Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) (38 page)

I slam my fist into his jaw. I hit him twice more and see the wild fire blaze in his eyes as he tastes his own pain. No one has dealt him physical pain in a long time and I can tell. The shock and surprise. The fury.

Protect her
, I tell Gabriel and he does. He reaches out for Ally’s drumbeat and strikes that cord. He envelops her, wings out, protecting her and the child.

It is all the distraction Caldwell needs to regain his focus.

He hits me and I hit the dirt. Something in my shoulder snaps with the force of his blow. Dirt is blown up in my tumble and gets into my eyes. I cough as another blow connects with my ribs and I feel the explosion of pain. My ears are ringing, blocking out the gunfire, the girl’s crying and Caldwell’s own heaving breathing—leaving me with only a high-pitched whine.

Then I think the mind rape will come. The snap, or earthquake, but Ally puts herself between us. She can barely move, but she won’t let him get close. But then another blow rocks me and for a moment the world goes black.

“Jesse? Jesse!” Ally yells. I hit the ground, scraping my hands on the little rocks in the soil.

He snapped and the world went dark. But it didn’t work on Ally. And I recover sooner than he intended by the look of confusion on his face. The power is new to him. Lucky for us.

Then everything changes.

I see the gun first. Held by a disembodied hand, the muzzle is pressed firmly against Caldwell’s temple. Brinkley in his leather jacket like a debonair James Dean come to save the day. Brinkley fires a shot without hesitating.

But Caldwell disappears.

When I see his face again it is only for an instant as he turns those eyes on me.

It isn’t the eyes, it’s the hands that matter. The two white hands that close around Brinkley’s neck and twist before he has a chance to change the direction of his gun.

It’s as if someone has yanked out my engine. I sputter and come to a complete stop. I jump forward but Caldwell is gone. I turn around and around but he doesn’t reappear.

I turn and see Ally kneeling beside Brinkley. Julia weeping and holding onto her coat tails. Ally puts her face in her hands and that is all the answer I need.

Brinkley is dead. Dead. The man that pulled me from the wreck of my old life and gave me a job. A purpose. The man who tried to prepare me for all of this.

Dead,
dead
. The man who stood beside me, protected me even after the danger grew. The man who’d rather desert his job, his loyalty to his brothers-in-arms than to leave me at the mercy of Caldwell.

“No,” I say. I kneel beside him and I put my hands on his neck, at the weird angle where the flesh bulges from a displaced vertebrae. “
No
.”

“You can’t replace him,” Ally says. “He’s gone.”

“I can,” I say again as if saying it over and over will bring him back.

“Jesse,” she warns. She pulls me away from the body up to my feet. She shakes me.

“I can save him,” I say and fall to my knees again. “I save everyone.”

I can save him.
Gabriel, save him.

Gabriel stands over me with those brilliant green eyes, his shaggy hair fallen into his face.

I search the rows for Caldwell but he hasn’t come back.

“I’m still here!” I scream into the night. “Don’t you want me? You wanted a fight, well I’m right here you, coward!”

“Jesse,” Ally shakes me again, pulling me up. “We can’t stay here.”

“Come on!” I scream. I scream until my throat burns and head pounds. “I’m right fucking here!”

But Caldwell doesn’t come back.

Ally

J
esse is hysterical that Caldwell got away. It takes strength I don’t have just to drag her back toward the others. At the line where the trees and cornrows meet, a group of people congregate.

Gloria is on the ground with someone patching up her stomach. Jeremiah stands beside her. And as soon as I see him I realize the gunfire has stopped. How I could have missed the eerie silence I don’t know but now men are simply walking the corn rows, dressed in black mission gear. Two men lift a dead body and carry him out of sight. Another stoops to pick up a discarded shell.

Jeremiah sees me first. “Caldwell?”

“New York to San Diego,” I say, feeling cold and stiff as I approach the little group.

