I’d planned ahead and had put my keys in one hand before scooping a grocery bag into each arm. I popped the trunk, then used my knee to nudge it open enough so I could put the bags in. I heard the sound of a car door closing, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone walking around the car beside me. I shoved my bags into the trunk, planning to ask the driver nicely if he would pull up so I could get into my driver’s seat.
I slammed the trunk closed, then turned to the driver beside me. He had opened his own trunk, although I was sure he hadn’t gone into the grocery store yet. He turned his head toward me and grinned. I frowned, not knowing what he was so happy about. Until his hand emerged from the trunk and I saw the tire iron in it.
It had taken me way too long to recognize the threat, and though I tried to ward off the blow with my shoulder, the tire iron still connected solidly with my skull, sending a stab of pain through my head. It felt like the parking lot pitched below me, and though I desperately tried to stay on my feet so I could take evasive action, I couldn’t do it. The ground rushed up to meet me, and my attacker took another step toward me, raising the tire iron.
My head throbbed, and my brain felt all woozy. I tried screaming for help, though I doubted there was anyone nearby who could hear me.
The lunatic swung at me again, and I rolled violently to the side to avoid the blow. I heard the metallic clank of the weapon striking the pavement, and my attacker’s curse at having missed. My stomach didn’t like the sudden movement, threatening to toss my breakfast. I wondered if that meant I had a concussion from that first blow.
I didn’t have time to bemoan my miseries, not unless I wanted to add more to the list. Swallowing my gorge, I tried to push to my feet. If the world would stop spinning enough for me to stand up, maybe I could run into the store, where there were at least a handful of people who might help me.
The tire iron connected with my back at shoulder blade level, knocking me flat on my face and forcing the air out of my lungs. My reeling mind ordered me to pull myself together and get up, but my body was having none of it. Pain and nausea roiled through me, along with a good dose of fear. No, my attacker couldn’t kill me, at least not permanently. However, he could do a whole lot of very unpleasant things to me if I didn’t find some way to muster my strength for an escape.
I was still struggling to get up when I heard the scrape of a footstep on the pavement right by my head. I looked around just in time to see my attacker’s foot coming for my face.
I blacked out for a while, but either I wasn’t as badly hurt as it seemed, or my supernatural healing was working overtime, because I woke up what had to be no more than a few seconds later. Pain screamed through my head, and I wanted to shrivel up and hide in some dark corner until it went away.
I was draped over a hard, bony shoulder, a pair of arms clamped around my legs. I struggled feebly, but the only effect was to let my attacker know I was conscious again. He slung me off his shoulder, and I tried once again to scream for help. I don’t think a whole lot of sound made it out of my mouth.
I thumped down on the ground much sooner than I was expecting to, and in my weakened state even that relatively mild impact was almost enough to knock me out again. Like I said, my mind was pretty fuzzy, and it took me an agonizing minute to realize I’d been dumped into the trunk of my attacker’s car.
This couldn’t be good.
My attacker leaned into the trunk, and I got a good look at his face for the first time. He was no one I knew, and I didn’t see any sign of a glyph anywhere on him. I hoped that meant he was just some random human thug who’d seen a delicate-looking woman alone in a darkened parking lot and decided to take advantage of the situation. If that was the case, I might be able to surprise him with my supernatural healing ability and make my escape.
The possibility that he might not be some random human, that he might have been after me specifically, was not something I cared to contemplate.
I was in no shape to make a flashy getaway from the car in my current condition, and I decided my best chance of escape—at least while my head was still reeling from what I was now sure was a concussion—was to attract attention and get help. I drew in breath to scream, but even that turned out to be more than my body could handle, as the ribs in my back sent a breath-stealing blast of pain through me. Maybe I had some broken ribs to go with the concussion.
My midsection hurt so much I barely even felt it when my attacker punched me and I blacked out again.
When next I woke up, my situation had not improved. My head felt even more woozy, and the car felt like it was pitching and bucking beneath me. I was lying on my stomach, my hands bound behind my back. I heard the distinctive ripping sound of duct tape, and felt something being wound around my ankles. I tried to voice a protest, but there was duct tape over my mouth, too. I swallowed a few times in rapid succession. This would be a really bad time to throw up, no matter how bad the nausea was.
Once again, my struggles served only to let my captor know I was awake.
“Damn, you are one tough bitch,” I heard him mutter.
He grabbed me by the hair and slammed my head down against the floor of the trunk. If I hadn’t already been hurt, I don’t know if the impact of my head against the carpet would have done much, but as it was, it stunned me into semiconsciousness.
In the last few moments of light before the trunk slammed shut, I caught sight of something that struck terror into my heart: lying next to me, on the floor of the trunk beside the roll of duct tape my attacker had thrown in when he was finished with it, was a shovel.
SIXTEEN
I closed my eyes in the darkness of the trunk and tried not to panic. Panic would steal my ability to think rationally even better than the aftereffects of the concussion would.
It could be just a coincidence that there was a shovel in the trunk with me. Maybe my captor was a gardener, or a handyman or something. It didn’t mean he was planning to bury me alive.
Or bury me after killing me, which was just as bad.
