The Neon Graveyard (26 page)

Solange stayed where she was, imperious and content to watch from above. Why not? She’d been scorched within an inch of her life. Now was her chance to watch us burn.

The dangling heads began to choke, then came sounds like corn kernels popping in hot oil. Something hit my back, dull but hard, and the screams erupted in earnest, followed by more pops. Closing my mind to what was happening behind me, I kept digging. Smoke danced as if alive, billowing in earnest, and the fire sped down the railing, closer by the second. Yet my palms were weighed down from the outside, the thick webbing pressing them together, as if folded in prayer. Yanking furiously, I realized too late that, like Chinese handcuffs, this only served to further tighten them. Then, unexpectedly, fingertips touched mine.

I looked up. Hunter was once again shaking his head, this time sadly. His mouth moved, and even though I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I could make out the word
love
forming on his lips again and again, so regularly it almost soothed.

The warmth and strength in that gaze and mouth and those fingers was greater in that moment than even the encroaching fire. I teared up as smoke pushed between us. I choked, but held Hunter’s gaze, as well as his fingers, tightening around mine. It’s not a terrible way to die, I thought, fighting to keep my eyes trained on his. As soon as the fire cauterized my nerve endings, I’d grow cold. Then I’d feel nothing. And, yeah, we would die, but I’d never carry the same questions and regret that lingered in my soul as I did after Olivia’s death. I knew I’d done everything I could to save Hunter. From the look on his face, he knew it too.

The smoke suddenly obscured everything. I cried out as I lost sight of Hunter, though I could still feel his fingers tensing around mine. Then the cocoon burst into flame.

“No!” I instinctively turned away as the fire leaped for my petrol-soaked body. My arms were aflame, and then my neck and hair, and then I was fully engulfed in fire . . . though those fingers remained, still clenched around my own.

He was safe in there, I remembered. So maybe if Solange had tipped him to which lantern connected the Serpent Bearer entrance, he still had a chance of making it out of Midheaven alive, after I was gone, after . . .

“What the fuck is this?” I heard next to me, and I glanced over, squinting. Solange’s enraged, blackened face—inches away—peered into mine. As expected, the fire didn’t bother with her, and it wasn’t even because of the lopsided kundans dangling from what used to be her ears. There was, very simply, nothing left on her body to burn.

“Why aren’t you frying?” she said, biting off each word.

I met her confused gaze with one of my own, then caught Hunter’s wide eyes through the clearing smoke—though fire still roared between us—before looking down. “Oh.”

The shield. My personal power. I’d never removed it after ambushing Lindy. Adrenaline and panic were running so hot and high through my body that I hadn’t realized I wasn’t feeling the pain associated with burning, only anticipating it.

“Oh,” I said again, shifting to see myself in the bar back mirror, immediately wishing I hadn’t. My true self was shown there, though the face and body I’d been born with looked like flaming saganaki. It was as if the remnants of my old self had gone up in flame. It made me wonder, if I survived this, what exactly I’d be left with.

Solange growled next to me. Another swift motion, and I was pushed to my knees by a second pounding wave of liquid. Only my hands, still cuffed in the webbing, remained aloft as I choked on the stew of smoke and water.

The greedy, controlling bitch hadn’t planned to burn down her world after all.

“How did you do that?” Solange asked in the sodden silence. I looked up at her through the lightening haze of smoke. Her face was indistinguishable from the soot floating like black snowflakes in the air.

“The best offense,” I told her, rising shakily to my feet. A good defense. “And the one part of me you still don’t possess.”

The power she’d returned to me hadn’t just ferried me back to her. It’d done so safely. The madness in Solange’s gaze seemed to suck the rest of the heat from the room as she leered close, fists clenched. “It didn’t do that for me.”

No shit. If it had she wouldn’t look like an ebonized Jack Skellington. “That’s because it’s mine. Just like him.” And you could never really take away something that truly belonged to another.

Bearing cracked teeth, Solange lifted Mackie’s shining blade. “But this is mine now.”

