Chapter 25 #2
Cass didn’t even get off a single shot before Hart hauled her back down by the shirt.
If I was going to do something, I needed to do it now.
I closed my eyes and reached out, seeking only those whose spirits still lingered.
I swallowed.
“Fuck!” came Hart’s voice as something a good deal larger and more explosive than bullets slammed into the balcony. “Jesus fucking Christ, they’d better not get one of those over the fucking railing.”
“Was that a goddamn grenade?” Cass hissed.
“Either that or they have a fucking rocket launcher,” Hart snapped. “Honestly not sure which I’d rather at this point, but both of them are fucking bad news bears.”
I had no idea what that meant in literal terms, but I knew we were in trouble.
Cass had seen at least one of us die. Given what was happening, probably all of us.
I reached out to the dead buried beneath the poured cement of the warehouse floor. The dead who’d been left in unmarked and unremembered graves, and whose desecrated bodies even the construction workers hadn’t bothered to report.
Please help us, I begged.
They were uninterested.
We have magic, I told them. So they want us dead. They’re hunting us. Killing us in the streets. Because we’re different. Like you were different.
Now I had their attention.
Sometimes, when they’re left for long enough and their emotions are strong enough, the dead lose some of who they are.
Places become haunted when the dead forget their own names and remember only their grief or rage.
Someone like Ward or Beck could help them remember, but I wasn’t a medium.
I was—whatever I am. A witch of life and death.
I could blend the two, but I couldn’t give them back their identities.
But I could channel their anger.
And these dead were very, very angry.
That’s the thing about slavery.
The people who lived and died under its lash were not happy about it. They hadn’t been when they were alive, and they hadn’t given up that rage after death, either.
It was one thing to raise rats or mice or bugs.
It was a very different thing to raise people.
Animals have animal personalities. They don’t hold grudges.
A hundred murdered slaves absolutely do.
Sweat beaded on my forehead as I called to them, raising bone and flesh and dust, binding it with spirit. Urging them to balance out the wrongs that had been done to them by stopping the wrongs these people would do to others. I pushed my will and anger into them, feeding their rage with my own.
Because underneath all the fear and doubt and self-loathing, I was also angry.
I was angry that my parents had locked me in an asylum so that my magic could be taken from me.
Angry at the doctors and nurses and orderlies who had done it again and again or let it happen and did nothing.
Angry at the people who thought I was less than fully human for being a witch or a psychic.
Angry even at the people who cared about me, but who sheltered me and treated me as though I were made of hand-blown glass.
Angry that I’d let people treat me that way for so long that I no longer knew what I wanted.
Angry that I’d never gotten the chance to figure out who I even was, much less who I wanted to be.
A low rumble sounded below us, the metal and cement of the warehouse trembling as a hundred long-buried dead began to claw their way to the surface.
“The unholy fucking hell is that?” Hart rasped.
“I don’t know,” Cass hissed.
“This part of your vision?” Hart asked.
“N-no,” she answered, the fear clear in her voice.
“Good,” came his response, although his tone was grim and serious.
A breath after the screaming and shooting started, I heard him breathe out a “What the fuck…?”
Then I heard a slight crunch of glass as he moved, presumably trying to see what was going on down on the floor. I kept my eyes shut. I knew what was happening and I definitely didn’t want to see it.
Maybe I should have. It was my fault that the dead were unleashing their centuries-pent-up fury on the people below.
“R-Rayn…” Hart stammered, and there was fear and something else in his voice. Enough that in spite of the bone-deep ache that using this much magic had caused, I tried to respond.
Because I’d never heard him stammer before.
“Yes,” I managed. I was answering the question he hadn’t asked—Are you doing this?
“Jesus fuck.”
I could hear Cass’s ragged breathing over the screams and cries in the beats between gunshots and explosions.
Oh.
It wasn’t Cass’s breathing.
It was mine.
Everything felt so heavy.
And dark.
Even if I’d wanted to open my eyes, my lids were like stone.
My body crumbling like the corpses below.
I couldn’t—
“What the fuck were you thinking, Hart? Bringing him here?” I recognized the voice as Raj’s, although it sounded distant, as though it were traveling through glass or water.
I tried to open my eyes, but they refused, and the world remained dark.
Trying to move felt like trying to push my body through solid lead.
“I the fuck was thinking that—as we all agreed, may I remind you, oh glorious leader—you and Drew and the fucking cavalry were going to be the ones to find the actual religious nutjobs, and that the cavalry was probably unnecessary, because most religious groups like this one aren’t the second coming of the fucking Branch Davidians,” Hart snapped back.
“I was thinking—and everyone agreed—that bringing Rayn here would be perfectly safe and possibly enlightening. Turns out, we were all fucking wrong.”
“And why the fuck didn’t you leave him in the car? He’s a civilian who has no capacity—”
“The fuck he has no capacity, you overprotective asshole!” Hart was yelling now.
“That man is the reason Cass and I are alive, you arrogant dickhead. He is the reason we were able to wait for twenty-seven goddamn fucking minutes for the rest of you to get here. Rayn. What Cass and I did might have bought us five. Maybe. If we were really fucking lucky, which, let me tell you, we fucking weren’t. ”
“You can’t possibly—”
“What the fuck do you think happened out there, Parikh?” If I could have flinched, I would have. Hart was really angry.
So was Raj.
But Hart was furious. And he didn’t wait for Raj’s answer.
“A goddamn fucking corpse party? You think the jibbering cultists were, what, tossing arms and legs at us? They had fucking rifles and AR-15s and grenades. Grenades that, thank fucking God, got thrown at the literal army of the dead that your delicate boyfriend resurrected through the goddamn concrete. And you wanna tell me that he can’t take care of himself?
That man took care of a whole goddamn nutjob army by his own fucking self.
And you’d better fucking be prepared to do some serious groveling for even thinking that he needed our sorry-ass protection. ”
Raj said nothing, although I thought I could hear the low, telltale rumble of a growl.
“And that’s not even counting the fact that he’s already survived a whole fucking nightmare of a childhood, Arcanavirus, and being thrown in a fucking well,” Hart continued. “So don’t you fucking dare think he can’t take care of himself. You got me, Parikh?”
Hart was breathing so hard I could hear the breaths, even over the sound of whatever was happening down on the main floor of the warehouse.
“He’s still a civilian,” Raj said. “And you should have left him in the car.”
“Oh, fuck you,” was what Hart came back with. “Don’t you fucking throw protocol at me. If we’d left him in the car, you’d have yelled at my goddamn corpse that I left him alone and unprotected, so cut the bullshit and just man the fuck up and apologize.”
“If you think I’m going to apologize to you—”
“Not to me, you shithead,” Hart snarled. “To him.”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence.
“I’m not going to apologize for worrying about his safety.”
“Free advice, Parikh,” Hart hissed. “You treat him like he can’t take care of himself, and he will dump your paternalistic ass sooner or later.
And if you can’t recognize that you’re treating him like a child or a pet instead of your partner, then I hope it’s sooner.
In fact, I hope he can hear this, and that it pisses him off enough that he won’t take your apology if you make it on your goddamn knees. ”
If I’d been capable of moving—of gasping or gaping or doing anything at all besides lying on the ground—I would have reacted to that as though Hart had slapped me.
Hart believed I was capable. Powerful. Worthy of respect.
Raj respected me. I knew that. He was always careful to make sure that I was okay, that I was—
You’re treating him like a child or a pet.