Jeremiah’s jaw clenches then relaxes. “We have Lane safe and ready for transport and we recovered 48 innocent people. That counts for something.”

“Does it?” Jesse asks. But I don’t think anyone hears her but me.

“We all knew this would be a long battle,” Jeremiah says.

For the first time, I see the body in the grass, hidden in the tree’s shadow. “Who is that?”

“Micah Delaney,” Gloria says. As soon as Gloria sees me she swears. “Your face—”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know,” I say. I nod toward the body again. “This is good news. He’s been the root of our trouble since this began with Caldwell.”

“We are safer,” Gloria admits, hissing as the medic digs deeper into her wound. “But not good news.”

“Were you close?” Jeremiah asks. His voice is full of compassion.

“A long time ago,” she says. But she doesn’t need to. The way she fingers the hair beside the gunshot wound in his head says everything. It’s tender, undeterred.

A silence falls on us until Jeremiah takes a step forward and gingerly turns my face in the firelight. “Your nose is broken and this cut by your eye looks bad.” It was probably my nose ring that scratched my eye when Caldwell ripped it out.

The medic moves as if he plans to come to my rescue.

I raise a hand. “I can wait. I want someone to look at Jesse. Good luck getting her to sit still.”

Nikki appears at Jeremiah’s call. I’m relieved to see her, unharmed. “It’s done. The transport will move them to the Chicago base. We have six vans to use. I designated one for the bodies.”

“Two,” Jeremiah interjects. “We will have to use two vans for the bodies.”

“We don’t have the space,” Nikki argues.

“We will have to make space,” he says. “We can’t pile Caldwell’s dead on top of our own. Our people will see it as disrespectful—we have to make room.”

“Just leave their dead,” I say.

“And the evidence of our having killed them?” Jeremiah asks. “We can’t.”

When I speak Nikki realizes I’m here. She comes around Jeremiah. Her mouth hangs open in shock then closes into a clench. “Your face!”

“I wish everyone would stop saying that,” I say and wonder just how bad my face really looks. It certainly burns like hell.

“Who did this?” Nikki asks.

“Why does that matter?” I ask.

“Because I want to know who to kill.” Her words sound like a joke, but her face holds no humor.

I laugh and it sounds cynical even to me. “Get in line.”

“Caldwell?” she asks, clearly surprised. “Why would he go after you himself?”

“To get to me,” Jesse says, still pacing like a caged animal. And she isn’t giving Nikki a friendly look. She turns toward the night and screams into the cold, black air. “And it’s fucking working!”

Nikki reaches out to touch me and something happens. The area around my body hardens, the shield back in place. Nikki is surprised and confused. And it takes me a minute to realize what’s happening.

“Jesse,” I say.

“I’m not doing anything,” she says with an arched eyebrow, but she’s stopped pacing, her mouth open a little in surprise.

The shield doesn’t disappear until Nikki lowers her hand, clearly irritated. She turns back to Jeremiah. “Four vans to move 48 people. Then we’re just going to have to pile them in.”

“Put them in sitting positions,” Jeremiah instructs. He’s been strangely quiet and observant this entire time. His face is
too
emotionless for what he’s just seen. I want to know what he’s thinking, what assessments he is making about Jesse.

“You’ll get people into each van,” he says.

“No, you have to let me,” Jesse says. I took my eyes off of Jesse for two seconds and now she is arguing with Gloria, kneeling in front of her.

“You were shot twice,” Jesse says.

I come closer so I see the second wound. A small, oozing hole in Gloria’s right shoulder.

“Don’t be so stubborn. Let me help you,” Jesse says.

“You don’t know that,” Gloria says. “With what they did to me, I—”

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

Jesse looks up at me from where she crouches. “She thinks I can’t replace her because of the magnetite in her brain. But she’s an
idiot
if she thinks I’m just going to watch her die without even freaking trying.”

“You can’t replace someone with NRD and I suspect you can’t replace me either,” Gloria says.

