Dangerous Calling (The Shadowminds) (21 page)

“He’s still alive!” I rushed forward, forgetting everything.

“Too late,” Ryan said. The white tile of the floor was streaked with blood. It had pooled in the corners and around the toilet. There was too much of it.

I knelt and lifted him. The last time we’d been this close, he’d been trying in all earnestness to kill me. He was no threat now.

“He’s already gone,” Ian said, standing behind me with his wings flared and his face a flat mask. “Nothing we can do.” His thoughts surfaced in flashes he fought to keep down. Memories of the men he’d killed, lightning strikes of regret.

“He’s right,” Shane said. “We have to go.”

I ignored them and put my blood-slick hands on either side of Ryan’s face. “Diana. Is Diana alive?”

“Don’t know. Been in here...hours.”

“Where is your mother?” It was suddenly more important than anything that I know. “Is she alive? Did Annette kill her?”

Ryan shook his head, and the movement seemed to be almost too much for him. “Ran.” He tried to gesture with one hand, but he lacked the strength to lift it. “Daylight. Ran.”

I was glad. Thank God, I was glad.

Ryan’s fingers curled in the pooled blood on the floor. A bubble formed where his lips parted. It popped with his breath, and he was gone.

“Cass.” Shane tugged on my arm.

This is my fault.

“Cass.”

“No time for this now.” Ian’s voice. “Beat yourself up about it later. Come on.” He pulled me roughly away, and Ryan’s body slipped from my grasp and fell with a thud to the tile.

“We have to get his body out. When this is over.”

“Cass, come on.”

We moved to the doorway to the parlor and peered through a crack in the door.

Annette lay on the rug, facedown. Diana was curled up in a fetal position in the far corner, crying. Blood soaked her shirt, her hair—it was everywhere, all over the couch and the rug. If her body hadn’t been racked by sobs, I would’ve been sure she was dead. Annette didn’t move.

“Finish it,” I said to Ian, all desire for mercy gone. I ran to help Diana.

I turned her and she moaned, her eyes fluttering as I settled her on her back. I saw the mess Annette had made of her neck and froze.

“
Shane
,
get to Bunny.
Get her over here now.
”

“
Like hell.
I’m not leaving you.
”

I sent him the image of Diana’s mutilated neck. “
We can’t move her.
Please.
”

He hesitated, looking to where Ian stood over Annette’s body. Ian kicked her with his boot, rolling her over. She didn’t make a sound. Ian pulled out his knife and put the tip to her chest.
Her head or her heart.

She had him pinned before I realized what had happened. His knife flew across the room. One of her boots was on his neck; the other she brought down on his thigh. The sound of the bone snapping was like a gunshot.

Ian made a horrible sound, a roar of pain, and Annette fell on him with her fingers curled into claws. She sank them into his thigh and ripped out a chunk of torn fabric and flesh, brought it to her lips and sucked. She turned to look at Shane where he stood by the door, blood still on her lips. Shane pulled Lionel’s handgun from his waistband.

Bullet after bullet hit her in the chest. One missed and splintered the ornate curved leg of a mauve love seat. Shane stood with both hands on his gun and fired until he ran out of ammo
.
She was almost on him. He threw the gun aside and pulled the machete out if its makeshift sheath.

I knew what I had to do.

Ian was still trying to crawl forward. His pain hit me in the gut as I opened the connection between us and pulled from him for what I prayed would be the last time.

Power flooded me. In the midst of everything, the blood and the threat of death, the rush was still enough to make me shudder in satisfaction.

I pulled, and I focused on Annette. This time, I wasn’t trying to send her away. I rooted her body to the rug. It took an incredible amount of force, more that it would take to stop an eighteen wheeler. More than it would take to lift a house. She twisted in my grip, but I held fast and raised my left hand.

Motes of light collected in my cupped palm. I looked at Shane.

“Get out.”

“I’m not leaving you!”

