40 Souls to Keep, page 28
“Same place I got the kid’s address,” Martinez replied. “From the personal effects collected at the scene.”
The disengaging lock sounded like gunfire. Lucas hissed in a breath and held it. After a thirty-second count, Jase reached for the handle. Nothing terrifying happened when he did—no gunshots, no pickaxe through the doorway, so he slid it open and crawled inside, Martinez providing cover from behind.
Lucas followed, slipping into a large, airy kitchen dominated by a wide island. The only light in the room spilled in through the glass-paneled door, although a weak yellow glow emanated from the adjoining living room. Content that the kitchen was clear, Jase rose to his feet. Martinez kept her gun up and ready, panning it across the room, first toward the dark hallway, then back to the living room. Lucas followed the beam of light, wondering in which direction they’d find Macy and Swift.
Martinez peeled off toward the hall and Jase inched his way to the living room doorway. “Martinez,” he whispered. “Get out of sight.”
Lucas strained his ears for a sound, any sound, but all he heard was the soft patter of the ever-strengthening rain. If it followed the usual pattern, a deluge would follow. When Jase glanced over his shoulder to the open doorway, Lucas knew he was thinking the same thing—the downpour might cover their approach. Jase raised a hand to Martinez, who nodded and back-stepped into the kitchen. They’d wait for the rain.
The skies opened a few seconds later. When it rained in the Everglades, it didn’t fool around. The water fell so heavy and thick that Lucas couldn’t see two feet out the door and into the yard. Rain pounded onto the roof loud enough to cover his heartbeat, and they all looked to the ceiling. Maybe fate was on their side.
Lucas gave in to a tense smile, dropping his eyes to meet Jase’s across the dim room. He knew the split second he was in trouble. Jase didn’t gasp or shout or even move, but his eyes shifted, turning cold as they came to rest over Lucas’s shoulder.
“Don’t move,” Swift said in Lucas’s ear. Water dripped from his sodden clothes onto the floor. Something cold and hard jabbed at Lucas’s windpipe.
After all their precautions, Swift had come up behind them. If they’d been ten minutes earlier, the scene would have played out differently. If Martinez hadn’t arrived when she had. If they hadn’t lingered in the car to kiss and say goodbye. If. If. If.
Lucas had never felt more powerless in his life.
Martinez swung her gun around, cursing, and Swift growled at her, “Put it down!”
“No!” Jase yelled at the same time, and Martinez fell to her knees, clutching her ears. “Get out of here,” Jase ordered, rushing around the island toward Swift.
“Stay back!” Swift jabbed the gun deeper, and Lucas choked, but it was the distraction Martinez needed. She bolted down the hall and out of sight. Jase stopped a few feet away and raised a trembling hand toward Swift.
“Don’t hurt him.”
Lucas squirmed and Swift drew him tighter, until his every heaving breath washed over Lucas’s face. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he spat. “You can’t control me.”
“I’m well aware of that,” Jase replied, lowering his voice.
Swift panted noisily in Lucas’s face. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here for Macy.”
Swift sucked in a deep breath. “That’s what I thought.” The arm pinning Lucas loosened, and the ice-cold weight against his throat disappeared so fast that he stumbled. Swift shoved him away, and he tripped forward two steps, turning just as Swift aimed the gun at Jase. “I’m not going to let you ruin this.”
It was the nature of Lucas’s job that he saw people at their worst, and over time he’d learned to recognize the heaviness in their voices that meant they’d hit bottom. Everything in Swift spoke of that moment of desperation.
Jase started to speak, putting his faith in reason and dialog, but it was too little too late. For once, Lucas was the one to see the future, knowing in the same moment that he could change it. He leaped, playing out the scene in almost perfect silence, leaving only Jase’s gasped denial, the pummeling rain and the report of Swift’s gun to mark the moment.
Lucas landed in Jase’s arms, and they both tumbled to the scuffed vinyl tile, Lucas on top. No pain, he thought as Jase cried out and rolled them over. He felt strangely light and disconnected, limbs weightless.
