Even on a private jet, the trip from Montana to Mississippi still lasted eight hours. I slept six of them. When I woke, Wu was in an ugly mood, and I didn’t try pulling him out of his funk. I didn’t know him well enough to trust what I said to make things better and not worse.
There was no limo waiting for us this time. The White Horse SUV had been reclaimed too.
Sariah was alert enough to have opened her eyes, but there was no one home behind them yet. Wu dumped her in a wheelchair and pushed her to the curb.
I didn’t wait for him to make arrangements. I dialed up Cole. “Can you swing a pickup for three?”
“I think I can manage,” he rumbled, and it vibrated down my spine.
Headlights winked to life three rows in front of us in the parking lot, and the vehicle circled, pulling to a stop in front of us. The window lowered, and Cole leaned out, taking in our third wheel. He threw the SUV in park and exited the vehicle with a bounce in his step that had me curious.
“You’re in a good mood,” I observed. “What’s that in your hand?”
“I had this made for you.” He held out his palm, and a set of ornate handcuffs plated in rose gold rested on them. I traced the design, reminiscent of the rukav, and I lost the ability to speak. “I wanted to give them to you before you left, but they weren’t finished yet.”
Beside me, Wu snapped to attention. “Is that rosendium?”
“Yes,” Cole said, not taking his eyes off me.
“You didn’t have to do this.” I accepted them, though. Their weight was a familiar comfort, and the fact he had commissioned the piece made them precious. Too valuable to waste on Sariah, who might ding them just to spite me. “Thank you.”
“She doesn’t understand.” Wu dropped his gaze to Cole’s wrists, one of them exposed, both inflamed. “How could you bear it?”
“What is he talking about?” The gift took on an uncertain weight in my hands. “Cole?”
Wu backed off and left Cole to his explanation.
“Rosendium is a metal produced by Otillians.” He smoothed his thumb over the lowest band on my arm, the one above my wrist, and the resonance made my knees quiver. “They harvest it from their bodies and use it to bind their coterie to them.”
Understanding struck with the force of a two-by-four to the face. “You let someone pry out your bands?”
“The moment you captured Famine rather than kill her, I knew the day would come when you required a means of restraining her.” Determination brightened his eyes. “When you took Sariah as well . . . I had to act, to protect you.”
“But at what cost?” I clasped his hand, the one with a naked wrist, and turned it gently from side to side, inspecting the ridges of skin, years’ worth of scar tissue. His hatred for his bindings had carved a valley in his flesh as he picked them out, over and over. But they regrew. Whatever Conquest had done—whatever I had done—to him, it was permanent. Or it was until I decided otherwise at the very least. “You should have told me. I would have—”
“No.” He softened his voice. “You can barely set foot inside a hospital because of what those doctors did to you.”
“That’s different,” I protested. “I was a child then.”
“Thank you,” I said again, and this time I kissed each of his wrists, right over the swollen flesh.
A shuddering exhale gusted through him, and I wondered if he was affected by the gesture or the brush of my lips against his bands. Mine were sensitive. And War had shown me they were more than decorative, more than a means of subduing our coterie. She had struck hers against mine and—I had no words to describe the sensation.
One day I would work up the courage to ask Cole what else was possible, but not tonight. Not in front of Wu and Sariah. A tiny suspicion was bubbling up in me that a fraction of my previous touch aversion was thanks to humans’ lack of resonance. Contact from them was a screeching discord while my coterie and I vibrated on the same frequency. Other charun were less offensive to my senses, but still discordant.
Allowing myself to compartmentalize how Cole had brutalized himself for my sake, I focused on what had been worth the sacrifice. “How do they work?”
“The metal itself is harmless, to humans and charun, unless it completes a circuit.”
“That explains the design.” I turned the cuffs over in my hands. “These have to connect to be effective?”
“Yes.” He pointed to the keyholes. “They’re double latched.” He showed me how the tricky second lock functioned. “They’re no more effective than standard cuffs unless you lock them on your target.”
