A desert.

It is dusk.

I hold a child in my arms.

I stare into the night.

I won’t look down.

Can’t face what’s in his eyes.

Can’t not look.

My gaze goes unwillingly, hungrily down.

The child stares up at me with utter trust.

His eyes say, I know you won’t let me die.

His eyes say, I know you will make the pain stop.

His eyes said, Trust/love/adore/youareperfect/youwillalwayskeepme safe/youaremyworld.

But I didn’t keep him safe.

And I can’t make his pain stop.

Bitterness fills my mouth with bile. I turn my head and vomit. I never understood anything about life until this moment.

I always sought only my own gain. Mercenary to the core.

If the child dies, nothing will ever matter again, because a piece of me will go with him. Until now I was not aware of that piece. Didn’t know it existed. Didn’t know it mattered.

Ironic to find it, in the moment of losing it.

I hold him.

I rock him.

He weeps.

His tears fall on my arms and burn my skin.

I stare into those trusting eyes.

I see him there. His yesterdays. His today. The tomorrows that will never be.

I see his pain and it shreds me.

I see his absolute love and it shames me.

I see the light—that beautiful perfect light that is life.

He smiles at me. He gives me all his love in his eyes.

It begins to fade.

No! I roar. You will not die! You will not leave me!

I stare into his eyes for what seems a thousand days.

I see him. I hold him. He is there.

He is gone.

There’s a moment, in the dying, of transition. Life to death. Full to empty. There, then gone. Too fast. Come back, come back, you want to scream. I need just one more minute. Just one more smile. Just one more chance to do things right. But he’s gone. He’s gone. Where did he go? What happens to life when it leaves? Does it go somewhere or is it just fucking gone?

I try to weep, but nothing comes.

Something rattles deep in my chest.

I do not recognize it.

I am no longer what I was.

I look at the others.

None of us are.

The images stopped. I was back in the bookstore. I was shaking. Grief was an open wound in my chest. I was bleeding for the child I’d just lost, bleeding for Alina, for all the people dying out there in this war we’d been unable to prevent.

I jerked, looked up at him. If he thought he was going to get tit for tat, he was wrong.

I was raw. I was badly off balance. If he touched me right now, I might be nice. If he was nice right now, I might touch him.

His face was impassive, his eyes flat black, his hands fisted at his sides.

“Barrons, I—”

“Good night, Ms. Lane.”

Couldn’t we have taken something faster?” I complained, as we skirted abandoned cars and dodged IFPs at what felt like a snail’s pace.

Barrons gave me a look. “All the Hunters were busy tonight.”

“Well, can you at least step on it?” I groused.

“And end up in another IFP? They’re moving, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

I had, and it seemed highly unfair. Static, they were predictable, but the last two we’d encountered on our way deep into Irish country had been unattached, floating several feet off the ground, drifting wherever the wind carried them. Dodging a stationary IFP was hard enough. Dodging one that was blowing erratically felt like one of those dances you do when you run into someone on the street and both of you keep stepping to the same side, trying to get out of each other’s way. Only, in this case, it seemed the floating IFPs wanted to dance. Take you in their arms. Swallow you up.

“The last one took us forty minutes to get out of.”

Problem was, you couldn’t back out of them easily. Once you were inside one, it seemed to shift cunningly, concealing the entry point. You had to fumble around for an exit. “Point,” I conceded.

I was bored, restless, and impatient to get to the old woman’s cottage. And here we were, lumbering along, taking forever, in the Alpha.

I glanced around the interior of the Hummer and saw a CD case on the backseat. I wondered what Barrons listened to when he was alone. I punched on the audio. Rob Zombie blared:

Hell doesn’t love them. The devil’s rejects, the devil’s rejects …

He punched off the audio.

I raised a brow. “Could you be any more trite, Barrons?”

“‘Trite’ is merely another word for overdone by the media to the point where the common masses—that would be you, Ms. Lane: common—are desensitized by it, most often to their own detriment because they have become incapable of recognizing the danger staring at them from the eyes of a feral animal or down the barrel of a loaded gun.”

“I’m not common and you know it.” I would never admit he had a valid point. Mirror neurons did funny things to us, made us mentally live things we observed, firing whether we were performing the action ourselves or merely watching someone else perform the action, numbing us bit by bit. But who needed media to desensitize? What was I going to be like after living a few more months of my own life? Numb to everything. “Look at you. All stalky and badass.”

“Stalky. Do you think that’s a word, Ms. Lane?”

“Who was the child?” I said.

For a moment he said nothing. Then, “You ask absurd questions. What did I feel?”