“Lucas!” Jase called, bending over him.
“It’s okay.” Lucas smiled and closed his eyes. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”
Chapter Nineteen
Horrified, frozen, Jase watched blood puddle around Lucas’s shoulders and head. The past seven years of his life had been full of grim scenes, but none had ever crippled him like this—made him incoherent and weak.
“No, please,” Jase begged, digging under Lucas’s limp shoulders and pulling him into his lap. If he could find the wound and put pressure on it...but no matter where he put his hands, the blood kept coming.
“Don’t bother,” Swift said, tone eerily conversational. “You’re going to be lying next to him in a minute.”
Blood everywhere. Lucas’s blood on his hands. Jase’s world narrowed and went dim around the edges. Mesmerized, he kept his eyes on the pulse beating at Lucas’s throat. It was still there—nothing about this man gave up easily—but already Jase saw it stuttering as his heart faltered. He lifted his head. “Then what are you waiting for?”
Still, Swift didn’t act. The barrel of the gun dipped toward the floor. “You don’t understand,” he said.
Jase did, but it changed nothing. For the first time in seven years, he prayed, asking for mercy from whatever higher power had set him on this path. He pressed his lips to Lucas’s forehead and begged.
“She’s my last.” Swift looked over his shoulder, where Martinez had fled a few minutes before.
“She’s my last too,” Jase felt compelled to say, meaning it in more ways than he could explain.
Swift’s eyes swung sharply back to him. “Then I’m sorry.”
Despite everything, Jase found that funny. His loud bark of laughter had Swift frowning and raising the gun again.
“You’re sorry!” Jase said, choking now. “Forgive me if I don’t buy that bullshit. You haven’t got one ounce of compassion. I’ve seen what you’ve done.”
Swift cocked his head. “Are you upset about the kid or about your little boyfriend?”
Jase couldn’t think about Lucas right now and still function. “Macy,” he said, “I’m talking about Macy.”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t make it easy. Bitch.”
The venom took Jase aback. “She’s just a child.”
Swift blinked. “She’s not just a child. She’s potential. Pure potential. She could be the savior of the world, but—” he wagged the gun at Jase, as though they were sharing an inside joke, “—she could also be its destroyer. That’s how much power she has. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it.”
Of course he had. Her dreams had tasted prophetic to him from the start. She loved a world that had been unbearably cruel to her. She was a guiding light. A beacon in the darkness.
“If you believe that, then why haven’t you killed her?” Jase asked.
“No, no, no!” Swift chided, stabbing the gun in Jase’s direction with each word. “Didn’t you hear me? Waste of potential. She needs to hate, not love. Be bitter, not understanding. It’s such a fine line, you know? I just needed to warp her a little,” he said, twisting his hand in the air.
“Warp her.” Jase felt sick. Lucas had been right all along.
“Yeah. You know...make her feel safe, then steal that away. Give her hope, then yank that away. Over and over, until she’s an empty shell, just waiting to be filled up with hatred and resentment.”
People have no more hope.
Oh, Macy.
Jase wrapped his arms around Lucas’s motionless body. “Is that what you do to everyone?”
“Yeah.” Swift’s eyes fluttered, settling at half-mast. His lips stretched into a toothy grin. “That’s what I do to everyone.”
Martinez had been right too. “You are a monster.” Jase swiped a hand across his mouth, remembering too late it was covered in Lucas’s blood.
“You’re acting like I had a choice,” Swift said with a sneer. “There is no choice for me. Or for you.” The gun trembled, slipping lower. “You do what you have to. If you want to get your life back, you do what you’re sent to do. You don’t question and you don’t complain.”
“Who told you that?” Jase asked softly. In his arms, Lucas jerked once, then was still. His chest stubbornly rose and fell every few seconds.
The question caught Swift off guard. “I met someone. A woman. She explained how it all worked.”
Jase bet she had, just as Philip had explained the rules to him. They were all playing the same game—pawns on a chessboard.
