The Killing Season (27 page)

“Ah,” Killian said as we stepped outside. I was in nothing but a thermal and jeans. No coat. “I like a man who’s punctual.”

For a stupid, naïve moment, I thought he was talking to Luke.

“What did you do to her?”

I knew that voice. I’d know it anywhere. And I’d heard it so recently too.

Max.

The spike of adrenaline cleared my head enough for me to feel Killian roughly handing me over. Feel how Max delicately balanced me in his arms, cradling me against his chest. I groaned, tried to struggle.

“Just a sedative to keep her quiet for you. Just like we agreed to.”

“You didn’t touch her?”

“Only a little.” Max’s grip on me tightened, my ribs flaring with heat. Over my head, he growled. Killian laughed. “Calm down. I’m joking. Here, take these for your fun.”

“What is it?” Max asked, his voice rumbling through his chest and making my bones shiver with fear. He shuffled me in his arms to take what Killian offered.

“It’ll make her more fun to play with. Trust me. You don’t need to give her much at a time, so you can make those last for your entire stay. As for our plan, you should be safe out there for a couple of weeks. You can move after that, and leave the snowcat where we discussed earlier. Remember to keep the doors boarded up, and have a gun handy at all times.”

Killian and Max’s voices mingled together and sank into a deep drone. My eyes drooped close.

“And when you’re done playing, make sure she’s good and dead.”

S I X T E E N

Sunny

I
’d never done a charcoal hemoperfusion, but I didn’t tell Nyny that. Abigail’s blue lips twitched and her body randomly convulsed. I doubted cleaning her blood would save her. Her dismal blood pressure indicated she’d been up in the greenhouse for a couple hours before we found her, lying in her purple bed of death. She was at the point of no return.

But I still carefully inserted the arterial and venous catheters in her arm, sterilizing and pressurizing as I went. The portable system hummed beside me, ready to siphon and silt her blood over a cartridge of charcoal. When the blood thinner I’d given her had enough time to start working, I flipped the switch and watched as her blood pulled away from her heart, up the pipe, and into the system, where the good would be separated from the bad, and it would get pumped back into her body.

Fascinating stuff, but I had more important things to do.

I refused to allow Ollie to hunt down Killian on her own. She needed help, and I’d done all I could for Abigail. If tonight came down to a fight, Ollie wouldn’t be fighting alone.

“I’m going after Ollie,” I said, standing up and wiping the greenhouse dirt and grime from my jeans.

Nyny looked up from where she was preparing the next dose of blood thinner. The hemoperfusion would take about three hours to complete, with no complications, but Abigail would need doses of blood thinner every half hour, which meant one of us needed to stay with her. The syringe stilled in Nyny’s hand. “But she said to wait here.”

I picked up the supplies Ollie had brought from Luke’s room. As I prepared myself, I tried not to let myself think about her being out there, in this big base, alone with Killian. I pushed the fear away and focused on Nyny.

“We can’t wait an hour. Killian might find us before then, and I have to help Ollie. While I’m down there, I’m going to call the police too.”

The thing I loved about Nyny was her pragmatism. She would have made a good doctor. Thinking through the reasoning, weighing the pros and cons, she eventually nodded. “Fine. Make sure Ollie called the hospital too. They need to come straight here when the storm lets up. We don’t have the equipment to safely transport Abigail.”

“Got it. Come and lock the door back behind me.”

We walked back to the greenhouse door, and Nyny reversed the lock’s wiring. Together, we pulled the door open, our eyes scanning the darkness around us. Before she locked me out, Nyny said, “Find Ollie. It would suck for her to die right when I’d finally started liking her.”

“Uh, sure.” I fingered the edge of my knife belt, which hung lower on my hips than I was used to thanks to Ollie’s supplies. The urge to glance over my shoulder and scan the darkness stifled me, but I focused on Nyny’s face and told myself to calm down.

“Just try to not die, okay?”

