Stone Cold Lover (9 page)

Fil watched and opened her other senses. She saw the woman’s basal aura color of pale peach flash with irritation, curiosity, pride, and hesitation. It looked like the woman wanted to help her, but was remembering the rules of her position.

“I’m sorry,” Marie-Luce finally said, shaking her head with a regretful smile. “I’m not at liberty to give out information on a patient’s condition to anyone other than next of kin. If the
Gazette
would like, I can give you the number of our media liaison. He may be of more help.”

Fil fought back a wave of impatience and shared a look of sympathy. “Trust me, I understand. I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble, but if I don’t get Mr. Racleaux this info ten minutes ago, I’ll be doing nothing but fetching beignets for the next year. Let me just do this. We have his condition so far listed as critical. If that hasn’t changed, all I have to do is put a little checkmark on my report. Can you help me out that much?”

Indecision stained the woman’s aura a dark magenta for a moment before compassion won out. She turned to her computer screen and typed in a command. A second later her eyes scanned something, and Fil didn’t need a read her aura to know what she’d learned. The way all the color washed out of her told her what she needed to know.

“I’m sorry, miss,” the woman stammered, “but I really would be in trouble if I told you anything. Please give Mr. Charbonneau in our media office a call. His number is right here.”

Fil accepted the card Marie-Luce handed her with a smile. “Understood. And thanks for your help. I’ll call him right away.
Au revoir.
”

She turned away and rejoined Spar, already tucking the card into her pocket to be forgotten. She didn’t need to call anyone, and the spring in her step as she led the way out of the hospital and into the bright sunshine should have told her bodyguard all he needed to know. With the cultist dead—and therefore clearly unable to talk—she would no longer be in need of his services.

When Fil returned his inquiring glance with a broad smile, she could read the confusion in his furrowed brow. Didn’t matter. For all intents and purposes, she was as good as free, and didn’t that feel better than an hour-long massage?

As clichéd as it felt, Fil couldn’t stop herself from clasping her hands together in glee.

“Ding-dong the witch is dead,” she half said, half sang. “Our crazy bomb-making friend failed to survive, despite medical intervention. He’s gone, which means that even if he wanted to tell the Order about me, he’ll never get the chance. I can finally—”

A stabbing pain in her left palm cut her off, making her hiss and glance down in confusion. Before she could even focus on her own skin, the pain shot up her arm into her chest, squeezing as if she were having a sudden, massive heart attack. At the same time she felt as if the point of a white-hot dagger had been thrust with brutal force into her brain just behind her eyes.

The agony sent her crumbling to the pavement. Vaguely she heard Spar’s voice calling to her, demanding an answer, but she was incapable of speech.

Then the world went black, and she became incapable of anything else.

*   *   *

The cold—so cold—penetrated her clothing, her skin, her muscles. It settled in her bones, gnawing them from the inside like a cancer. Like a cancer, she knew, it could be deadly, but she knew as well there was no escape. The cold had consumed her. She lived in it as much as it lived in her.

In the cold, there was darkness. Darkness. Deep and thick, it wrapped around her, blinded her, seized and carried her until she felt as if she floated in an endless ocean of black. Nothing existed but the Darkness, and she began to panic.

She needed to escape, to break free of the void. At least she needed to find something there, something other than the nothingness, something to cling to that could reassure her that she herself still existed.

She began to fight the grip of the Darkness. It surrounded her and clung to her like a forest of kelp, slimy tendrils always grasping and grabbing, twining around a wrist, an ankle. It tugged and slithered, trying to pull her down deeper, down to where she couldn’t see. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t escape.

Terrified and determined, she poured every ounce of strength into the struggle until she felt the tendril imprisoning her snap. A pinprick of light, weak and red but still discernible, appeared in the distance. The flash of hope energized her, and she threw herself toward the faint promise of illumination.

She felt herself buffeted, tumbling, lifted on a wave of blackness until the Dark disgorged her like a sickness onto a hard, unforgiving surface. She landed heavily. The ground felt like stone, rough and bruising. In fact, her entire body felt like one big bruise, as if she’d been battered and discarded, and she held herself very still for a moment, trying to catch her breath.

