Changeling (34 page)

She jerked upright, both eyes flying open. They flashed a shimmering green. Dark, deep slits ran the vertical length of them, just like Marco’s panther-form eyes. The skin on her face darkened, pale pink mottling with brown and black smudges of baby-soft fur. My heart jackhammered. The struggle between two dominant personalities played out in a series of facial tics and twitches, and somewhere deep inside of her came a low, feline growl.

“Marco?” I said in a near whisper, afraid to break the spell and scare him away.

Familiar eyes moved, their direction shifting around the interior of the car, looking without understanding. Taking in unfamiliar details. Seeing for the first time. Her head turned and those haunting eyes finally looked at me. Saw me.

“Dahlia?” s/he said. Two voices vied for dominance, coated with Marco Mendoza’s subtle accent.

“It’s me.” I had to remind myself to breathe.

“Do not trust Queen. She will kill them for spite. Deuce knows this, but will not say it. She will not turn against her sister.”

“How did you come back?” I wanted to ask a hundred questions, but didn’t know how long he had before Deuce’s personality beat him back. He’d been strong enough to surface and feed me a hint, and I desperately wanted to hold on to him any way I could.

His/her eyebrows furrowed. Sweat poured down the sides of Deuce’s face. Marco’s eyes remained. “Should not have taken a Meta. Cannot absorb us. I am as strong as she.”

“Can you get out?” Gage asked, startling me. I’d forgotten about the others and found him hovering over my shoulder.

Friendly feline eyes shifted focus to Gage. A spot of fresh blood dribbled from Deuce’s left nostril, the stress of dual personalities taking its physical toll. “No,” s/he said. “Make her let me go. Please. Let me go.”

The anguish in his voice broke my heart. The host retained the memories and experiences of the possessed host, even though the distinct personality died. She couldn’t absorb him. He wanted out, and while part of me could have accepted him living on in someone else’s head (the part of me that kept saying “at least he’d be alive”), he could not accept it.

He would rather be let go.

“I’m so sorry, Marco,” I whispered, unable to raise my voice for fear of its breaking, of letting myself shatter into a hundred little pieces. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live. I wanted my friends back whole and happy. I wanted things back to normal, like they’d been just a few days ago.

What’s done can never be undone. You should know that by now.

“Not your fault,
Ascua
.” He cried out and squeezed his eyes shut. His mouth puckered. Blood dripped in a steady stream, coating Deuce’s lips and chin. The coloration on her skin faded, returning to its original shade. Another shriek came, this time more feminine, and when she opened her eyes, Marco was gone.

“He’s getting on my nerves,” she said.

Noah shouldered his way past Gage, earning a grunt of annoyance, and crouched next to me. “Why didn’t you just absorb him?” he asked. “Why keep his personality compartmentalized if he causes you so much trouble?”

“I couldn’t absorb him. His memories would have impaired my judgment. His love for Dahlia is strong enough where it is and provides constant irritation. To take it into myself would be suicide.”

His emotions would have overthrown hers. If Deuce had tried to amalgamate Marco into herself, she would have been lost to his loyalty. His love. He would have become the dominant personality, making Deuce useless in her assigned task. She’d worn him and done a good job of it, without actually becoming him. The Changelings had a weakness, after all.

“Why don’t you dispel him, then?” I asked. “If you can’t take him on, why not get rid of the problem?”

Her nostrils flared. “Because keeping him hurts you.”

“Seems to hurt you, too.”

“Yours is a more delicious hurt.”

“She’s lying again,” Gage said.

Deuce shot him a poisonous glare. Through clenched teeth, she said, “I can’t get him out, all right? I can’t absorb
him, and I can’t get rid of him. He’s like an itch that stays just out of reach and burns to be scratched.”

“What if we can help?” Gage asked, nudging Noah over this time. Those two were going to end up in a fistfight if they weren’t careful.

“Help how?”

“We have a friend with abilities that may be of use to you.”

I could have slapped myself. Simon’s unique telepathic powers allowed him to sense and control other people’s conscious minds. If he could locate and isolate Marco’s consciousness, perhaps he could draw our friend back out of Deuce—free them both from each other.

We had to find Simon first.