And the blade screamed as it raked forward to claim my life.

I dodged, I even felt Hunter trying to pull me to the side, but I knew it was too little and too slow, even were I not trapped and kneeling before her. Solange swung her arm down like a lumberjack, but her body suddenly disappeared and the blade jerked. Instead of finding my body, it imbedded itself in the cocoon. Hunter’s grip on my fingers released as struggle sounded somewhere on the floor to my left. The smoke had cleared enough for me to make out two solid forms, writhing bodies locked in a fight to the death, one clearly Solange’s, but the other belonging to someone I hadn’t even known was there.

And that’s when Hunter came to life.

Careful to avoid the tip or underside of the poisonous blade, he pushed the flat edge downward with his index finger. It didn’t take much. Mackie’s knife continued its confounding habit of annihilating everything it touched, and the webbing sliced open like linen. Once it touched the floor, Hunter reached out and reversed it, and began hacking at the shell. Using a weapon, he looked more like himself than he had at any other time since entering Midheaven.

A few moments more of skillful whipping, and he’d circled the blade around my hands, cutting them free. It was a hasty job, they were still bound snugly to each other, but at least I was able to back away. That alone was how I avoided a direct hit to the jaw from a newly enraged—and suddenly bloodied—Solange.

The blow still tossed me to my back. She was atop me immediately, more mantis than woman, and snarling into my face like a rabid dog. “I don’t care how long it takes to dismantle this shield from your body. You will die at my hands.”

“Okay.” Swallowing hard, and noting that one of her protective earrings was missing, I gave a short nod. “One question, though.”

“What?” Spittle, and someone else’s blood, rained down over me.

I winced. “Was your marriage to Hunter ever consummated?”

Her jaw clenched, visible bone flexing, and she glanced away, giving me my answer.

“Good.” Acting fast, I yanked at her other earring. “Consider yourself annulled.”

Mackie’s blade, now Hunter’s, entered her neck smoothly, turning her charred banshee cry into a protesting gurgle. She arched and tried to whirl, but the blade found bone, then bone again. Apparently all the souls trapped in the knife hadn’t been released into her malformed child, because they emptied themselves into her too, though instead of their features forming on her as they had the soft putty face of the chimera, they cracked through her ribs, their tortured screams mingling with her own. Her voice went utterly silent as the gristled muscles of her neck bulged, before it literally burst with a fresh scream from some undead soul. Singed, black flakes fell like ash, and a clump of marrow hit me hard enough to hurt. Cringing, I looked back up at her face to find the only softness in that body—her eyes—fixed hard on me. Then they too exploded in bone and soot, and Solange finally toppled. The handle of the most feared weapon I’d ever seen rolled to a stop at my boot. The blade had disappeared, just like everything created in this world eventually did. By the time the air had cleared, I saw too that there was nothing recognizably human in the pile of black bone and ash.

Solange was finally gone, dead in a world of her making.

I
closed my eyes to the carnage. Although the talking head fashioned after my sister, using pieces of me, had long stopped, Olivia’s voice—that initial scream—echoed one last time through my brain. I knew it for an illusion, but another shudder struck me, and this time it zapped all my strength. Solange had known what to use against me, from the first time I entered Midheaven to the last.

And though I felt physically sound—if not entirely fine—I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d succeeded in destroying something inside me with this last trick. If, perhaps, she’d delivered a cut deeper than even the soul blade could manage, shattering my sanity, turning it into shrapnel. Wouldn’t she love that? I thought, feeling the room spin, and then myself begin to drift alone. I thought about just letting go, if only to get away from the resonant tone of that pitched death cry.

“Joanna?”

Shock had me sucking in a deep breath—I wasn’t alone—and I opened my eyes to the most amazing sight: Hunter—thinner, but alert; hollow-eyed but sharp; covered in his own sweat, armed, and standing on the other side of Solange’s corpse.
Safe
.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

If I hadn’t already been down, it would have been one hell of a swoon. I sucked in a deep breath to fight off the light-headedness, pushed carefully to my elbows, though I couldn’t manage more than that. All this time, all the battles over my life and my soul, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by the moment—success, freedom . . . a smile growing on the face of a man I hadn’t been sure I’d ever even see again.