“You have to. They won’t make it.” I looked at Diana, still curled on the ground. She was alive, but she was losing her grip on consciousness. Ian had already lost his, but he was still breathing. His city was still strong, and it flowed through him to me, a river of energy. Hundreds of thousands of people and their complex lives, their well-loved homes, their interconnected communities. The ball of light grew bigger, and the color shifted to blue, then to deep, inky purple. The tips of my fingers burned. Annette shrieked and covered her face.

“
Go now.
There’s no time.
”

I couldn’t look at the light anymore. It was too dangerous for anything living to be near the radiation in my hands, but Shane still wasn’t moving. I sacrificed a burst of power to push all three of them, Shane and Ian and Diana, bodily from the room. I sent two couches to brace the door. Shane banged on the other side.

“
Goddammit
,
Cass!
Let me in!
”

“
Too late for that.
Go get Bunny.
She’s the only hope I have of making it through this.
”

A lie. It was going to be too late for me. But she was the only chance Ian and Diana had. I pushed the energy in the ball of light out of the visible spectrum and into ultraviolet.

“
Cass!
” The door rattled as he banged it. He tried to use his powers to move the couches, but I pushed back against him.

“
Shane.
Please go.
I
love you.
Please go.
”

“
I’m coming back for you.
”

“
Go now.
There’s not much time.
”

I felt him look at Diana’s unconscious body. I felt him decide.

“
Thank you.
” I couldn’t tell him goodbye. He had to believe I would survive.

“You won’t be able to stop me,” Annette’s voice grated like a screen over gravel. “You’re just one pathetic girl. You won’t be able to keep this up.” She lifted a foot from the spot where I’d held her. It didn’t matter anymore. I released her and funneled the energy I’d been using to hold her down into the ball of light in my hand. I could barely see it anymore. It was well past ultraviolet. X-rays, gamma rays. Penetrating radiation that went through her clothes and her flesh to fragment her bones. The skin on my cheek blistered and burned, and I pulled my shirt over my face and looked away. It didn’t do much good. Thick chunks of my hair crackled and fell out of my scalp. Annette clawed her way toward me, but I stumbled back, and she grasped at air and fell. Her eyes had paled out to dead white. She was blind.

Her fingers reached for me, curved like talons and bright red. Blisters bubbled under her skin and broke. She screamed, trying to find me with her hands, all senses but touch decayed. Swathes of skin and flesh tore from her body on the rough texture of the floor rug and she howled.

Outside the room, Shane was gone. I couldn’t feel the tips of my fingers anymore. Annette pulled her lips back in a snarl, and I sank to my knees. She wasn’t gone yet. Her skin was blackened and her eyes had shriveled and sunk into her skull, but at the base of her neck, where her shirt gave her some protection, healthy skin regenerated, creeping over the ruined flesh like paint over asphalt. I pulled, and ice formed under my feet.

“Not enough.” Annette’s voice was a hoarse rasp, now. It was almost done.

I hit my knees, and the light ball shrank. I had to keep my eyes closed or lose my vision forever. The side of my cheek was already burned beyond pain, the nerves charred. I’d given up on my left hand. Annette crawled forward and grabbed my shoe with a charred, ruined hand.

It had to be now.

My right hand partially protected with the sleeve of my shirt, I brought Ian’s abandoned knife sliding toward me. Annette’s jaws opened, fangs extended as she reached for the flesh of my leg. Even weakened as she was, I couldn’t escape her grip. There wasn’t much I could do. I let her teeth sink into me.

Needles of pain shot up my leg, but it was nothing, not now. The contact opened a mental connection between us, and the full force of her agony rolled over me. Her need for blood to heal the damage I’d done was more than intellectual—it was a compulsion. The desire raked through her, furious, rampant, barely slaked by the mouthfuls she pulled from my leg. I brought the knife around, my muscles barely strong enough to hold it, and plunged it through her ruined, brittle ribcage to her heart with a jolt of telekinetic force.

Annette arched back in pain and fury, bringing a big chunk of my calf with her. My blood stained her face and spotted the islands of healed skin that dotted her body.

She slumped backward on the ice-covered rug, twitching. I pulled out the knife and struck again and again, making a hole in her chest. She was too weak to stop me, her body too preoccupied with healing the massive damage of the radiation to deal with a simple knife wound. I plunged my hands into the hole, and with an awful, sucking sound like boots in mud, tore out her heart.

