My fingers, one by one, like he’s counting proof.
“Cassian,” I whisper, trying to catch his face, trying to slow him down. “Hey. Hey. It’s okay.”
But he isn’t hearing me. His pupils are blown wide, his breathing uneven, and his hands shake as they move over me, my arms, my cheeks, my throat, like he’s searching for injuries he can’t stand to find. His mouth finds my knuckles again, pressing a kiss to each one like a vow.
“Skye,” he keeps saying, voice hoarse, part prayer and part curse. “Skye. You’re alive. You’re alive.”
“Cassian,” Talon says. “Easy, man.”
Cassian finally pauses long enough to press his forehead to mine, but something is off in the way he holds himself, something almost wrong. I lift my eyes to Talon, wordless, asking for an explanation.
“Nathaniel gave him something for the pain,” Talon mouths silently. “Cass is a bit… more than usual.”
I can see that. He would eat me if he could.
Nathaniel is the last one to arrive. His shirt clings to him, damp with sweat, and when he spots me he stops a few feet away, bent over with his hands on his knees, like the sight of me knocked the air out of him.
“Thank fuck,” he breathes. He lifts his gaze, and there is a haunted edge there I have never seen before. “We made it in time. I thought…”
He cuts himself off and swallows hard, and for a second he looks like he might lose it completely.
Cassian exhales at last
“Don’t disappear again,” he whispers.
I smile faintly and slip my arms from around him, my fingers reluctant to let go. When I finally turn toward the girls, it all feels a little bit unreal.
They are still frozen in place. Hailey’s eyes glisten, her lip trembling. Lila’s stare keeps darting between me and the men outside, wide and glassy, like her mind is still trying to catch up with the fact that I am standing here, breathing and talking.
“Told you,” I say quietly. “I’m going to save us.”
The monster they grew to be so scared off lies unconscious on the ground. No one could care any less about him.
For a moment, no one moves. Then Lila lets out a broken, startled laugh that comes out wrong, half sob and half hysteria. Hailey crumples forward and starts crying for real, and the sound cracks something open in all of us.
It’s over. We survived the nightmare.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch movement in the trees.
Rhea is there with her Grim Reaper friends, half-hidden among the trunks, watching us in that quiet, impossible way they have.
I give them a small nod of thanks, because they were the ones who led my men to me, and I do not forget what that cost. Even with gratitude in my chest, their presence lands like a warning.
If Reapers are still watching, it means something else is still waiting too.
Another nightmare, not gone, just patient.
I tuck that thought away and decide it can be tomorrow’s problem.
Because I am done being scared. Whatever time I have left, and whatever is supposed to happen next, I will meet it with open arms from now on. If it wants me, it can come straight at me and find I am not flinching anymore.
We get born to die after all, right? Might as well stop living like the ending is the only thing that matters.
I know for a fact it is not.