I opened my mouth to ask the same of him, but all that eked out was a breathless, shaky squeak. Normally I’d have felt stupid for freezing up this way—normally it didn’t happen—but right now I was just happy it hadn’t happened sooner. I glanced back down at Solange, destroyed by souls she’d coveted, and shuddered.

Hunter drew my attention back to him by stepping over the ash and bone, and looming above me. “Come on,” he said, holding out his hand.

I stared at it, squinting like it might disappear if I blinked. Feeling sweat trickle over my brow, I found myself thinking that if this moment wasn’t real—if something tried to pull me back into another world to reveal this for a dream—I might just lie down here and never get up. I simply couldn’t fight anymore.

“Joanna,” Hunter said. “Just take it.”

His own weariness snapped me back into focus. I reached out and felt warmth reach to me. Yet unlike my most recent brush with fire, this didn’t burn. I buried my nails into his flesh, the soft palm, and though his eyes squeezed tight in a wince, Hunter didn’t pull away. Swallowing hard, I leaned just a little closer and breathed in the faintest scent of wood smoke and musk. But even more than that, I scented desire—familiar and much longed for—as heady as ripe greenhouse blooms. “Hi,” I finally said, sounding shy.

“Hi,” he answered, and pulled me close, wrapping me in all that warmth. His arms tightened when I sagged, and I closed my eyes again, this time in relief.

I did it
, I thought, over and over again.

“Yeah, you did,” Hunter said, which was how I knew I’d been whispering it aloud. I leaned back to look up into his face. He pulled back too, but only far enough to plant the Universe’s softest kiss on my lips. “Thank you,” he said, his own whispered mantra.

And that’s how my breathing steadied, and my heart recovered its beat.

Finally I shook my head, which actually helped to clear it this time, and sucked in deeply of Midheaven’s air. It was tinny and clouded with residual smoke from fire and wasted souls, but I wasn’t complaining as long as I still breathed. “What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know,” Hunter said, pulling back, but not releasing me. “Something attacked her.”

“What?” I asked, looking around, before gasping. “They’re . . . all dead,” I whispered to Hunter.

Every single shrunken head sagged on its strings, heads drooped forward, jeweled eyes closed.

“They already were,” he whispered back, though there was no one around to hear. “Their animation was tied to hers.”

Yet another reason to be glad Solange was gone, on top of so many already.

So how? Who?

A memory flash of the creature, the chimera, reared in my mind, but no—I was sure Carlos had seen that thing dead. Holding hands, Hunter and I skirted Solange to edge toward the staircase.

The scent of blood hit us first, and there was a lot of it. The body, though turned away and shadowed, was identifiably human. Yet for some reason it was the shoes I recognized first.

I remembered admiring how quietly they slipped into Vegas’s underground tunnels. And now they’d slipped into Midheaven the same way.

“Vanessa,” I said, and rushed to cradle the dark, still head.

I
t turned out Hunter did know which exit led back to the Serpent Bearer entrance, though it wasn’t either of the two lanterns studding the far wall, as I’d originally expected.

“Are you sure?” I asked, still knelt and clinging to Vanessa as he pointed at the bright red door. The damned thing had been rimmed in light and heat in my previous visits here, so I’d thought it led closer to the earth’s core, not away.

Yet it was etched with the same whorling loops and symbols that lined Joaquin’s underground passageways, and when Hunter glanced at me, his face betrayed no uncertainty. “Solange confided the door’s purpose to me on one of her ‘trust me’ days.”

Unwilling to even entertain what else those “trust me” days might have included, I simply nodded and turned back to Vanessa. She was alive, but her face was scrunched in pain, and her bloodied legs were bent and curled in, like something vital had been removed. I didn’t know what Solange had done to her, but from the blood already pooled at her waist, it was likely catastophic.