I wracked my brain, trying to think of when or how it might have happened. I didn’t want to think Arnold could have been responsible for it, but it was clearly magework.
Then it hit me.
Sara had always been more elegant in her manner of dress than I was. When we were working, she had always worn long-sleeved blouses for as long as I’d known her. She wore T-shirts and jeans now and again, sure, but the long sleeves hadn’t become a part of her after-work ensemble until after I became contracted to Royce.
After the battle with the sorcerer. David Borowsky had kidnapped Sara for the better portion of a day—a period of time she never talked about. Not even with me.
The kid dealt in the worst kind of blood magic, summoning demons and who knew what else. It was not a far stretch of the imagination to think that he might have been using his skills in the dark arts to do something to hurt Sara. And considering how strong she was, how much she hated being told what to do or how to do it by anyone, being under some magical being’s control wouldn’t have been any picnic for her.
I knew. I’d experienced what it was like being a puppet to Max and to Royce. It was one of the most frightening things that had ever happened to me. Even knowing Royce had no intention of hurting me and wouldn’t do anything to abuse the power he held over me, those few days of having no conscious choice in when or how I answered to him had been a special kind of hell to live through.
It had been more terrifying than answering to Max—at least I had known what the crazy-ass douche-canoe wanted from me. To use and discard me, just a pawn in his games to take whatever Royce cared about from him.
Royce was still in many ways a mystery to me. A puzzle I wouldn’t be able to solve until I returned to New York.
As for Sara, I couldn’t imagine how much scarier it must have been to have something so incorporeal as your energy sucked away instead of something physical, like blood. Being bitten by vampires was already enough to give me the heebie-jeebies. Having my soul sucked out with no more than a touch was a thought too horrid to bear.
As much as I wanted to throttle her for keeping it a secret from me, I pitied her for it in the same breath. The shame she must have felt being used that way was incomparable to anything. I should know.
And if the necromancer could draw from her, too, that meant there must be other things she was vulnerable to that we hadn’t counted on. I wondered if Arnold knew that. I wondered if that was why she hadn’t thought it would do much good to talk to her boyfriend. He had to know—and, oh, did it burn me that Arnold had known about the runes before I did—but that also meant that he must not have any way of fixing the damage.
Which also made me wonder if he had ever used her for energy the way the necromancer and sorcerer had.
If that Borowsky kid hadn’t already been dead, I would have hunted him down and murdered him all over again with my bare hands.
I wanted to chase after Gideon, to beg and plead for him to do something for my friend to make this awful thing that had happened to her go away. If Gideon knew how to remove the runes, then that meant it was in our best interests to make sure that Clyde was deposed as the master of Los Angeles.
This was a drastic change in plans for me. My earlier ruminations about the morality of informing Clyde about Fabian’s plans be damned. Clyde had nothing to offer me anymore, whereas the necromancer’s survival and success was of vital importance.
Royce wouldn’t like to hear it, but then, he wasn’t here to deal with this mess. The complications were tremendous, and I hated that I had so little say in any of it, but Sara’s health and well-being mattered to me far more than the life of a stranger who had forced us into dealing with his mess at the first opportunity.
Damn Clyde, and damn Fabian, and damn Royce, too, for sending us out here.
For the moment, all I could do was hold Sara’s hand and wait. Tiny was too weak to walk, and there was no way Devon and I could drag him and Sara. I would have to be cool, calculating, and as devious as the vampires if we were going to make this work.
And it had to work. I had to fix this for Sara. It was my fault she had been hurt that way, my fault she was a living battery for magi to suck the life out of at any given moment. Without Arnold here to protect her, God only knew how safe she was. Considering how easy it had been for Gideon to use her, probably not at all. As far as I was concerned, her survival mattered more than any vampire’s, no matter the cost. If we couldn’t make it back to Arnold for a while, then I needed to do the best I could to take away as many of the dangerous threats to her health as possible.
I turned to Devon. “We’ve got to make sure Fabian and Gideon win. If they don’t, Gideon can’t fix what’s wrong with her. Damn it, Devon, I hate this. I hate that there’s no right answer, that every choice I’ve had to make since I got here has just made things worse for somebody—maybe even long before I got here. But there’s got to be some way we can round up the White Hats who are left and get them to help in this fight. I need that necromancer to fix . . . whatever those are.”
Devon and Tiny were both looking at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was.
“Girl, you are nuttier than a squirrel turd under an oak tree. You want to let that thing have control of LA? What do you think he’s going to do once he’s won?”
I shook my head, frowning severely at Tiny. “I don’t know. I don’t really care. What I do care about is fixing that,” I said, stabbing a finger in the direction of the runes on the inside of Sara’s arm.
Devon spoke gently, like he was trying to keep me from storming off or doing something equally stupid. “You’re not thinking straight, Shia. Of course you’re scared right now. We all are. But we can’t let that monster win.”
“You don’t understand,” I snarled.
His tone grew sharper. “Yes, we do. You’re afraid of losing her. So are we. But we’re more afraid of losing our city to something that could destroy us all if we give him a chance. I know you want him to fix what’s happened to Sara, but you have no guarantee that he will, even if he wins.”
I didn’t want to consider that. Shaking my head again, I rose to my feet and started pacing, though I stayed close to Sara. It felt like the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck were crackling with static electricity, standing at attention. My vision was feeling a little funny, too. Something was wrong with me, more than just the overdose of adrenaline pumped into my system from the buildup of terror while facing down the zombies and the necromancer.
This was what Sara had been talking about when she said I never thought things through. The thing was, I didn’t want to think them through. Not one bit. I wanted to go rampaging through the streets until I found Clyde and destroyed him.
That was my clue that not all was kosher in my head. Had the necromancer messed with my mind somehow? Or was it something worse?
Feeling sick, I stopped my pacing, hanging my head and taking deep, steadying breaths. When my gaze fell on my hands, those deep breaths caught in my throat. The veins under my skin were clearly visible.
Black. Not blue.
Fuck me sideways. Was nothing going to go right for me?
I closed my eyes and fought off the looming panic attack, forcing myself to take deep, steady, slow breaths. No hyperventilating. No rushing off to attack things with my bare hands. No succumbing to the corruption in my blood.
Once the worst of the desire to rush off and attack Clyde with nothing more than my teeth and nails subsided, I focused again on Devon and Tiny. That odd haze to my vision had cleared up somewhat, though the two hunters were both watching me warily now. Were there other visible signs of the change? Was I starting to turn Were? That thought cooled my ire faster than anything else.