“What’s with the chain?” I gave it a tug, and the links held firm, but there was something odd in the way they had been anchored to each cuff.
“The cuffs also function as bangles,” a soft voice murmured from the shadows. “They will give you limited control over whoever wears them.” The small woman from the hall stepped forward and drifted into Cole’s shadow. Her gaze fell to his wrists, and she winced. “Handcuffs to subdue, bangles to subjugate.”
A warning growl pumped through Cole, but the woman didn’t shy from him.
No, I was the one who terrified her.
Jealousy failed to rouse this time, and I was glad for the reprieve. “You designed these?”
“Yes.” Self-loathing made her choke on the admission. “I owed him a favor. This clears our debt.”
The woman’s reappearance captured Wu’s interest, and he sidled up to me. “The craftsmanship is exquisite. Could you forge another pair?”
“No,” she spat. “Never again.” She made a sweeping gesture over her chest that came across as Catholic but couldn’t be. “I have never used my talent for evil, but that—that is cursed.” Her gaze latched onto mine. “He promised me you were different. He vowed you were here to save us. Please. Please. Destroy the cuffs after. Let them serve your purpose. Wield them with my blessing. But do not force me to live with the knowledge such a foul thing exists, and that I birthed it into this world. No one deserves to have their will stripped. These cuffs are an abomination.”
“I give you my word,” I said before Wu finished voicing his protest. “I will destroy them the second I don’t need them anymore.”
“That’s not good enough.” Resolve starched her spine, and she inched away from the safety Cole provided. “When the fate of this world is decided, I want them gone.”
“All right.” I allowed a smile at her ferocity to bend my lips. “When the fate of this world has been decided, I will destroy the cuffs myself. Failing that, I will entrust them to someone who will carry out my wishes. You have my word.”
The woman wilted on the spot as the head of steam she’d built up evaporated. “Go then, with my blessing.”
Cole offered the woman a formal bow then kissed the back of her hand. “You have my gratitude.”
“You can keep it.” She flushed at his praise but paled when she caught me watching. “I like you well enough, Nicodemus, but not so much that I would step between you and your—”
His cold stare froze her on the spot, the terror she exuded when staring at me now leaking out in front of him.
I had taken a half step forward to diffuse the situation when what she said registered. Nicodemus. Not Cole. Not Heaton. Not any combination of the two. But Nicodemus. A name I had never heard applied to him. And yet she had known. How had she known?
“Forgive me,” she whispered. “I misspoke.”
“You got your assurances,” Cole snarled. “Now go.”
The woman crumpled in on herself but nodded and backed into the darkness until it absorbed her.
Cole rubbed a hand over his face, sighed in my direction, then went after her.
I let him go without a word.
“He never told you his name,” Wu surmised, touching his knuckles to the side of my neck.
“No.” I cleared my throat. “His secrets are his own.”
“Trust will come in time,” he assured me, and a knife to the heart would have hurt less.
For all that I trusted Cole, he didn’t return the favor. I couldn’t blame him. But forgiving him was hard.
Conquest shared history with him, and its depth and breadth had formed a chasm between us I was still bridging, plank by plank. But this woman leapt the divide with a single bound, a single word.
His name.
Nicodemus.
“Thish ish better—” Sariah slurred, “—than televishion.”
The handcuffs had lost their shine by the time I clamped them around her wrists and hauled her to her feet. We gave Cole fifteen minutes to return, and when he didn’t, we took his SUV back to the hotel.
Wu kept his own counsel, and I returned the favor. Some burdens weren’t lessened by sharing them.
Up in our suite, Maggie curled against the arm of the couch with a book in her hands. Miller sat on the floor, his shoulder almost touching her ankle, a manual pulled up on his phone if the array of components fanning around him were any indication. The quiet week I spent at the bunkhouse, surrounded by books, felt like it happened years ago, to someone else.
Armageddon was hell on a TBR pile.