Chapter Twenty-One

It was pleasant to be dead.

It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t much of anything, really. It was like the void between places in a jump, only without the breath-sucking vacuum. And it was warm, like floating in the gulf in summer. I was in no hurry to find out what came next. I sank into the warm dark and slept there.

Light flared above the still water. It wasn’t the pleasant glow of sunlight, but something burning and terrible and silver-white. Was this the light everyone talked about, the one that came before you faced whatever happened next? I tried to turn away from it, but it was everywhere.

The pain came next.

My legs, my hands, my eyes. Everything ached, and flashes of bright pain sliced through the ache, making me twist and cry out. An aggressively pungent smell hit me in the nose and I came awake in a panicked instant, gasping for air.

“Whoa, whoa, easy.”

Shane. He was sitting next to me on a fancy massage table. He held a broken glass vial in his hands. For a moment, it was all I could see. Not dead. Not yet. The edges of broken glass reflected the light from above, and it was enough to hurt my eyes. I closed them. The pungent smell faded with every breath I took.

“Cassie? You with me?”

“What is that?”

“Something Bunny gave me to bring you out of it.” He threw the vial into a trash can by his feet. “You okay?”

I focused back on Shane’s face as he reached for me. I let his warm hand cover mine. I was naked except for a sheet covering my body, and the table was surrounded by dozens of burned-out candle stubs. Bunny’s spa. She’d healed me.

“How long?” My voice was hoarse. I tried to clear my throat, but it was too dry. “
Water.
” At least my powers still worked.

Shane brought a glass floating to my lips, and I sipped from the straw. It was pure bliss going down, cool all the way to the pit of my belly. I drank and drank until he took it away.

“You’ll make yourself sick.” He set the glass on a table beside me. “Take it slow.”

I swallowed, and my throat cleared. “How long was I out?”

“Two days.”

“Ian? Diana?”

“Both fine. Bunny healed them in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank God.”

“Cass, there’s something else...” He paused, hesitating, and I started to panic at the possibilities. Annette had survived, she’d killed everyone in the neighborhood to regenerate, she’d burned down the B&B, she’d burned down the entire French Quarter. I tugged at the sheet, looked down at my left hand and froze.

My fingers were gone from the second joint. A web of scars covered the flesh of my palm like frost, creeping up to my wrist and feathering out along my forearm. They were white and shiny, old. The blunt stubs where my fingers had been were the unearthly pale color of healed burns, and the flesh was as lumpy as unkneaded dough.

I stared at the place where my hand had been. I could still feel my fingers, as though my body didn’t know they were missing. I touched the stub of my left pointer finger with the tip of my right.

“What happened?” I stared at my hand. I didn’t want to look at it, but I didn’t want to look away.

“Radiation damage.” Shane glanced down for an instant. “Bunny did everything she could, but...you nearly lost your arm.” He glanced to where the sheet covered my feet. “You almost didn’t make it.”

I flexed the remains of my fingers. They were stiff and painful, and I itched unbearably where my fingertips had been. I closed my eyes and breathed. The sensation subsided.

“Will there be effects? Am I going to be okay?”

“Bunny isn’t sure. She thinks you’ll be fine. Cassie...” He handed me a mirror.

I took it with my right hand, afraid to look at my reflection.

“It’s not that bad,” he said. He was holding his breath.

I lifted the mirror.

My hair had been shorn close to my skull, but I could see the places where it had fallen out. It was too soon to tell whether it would ever grow back. On my left cheek, scars crept along my cheekbone, feathery lines and pockmarks that must have been blisters. They were white against the new unnatural tan of my skin.

“Wow.” I touched the scars on my face with the stubs of my fingers. A matched set. “It’s like I got drunk and got the world’s weirdest face tattoo.”

Shane laughed, just a little. “It’s a good thing you’re so hard to mess up.” He took the mirror from me. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. I was alive. That was already more than I’d hoped for. “So she’s gone? She’s really dead?”