Deuce seemed to consider the offer, her unfocused brown eyes shifting from Gage to me, and back again. She waged her own internal battle, a choice between living with another mind at constant war with her own and potentially betraying her sister.

“How much is your own life worth to you, Deuce?” I asked. “Do you want to live forever with someone else vying for control of your brain?”

“Can he really do it?” Her eyes glistened. “Can he separate us?”

“We don’t know for sure until we ask him.” Which led us back to another problem: we didn’t know where Simon was. No one had seen him since the morning, and he didn’t have an active com.

“Then let’s ask him,” she said.

“We would, but—”

“I know where he is.”

I stared. She winced, tried to shrug.

We should have known.

Queen still hadn’t
called by the time we arrived back at Hill House. She was either taking her time choosing a meeting location, or still hadn’t committed to a plan of action. No matter. We needed all the time we could get.

It made sense to stash someone in our home; since we weren’t likely to go back there while under the threat of immediate arrest, it was the perfect hiding place. Gage took Noah in first so they could locate and deactivate the bugs. Gage took that particular revelation better than I expected, considering he’d read Noah’s vitals the day he came to inspect the house. I knew firsthand how good an actor Noah was, but it was rare to get one over on Gage.

Once they declared the house clean, King slung Deuce over his shoulder and the rest of us went inside. As promised, we found Simon tied up in the courtyard, awake and a little sunburned, but otherwise unhurt.

I hung back with Noah, waiting in the interior hallway while Gage untied Simon, not daring to hope that this would work in Marco’s favor—just hoping it would release them both, and that Deuce would honor her promise to help.

King put Deuce down and started to unroll her from the rug. Ethan oversaw the process, pale and unsteady on his feet. I wanted to tell him to sit down and rest, but knew
he wouldn’t do that until this was finished. He and Gage wouldn’t let me blunder into this on my own.

As if they had a choice in the matter.

“Do you believe in heaven, Noah?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I do, because I believe in hell. Maybe not the biblical heaven and hell, but something.”

In the courtyard, Gage and Simon were arguing. A loud, hand gesture–filled argument. Snippets of words filtered through the closed door. King helped Deuce stand up, her hands and feet still tied. Her entire body glistened with sweat, her skin angry and red.

“What if this doesn’t work?” I asked.

Noah’s arm snaked around my waist. “We’ll figure it out, Dahlia. We’ll get through this.” He kissed my cheek, just a brush of his lips. A gentle reminder that I wasn’t alone.

“I haven’t forgiven you for lying to me.”

“I know.”

The cell phone rang. My heart slammed against my chest, and I jumped away from Noah. No one in the courtyard had heard it. Everyone was intent on Deuce and Simon, who stood toe-to-toe. Simon radiated annoyance.

Noah handed me the phone.

“Yes?” I said, turning my back to the courtyard windows.

“I’ve fulfilled my part of our bargain,” Queen said. “You ready to do yours?”

“Your interpretation of fulfillment is hilarious.”

“How’s my sister?”

“Annoying. How are my friends?”

“Squirming. Joker really should learn it’s impolite to peek into people’s heads without permission. I’m afraid I had to punish him a little.”

I bristled, my hand closing tight around the phone. “If you hurt any of them—”

“Can we please skip this, Dahlia? The part where you issue threats, I issue threats, and neither of us feels threatened by the other? It’s tiresome. We both know how this is going to end. You die, your friends go free, and Deuce and I go home for our next assignment.”

I glanced at the courtyard, stalling now. Simon’s hands were cupped around Deuce’s face. Their eyes were shut, both of them concentrating. A sparkle of energy surrounded them, like a shimmer of heat off hot pavement.

“Is this your idea of a happy ending?” I asked.

“This isn’t a fairy tale. Happy endings don’t exist for people like us.”

“I beg to differ.”

“Planning to prove me wrong?”

“Definitely.”

She scoffed. “You certainly have balls, I’ll give you that. If they’d kept you around, instead of erasing your memory and giving you to a human family, you might have amounted to something.”

Anger bubbled to the surface as heat rose in my cheeks. I forced my hand to loosen its death grip on the phone. “I did amount to something, you absolute shit.” Another look: more energy and a thicker haze of it. Ethan, King, and Gage had retreated to the corner of the courtyard, watching.