They glanced up in unison, but the first snarl shot from the far corner of the room, where Santiago hunched over a table scattered with circuits and wires.
“What the hell is she doing here?” He shot to his feet, brandishing a Phillips screwdriver like a sword. “Are you insane?”
“You bartered with her.” Miller figured it out first. “Do you trust her to keep her word?”
“We do,” Wu answered for me when it turned out I was still having trouble finding my voice.
“What does Cole think about this?” Portia, who set aside Maggie’s book, stood and joined Santiago. They stood shoulder to shoulder, ready to bar Sariah from our rooms. “Does he know?”
“He picked us up,” I rasped. “He knows.”
“Luce?” Portia’s voice wavered, teetering on the edge between personalities. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Worst lie in history. No one believed anyone who claimed to be fine because they never were. “He gave me these.” I lifted Sariah’s linked arms and let them catch the glint off her wrists. “She won’t be a problem. If she breaks her word to us—” and I had no doubt she would attempt to wriggle out of our deal now that she was free, “—these will keep her in line.”
Or so I hoped until Cole explained how they worked in full detail.
“I know what that is.” Miller flared his nostrils. “How—?”
“Lorelei,” Santiago swore. “That’s why she met Cole here.”
“Where is he?” Thom strolled in from the mini kitchen, holding a raw fish in his hand. “He was waiting on you.”
“Who knows?” I flapped a hand at him. “He’s gone to find this Lorelei person.”
“Is she lost?” He crossed to me and sat on the floor at my feet. “I saw her earlier.”
“She got her feelings hurt.” Emotions I didn’t want to identify in my present mood. “She bolted after he presented his gift to me, and he went after her.”
Miller turned his head to hide his expression from me, but Santiago I could trust to make the direct hit.
“Who is she?” I would know no peace until I understood what wasn’t being said so loudly.
No one answered me. Not even Santiago, and the force of maintaining his quiet caused his jaw to bulge.
Thom held the fish aloft, offering it to me, and it took every ounce of patience in me to reach down, sift my fingers through his hair, and tell him, “It looks fresh. You should keep it.”
“I caught it after I finished scouting the area where the body washed ashore.” He bit into its belly, his teeth having sharpened to catlike points. “I stole one from the market, but it wasn’t fresh caught today. The man lied on his sign.”
“People do that.” I cupped Sariah’s elbow and led her into my room. “Come on.”
“I’m not sleepy,” she grumbled, her speech already solidifying. “Or are you going to lock me in there?”
“I’m going to let you shower, find you some clothes, and locate a map.” She would fit into my spares until I could buy supplies for her. “You took an eight-hour nap. It’s time for you to earn your keep.” I didn’t notice Wu slipping in behind me until I turned and smacked right into him. “I can handle her.”
“I don’t doubt it.” His gaze touched on the bed, king-sized, like I might be sharing. But there were no dragons here. No Coles either. And he gave the impression of liking that just fine. “You’re the one who captured her.”
Eyebrow cocked, I let him get away with herding me. “Then why are you backing me up, in my bedroom?”
“You’re emotional,” he said calmly. “I only came in case you needed assistance.”
“You did not just say that,” I growled. “Just because I’m a woman—”
Wu closed his hand over my throat, his thumb caressing my carotid in a slow glide that turned my blood to honey. “You don’t think clearly where Cole is concerned, and any distraction around a predator will get you killed.”
Pulsing slowing, head clearing, I bobbled my head on my neck. “You’ve done this before.”
The night we confronted Famine at the Trudeaus’ home, he had calmed me with the same technique. Chokeholds weren’t exactly soothing, but since I hadn’t kneed his balls so far up his throat he sprouted a second pair of tonsils, my boneless response must be a charun thing. Biology at work. Yeah. That sounded good. Better than any other excuse that leapt to mind.
“To you?” Gold warmed his brown eyes. “Only once.”
“It’s a dirty trick.” I exhaled slowly. “But I needed it. Thank you.”
