Red Right Hand (22 page)

It was a strange question, and she didn't sound right. “I'm fine.” I sat up and shook my head to clear it. “What's going on? Is everything all right?”

Please don't say Dad's heart, please don't say Dad's heart.

She cleared her throat on the other end of the phone call. “Well, dear, there's been … I don't know how to…” She took a deep breath. “Something's happened.”

Oh, God.

My finger joints ached around the phone. I couldn't talk. I couldn't speak the words into existence. I took my own deep breath and forced myself to go on. “Is it Dad?”

“What? No, why would you ask that?”

“Mom, just tell me what's going on.”

“Something happened to the four boys … to the four boys who hurt you.” Her voice trailed off.

Her words were a cold jolt down my spine, and numbness spread along my ribcage. Swinging my legs off the bed, I stood and walked over to the window, trying to think.

“Are you there, dear? Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard you.” I didn't know what to say. “I don't know what to say.”

“Do you want to know what happened?”

I know what happened.

“What happened?”

“They're … dead. All of them.”

I know that. I was the one who killed them, but I can't tell you that.

The thought was cold, already compartmentalized away from my core. It had been dealt with and filed away. I needed to respond to my mom, to tell her something. Silence boomed on the phone. I said what I thought I would have said if I'd had no foreknowledge, if I hadn't played a hand in the men's deaths.

“Good.”

My mom took in a sharp jerk of breath.

“What else do you want, Mom? You know what they did to me. I don't feel sad for them, not at all.”

“I know, Charlie. I know. It's just that—”

A voice broke in, cutting her off.

A man's voice. “Hang up, Mrs. Moore.”

The bad connection wasn't a bad connection at all.

My mom's voice wavered. “I'm sorry, dear. They made me call.”

“It's all right, Mom. I'll talk to him.”

“I can call our lawyer.”

“Mrs. Moore, clear the line. Right now.” The man's voice was sharp, commanding. Used to being listened to.

“Mom, you should go. I don't think I need a lawyer.”

“I love you.” I could hear the start of tears in her voice. I'd heard that same catch a thousand times before.

“I love you too. Kiss Dad for me.”

She didn't say anything else, but I could feel her leave the line. I didn't speak, waiting to let whoever was there go first. That felt safer, smarter. I didn't know how to do this. I'd have to lie.

I didn't have to wait long.

“Miss Moore, I'm Special Agent Bronson. May I ask you a few questions?” The voice was quiet—not speaking quietly, but quiet of its own nature. It didn't sound like a voice that ever yelled at the game on TV or screamed at the dog. It was a voice that spoke little and only once, and if you weren't listening it wouldn't repeat itself.

I pushed the phone harder against my ear. “Okay.”

“Have you left your city of residence in the last twenty-four hours?”

Tyler Woods's house was in my parents' city, in the same district where I had gone to high school. Five and a half hours away from where I lived now.

“No,” I lied.

“You have not flown or driven from your home in the last twenty-four hours?”

“I went to work and then to a friend's apartment, but that's all.” Lie.

“Thank you, Miss Moore. That will be all for now.”

“Wait, what? That's all you want to know?” Silence echoed. I wasn't sure he was still there. “Mr. Bronson?”

“Special Agent Bronson,” he corrected. “There is one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Miss Moore, do you own a sword?”

 

39

I
STARED AT
the phone in my hand as though it had turned into a poisonous snake. I'd answered
No,
and Bronson had said,
Good-bye, Miss Moore,
and hung up.

He knew.

I didn't know how he knew, but he knew I'd been there.

I looked at the phone. The time read five fifteen. The slaughter at Tyler's house had happened before dawn. Not much before, maybe about four a.m.

Nearly thirteen hours ago. Long enough to fly there, kill them, and fly back.

Panic swept over me, hot and moist, making my skin tingle everywhere it touched. My armpits, my elbows, the backs of my knees: all of them were set alight with a buzzing, electric jolt sensation.

There's no record of a flight, because you didn't fly.

Relief fell on me, driving me down into the chair I kept by the desk in the corner. A bubble rolled inside
my chest. Laughter. Ridiculous, hysterical laughter. It twittered behind my breastbone like a caged hummingbird, trying to take wing and fly free from my voice box. I swallowed it, sniggering instead.