The rain softened until it no longer sounded as if they were trapped inside a bass drum. Now another sound took top billing—an infrequent, shallow, wet wheezing. Jase unclenched his fists from Lucas’s blood-soaked T-shirt when he realized he was trying—in vain—to breathe for him.
A quiet scuffle reached Jase’s ears, from the deep shadows of the hall. Martinez?
Jase grabbed at anything to keep Swift distracted. “How will you know when you’ve tortured her enough?” His own powers had instant feedback and a built-in reward system. When it came to matters of the mind, things weren’t as black and white.
“I’ll know,” Swift said, and left it at that. His eyes drifted to Lucas, and Jase followed his gaze, raging inside at how still the body in his arms had become. The bleeding had either stopped or Lucas had run dry. They both watched him silently until Swift swiped a hand under his nose and said, “It was weird, wasn’t it? The way he wouldn’t do what I said.”
Jase shuddered at the past tense. “Yes.”
“Did he listen to you?”
“No.” But why was hardly a mystery anymore. No one could tell Lucas what to do or how to feel. He figured those things out for himself. The idea of anyone having power over him was laughable. Martinez had a touch of that too.
The sound came again, the soft squeal of a wet boot on tile, and Swift’s grin crawled back onto his face. “I think we have company. Martinez! Listen to me and ignore everybody else, is that understood?”
Would that work? Jase’s brow furrowed. It occurred to him how much more experience Swift had with his power.
“Carla, no,” he called. “Run!”
Martinez didn’t reply, but when Swift made a sharp gesture, she came, stepping just far enough into the kitchen that her shadow was a bit brighter than the rest. Her ponytail had come loose, leaving her hair full and disheveled around her shoulders. Her gun hung limply at her side.
“Now, you see,” Swift said, “the irony of this appeals to me. Martinez! Shoot your friend. Twice. Let’s make sure the job’s done right.”
Jase formed and discarded a dozen plans in the space of ten seconds. Every one came up against a brick wall of impossible odds. This was the end. He’d failed.
“Carla,” he pleaded. “Don’t.”
She raised her gun.
“Shoot.” Swift dropped his own gun to his side. “Do it.”
She did, swiveling at the last second. The bullet took Swift in the center of his forehead, snapping his head backward. He tipped onto his heels and crashed to the floor. Martinez took five wide strides across the room and sent his gun skittering away with the tip of her shoe. “Bastard.” Only then did she turn to Jase and Lucas. “You guys okay?”
Speechless, Jase watched her tug her ear buds loose so that they dangled around her neck. The faint strains of Guns N’ Roses reached his ears. “Hey. Hey!” Martinez crouched down and smacked his cheek. “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” Jase confirmed. “And you’re brilliant.”
“Macy’s back there.” Martinez gestured behind her. “I thought she was just sleeping, but I can’t wake her up.”
Go! Macy needs you. The command should have energized him, but he couldn’t make himself move.
“Hey, did you hear me?” Martinez shook his arm. “I’m calling for backup and an ambulance.”
“I heard you.” Jase carefully lifted Lucas out of his lap and onto the floor, rolling him onto his stomach. “Better go meet them around front.”
“Oh shit. Oh shit.” Martinez clapped a hand over her mouth. “Is he dead?”
“No. Go, Carla.”
Nodding, tears in her eyes, she went.
Mechanically, Jase ripped Lucas’s T-shirt down the center and used the remnants to wipe at the blood. There. A small, round hole right between the shoulder blades, still oozing. “No,” he muttered, “He’s not dead. Not yet.”
Not today.
Jase cupped both hands over the wound and let his power flow into Lucas—eager, strong and sure. It branched out, catalogued the damage, repairing it as quickly as it had occurred. From death’s door to a peaceful sleep in under a minute. Jase stayed braced over him for a long time afterward, eyes closed and mouth turned up in a weak smile.
Healing Lucas brought no pain. It gave no pleasure. What Jase took away was something different altogether.