My attempts to comfort myself didn’t do a whole lot of good, and fear stole my breath. Ever since I’d first heard about what Konstantin had done to Emma, chaining her at the bottom of a lake so that she would revive and die over and over again for all eternity, facing a similar fate had become my worst nightmare. Immortality might have its perks, but making a fate like that possible was one hell of an awful drawback.
Until I had joined the fold, Anderson had been searching for Emma for ten years, unable to locate and rescue her without a descendant of Artemis to help in the hunt. And if my attacker buried me, Anderson wouldn’t have a descendant of Artemis to help him find me.
Which meant that no matter what it took, I had to make sure I didn’t find myself planted in the ground.
I felt the vibration through my body as my captor started the car, then the lurch as he pulled out of the parking space and a bump when he pulled out of the lot. I didn’t know where he was taking me, but I hoped it was a long way away. The more time I had to recover and plan, the better the chances I would be able to get myself out of this nightmare.
At least, that’s what I tried to tell myself to keep the panic under control.
I tried wriggling my arms around, seeing if there was any leeway in my bindings, but there wasn’t. I tried to fit my body through the circle of my bound arms so at least I could get my hands in front of me, but there wasn’t a whole lot of room to maneuver, and my injuries seriously hampered my efforts. I forced myself to lie still for a moment, sucking in deep breaths, reminding myself my life might depend on me staying as calm and rational as possible under the circumstances.
If I wanted to survive this encounter—or at least survive this encounter in a manner that didn’t make me wish I hadn’t—I had to get free. I could try to position myself so I could give my attacker a kick to the face with my bound legs when he opened the trunk, but if I wasn’t able to run for it, that would only delay the inevitable. I’d
heard that escaping duct tape wasn’t all that hard, but I wasn’t sure I believed it, and I didn’t know any tricky methods to accomplish it. The best I could do was try to wriggle my hands and wrists until the tape either broke or stretched, or until I somehow had enough space to get my hands through.
There wasn’t a whole lot of wiggle room at first, that was for sure. I was painfully aware of the passage of time, painfully aware that every second I spent struggling, we were closer to wherever my attacker planned to take me to finish things. Panic kept trying to take over my brain, and though it was cold in the trunk, I was sweating from a combination of exertion and terror.
The sweat worked to my advantage, giving my wrists a little lubrication as I twisted and pulled and writhed, trying to find a way out. I definitely had a little more freedom of movement now than I’d had when I first started, and I seized on to that tiny hint of success to fuel my efforts to keep trying.
Those efforts were complicated by the fact that my attacker was a terrible driver. The car lurched whenever he hit the brakes, and he took every corner just a little too fast. Having no way to brace myself, I was thrown around the trunk like a sack of groceries, and the repeated, jarring impacts weren’t doing my head a whole lot of good. It didn’t help that the damn shovel was getting tossed around, too. I landed on it—or it landed on me—more than once. I tried to push it out of the way, trying to make sure the metal blade wouldn’t come into contact with my head, but there wasn’t anywhere to move it to.
I didn’t know how much time had passed—it seemed like some weird combination of forever and not long enough—before I started to feel like I had a chance of getting out of the duct tape after all. The car had stopped doing so much starting, stopping, and turning, and I figured that meant we were on a highway somewhere. The steadiness meant that I didn’t keep losing my progress every time I was tossed around, and I had slipped one hand up and one hand down so that only the ball of my thumb was holding me in. If I could just get that big part of my thumb out, I would be free, and the shovel would become my best friend. I almost grinned thinking about the look on my attacker’s face when he opened the trunk, expecting to see a helpless, bound female, and instead found a heavy metal shovel coming at his face.
My thumb was coming free millimeter by millimeter, and I knew that at any moment now it would slip all the way through the tape, and I would be out.
Suddenly, a car horn blared from way too close.
Even from the trunk, I could hear my attacker’s shouted curse as he stomped the brake pedal. Tires shrieked in protest, and I could tell the idiot at the wheel didn’t know to pump the brakes, because we were skidding wildly.
I slammed into the side of the trunk, hitting it with my forehead while the shovel thunked into me from behind.
More shrieking tires, more frantic blaring of horns. And then, impact.
I can only guess at exactly what happened next, because the sound of the impact is the last thing I remember of the accident. I think I took another blow or two to the head, either from the shovel or from the side of the car. It’s also possible my head was thrown against the side of the trunk so hard that my neck snapped.
Whatever exactly happened, it killed me.
One moment, I was hurtling around in the trunk of the car, the next, I was nothing but a consciousness in the dark.
Having been dead once before, I knew exactly what was happening this time. I could feel my body, but I think I felt it in the way that an amputee sometimes feels a lost limb. I was aware of its existence, and I felt physical sensations, but I was utterly paralyzed, unable even to breathe, though my nonexistent lungs screamed for oxygen. My similarly nonexistent eyes felt like they were open, but I could see nothing but impenetrable darkness.
As far as I could tell, there was nothing above me, and nothing below me. I felt physical sensations, but only within myself, nothing from outside my body. No sensation of my weight resting on something, no heat or cold or breeze or movement.