It was okay. I was going to be okay.

Daniel moved, his legs sweeping the covers off him to fall and tumble in a bundle to the floor. His head twisted, and he began to murmur.

Daniel's going to be okay.

The moment the thought was complete, he convulsed, jerking off the mattress as if a string had been hooked to his spine and yanked sharply upward. Arms and legs stiff, he vibrated on the bed as though a hundred thousand volts of electricity were coursing through him.

I grabbed his arm. His skin burned my fingers with fever. “Daniel!” I screamed, trying to wake him, drag him back to this reality.

His voice stuttered from his throat, jerking past clenched jaw muscles, coming out low and animal-like. Foam boiled through lips pulled thin and tight over his teeth, a symptom of rabid dreams rampaging through him. His skin purpled as he failed to squeeze air into the lungs trapped inside his constricted chest.

He choked, suffocating on a nightmare. I tried to jam my fingers into his mouth, to pry it apart, but they bounced off his teeth, shut like a portcullis.

Think. THINK!

Shoving my hands against his chest, I tried to push him down on the mattress. He was made of case-hardened steel, unmovable, unbendable. Pressing with all of my weight made no difference at all. His face darkened, gallows-black creeping down his neck as arteries throbbed like living things trapped under his skin.

Desperate panic clawed at my mind. Without thinking, I shoved my hand under the edge of his shirt and touched my Mark to the sweaty, fever hot skin over his heart. The cut lines in my palm lit like a brand against his perspiration, making me cry out. Pushing through the pain, I commanded the magick inside me.

Show me.

The steel circlet convulsed around my throat, a cold metal clench that sent shivers up my spine. The magick sputtered to life, flickering inside me, a hand shaking off droplets of water, and my mind's eye fluttered open. My vision slewed sideways into a weird, grainy tone, as if the room had switched to a cheap black and white film.

Daniel looked hollow, a near empty chalice, slicksided with the remnants and the dregs of a slow-draining pool of his life force. The energy gathered in the low places of his body. Some of it flowed through our connection, a thin tributary running from his chest into my arm, feeding the magick that connected us. The rest turned in a slow-moving whirlpool, corkscrewing away into a sinister spot nestled by his spine.

I pulled my hand away, breaking the connection. The real world slapped me in eye-searing color. Leaning over, I grabbed Daniel's arm and pulled. His body slid a few inches on the sheets. He was too stiff, too heavy. I couldn't flip him over.

Changing tactics, I shoved, pushing him off the edge of the bed to roll onto the floor.

Scrambling, I found him face down on the floor, spine still arched, making his feet hang in the air—but that's not what I saw, not what my eyes locked on.

His shirt had ridden up in the fall off the bed, gathering around his chest, under his armpits.

A fist-sized chunk of tumor blinked up at me from the small of his back.

 

40

T
HE THING STARED
at me, its sulfur-yellow iris leering at me. It pulsed, black veins running into Daniel's skin, melted and fused to the bottom of the ugly, malignant mass. Prickly waves of angry magick radiated from it.

Daniel's muscles gave out in a chain reaction that left him spent and loose on the floor.

Do something, do something, DO
something
.

I slid off the bed and crouched beside him. My hand fell on the Knife of Abraham, sliding it off the table.

The tumor's eye widened.

I shoved my thumb into it.

The surface was slimy and firm, resisting, fighting the intrusion of my digit, then suddenly bursting around my nail and opening to my knuckle in a squelch of egg yolk, runny and aqueous. My hand became a claw. I dug in and pulled up, stretching the diseased parcel against its mooring. The thing felt rubbery, slick
with its own fluid. Daniel made a noise, a grinding, choking moan from the back of his clenched throat.

Stomach churning, I laid the gleaming edge of the knife on the seam of corrupted flesh. The edges of the lids around my thumb turned sharp, the eyelashes turning into needles. They jabbed my skin, stabbing through to pierce tendon and bone. The eye gnawed at my thumb as I screamed and pulled the knife
hard
. Flesh parted like water against the razor edge, a brackish jelly leaking from the wound and filling the air with the stench of meat gone spoiled. I yanked on the tumor, hacked with the knife, and peeled the rotten nodule from Daniel's body.