She opened her eyes and let them adjust to the light. There was little enough of it, but compared with the void she had just escaped, the small amount was enough to briefly blind her.

After a moment, she blinked and surveyed her surroundings. She half lay, half sat on a dirty concrete floor, her back and side pressed tight against cinder-block walls. The room looked like a basement of some sort, and a brief inhalation confirmed the impression. It stank of damp and soil, an odor of dry decay overlaid with hints of heavy incense and the whiff of sulfur.

She could see no windows; the only light came from an open flame snapping amid a circle of stones. It appeared in the center of the cavernous space, barely enough to illuminate a small circle around it. The other walls remained hidden in shadow.

Silhouetted against the light, a tall figure in heavy robes stood motionless, his attention centered on the flames at his feet. He made no sound, no gesture, but somehow his very presence made her skin crawl. Opening her senses, she attempted to sight his aura, but all she could see was darkness, an absence of the nimbus that normally surrounded every living being. In this man, she saw only a lack of light, as if his being absorbed instead of emitted.

Unwilling to draw attention to herself, she stayed frozen in place and simply watched.

For long moments there was no sound but the hiss and snap of the fire, no movement but the flicker of flames. The being before it appeared as if in a trance, head bowed and eyes fixed on the glowing light. The longer she remained in his presence, the more she began to feel the urge to leave, to flee. She tried peering into the darkness, searching for an escape, but there was nothing. She felt trapped, and the pressure inside her continued to build.

Go. Now. Run. Quickly.

Her muscles tensed as she began to gather herself. Where she would go, she had no idea, but everything inside her commanded she could not stay here. She could wait no longer.

Just as she poised herself on the edge of flight, there was … not a sound, but a sensation, like the rush of air into a vacuum, followed by a thunderous pop and a sudden flash. The small fire flickered and then roared, the circle of flames leaping from one foot to fifteen feet off the ground in a single rush. As the column of fire reached high, she could smell wood charring, the tips of the flames teasing across the beams that spanned the ceiling.

She heard a word, foreign and guttural and full of rage, just before the Darkness rushed back in on her, and the world disappeared.

She had hoped it would reappear with the streets of Montreal leading the way, but no such luck. Instead she found herself looking down on a bed in a room full of beeps and chirps and soft whirring buzzes. It was a hospital, but instead of standing against the wall, as she had in the basement, this time she felt as if she floated in a corner, up near the ceiling, with a bird’s-eye view of the still figure lying on crisp white sheets.

Despite the heavy swathing of bandages and the array of lines and tubes leading from machines to the motionless body, she recognized him immediately. Henry. The mad bomber cultist.

He had survived the blast, but not unscathed. Burns marred his skin where she could see patches left unbandaged, and cuts and bruises had turned his face a rainbow of ugly hues from black to red to sickly yellow-green. He was a mess and hooked up to so many monitors, she was unsure if he slept or simply remained unconscious.

She watched for what seemed like hours, unable to move, unable to leave, simply floating and watching while the machines beeped along with his heart. A light shone from a shallow alcove behind the head of the bed, but otherwise the room remained in shadow, and she remained waiting.

She didn’t know why she was there, let alone why she floated in the corner, but after a long time something in the corner caught her eye. A patch of darkness seemed to draw in on itself, to grow denser and blacker until it looked almost solid. Somehow she knew that if she reached out, it would feel that way under her fingers, but just the idea of touching it made her stomach churn. When it moved, she understood why.

Out of the darkness—the Darkness—stepped the figure from the basement. Still clad in robes and nothingness, it stepped forward to the side of the bed and laid a pale, narrow palm against Henry’s forehead. With a desperate gasp, the body in the bed convulsed and arched as if shocked with an electric current, and his eyes flew open to gaze up at the visitor.