I resisted the urge to shudder. “I’m going to try my hardest.”

“Later.” Nyny waved her bat at me.

“Later,” I echoed.

Behind me, the greenhouse door swooshed shut. I swallowed, my spit sticking in my dry throat, and adjusted my belt. I felt unwieldy and awkward in the supplies Ollie had given me, but I forced myself to ignore it. My eyes flicked from shadow to shadow. When a gust of wind rattled against the greenhouse’s glass roof, I flinched and had to hold back a yelp of fear.

I started down the stairs with care, focusing on keeping my steps quiet and my head on a swivel, ears straining for any noise. But as I went down to the third floor, a feeling overcame me. If Gran had been there she would have said something about spirits. About knowing. About something
extra
in the air with me.

My pace quickened until I took the stairs two at a time. I hit the landing and sprinted down the hall to the right, checking rooms.

“Ollie!” I whisper-shouted. “Ollie!”

All of the bedrooms were empty, so I backtracked and raced down the left hall toward Coldcrow’s apartment. His door stood open, leading into his small apartment. Inside, I smelled coffee, and only a few lights were on, forcing me to walk halfway into the room.

I rounded the corner of the sofa, my eyes catching on a dark bulk splayed across the floor. With another halting step, I looked closer, squinting into the murky, lumpy shadows.

“Ollie?” I whispered.

My foot descended on something soft, something wet. Something solid that squished beneath my shoe. There was a smell in the air that burned the back of my throat. Swallowing my fear, I crouched down. Leaned forward on my hand, something wet slicking across my fingertips. Looked even closer.

Came practically nose-to-nose with a very dead Coldcrow.

I screamed, leaping back and falling over the armrest of the couch. I landed in a heap on the floor, all arms and legs, and a knife skittered across the floor from me. I lurched forward and fell out the door, but I’d found my feet by the hall. I reached for another knife as I started running.

“Ollie!” I screamed.

The bad feeling kissed up the notches of my spine and rattled the edges of my ribs to warn me. I slowed my pace and looked around. From the stairs, the stained-glass window’s flickering light made up my only illumination in this part of the hall. Colors splayed across the floor, back and forth, back and forth. The hair along my arms stood on end.

Someone’s behind you,
the voice whispered.

I spun around, letting a knife fly at the same time. The metal sliced through the air but nothing was there. It hit the ground somewhere far ahead of me with a clang.

I stepped back, away from the dark hall in front of me. Easing back, step by step, I made my way closer to the stairwell and the window’s light.

I paused and listened.

Look
.

I looked. The air in front of my mouth condensed with every exhale. I trembled, shivering from the cold. The base felt twenty degrees colder than normal, which meant the front doors had been open at some point. Blind hope eclipsed my fear. The hunters were home. Hatter was back. I had help. We would be okay. As I started down the stairs to the second level, the front door in the entry scraped open again, echoing up the stairs like my thoughts alone had opened it. As the temperature and pressure changed in the base, I flung myself down the rest of the stairs, thinking it was the hunters, pausing only when I’d reached the landing right before the entry.

Hunched against the cold and laughing to himself, Killian slipped inside and heaved the door closed with his shoulder. Frozen atop the landing, I watched as he turned around, a silenced gun in hand, and saw me. The slow smile stretching across his face told me all I needed to know. Ollie had been right: Killian was the killer.

“What’s your name again?” he asked, eyes bright.

Ollie. Ollie isn’t here
. My brain tumbled over the thoughts. She would have killed Killian by now if she were in the base. Which meant . . . “What did you do to her?”

Like I’d spoken to someone standing behind him, Killian glanced over his shoulder, to the door he’d just come through and laughed. “Who? Her?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Oh, she’s probably face-down in some snow drift somewhere by now. That bastard didn’t seem to be the patient sort. You should have seen the way his eyes lit up when I told him about the ’swang saliva. Sadistic motherfucker.”