As the last tendril split under the knife edge, his jaw unlocked, releasing the howl of suffering held captive in his mouth. Though it only lasted a second, it was the worst sound I had ever heard.

The tumor acted like a landed fish in my hand, flopping and flapping, trying to slip the hook. Needle-lashes raked my thumb in diabolical acupuncture as the lids chewed and sucked. Dripping jelly hung in strings from the cut end, solidifying, skin forming over their length, turning them into grasping tentacles that wrapped my wrist in clammy wet circles. Stretching and contracting, it tried to pull itself over my hand, the evil essence of the thing trying to bond with me, skin to diseased skin and bone to jelly.

I don't think so, you little bastard.

Magick rushed from below my stomach, from the pit of my pelvis, sweeping in a twisted whirl through my body, a tornado of energy up and out to my hand.

BURN.

The remnant of Yar Shogura began to sizzle in my palm.

I felt no heat, no flame, but my hand began to glow, sunset orange like the electric eye of a stove, and smoke curled off the scrap of elder god as it shook. The purple-gray membrane that covered it like a decomposing sausage began to fissure, miniature flames
flickering,
licking along its surface in a wildfire chain reaction.

In seconds it was reduced to a handful of ash.

I shook it off, wiping my palm on my pants and turning to Daniel.

He was pale as a ghost, skin so cold tiny wisps of white curled from it to dissipate into the warmth of the room. The patch where I had excised the tumor was raw and bloody, the meat of him exposed to my eyes. I touched him just to make sure he was still breathing.

He was.

Barely.

My heart locked, frozen between one beat and the next.

No. No, I
can't
lose him. I'll do anything
.

Anything.

And I meant it.

Carefully, as gently as I could, I pressed the symbol on my palm against the bloody patch on his back.

 

41

M
AGICK CRACKLED THROUGH
every fiber of me, arcing along nerve endings, spitting from cell membrane to cell membrane. It filled me, all of me, swelling my insides shut and turning my bones to heavy, polished
alabaster.

I pushed through it, fighting to clear my head.

My eyes were closed, and I forced them open. My magick-soaked vision painted Daniel in alien color. I could see through him, as if he'd been transformed into glass. His heart beat in slow, heavy
thump
s, a wounded animal trying to drag itself away. I could see the blood in his veins lurch with each throb.

He was dying in tiny ebbs and flows.

I can save him.

The sure knowledge became a stone in my mind, immovable, irresistible.

I began to draw energy to me. The room dimmed as I pulled, sinking low in the fabric of the world, mak
ing a depression where all the magick around me would pool and soak into me. I was a magnet, a sinkhole, a dwarf star.

The room darkened further.

Outside, a bird fell dead from the withering branch 'neath its tiny, clawed feet.

Multi-legged creatures lodged in the structure of the house stopped moving, a slaughter of microscopic lives.

It all fed into me, into my magick.

Inside me the magick roiled. I felt like a pot, overfull and on high heat. The mystical energy in my stomach simmered through my limbs. I had life. I had more life than I knew what to do with, and my head swam with the power.

I pushed the magick through my Mark.

It spooled out in a ribbon of pleasure that reached me deeper than just my arm. This was creation. I gave life, and it was glorious. I watched the energy pour from me into Daniel, filling him, making him whole in my eyes.

Making him real.

Making him
mine
.

Ecstasy rolled through the deepest part of me as our connection grew. Our skinsong sang across time and space. My mind was a lotus flower that opened to his, and I
knew
him. I could see his life laid like a tapestry before me, the texture of memory woven into who he was: a man of honor, still growing into his own skin but close, so close to the man he would be forever. He had no stain of guile, no taint of deception in him. My eyes followed a golden vein that ran from his heart, a crack of ore in a mountainside. As I watched, it widened, spilling energy into the magick I poured into him. The two mixed. The golden energy began to suffuse through my magick, running along the channel. It hunted, seeking the source of magick.