“She’s really dead. We put her in that SUV and set it on fire. Just to be sure.”

“Jesus.” I caught the images in his head—the car plowed into the oak tree out front, the whole thing going up in flames.

“I made sure it looked like an accident,” Shane said.

“Jeremy?”

“Ran off. The cops got Ryan’s body, though. Sounded like they thought it was a suicide.”

“What about Janine?”

“We still haven’t found her.”

I doubted she wanted to be found. “Maybe after some time...”

“Maybe,” Shane said, but he was as doubtful as I was. “I also found this.” He laid a blue notebook on my lap.

I used my good hand to open it. It was a ledger of accounts, lists of payments and clients. Buddy Broussard made many appearances.

“Where did you find it?”

“Office on the first floor. Looks like she’s been doing this a while.”

I flipped back through the pages. She’d been in New Orleans for over a decade, and I lost track of the number of names I recognized.

“Is that—”

“Yep.”

“Oh my God. What do we do with this? I mean...” It might’ve been sweet justice to nail some of Louisiana’s more corrupt politicians for their payments to a vampire crime boss, but with entries like
Fortune telling
, $
10,000
next to
Assassination
, $
52,000
it was hard to know if anyone would take it seriously. Then I saw Emily Sanchez’s name.

“That’s her,” I said softly. “The girl Ian was in love with.”

Her entry said
Assassination
, $
78,000
with an asterisk next to it. At the bottom of the page, I found out what the asterisk meant.
Make it look like suicide.

I felt sick. “Has Ian seen this?”

Shane shook his head. “But I think I know what we can do with it.”

“Those guys he killed...”

“We put him in as one of the hits. Gives him a leg to stand on for the self-defense case. We just have to get this into the right hands.”

“I know whose hands,” I began, but then the door flew open, and Diana slammed into the massage table and shifted it a good two feet.

“You’re okay!” She wrapped me in a bear hug and squeezed.

I was too surprised to return the hug at first, but after several moments, I patted her gently on the back. She didn’t let go.

“It’s all my fault. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Her voice was muffled, her face buried in my shoulder. I realized she was crying when tears soaked the sheet.

I gently extricated myself and held her by the upper arms. “What are you talking about? None of this was your fault.”

“No—I was supposed to fake a vision, but I had a real one—I couldn’t stop it—I didn’t even have time to take the drugs—I’m so sorry—”

“Shh.” I pulled her back into a hug and let her cry.

Shane watched silently and sent me a message. “
I’ll give her some privacy—going to get you some clothes from home.
”

I could only imagine the state my previous ones were in. I hoped he’d burned them. I nodded, and he left the room.

“Can you show me what happened?” I asked her once he’d gone.

She was strong enough to keep me out if she wanted to, but she didn’t refuse. She nodded, and I felt doors opening in her mind.

Memories of complex events are almost never perfectly linear. People subconsciously jump to the good parts. But Diana wasn’t most people. Even knowing I was about to see things I’d rather not see, I was impressed with the level of control she had over her brain. She gave me an almost perfectly sequential replay.

Annette hadn’t been there when she’d arrived. Alex had shoved Diana into a bedroom much like the one I’d been held in, and she’d waited there for hours.

He’d come for her finally, brought her downstairs to the darkened parlor where Annette was waiting.

I could barely make out the vampire’s form, sitting on the same love seat where she’d fed from the furniture guy in Diana’s memory. She seemed to be looking down when she asked, “What happened?”

“Bitch tried to run,” Alex replied. “I had to get her under control.” He shoved Diana toward Annette. “Didn’t I?” His comment was directed at Diana. I could feel her rising anxiety. She knew what was coming.

Annette was on him in an instant. She came at him so quickly, he didn’t have time to take more than a half step back before she gripped his short hair and yanked back his head.

“I said she was not to be harmed.”

“Had to—stop her—couldn’t let—get away—” He panted between words, struggling. He was twice Annette’s size, but she restrained him easily.

“I was very clear.”

“I didn’t think—please—”

She sank sharp teeth into his throat and ripped out a chunk of flesh and sinew. Blood gushed from the wound and she drank it, staining her shirt and hands and hair bright red. He thrashed, but it wasn’t long before he went still. She dropped his body with a
thud.