For another thirty seconds or so, he kept caressing me, and I kept letting him. The more he touched me, the less discordant he became, until I had to wonder if he hadn’t somehow attuned himself to me. How, unless he hid his rosendium better than us, was he resonating with me at all?
Wu might look at me like he wanted to take a bite out of me on occasion, but I always wrote it off as posturing. That it might mean more . . .
The skip in my sluggish pulse furrowed his brow, and I broke free of him before he figured out why my heart had broken into a samba.
“Luce.” Tablet in hand, Santiago shouldered past Wu into the room. “We got a problem.”
The intrusion spared me from answering the question in Wu’s eyes, and I blessed Santiago and his lack of personal boundaries.
“Is that—?” A security feed clued me into what I was seeing. “You’re spying on Lambert?”
“He’s awake.” Santiago pressed the device into my hands. “We might ought to do something about that.”
“Do something?” I studied the image, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. “One, two, three . . . ” I counted the hospital personnel in the room. “There are four people seizing on the floor.” I spun it around for Wu to see. “You said he wasn’t contagious.”
“He shouldn’t be.” Wu cut his eyes toward the bathroom. “Keep an eye on Sariah. I’ll go check it out.”
And risk him dismissing this incident out of hand too? No thanks. “Santiago, can you babysit our guest?”
“Sure thing.” His smile was all teeth. “I’m sure we can find some way to entertain ourselves until you return.”
“Don’t let her near Miller,” I warned him. “I don’t want either of them hurt.”
Last time they butted heads, Sariah almost killed him. She’d had help. Lots of it. From her siblings. That didn’t mean I wanted them left unsupervised. Miller was dangerous, that’s what everyone kept telling me, but all I saw when I looked at him was a pool of blood on the kitchen floor in the farmhouse where I grew up, and a friend we had scrambled to save.
We left Santiago in the bedroom and gave Portia orders to select clothes that would fit Sariah. As dangerous as it was to let the two of them tag team our spy, I had no other choice.
A tentative hand on my elbow stopped me near the door, and I found Miller beside me. “Yes?”
“I’m not a liability.” A flash of hurt made it clear he resented getting benched. “Santiago and I can handle Sariah. Maggie isn’t ready for this.”
“You’re not a liability,” I agreed quickly. “That’s not why I’m asking you to stay out of that room and away from Sariah. I just don’t want her near you unless I’m here to mediate.”
“She can’t kill me.” He gentled his tone. “Not without signing her own death warrant.”
So everyone kept telling me. “Remember when we agreed to try and understand each other’s perspectives?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I was going to lose you.” I removed his hand from my elbow and squeezed his fingers. “I don’t see you as some world-ending super demon. You’re my friend, Miller, and you lost more blood than most horror houses use at Halloween because of her. Just humor me this one time. Can you do that?”
“For you.” He pressed a fond kiss to my forehead. “But I will open her stomach and feast on her entrails if she harms Portia or Maggie.”
Aware of the signals my body transmitted without permission, I smothered my fear, grasping the cold place with two hands and diving deep before the predator in Miller scented my panic. An unearthly calm spread through my limbs, and the tension in his shoulders eased. With emotion walled up behind bricks of ice, I saw things more clearly.
“I expect nothing less.” Frost crackled in my mouth. “I respect your right to protect what is ours.”
“It’s time to go.” Wu studied me, his eyes flecked with gold, his lips thin. Conquest always put him in a mood. For someone so eager to watch her rise in me, he sure preferred her tamped beneath my personality. “Your coterie can handle Sariah.” Glancing past me, he singled out Thom. “Come with us. You have a soothing effect on her.”
Thom discarded the remains of his fish sullenly then washed up to his elbows in the kitchen sink.
The urge to laugh plucked my vocal cords. “I can soothe myself just fine.”
“Maintaining a partial shift for too long is dangerous. You need to settle your nerves.”
Partial . . . shift? Embracing the cold place ceded that much of me to her?
