“No matter who wins, we all lose. My only hope at this point is to find something I can give to that necromancer to make him fix what’s wrong with Sara.”
“He can’t fix it,” Sara muttered, one hand lifting to her brow. My attention shot to her, and I quickly knelt by her side again.
“How do you know?”
Her eyes fluttered open. She tried to sit up, but couldn’t quite manage on her own, so I gave her a hand. Once she was sitting up, she addressed the three of us, her voice soft and features twisted in a grimace of discomfort.
“Arnold checked every source he has at his disposal. There’s no cure for this, Shia. I’m going to end up living with these things for the rest of my life.”
She might as well have told me her parents had died all over again. My heart ached for her in a way I couldn’t put words to. All I could do was wrap my arms around her and hold her close.
There was no way I could ever be sorry enough for what had been done to her. Knowing it was my fault was like having a dagger buried in my gut, twisting and turning and digging its way all the way up to my heart. David never would have taken her if she hadn’t been connected to me. Helping me fight his plans to make the Others of New York his slaves. Who would have thought some puny human women would have the power to stop a mage who had control over the will of New York’s most powerful Others? The sorcerer had obviously felt threatened by me at the time—threatened enough to drag Sara into my mess and hurt her when he couldn’t get to me directly.
And the joke was on him. I was alive. He was dead. All that mattered now was finishing cleaning up the mess he’d left behind.
A small part of me wanted to hope that Gideon hadn’t been lying—that he had some way of making this right again.
The rest of me knew it would be stupid to take anything he said at face value, and that if Arnold said there was no way, I should leave it alone.
Still, I wanted to give him a chance. Just once. Just to see. Maybe this would be the one epic fuck-up in my life that I could fix.
Sara pulled back from me, running a shaking hand through her hair. We all looked like hell, covered in gore, tired, shell-shocked. Tiny somehow managed to stagger to his feet first, his hands braced on his knees as he bent over to catch his breath. Devon soon followed, then me. I helped Sara get to her feet, though she did take my unspoken offer to lean on me for support once she was up.
“Look,” I said to the White Hats, as we all limped toward the exit together, “you told me yourselves that you want to see Clyde dead. There will be no better opportunity to see that happen than to help Fabian and Gideon get rid of him. But”—I added hastily, cutting them off as they opened their mouths to protest—“if we let them win, then they’ll be weak and vulnerable, and that will put us in a better position to get rid of them, too. Maybe we can get Gideon to tell us what he had in mind for Sara first. He might know something that our mage friends in New York don’t about how to get rid of those scars.”
No one seemed very happy with the idea.
That was okay. I wasn’t either.
“I guess that might work,” Devon grudgingly agreed.
Hallelujah. It was the least I could ask for, and the best possible outcome.
Now, if only things turned out the way I hoped they would, then everything would be golden, and I would have an honest shot at atonement.
Chapter 25
“Tiny, why don’t you take Sara somewhere safe—” I started to say, but Sara cut me off.
“No. I’m coming with you guys.” That didn’t sound like a good idea. She looked like a stiff wind would knock her on her ass. She lifted her fist, giving me a fierce glare in return for my dubious look. “You can’t keep me out of this fight. If the necromancer has been following us through me, then it doesn’t matter where I go. He’ll find me again, and I’ll end up leading him right into one of the White Hats’ hideouts.”
Devon rubbed his temples. “This is too complicated. So we need to help the necromancer kill Clyde, but then we have to wait just long enough for one of you two to ask him for help removing those runes—and then we have to try to kill him? How are we supposed to know the right time to get involved? It’s not like he’s going to be an easy kill, even after he’s worn down from the fight with Clyde. Not if the mess up there is anything to go by.” He gestured at the freeway, encompassing the sounds of gunfire and screams, punctuated by the occasional roar from the shifted werewolf, only a few hundred feet away.
That gave me an idea. I could have kissed him if it wouldn’t have sent the wrong message about my intentions.
“Follow me!”
Devon helped support Sara. Tiny wasn’t too quick on his feet, but he was able to follow without much trouble.
I led them around the fence and up the freeway off-ramp, thrusting the gun into Devon’s outstretched hand. Better not to face the Were while armed. Didn’t want an unspoken threat to piss off our one shot at turning the tables on the necromancer and both vampires right off the bat. Werewolves were so touchy about those visual cues.
The Goliath was still rampaging across the freeway, gallumphing its way from one clump of zombies to the next. Most of the people who had stayed in their cars were watching with their hands and faces pressed to their windows, only withdrawing when a zombie came too close.
Earlier, I hadn’t noticed, but the Goliath was making a sincere effort not to damage any of the vehicles around it. It moved its great body gracefully considering all of the many places its skin was torn and bleeding, chunks taken out in human-sized bites. Every now and again it bumped into one of the stopped cars, but it never knocked any over or even scratched the paint. It had developed a system for killing the zombies still coming after it, getting up on its hind legs to grab a torso with one paw, and using a foreclaw from the other to pop the head off.
What was left of each zombie flopped bonelessly to the ground once the Goliath let it go. It was a pretty efficient, if disgusting, system.
There weren’t too many left. I scrambled on top of one of the nearby cars, some expensive luxury sedan with a long, low-slung front end, ignoring the owner’s indignant shouts as I got up on the roof. Sara, Tiny, and Devon crouched behind it, all three of them hissing variants of “Get down! Are you crazy?”
Why, yes, I was feeling a bit on edge at the moment.
A quick glance farther along the freeway gave me a glimpse of flashing red and blue police lights, and a better view of the helicopters hovering overhead. One had “LAPD” on it and seemed to be more focused on the jam ahead, but it looked like the rest were from news stations. A handful of them were closer to this end of the jam, probably videoing the Goliath melting zombie faces.
“Hey! Hey, you . . . werewolf!” I waved my arms over my head, shouting at the Were. It growled as one of the walking dead grabbed at its hind leg, shaking the cadaver off and then pinning it with that foot, before looking at me. “I need to talk to you!”
The Were lifted its lip, turning its attention back to the remaining zombies. I stomped my foot, making the roof of the car make a hollow sound that didn’t do anything to get the Were’s attention, other than making it flick its ears back. The guy inside yelled again, but I ignored him.
“C’mon, you asshole! I haven’t got all day!”
This time it looked at me over its shoulder, hackles raised and pearlescent fangs gleaming as it turned narrowed, golden eyes on me. Finally. A hand was grabbing at my ankle—Devon or Tiny, I was sure—tugging at my pants leg for attention. I couldn’t listen to them right then. I had hundreds of pounds of pissed off werewolf leaning meaningfully in my direction.