Phantom adrenaline flooded my system as my phantom lungs continued their desperate screaming for air. I knew I didn’t really need to breathe, knew that my body was right now dead and had no needs whatsoever, but that primal need to flee, to fight, to survive was louder and more urgent than any logic. I honestly don’t know which is worse: the feeling of suffocation, or the soul-tearing, uncontrollable panic that feeling engenders. There was a very good reason that even the immortal Liberi feared death, even when they knew they would come back from it.
The last time I’d died, my body had been completely destroyed, burned to ashes. The seed of immortality meant that I eventually grew a new body, but it had taken days for that to happen, and the time I’d spent in the dark, airless confines of death had felt more like years. I was fairly certain I wouldn’t stay dead as long this time. I might have thought that knowledge would make death easier to bear, but it didn’t.
I suffered, and it felt like it would go on forever.
I came to to the feeling of someone’s fingers sliding off the skin of my neck.
“She’s dead,” a voice said, sounding like it came from far away.
I sucked in a frantic breath and opened my eyes, but whoever had been feeling for a pulse had already pulled away, and there was enough background noise that no one seemed to hear. Which was probably just as well, because it gave me a little time to gather my wits about me.
I took a moment to appreciate the luxury of breathing, practically hyperventilating in my effort to get as much air as possible into my lungs. The duct tape over my mouth hampered my efforts to fill my lungs, and I lost a few seconds to incoherent panic before I finally calmed down enough to assess my situation.
I was still in the trunk of the car, but I was crumpled awkwardly against one side of it, my head pressed against it, bending my neck at a painful angle. The trunk had been so badly mangled by the crash that I didn’t at first realize the car had come to rest on its side. There was no way anyone could have pried the trunk open, but one side of it had buckled enough to create a sizable opening, which was letting in a steady patter of cold rain. I guess whoever had been checking my pulse must have crawled through that opening to get to me. Or perhaps been dangled through by someone holding his legs.
I was probably lucky I’d ended up wedged in like I was; otherwise, I might already be at the morgue. I imagined coming back to life there might have caused some serious issues for everyone involved. I was probably going to startle the hell out of some people even now, and I bet the guy who’d declared me dead was never going to hear the end of it.
The thought might have been amusing, except I had some clue how weird things were going to get when I made it known I was alive. I twisted around so that my neck was no longer in such an awkward position, and twisting like that was enough to show me that any injuries I might have sustained in the accident had already healed. I was utterly exhausted, which I knew was a side effect of the supernatural healing, but otherwise, I doubted I had more than a bruise or two on me. That was going to have a lot of people scratching their heads after I’d been tossed about so violently I’d been declared dead.
But there was no help for it. They knew I was in here, so it wasn’t like I had any hope of sneaking away undetected. Even if I weren’t still trussed up in duct tape. I was just going to have to feign ignorance and rely on the EMTs to believe they’d witnessed a miracle.
It took a while of kicking at the side of the trunk with my bound legs before someone heard me and came to check it out. There was quite a flurry of activity after that. They pried the trunk open to get me out. I wished they’d just grab me and drag me out through the small opening the EMT had crawled through, but I guess they were too worried about my injuries to manhandle me like that. Not surprisingly, I soon found myself on a gurney being rushed toward a waiting ambulance. I decided not to protest the treatment, because I knew no one would believe me if I said I was fine. I did try to protest having my head immobilized, but I couldn’t blam
e them for thinking I had a head injury considering the position I’d been in when they’d first found me.
I had a couple of minutes to take in the scene around me while the EMTs were fussing around, trying to get me strapped onto the gurney and immobilized. The car I’d been in had done its best impression of an accordion, its trunk and hood crumpled to show there’d been solid impact from both ends before it had skidded into a ditch and ended up on its side. Through the shattered windshield, I saw the deflated airbag drooping from the steering wheel, its white fabric spotted with dark blood. Despite the extent of the damage, it was a pretty good-sized car, and I thought it possible my abductor had survived the crash. More’s the pity.
There was another, smaller car a little farther up the road, and it looked like it was in even worse shape. I didn’t think there was much chance its driver had made it. He or she had probably saved me from a fate worse than death, and I hoped I was wrong about their survival chances.
The ambulance doors closed, cutting off all sight of the wreckage and the flashing lights of an impressive array of emergency vehicles. One of the EMTs gunned the engine of the ambulance, hitting the siren, while the other climbed into the back with me, continuing to try to assess my injuries. I tried to tell the guy I wasn’t that badly hurt, but I wasn’t surprised he didn’t take my word for it. He probably thought I was in shock or delirious or something.
The ride to the hospital didn’t take long, but by the time we got there, there was already a lot of head scratching going on in the back of the ambulance as the EMT failed to find anything wrong with me. I kept repeating that I was okay, except for a little soreness here and there, but he was still sure I had to have some kind of dire injury he had so far missed. I tried to remain calm and patient, knowing he was just doing his job and that there was no reasonable explanation for my condition. I didn’t blame him for being confused. I guess toward the end I was getting a little bit testy despite my best efforts, because he gave me a ferocious glare.