“Mercy…” His voice gasped and choked, barely audible, as if it were being torn from him by some violent force. “Hierophant … Guardian…”

“Yes,” the robed figure hissed, and from her vantage point she could see his mouth twist in the cruel parody of a smile. “The Guardian survives, and you have failed, Henry. The Master does not accept failure, and neither do I.”

“Girl. Hierophant…,” Henry managed, the sound more a groan than a word. “Magic … Warden…”

The figure in black stiffened, his eyes narrowing. “A Warden here? One I have not seen? Show me.”

A second hand pressed against Henry’s temple. Again, it looked as if a seizure grabbed him and shook him hard. The visitor threw his head back and she could see his eyes fixed toward the ceiling, blind and unseeing. Whatever Henry showed him, it appeared to no one else.

A moment later the visitor shuddered, and his gaze dropped back to the figure in the bed. “A girl with magic is an interesting development indeed, but whether you marked her with the intent to gift her to the Master or to win her to his service is unimportant. Your brothers will deal with her. The fact of the matter is … you still failed, Henry. And failure must always be punished.”

The man smiled again, and bile rose in her throat at the sight. It was evil, she knew, pure and undiluted, and it rejoiced in knowing that it was about to feed.

He lifted one hand, leaving the first pressed to Henry’s forehead. The second he laid over the wounded man’s chest, and when he spoke, the filthy sounds cut at her ears like daggers thrust deep into her brain.

There was a flash of blackness, if you could call it that, where the nothing she had felt before waking in the basement seemed to well up out of Henry. It hovered for a moment before diving back in on itself, like a pack of starving hounds falling on fresh meat. Henry screamed, high and shrill and piercing. The sound rattled her bones for a long moment before it went abruptly dead, only for the call to be taken up by the monitors that began to whine and buzz and scream out warnings of their own.

It wouldn’t do any good. Henry was dead, she realized, just before the figure of the visitor dissolved back into the shadows and
Fil rushed back into herself with a painful, jolting thud.

“Felicity!” Spar roared in her ear.

Directly in her ear, she realized as it began to ring at the volume of the bellow. She tried to yell back for him to shut up, but the only sound that emerged was a weak whine.

She frowned. That was hardly like her.

The bright sun seared her eyelids, and she lifted them to squint up at the glowering face of a gargoyle who had begun to go gray at the edges. Judging by the feel of the hard pavement beneath her and the buzzing sound of human witnesses in the area, she figured having him shift back to his natural form would be a very bad idea just then. She reached deep to find her voice and tried again.

“Calm down,” she croaked. “I’m fine. You can stop yelling at me.”

“Fine? How can you be fine! You swooned! Right in front of me. One moment you walked calmly out of the hospital, and the next you collapsed at my feet as if felled by an enemy’s blow. You cannot be fine.”

“Miss?” she heard, and reluctantly peered over Spar’s shoulder to see a concerned security guard frowning down at her. “Miss, are you hurt? Do we need to get you back inside to see someone?”

By which the well-intentioned stranger meant to ask if she needed to see a doctor. As if being poked and prodded and pronounced physically healthy but marked by a demon and newly prone to psychic visions would make this day any better.

“No, thanks, I really am perfectly fine.” She forced a smile and pushed herself into a sitting position, smacking Spar’s arms when they tried to pin her in place. “I, uh, I just forgot to eat breakfast, that’s all. I’m, um, I’m hypoglycemic, so I guess my blood sugar just took a nosedive. That will teach me to oversleep, right?”

Her light laugh, as lame as it sounded to her, seemed to convince the security guard. His worried frown eased into a cautious smile. “Ah, I see. Okay, then. Maybe we should still get you inside. The nurses can at least get you a glass of juice or something.”

Fil pinched Spar hard when it looked like the big idiot intended to agree with the stranger. He glared down at her, but she ignored his displeasure and used his bulk to slowly lever herself to her feet. He followed her up, hovering all the way. His arms loosely circled her, not touching, but braced as if waiting to catch her in case of another tumble. Chivalrous, maybe, but unnecessary. She needed him to stop acting like she was really sick, so they could get the hell out of here and discuss what she’d just seen.