Noah’s hand slipped into mine; I held it tight.

Queen giggled. Actually freaking giggled. I shuddered. More than any of her threats, uttered or implied, her giggling frightened me the most.

“One hour, Dahlia. Just you and my siblings. No one else.”

“Where?”

“Where they failed to kill you the first time.” She hung up.

The first time they failed—oh, right. The factory fire. I had a location. Now I had to figure out how to ditch my friends.

Noah slipped the phone back into his pocket. “Well?”

“An hour, and now I know where.”

I turned back to the courtyard and froze, dumbfounded by what I saw. Deuce was completely out of phase. I could have been looking at her through an unfocused camera lens. Two distinct shapes meshed together in that blur: one male and one female. One dark, the other pale. Two bodies coexisting in the same space, but neither truly there.

Simon stood in front of them, hands splayed by his sides, eyes closed and forehead wrinkled. Concentrating so deeply I couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. He was frozen in place. The three of them seemed to exist in a separate world, out of synch with ours.

Someone screamed, a high-pitched wail that set my teeth on edge, even through the protection of the windows. Gage clamped his hands over his ears, falling to his knees under the echo of it in the enclosed walls of the courtyard. Ethan and King winced under the auditory assault but stood fast. Waiting.

Time stood still. The air crackled and snapped. A flash
of white light obscured the unfocused forms and knocked Simon backward. I raised my hand to shield my eyes. Simon rolled to an ungraceful stop a few feet from Gage. The light died as abruptly as it appeared.

Two figures lay crumpled on the grass, one perpendicular to the other. Deuce was still tied up and fully clothed. She coughed and blinked up at the sun. At her feet, Marco’s motionless body lay facedown, completely nude, but whole and not a jumble of empty skin.

“Oh my God,” I said. Hope blossomed in my chest. I shoved the door open, ignoring everyone around me except for the one person I never thought I’d see again.

I fell to my knees next to Marco and rolled him onto his back. His eyes were closed, lips slightly parted. I pressed my ear to his bare chest, listening for the elusive heartbeat that would announce partial success. So far away, but it was there—one soft thump, and then another. I sat up, but the cry of victory died on my lips.

No rise and fall. No intake of air.
No, no, no.

“He’s not breathing,” I said.

Twenty-eight

Chessboard

I
held Marco’s hand, offering comfort the only way I could, until the paramedics shouldered me aside. They loaded their gurney into the back of the ambulance, which had arrived relatively quickly after being called. One uniformed girl, who looked too young to be out of high school let alone a practicing paramedic, rhythmically squeezed an Ambu bag. She breathed for Marco, as we’d taken turns breathing for him in the too-long minutes between his separation from Deuce and the ambulance’s arrival. The paramedic was keeping him alive with the faith of someone who’d seen miracles before.

I envied her for her faith.

Ethan went with him, as much for company as to get his own injuries tended. We had supplies at the house, but without the medical knowledge of a trained physician, they were mostly useless, and I was glad to see him finally out of direct harm’s way.

The ambulance tore down the driveway, lights flashing and siren wailing. I watched from the porch, chilled inside
and out. I squashed any lingering threads of hope. A heartbeat was good, but if Marco couldn’t breathe on his own . . . no, no doubts. No more wondering.

It was getting late. At least fifteen minutes had passed since the phone call.

Footsteps behind me. I sensed Noah before he spoke: “Deuce wants to talk to you.”

“Good for her,” I said.

“Dal?” He turned me to face him.

“At least Ethan is away from this,” I said, unable to meet his gaze. “They’ll be safe at the hospital, I think. It’s not City of Angels.”

He fought a small smile at my own black humor. “Do you have a plan?”

“You mean besides getting our people back and trying not to die?” He stroked my cheek with his fingers. My stomach coiled into a knot of . . . something. “What did you mean when you said ‘she’s mine’?”

His fingertips skimmed across my throat, around to cup the back of my neck. “When this is all over and everyone’s safe, I might ask you to forgive me for lying to you. And if you do, I might then ask you out on a date.”