“By your name I bind you,” he said. The words tapped against me like hailstones, and I felt the division between reality and the Pleroma thinning, the mindless, blind spirits thrashing in distress. “Abraxiel Unas, I bind you.”
Ex was shouting at me, his lips pulled back with the violence of the call. I couldn’t hear him. Everything was silent except the deep, constant pressure of the riders pushing against me. I rose to my knees, then sank again, my head bowed. Ex tried to shake me. The blood on his hands was wet and cold.
They were close now, their fingertips almost touching. Arcs of power danced between them, so powerful they were almost visible. My hands clenched in fists, fingernails digging into my palms, and I was also trapped in the tight space behind my eyes.
Rhodes’s voice rang with triumph and joy.
“By your name I bind you. Graveyard Child, I bind you.”
The trap was complete. I felt it close for the last time, and then wash away around me. Together, the Black Sun and I looked up into his eyes. They were the common brown of a human being now. The marks on his skin were only ink again. His smile spoke of exhaustion and pleasure and victory.
“Those aren’t my names,” I said.
There was a moment of shock and fear in his expression, and my body unfolded, legs and gut and back twisting, every muscle firing, bones creaking with the strain of sinking my right fist, knuckles down, into the soft place just below his rib cage. Ex rolled forward with a cry, scooped up his shotgun, and fired wild. The woman ducked back, her hand up to cover her face. Rhodes doubled over, his breath whooshing out of him. I got my feet under me and brought an elbow down hard between his shoulder blades, and he fell. Martinez tried to rush me, but the Black Sun danced out of his path and kicked at the back of his knee as he passed.
I scooped up Ex, holding him to me like he was a child. He didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. He lost his grip on the shotgun, and it clattered to the ground behind us as I sprinted out into the dark. The SUV wasn’t far. Chogyi Jake’s shoulders and head were a shadow in the driver’s seat. The running lights came on and a great puff of white rose up from the tailpipes.
Ex clung to me, his hands around my shoulder, his head pressed against me.
I ran.
chapter fifteen
The emergency room at Wesley Medical Center wasn’t the worst I’d been to. Which meant, in part, that I wasn’t actively worried about people trying to kill me. The halls were clean and bright, the intake nurse was calm and professional, and they got Ex into a room within ten minutes of our pulling up to the front door. The triage nurse and a couple of techs in blue scrubs cut away Ex’s pant leg and washed it down while I held his hand. I claimed to be his fiancée and that was enough to get me into the room with him, while Chogyi Jake was stuck in the waiting area.
Ex’s color was coming back, though he was still pale. Swaths of dried blood were flaking off his hands and cheek. Between his black eye and mine, we looked pretty rough, which I didn’t figure was likely to make the doctors more responsive. If I’d seen us, I’d have dialed straight to drug-addicted spousal abuse too. The nurse on duty came by after an hour and sprayed something on his wounded foot that seemed to take the edge off the pain. They weren’t dosing him up with any pills more powerful than Tylenol, probably on the assumption that we’d shot him in the foot ourselves in a bid to score pain medication.
Somewhere nearby, a woman was groaning and calling for someone named Steven. Over the previous few months and years, I’d been in more hospitals than I liked, and other than making me feel profoundly self-conscious and unwelcome, this one wasn’t bad. A nurse came and drew some blood for routine testing. She had a discreet bandage on the side of her nose to cover up the piercing there.
I held Ex’s hand while she did it, more for myself than him, and I didn’t let go when she left. After a few minutes his breath got heavy, slow, and regular. I assumed he was sleeping until he spoke.
“What is it with your family and firearms?”
“My family and . . . You mean Jay did this?”
“What we get for bringing civilians in,” he said. “We were waiting just past the shed. The warding was light there, and we had a decent line of sight on the back of the house. They brought her to the back when you showed up on the street. I figured the longer we could put off using the cantrip, the longer it was until they noticed us. Jay went up the back steps and waved at her through the window. She came out, and he put his gun under his armpit and blew my foot off.”
“It’s not off,” I said. “It doesn’t even look all that bad.”
“It looks like a sausage with a dozen little raisins where the blood’s clotting.”
“I was comparing it to blown off,” I said. “It looks better than that.”
Ex smiled without opening his eyes, and I smiled with him.
“They got away?”
“I think so,” I said. “He’s not answering his cell.”
“And the homestead?”
“I don’t think Mom and Dad are likely to accept my calls anytime soon,” I said. “What about the other shot? I heard two.”
“After he shot me, the other two noticed we were there. I tried to slow them down.”
“It worked,” I said.
“Sort of,” Ex agreed. “The trap. They were working a binding, weren’t they?”
“Trying to,” I said. “They didn’t do a great job of it.”
“Well, thank God we’re all the Keystone Kops,” he said.
We waited. The woman who was calling for Steven had stopped. I texted Curtis to see if he’d heard any news, and Chogyi Jake to let him know that I hadn’t. I listened to the nurses talking at their station, I paced quietly beside the bed. The monitors said that Ex’s heartbeat was regular, his blood pressure a little high. I wanted to go find Jay and Carla, wherever they were. I kept suffering visions of them in some dark place, caught by Rhodes and his cabal. Of course, if I left, I’d start imagining the Invisible College coming to the hospital to finish the job. We were too scattered, and we didn’t know enough. One worry followed the next, anxiety building on anxiety, and behind it all was the sense that I’d forgotten something. Something important.
The doctor arrived about three hours later, and I had to tell myself that the long delay only meant that Ex’s condition wasn’t bad enough to get worried about. He was a young man, probably not more than a year or two ahead of me, but he affected a world-weary attitude. Maybe he’d even earned it.
“So you did this to yourself, or did you have help?” he asked.
“Little help,” Ex said.
“That was my guess,” the doctor said.
“Is he going to be all right?” I asked.
“Sure,” the doctor said. “We’ll numb him up, dig the shot out of him, and send him home. We see this kind of thing every night. Only thing that’s strange about this one is that he came in sober. There’s going to be a form to fill out, though. Police like us to let them know when someone comes in shot. In case it matches up with something that happened.”
“Ah,” I said.
“That wouldn’t be the case here,” he asked, “now, would it?” I didn’t know what to say, and a few heartbeats later the doctor shook his head. “Well, I’ll need to fill out the form, so you two start thinking about what you want to say on it.”
“We’re not as bad as we look,” I said.
He smiled at me. His eyes were gentle.
“If I was one to pass judgment on people, I’d be in the wrong job,” he said. Honestly, I could have kissed him.
The whole thing start to finish took another four hours. I left during the extraction of the shot, since they wouldn’t let me stay in the room. Chogyi Jake had gone across the street and gotten McDonald’s. I didn’t realize how late it had gotten until I saw he’d ordered off the breakfast menu. I still hadn’t heard from Jay or Curt or my parents, and I still had the growing unease that came from something only half-forgotten. Something I was supposed to take care of and hadn’t.