“Max. You gave her to Max.” My stomach churned with horror, my mind racing. Could I catch up to them on a snowmobile? Through a whiteout storm? They couldn’t have made it far. He wouldn’t kill her so quickly.

He wiped his hands on his pants, which were splattered with blood. “Surely you understand she couldn’t stay here. She’s one of
them
.”

I raised my knife. “No,” I said, my voice ringing clear and tremor-free, my anger surging red-hot. “You aren’t one of us. You’re a killer.”

“We’re all killers,” he laughed. “And judging by your lack of surprise, I take it you already knew about her little secret.”

“Of course,” I snapped, eyeing his gun. I had to get around him, get outside.

“She hadn’t told Luke. I know, because he would have killed her for me.”

I jolted at his words and whispered, “He wouldn’t. He loves her.”

“You really are naïve, aren’t you? Love doesn’t work like that. You can’t love what you were born to hate.”

“I saw Coldcrow,” I said to change to the subject and take back a measure of control his words about Luke had robbed from me. “Everyone will know what you did.”

“Sadly for dear old departed Coldcrow, all of this mess is going to fall on him. Won’t be anyone,” he raised the gun, pointing the long barrel at my chest, “around to contradict my story.”

“Luke will kill you,” I said, my voice a scratchy whisper as I stared at the gun. Of all the ways I’d thought I might die, this was not one of them. “He’ll know what you did to Ollie. To his mother. How could you do that your own wife?”

Killian shrugged, lowering the gun and rolling out his shoulder like his muscles hurt. “My son thought he was so smart, keeping the tainted civvie from me. Like I wouldn’t know what he was doing to this family. Even Abigail was fouling—” He took a long, unsteady breath. “Fouling this family with filth. But that’s fixed now. Everything is set right. Everyone has paid the proper price.”

“Does Dean know about any of this?”

“He’s soft. Completely focused on the wrong things.” Killian scoffed and gestured with the gun as he paced.

I had to keep him talking. It was my only hope. I couldn’t rush the stairs with only a few knives in hand, which meant I needed another plan to save Ollie. Getting past him was impossible, but if I made him chase me, I could double back and get out the door.

He turned to pace away once again, and I took my chance. I sidled off the landing a bit, edging away inch by inch.

“He sent that civvie up here for me to set her straight, scare her back to his side. Like I’m some kind of lap dog. I’m most certainly
not
somebody’s fucking golden retriever. I should have been president. Not him. He stole that from me. Made me look bad . . .”

I tuned his rant out. I was almost to the edge of the hall, where the wall met the side of the stairs. One jump and I would be gone. Out of the corner of my eye, I traced my path: down the hall, duck into one of the unlocked bedrooms, hide, wait until he’d gone past, then double back. Super easy. No problem-o. Piece of cake. Punch in the door code. Out the front doors. Find Ollie. Avoid Max. Bring her back. Everything would be fine. Completely fine. I just had to make it past Killian. Once I was outside, I’d be fine. He’d never find me out there.

I took a deep breath. Then another. I thought of Hatter. Of Mom and Gran. Seth and Henry. Mainly I thought of Ollie. She’d become like a sister to me. I would save her. I would rescue her today. I could do this. I had this. It would be a cool story to tell people, and Hatter would look at me with the same kind of adoration and respect that Luke looked at Ollie with and Hatter would kiss me and hold me tight and I would wake up and Ollie would be there and she would laugh and the sad look would be gone from her eyes and everything would be okay.

With another deep breath, my muscles tensed, ready to go.

I looked up.

Killian had stopped talking and was staring right at me. Gun raised. Pointed at my chest.

My breathing stopped.

“Sorry,” he said and pulled the trigger.

The bullet tore through my shirt, right above my heart.

S E V E N T E E N

Sunny

T
he bullet had knocked the breath out of me. I already felt my chest bruising and my lungs bucked against my ribs, but I didn’t let myself move or gasp for air. I pretended to be dead.