Chapter Twenty
Lucas surfaced to the smell of antiseptic and a quiet, steady beeping. Dry-mouthed, achy, he floated between opposing emotions, the first of which kept him safely muddled and unconcerned. But pulling at that was a stubborn inkling of trouble.
His whereabouts came to him in a series of realizations as he identified the sounds and familiar odors of a hospital, but the events that led up to his being there were vague. He remembered Jase—pale, eyes bright with fear. And how his voice shook, the panicked words garbled and nonsensical. Everything after that in the timeline was blank, but before...it was like watching a film in reverse: the impact of the bullet and how it took his breath away, the press of the gun to his throat, the pounding rain.
“Wait,” he rasped, backtracking. The bullet. There was something important about that.
There’d been a brief, intense stab of pain. After that, only numbness and a dragging weight that he couldn’t throw off no matter how hard he tried. Wet warmth pouring out between his shoulders blades, soaking his hair. The desire to close his eyes and sleep—that he remembered. And Jase holding him and begging him to be okay. “I’m fine,” he recalled saying. “Perfectly okay. Can’t feel a thing.” Somehow that had made the agony in Jase’s eyes worse.
These memories froze him for a long moment, their implication terrifying. The machine’s beep made him flinch, its steady count suddenly ominous. And the sleepy numbness he’d woken to could be the most terrible truth of all.
Don’t be a coward, Lucas. Setting his jaw, he pulled in a breath, lungs filling on command, and wiggled his toes.
The scratch of the cool sheet on his skin had never been so welcome. He attempted the same experiment on his fingers with similar results.
He wasn’t paralyzed. And, despite being shot, he was still very much alive. Lucas grinned. Nice try, fate.
In fact, besides a deep, all-over ache, he felt fine. Though that victory did nothing to resolve the next pressing matter—Macy and Jase’s welfare. What had happened after he’d lost consciousness? He couldn’t even consider possibilities, not without spiraling into panic. His blank memory taunted him, but if he wanted answers, he’d have to ask for them.
After several tries, he managed to open his heavy lids and blink the room into focus.
Definitely a hospital. Beside the bed at his shoulder sat a heart and blood pressure monitor. He had an IV planted in his left arm, with clear liquid dripping slowly through the tube, and a white bandage taped around his chest.
Lucas curled his lip. That was going to hurt coming off.
Now he just had to turn his head. Simple, since he wasn’t paralyzed. Except that every message he sent directing his body to move got bounced back as though he’d typed in a bum email address. After several frustrating tries, Lucas adjusted his expectations to simple in theory. Apparently, his synapses were still misfiring.
Finally he got his head moving, rolling it until his ear was pressed to the pillow. He found himself facing a window, a familiar ugly orange chair...and Jase.
The man needed a shave. But his clothes were fresh, clean, and completely unfamiliar. Lucas groaned. How many days had he lost?
Jase leaned forward. “Hi, there,” he said, voice a curious mix of gruff and gentle. “Do you need anything?”
Yes, but forming words was still beyond him. Was ESP one of Jase’s hidden talents? Lucas couldn’t quite remember. He projected a tall glass of water, but all Jase did was smooth Lucas’s hair off his forehead. “Lucas? Can I get you anything?”
So much for the ESP. He cut his eyes to the pitcher of water and plastic cup on the nearby table. That worked. Jase poured a small glass and added a straw before holding it to Lucas’s lips. Lucas drank, and more of the fog cleared. The ability to speak returned almost immediately.
“Are you okay?” he croaked.
Jase looked okay—tired and worried, but physically intact. Alive. Exhausted, ragged, strung out. Gorgeous.
“I’m fine.” Jase flashed a smile. “And so is Macy.”
His next question answered. He had so many more, but Jase’s hand in his hair stole his desire to have them answered. He let his eyes drift closed.
“How do you feel?” Jase asked, the tone guarded enough that Lucas tensed. He forced his sleepy eyes to reopen. Expression blank, Jase’s face could’ve been chiseled out of granite. What was he holding back that required such intense self-control? Instead of answering Jase’s question, Lucas asked one of his own.