“Come on, Luce.” Thom took my hand. “Let’s go.”
A flash of warmth spread up my arm, thawing my heart, and that calculating place in my head dismissed Wu. The cold place lasted for as long as it was required and not a second more.
Thom led the way, and Wu looked on, amused. Thom had a set of SUV keys in his pocket, but he passed them over to Wu. I claimed shotgun, and Thom climbed in behind me. After we cleared the parking lot, a rush of energy tickled my nape, and a boxy tomcat leapt onto my lap. His purr rattled my teeth when he leaned against my chest to scratch the underside of his jaw on my shirt buttons. That, or he was scent-marking me. Probably the latter. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one with possessive issues.
“Does that help?” Wu flicked a glance at Thom. “The purring, I mean?”
“I like the sound.” Already, I was more myself. “I like the feel too.” I rested my hand on Thom’s back, and he revved up his motor. “She must have too.” He understood I meant Conquest. “All the coterie appears to have feline attributes.”
The sound Wu made, a tight half-chuckle, had me glancing his way. “What’s so funny?” I scratched behind Thom’s notched ears. “Conquest, Scourge of the Terrenes, was one charun away from crazy cat lady status. Does that amuse you?”
“Yes,” he admitted so quickly I knew that’s not what had tickled him.
“Come on. Spill.” The cold place had evaporated, leaving me in my own skin. “Why the laugh?”
“I’ll show you one day.” He dared me with a glance that left me with sweaty palms. He really shouldn’t take his eyes off the road while driving. “Will that work?”
“I’m guessing I don’t have a choice, so sure.” Scooping up Thom, I cradled him against my chest while he kneaded my shoulder with wickedly sharp claws. “Thank you, Thomas.”
“Mmmrrrrpt.”
“You identify most with your coterie in their natural forms,” Wu mused. “That’s unexpected.”
“People are hard to parse.” People lied, manipulated, stole, cheated. “Animals are simpler. Their motivations are easier to read. So are their moods.” I used Thom as an example. “When they’re happy, they purr. When they’re not, they bite or scratch or both.”
We reached the hospital before Wu could psychoanalyze me further. Thank God.
Thom hopped in the back while Wu parked. When we exited the vehicle, Thom did too. On two legs. He sniffed the air a few inches from my ear then licked the upper shell with his dry, raspy tongue that never seemed to shift back all the way.
“You’ll be all right,” he pronounced. “Your elevated testosterone levels have normalized.”
“I, ah, okay.” Resisting the urge to wipe my ear dry made my fingers twitch. “Good to know.”
“Comb the lobby,” Wu told him. “Keep your ears open for gossip. We must consider public opinion when deciding how best to suppress the spread of sensitive information.”
The order curled Thom’s lip, but he did as he was told and walked ahead of us into the hospital.
“I’m part of a cover-up,” I muttered. “I can’t believe this.”
“Would you rather we warn humans about the end of days? Open their eyes to what lives among them?” He scoffed at the idea. “Imagine if this boy is contagious, if the origin is in Death, what then? Humans would sensationalize a zombie plague, and mass hysteria would reign. Consider how many more lives would be lost.” He tamed his exasperation. “Humans die, thousands of them, sometimes hundreds of thousands of them, each time the cadre breaches. It’s inevitable. We do our best to minimize the casualties, but there are environmental factors as well.”
Thom was gone when we entered the lobby, so we hit the elevators. “What environmental factors?”
“Cadres unbalance the worlds they claim. Between them, they hold too much power. It disrupts the ebb and flow of the environment. That’s why they aren’t given the same chance at rehabilitation as other charun.”
“You let me live this long,” I pointed out.
“You were only one,” he said, shuttering his expression, “and your condition muted your significance. You weren’t expending energy, you weren’t disrupting the natural order. Even with all the power at your disposal, you left no footprint. There was no harm in monitoring you.”
“Now there are three of us.” The elevator spit us out on the third floor. “What have I missed?”
