Chapter 26
twenty-six
Gentry
Gentry woke up with an instant migraine and with every inch of her skin protesting the scratchy quilt on top of her.
She moaned and threw it off of her, as every aspect of her environment fought her.
Her skin pebbled at the freezing air conditioning and the late afternoon sun tormented her sensitive eyes.
Apparently recovering from poison wasn’t an instantaneous process, even with the antidote she recalled Kit pouring down her throat. Moaning, she turned her face into her arm. Hot warmth leaked onto her forehead, and she realized she was bleeding. Again.
The bastard must’ve cut me again. She didn’t bother to open her eyes to see the slashes. And Visha had just healed her arms from the vampyre attack. How ironic, that it’d been the exact same place Drayer Netherton always left his mark.
Knowing that she was going to have to wrap it up to staunch the blood flow, Gentry sat up and edged towards the bed, only opening her eyes so that she could place her feet onto a carpeted floor.
Distantly, she remembered waking up, but not much else.
She must’ve been out of it. From the time Visha poisoned her, her memories were pretty foggy — she recalled some details of the flight from the bunker.
Kit’s voice, his arms wrapped around her. Not much else.
Considering she was alive, she assumed this had to be the place with the cure. From the texts she’d read on Kit’s phone, she assumed this had to be the Jumper hideout.
Standing up and hugging her injured arm close to her chest, Gentry shuffled toward the door. Each step took more effort than it should’ve, a testament to her weakened state. Holy hell, but that poison packed a wallop. She regretted ever trusting a snake like Visha.
She entered a joint living room and kitchen area that was infested with plants, their leaves and flowers unnaturally healthy considering their home was in a desert.
Many were taller than her. She peeked around the messy space, spotting liquor bottles and secondhand furniture.
To her surprise, Kit sat kicked back at the kitchen table with his phone in his hands.
He didn’t look like his usual unflappable self.
"What's the matter?" she croaked, a little entertained when Kit jumped two feet out of his chair in surprise.
"You're awake already?" he asked, surprised.
"How long was I out?"
"An hour. I was gonna give you twice that amount before waking you up," His eyes went from open and kind to sharp when he noticed the blood on her face. “Unexpected company again?”
She nodded. He retrieved the first aid kit from her backpack that lay against his chair. "Come here."
She obeyed, and he immediately pressed a large hand against her forehead. “You're burning up. I won't be able to give you any healing potion until that fever's gone." He picked up a bottle of pills and rattled it at her. "But we've got these."
Gentry snatched the bottle out of his hand, thrilled that a witch's house would have non-magical medicine like this.
"Pills first," she said before downing them. Then she sat down and handed her arm over to Kit. He got to work, taking a washcloth from the kitchen and cleaning the blood off as he applied pressure with his other hand. Gentry gritted her teeth.
Kit stopped cleaning her for a second. "This is different," he said, his voice puzzled. "The lines… look like words."
Hot fury made her ears ring. “Keep applying pressure,” she ordered, and then Kit helped her twist her forearm so she could see the pink-tinged skin from Kit’s wiping. Her heart stopped when she saw droplets of blood squeezing out of a jagged 201 Old Springs Rd.
“Shit.” The curse left her mouth in a rush of air. She pulled her arm from Kit’s grip and grabbed her laptop from the backpack, her hands shaking as she flipped open the screen.
“Easy there”—Kit caught her injured arm again—“you don’t want to fry it.”
Gentry turned the screen on. “I’ll need the internet password,” she said.
“Not until I’m done wrapping you up.” His voice left no room for arguments.
Kit made quick work of wrapping her arm so tight she could almost feel the tips of her fingers turn white. Then he gave her a piece of paper with the password on it, and she was in. She went directly to the ship's security site she'd hacked into for her sister and mother's cruise.
Only when she caught footage of them eating breakfast thirty minutes before did she relax and slump forward. “Thank goodness,” she whispered, tears burning her already sensitive eyes.
Before she could blink them away, Kit pulled her into a hug. Her brain short-circuited at the physical contact and remained stiff.
"That was their address, wasn't it? Your family's?"
Gentry caved, pressed her hot forehead against his shoulder, and closed her eyes against the terrible light. "Yes." Drayer Netherton had carved her mother's address into her arm, letting her know that he was starting the precursory moves necessary to hunt her family down. Time was running out.
"They're on a cruise over international waters," she told Kit. "It's one of the cruises that keeps its movements pretty locked down to prevent piracy from witches. They'll be home in about two weeks," she said miserably.
Kit moved his hand in a circular motion on her back, and against all odds, she relaxed a little. "He won't get them," he promised.
"How do you know that?"
"Because you're smart," he said simply. "And you planned this whole thing out to give you the time you needed to break the curse. And if the worst comes down to it, I'll help you.”
