Chapter 45
CHAPTER
FORTY-FIVE
Boris jolted away from Jack like he’d been shocked.
“God damn it,” Carla groaned, looking past Jack to his assailant. The gun trembled in her hand, still aimed at the yellow-eyed man. “Ronnie, get the fuck outta here. We need help. Go get me some fucking help—”
“I don’t think so, cupcake,” said a low voice that made all the hairs on Jack’s body stand on end. “Tell me, what’s going on here?”
Fingers twitched at the yellow-eyed man’s side. Jack closed his eyes, swallowed down despair.
Enzo wailed. “You gotta help me, Ronnie. This guy’s crazy! He’s trying to kill me! I’m fucking melting!”
Jack couldn’t be sure, but he thought that the body behind him tensed. His eyelids fluttered open.
“What’s going on?” asked Ronnie, cool and authoritarian, completely unaffected by everything going on around him. Disappointed, but not surprised.
The barrel of the gun nudged against Jack’s skull, and he realized with a wince that Ronnie was speaking to him.
“Um, well—”
“Jesus Christ,” Ronnie groaned. “Your brains would be more useful splattered on the wall. What the fuck is going on?”
Carla shook her head frantically, curls flying. “Ronnie, no—”
“Interrogation,” Jack gasped, picking the first word that came to mind. “He-he summoned something he shouldn’t have—”
“Enzo summoning things,” hummed Ronnie thoughtfully. “What a shock. But what are you doing here? I assume he summoned you, as well?”
There was a strange energy in the air. Perhaps it was an excess of adrenaline or the waning magic from the circle. But it prickled at Jack’s skin, wriggled into the roots of each of the fine hairs on his body, made him want to scream and writhe.
The gun held him motionless, afraid to even blink. “I-I—”
“God, Carla,” Ronnie huffed. “Him? Of all people? You couldn’t have done any better?” His words buzzed all the way down the barrel of the gun.
“Hey, he’s nice,” Carla snapped, glaring over her shoulder. “Don’t hurt him.”
Ronnie knew about them. Worse, Carla knew he knew. Jack’s stomach fizzled, acidic. When had she told him? What else had she lied about?
Did Ronnie know about the time loop, too?
“You don’t like nice guys,” said Ronnie with an air of finality. Jack flinched, waited for the gun to go off.
“Maybe I changed my mind,” said Carla, free hand going to her hip. The shiver in her voice was unmistakable. “C’mon, we don’t got time for this. Enzo’s melting.”
“Yeah, I’m melting!” said Enzo, spitting out another clump of blood and mucus. “Somebody save me!”
An itch began in Jack’s sinuses, slinked into his eyeballs, then into his skull. Tears spilled down his face. Still, the sensation did not abate.
The tremble fled his limbs. His pulse slowed. His hands began to move of their own accord, fingers twitching, then clenching.
Before he even knew what was happening, he’d reached behind him and knocked the gun free with knuckle-crunching fervor.
Ronnie didn’t have time to react. Somehow, some way, Jack managed to grab him by the lapel, dragging him down, then throwing him onto his back. He crashed against the floor, hard. Wide, panicked eyes stared up at him.
Jack stared back, equally panicked.
Around him, people shouted. Boris’s baritone joined the cacophony—the only thing Jack could cling to amongst the buzzing in his brain, the sounds of four voices all melding together in agony and outrage.
Jack lurched, and Ronnie scrambled for something in his pocket. But he wasn’t fast enough. Jack’s foot connected with his nose. A crunch rang out. Ronnie made an odd choking sound. Carla screamed. Blood poured down Ronnie’s handsome face, soaking into the starched collar of his shirt.
“You little shit,” he panted, but it was too late.
Jack moved again, this time catching him by the ears, flinching at the greasy heat. Hands grasped at his legs but couldn’t stop him from driving his knee into Ronnie’s face a second time.
A shriek ripped from Carla as Ronnie dropped backward with a grunt, fingers twitching. A black bruise spread from the center of his face across twisted, bloody flesh, engulfing a white fleck that might’ve been bone. Jagged teeth pierced through his upper lip, now a miserable flap of skin.
A sob built in Jack’s throat and became trapped there. For all that he wanted to cover his eyes and weep, he found that he could only stand stoically, hands at his sides, breathing heavily.
And then, quite without his consent, he bent down, grasped Ronnie by the shoulders and dragged him onto the rug. There, he patted him down just as the yellow-eyed man had Enzo and plucked a gun from inside his suit jacket, another from a holster on his ankle.
Ronnie was all but a corpse. A deadweight whose breath escaped in shuddering rasps, punctuated by the occasional spurt of blood or bubble of spit.
Tears streamed down Jack’s face, but he could not stop, could not even release the lapels of Ronnie’s suit, now ruthlessly crumpled.