“Small atmospheric disturbances. Low-grade tornadoes, minor earthquakes, a weak tsunami. Weather that might cause a meteorologist to remark on an active season, but nothing alarming.”
I heard the yet clearly.
“No one told me.” There was so much I didn’t know, so much I didn’t want to know but must learn.
The problem was that survival was taking up all my spare time. I was being given the CliffsNotes version of my past on a need to know basis instead of being handed the entire book to peruse, but I had come awake too late to catch up on my reading.
“Conditions will deteriorate quickly once Death arrives.”
Note to self: Download weather app.
We turned the corner onto madness, and that spared him from answering more questions.
Wu at my side, I waded in. “What in the . . . ?”
Gurneys clogged the hall, convulsing bodies strapped to them. Nurses huddled in groups, some in triage mode while others wept and fluttered over fallen coworkers. Doctors waded in, and hands clutched at their white coats. Security officers milled among them, pushing the crowd back. More men in blue arrived and began herding anyone symptomatic into rooms down the hall.
One of them noticed us and whistled in our direction. “You’ll have to come with me.”
Wu started to protest, his hand reaching for the badge at his hip, but I gripped his wrist. “All right.”
“What are you doing?” He pitched his voice low as we kept to the path the officer cleared for us.
“We need to find out what’s wrong with these people. It will be hours before the staff is settled enough to answer questions, and we’ll have to stand in line for a turn.” I patted him reassuringly. “Why not go right to the source?”
“They might be contagious.” He hesitated on the threshold of a room that would be difficult to fight our way out of if it came to that. “Assuming this illness spread from the corpse, we might be at risk.”
“Well, that’s one way to prove I was right.” I waltzed right in. “I’ll try not to gloat.”
“I hope we live long enough for you to fully enjoy proving me wrong.”
We worked the crowd for two hours. There were three dozen people sequestered. Almost half of them wore scrubs. The first three or four had no information. They had been herded in here before grasping the situation. The next five or six had either been visiting family or seeking treatment when a commotion drew them out into the hall. The rest were starting to sweat and tremble.
“Are you . . . cops?” Winded from the short walk across the room, a nurse wearing baby pink scrubs latched onto Wu’s arm to keep her knees from buckling. “I saw . . . you interviewing . . . everyone.”
“We’re with the FBI.” Wu adjusted the woman and reached for his badge. The flash gave me a pang of envy. I felt naked without one. Done impressing her, he put it away. “Can you tell us what you saw?”
“I was meeting a friend for lunch. I work in maternity. He works in ICU. I waited at the nurses’ station on his floor, but he never showed. It’s not like him to stand me up without calling, but sometimes we get busy. It’s easy to lose track of time. I gave him fifteen minutes then I went looking. I found him collapsed in the hall outside Jay Lambert’s room. He was foaming at the mouth and speaking in tongues.”
“Speaking in tongues?”
“The way some religious people do? It’s all gibberish to me.”
Wu tensed beneath her hand, his face a calm mask that hid the cracks I heard in his resolve. “Can you remember anything he said?”
“There was so much of it, but he kept repeating ‘ah-tru-ha-dal’.”
The sheen sparking off Wu’s brown eyes was in no way human, and the nurse wasn’t so far gone not to notice.
Power radiated off him in waves that lifted the hairs down my arms. He was going nuclear, and there wasn’t enough time to insulate everyone from the blast. I had to get him calm and fast. God only knew what charun lived beneath his skin. This was not how I wanted to make that discovery.
“Here, let me help you to a chair.” I accepted her weight from him and guided her to the conference table. The crowd around the oval had thinned a bit as people grew bored and started pacing or standing in front of the doors like they might forge their combined will into a key that would open them. “There you go. Just sit tight. I’m sure it won’t be much longer.”
“I’m a nurse.” The stare she leveled at me would have done Rixton proud. “I’ve worked in this hospital for fifteen years and been certified for twenty. Go pull someone’s else’s leg. Your arms will get tired if you keep yanking on mine.”