“You’re dying,” Jesse argues. “I can feel it. You’re bleeding to death.”

I try to cover Julia’s ears from all the swearing, but I’m certain it’s pointless by now. But the child seems unresponsive, sucking her thumb with a glazed expression on her face. I won’t be surprised if Julia is diagnosed with shock.

“You don’t know that,” Jesse counters, then turns on the medic, one of Jeremiah’s, a short man with stiff dark hair and big biceps, examining Gloria’s shoulder with gloved fingers.

The medic frowns at Gloria. “You have lost a lot of blood.”

“I will still need medical attention, even if you replace me,” Gloria says.

“We will ensure you receive medical care,” Jeremiah says. “And we have transport coming.”

Nikki’s face lights as if remembering something. “Stetson is fixing the SUV so we can drive it back. But I don’t know how we will get to it. We can’t ride in transport. They are more than full.”

The medic rips a piece of gauze tape, then looks up at us. “You can take my car, sir.”

“Thank you,” Jeremiah says. “You’re a good man, Nate.”

“What about the fire crews, the media, the police?” Gloria asks. Jesse dabs the sweat off her forehead with a piece of dressing the medic gives her.

One of Jeremiah’s men tries for his attention. “You need to get out of here before they show up. Our local guys can talk, but we need your face off camera, boss.”

“We don’t need much more time,” Jeremiah says. I catch Nikki looking at me, at my ruined face, before she looks away. Something warm is flowing into my eyes, and it’s sticky. I have a good idea that it’s blood, so I keep Julia close so she can’t see my face. It is probably the stuff of nightmares for a kid like her.

Jeremiah reaches for the little girl and I pull back.

“No,” I tell him. “I want to take her myself.”

Jeremiah relents when another helper whose name I don’t know runs up to him with a walkie talkie. “Depp needs to talk to you.”

Nikki looks down at Jesse. “We loaded your boyfriend into transport. Do you want to ride with him?”

Jesse doesn’t even respond to her.

“Go on,” Gloria says.

“Not without you,” Jesse says. And her eyes gleam with tears. “I can’t.”

Gloria’s face pinches in a spasm of pain as she turns her head to look at me. “Brinkley?”

“He’s dead.” My chest tightens. “Caldwell.”

“I’m going to kill him,” Jesse says. “I’m going to make him
so
sorry.”

Jeremiah cocks his head listening to something on the com. Then he meets my eyes. “We need to get into the transport now. All of us.”

The medic and Jeremiah help Gloria up and Jesse stays close, unwilling to leave her side.

I turn away from the burning house and the wilting cornstalks, curling against the heat. I turn away from the dead bodies of Caldwell’s soldiers and Jeremiah’s own causalities. With a child in my arms, I turn and hobble through the darkness away from the sounds of sirens and the bright, blazing sky.

Jesse

“
I
’m going to kill him,” I say. “I’m going to fucking kill him.”

I have admit I’m starting to sound a bit like a broken record even to myself, but who is here to tell me shut up? Only Gabriel. And one of the benefits of having your own delusion is he can’t complain much. He’s as stuck with me as I am with him.

“He is very powerful,” Gabriel says. He is stretched long on my bed, his wings tucked away, suit still impeccable. His shiny shoes are on my duvet, which would normally piss me off, if I didn’t know they were fake feet or whatever.

“Then we will have to do it sooner rather than later,” I say. “As soon as possible before he sucks up anymore super powers.”

A soft knock comes at my door and I know who it is by the heavy irregular way the fist connects with the door.

“Yo,” I say, as Lane eases it open slowly.

“Can I come in?” he asks, hesitating in the doorway.

“Don’t be stupid,” I say. I’m trying for casual but my heart is beating too hard. Not from my “down with Caldwell!” speech but because this is the first time I’ve seen Lane since Brinkley’s real funeral, and he doesn’t look happy to see me.