Diana closed her eyes.

Annette walked toward her, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “Greg is dead too. I thought you should know.”

Diana’s guilt was even stronger in the present than it was in the memory. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t think it would be too much—”

Annette waved her hand. “I would have killed him anyway. He failed me, and I couldn’t let him go, knowing what he does about us.”

Diana’s whole body was tense. “Are you going to kill me?” She was no longer sure. Even after what she’d seen Annette do to Alex, doubt crept in.

“No.”

She relaxed a fraction.

“But you are no longer free in this house. You will be confined to your room. You will be kept in shackles if necessary.” Annette’s voice had gone from honey-slow to clipped and bitter. Hurt. “Is that clear?”

Diana nodded. In the memory, she was thinking that now was the time. She could go to the bathroom, inject the tranqs. She began building the false vision, an image of me, Shane and Ian huddled in a motel room with the shades drawn while Annette broke down the door. She should have her kill us, she thought, Annette would want to believe it more, and that’s when the real vision hit.

It came in like smoke, black swirls that blotted out the present and replaced it with the future. The immediate future. Annette recognized the signs and advanced on her.

“What do you see?”

Diana tried to crawl away, and her resistance was no act. I saw the true vision in her head, and it was disastrous for our plan. “No—you can’t make me—you can’t—I won’t—”

Even someone with Diana’s exceptional control couldn’t protect her mind from Annette’s unnatural skills, and they both knew it. Her only option was flight, and that was impossible. She made it halfway to the door before Annette grabbed her by the shoulder and bit into her neck.

She was gentle, or as gentle as something like that could be. I felt the memory of Diana’s pain, and it was softer than what I’d experienced at the jail.

Diana’s memory of the vision was overlaid with the events as they occurred. In the future that failed to happen, Annette drank and drank, then froze, twitching, and fell over with blood trickling from her mouth. The vision itself wavered between possibilities, tangled with actual events, with Annette drinking and surviving just as she was in the moment. She jerked Diana away from her with the wounds still fresh, hissing.

“What have you done?” She found the loaded syringe in Diana’s pocket and threw it, shattering it against a coffee table. Pale yellow fluid leaked out and spread over the marble top. “You were going to let them kill me.” Annette’s voice was low and soft with shock.

“I’m tired of being the reason people die.” Diana’s voice had gone hard despite the wound in her neck. She pressed a hand to it, keeping her gaze on Annette.

Annette backhanded her. Diana’s cheek lit up with pain and she clutched it in shock. It was the first time the vampire had ever struck her. Annette ignored her and dug viciously through her pockets, coming up with her cell phone. I watched through Diana’s watery eyes as Annette typed the signal we would receive.

Now.

The rest played out as we’d encountered it. Annette lay down on the floor and waited while Diana slowly went into shock from blood loss. By the time we got there, Diana could barely lift her hand, and Annette was more than ready for us.

“I’m sorry,” Diana said again. “I’m so sorry.”

“It ended well. She’s dead.” It surprised me, how easily I was able to say it. I would’ve liked to have been able to say it was the first life I’d taken, but it was only the first one I’d taken with so little regret.

Diana’s eyes flickered with grief for a moment. I assumed that grief was for Annette. “Your face,” she said. “Your hand.”

“I’ll be all right.” I didn’t look down. It still made me feel cold to see it.

“I can tell you, now. She’s dead—she can’t control me anymore.”

I looked up. “Tell me what?” I blinked back tears I didn’t quite understand. For Diana, for myself. “What do you mean?”

“About Shane.”

I’d managed to push the idea of Shane anchoring out of my mind, but it was past time I dealt with it. “She already told me. You saw him as a guardian.”

She nodded. “That’s what she made me do. That’s why she kept me. She didn’t want a guardian here in the city. She always told me they were bad—as if they were fallen angels or something. So I had to look for them.”

“You mean in visions.”

She nodded. “I can focus what I search for. It’s hard, but I can do it. The way she taught me to control my mind—I can look for things I want to see.”