Gentry pulled back and looked at the witch, who she'd imprisoned with the Favors, specifically at his neck, where that bloody mark lay. "Why are you helping me now?" she asked.
He shrugged and looked away from her. "I feel a little invested now that I've kept you alive this long," he said, "and a little bad because Visha poisoned you.
You know, I didn't really have much planned before you dragged me into this whole mess.
I was about to leave the Jumpers and go nomad.
" He held his cell phone up. "I was gonna try to make things right with my siblings, the ones who came with me to Skadra in the first place, but they’re not even answering my calls. Right now, getting you cured is about the only good direction my life can go.”
Gentry nodded, seeing nothing for him to gain by revealing that sad truth.
She didn’t have the energy to ask about Kit’s siblings and why they didn’t want to talk to him.
By ‘siblings’, she assumed he meant other orphans raised by Sophia.
It tracked that there was some drama. There’d been some tension between Kit and his foster mother.
“I didn’t know you had a family aside from your dad”—Kit changed the subject— “that complicates things. I was going to suggest we run off to the Wilds for a few months, let the heat die and then find a way to break your curse. That won’t work, huh?”
“No, it won’t,” she agreed, a little moved that he’d come up with a plan with her well-being in mind.
"Besides, I don’t want to live with this”—she gestured to her arm—“for any longer than I have to. This ends in two weeks.” Whether it ends poorly for me, or not, she added in her head. No one else was dying for her cause.
Oh, is that right? You’ll selflessly give yourself up when it’s time?
That sure sounds like you. Her inner self was vicious, and brimming with self-hatred.
The panic closing her throat didn’t exactly give her confidence in herself, either.
Death wasn’t her worst fear, but rather spending the rest of her days caged.
“Do you have a plan on where to go next?” Kit asked, blissfully unaware of her insanity.
“I’ll… need time for a plan,” Gentry admitted, flushing a bit. “Dad gave me the key to his apartment, so I thought we’d start there. But also, he said a few things I need to…” She trailed off and pointed at her keyboard.
Kit instantly understood. “I’ll get out of your hair then. We have to hightail it out of here soon. By the way, try not to worry your pretty little head if you don’t find anything. Sam mentioned a place we could try.”
He sauntered out of the kitchen and out of the house, the leaves of nearby plants caressing him on the way out.
Gentry watched, her mouth dry with both want and also jealousy.
She remembered the vines at the bunker. This house reeked of Visha.
Even when absent, the bitch was staking her claim on him.
And you want to claim him? There you go, Greenbriar, there’s your usual brand of ‘selflessness’, her inner self sniped.
God, but she needed to see a therapist after this.
Gentry focused on her computer, her brain working sluggishly through her bloodsoaked memories of her father dying.
Each second replayed like a drum in her already pounding head.
She opened a text document up and started typing, determined not to forget a single word of what he said.
His love for Beckett and her mom. For her. But also the hints he’d given her.
The Cobalts, he sold me out to the Cobalts.
Meticulously, she started working through her usual forums and channels for mentions of the coven. At first, there were no hits. Absolutely none. But then she caught one user sharing an anecdote on a vamps-only site:
Heard about some bloke who Made his dead wife into a vampyre. The Weavers gave him the Cobalt treatment. Stupid bastard.
Extrapolating that, since the Cobalts had been punished and weren’t in recent sites, Gentry set her search date to ten years ago.
Then twenty. Thirty. Bingo. The internet back then was far smaller, more niche.
Witches had yet to make the switch over, but the Weavers had let the government-run newspapers in Skadra back then.
Most likely so that everyone could hear about their atrocities.
She clicked on the first article.
VAST VAMPYRE RING TAKEN DOWN.
INFAMOUS COBALTS TO BE PUNISHED BY DARISIUS HIMSELF.
Gentry skimmed through the article and all the other connected ones.
Thirty years ago, Skadra’s magic-less were relentlessly preyed upon by a horde of vamps, all of whom were under the control of the Cobalt coven.
The Weavers had issued an emergency curfew and corpse burn order to lessen deaths while they’d gone to war with the other coven, which had apparently rivaled the Weavers’ own power at the time.
It’d been bloody, with multiple casualties on both sides.
For two years, the Cobalts and Weavers had fought until the former was placed under siege once their vampyre force was depleted. Within six months, the Weavers publicly executed all Cobalt members, including their leader, Freya.
Gentry stopped reading once she came across a grainy photograph of Freya’s corpse hanging in the town square. A giant vulture sat perched above it. She shuddered, but didn’t need to read any further.
The Cobalts as a coven ceased to exist the day Freya died. The Weavers had forbidden any future covens to take the name.
So why had her father said the Cobalts were responsible for her curse?