Nor could he meet Boris’s eye—his gaze was locked on the man beneath him, unceremoniously shoved inside the circle beside a gasping Enzo.
“Whoa, whoa,” he said, scooting away from Ronnie until his back was against the singed line, looking at Jack like he was some kind of demon.
Which to be fair, wasn’t far from how he felt—like some unseen force had overtaken his limbs, torn his will away and discarded it somewhere in the carnage.
Jack wanted to weep. Instead, he stepped away from the circle, back toward the doorway, where a wild-eyed Boris threw up a broad palm in a bid to stop him.
At once, the strength fled his limbs and he dropped to his hands and knees, coughing and gagging, muscles screaming like they’d been ripped free from his bones. A bolt of agony shot from his knee to his ankle. The blood smeared across his fingers was already tacky.
Voices came flooding back; Carla sobbing, Boris breathing heavily, and Enzo yelling, “What the fuck?!” like he expected someone to have an answer.
The yellow-eyed man remained silent, his gaze locked on Jack.
“Where did that Kung-fu shit come from?” Boris said, pale-faced, voice higher than Jack had ever heard it.
“Don’t know,” Jack muttered, sitting back on his heels, staring in disbelief at the scene before him.
Carla held a manicured hand over her mouth. “Is he—Is he dead?”
“No,” said the yellow-eyed man simply. “But he’ll wish he was.”
Boris looked from Jack, to Enzo, to the yellow-eyed man. “We need to end this,” he said. “How do we end this?”
An answering shrug. “Like you said. We must cut off the head of the snake… and destroy it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jack, reaching to brush his bangs from his forehead. Boris made a sound halfway between a yelp and a snarl, and Jack found himself once again staring down the barrel of a gun.
“Don’t fucking move.”
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Jack promised, raising his bloody palms. His knees ached where he rested on them. Beneath his torn trousers, he was sure a bruise had bloomed. “I didn’t—that wasn’t me.”
“Yeah,” said Boris, breath hitching. “I know it wasn’t you. I don’t care. Don’t fucking move.”
“I promise,” Jack said, trying to catch his eye, imploring.
“I can assure you that you will never again see this man do something like that,” said the yellow-eyed man coolly. “He’s physically weak. Uncoordinated. But easily controlled.”
Jack tried to smile and accidentally displayed all of his teeth. Carla sobbed.
“Don’t fucking possess people,” Boris snarled. The gun wavered in his hand.
“I make no promises,” said the yellow-eyed man, shaking his head. “What must be done will be done. We should move on.”
“To what?” Boris demanded.
A wave of exhaustion crashed over Jack, made his bones unbearably heavy. With it came a rush of adrenaline, charging through him like an electric shock.
“We lure the beast,” said the yellow-eyed man, slow grin unfurling.
“It’s simple,” said the yellow-eyed man. “We wait for Enzo to sleep.”
“I’m not sleeping,” said Enzo stubbornly, glaring outside the circle. “You can’t make me.”
Jack cast a guilty glance at Carla. Ronnie lay in a pool of blood, his head pillowed on Enzo’s lap.
Whatever terrible, rotting curse had been cast was dispelled.
For all that Enzo moaned about all his missing bits and pieces, he appeared reasonably intact.
A few teeth, a fingernail, the tip of a nose—all things that time or plastic surgery could restore.
But Enzo isn’t going to survive, Jack reminded himself, crestfallen. He bore no love for the short, tubby man in the circle, but this was a fate no one deserved. Even Enzo, who might have killed his lover and summoned the vampire to Hidden Cove but surely did not comprehend its abilities.
Chose to disregard it, whispered the voice in the back of Jack’s mind. He knew it was wrong and did it anyway.
But Jack couldn’t imagine putting someone to death for their ignorance, no matter how willful. Perhaps he was too kind, too understanding, but the thought of anyone being consumed by that thing made him physically sick.
There was no way to fight against the yellow-eyed man. No way to battle someone who could disintegrate flesh or take control of someone else’s limbs like a child playing with a rag doll.
Carla sat on the couch, gun in her lap, black tears cascading down her face. “Ronnie,” she would mumble occasionally, her gaze flitting to Jack, then back to the wall.
Maybe it was a mistake to assume that Carla was intimately familiar with the ways of the mafia.
That she’d seen terrible things and shrugged them off like the dregs of a nightmare.
Maybe she knew how to shoot. Maybe she’d seen a death or two.
But she couldn’t possibly be accustomed to this sort of violence.
Not when she reacted like this, limp and afraid.
Boris moved to stand beside Jack and reached tentatively for his shoulder. “You OK?”
“No,” Jack mumbled, afraid to look away from the yellow-eyed man, lest he find that his limbs were not his own once more.