Reyes sat there stunned. Osh as well, and I was right there with them. Cookie, who would not have been able to see the hellhounds at all, seemed to be in a state of shock.
Only then did I realize it was raining. A downpour, in fact.
I held out a hand, palm up, and looked toward the heavens, wondering if the quizzical angel was sending me a message.
“I think I died for a minute,” I said to Reyes. Water poured in rivulets down his handsome face. The heat from his body radiated out and warmed me as icy droplets drenched me to the core. He reached out with one arm to embrace me, but I leaned away from him. Shocked once again.
“You’re ripped to shreds,” I said, one hand covering my mouth, almost unable to look.
He shook his head. “It’s not so bad this time. We’re learning.”
“Beep?” Osh asked, his impatience shining through when he grabbed my shoulders and turned me toward him.
I nodded in affirmation.
Relief flooded him visibly. He lunged forward and placed his palm on my abdomen, an act that Reyes didn’t entirely appreciate. I had to slam my eyes shut at the sight of them. At the blood that saturated their soaked shirts and jeans.
Cookie stood shaking, her face the picture of shock.
After an eternal moment, Osh nodded. “She’s okay. She’s —” He lowered his head in thought. “— she’s even stronger than before.”
“She’s the future of the world,” I said, as though I’d planned such an outcome the whole time. “That’s a lot to place on a girl’s shoulders. She’ll need all the strength she can get.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Cookie said, kneeling beside me and pulling me into her arms. “You – You were going to take your own life.”
“I’m sorry, Cook. I thought it was the only way.” Then I looked at Reyes, who was none too happy about that fact, if his rigid jaw was any indication. “Are they gone?” I asked him.
“For now,” Osh said, answering for him. “But you have to understand,” he added, “just like me, just like Rey’aziel, they were created for this kind of thing. I don’t think it killed them. And I think it’s safe to say beyond a shadow of a doubt, they definitely all made it onto this plane.”
“Reyes?” I asked, hoping for a different answer.
He nodded reluctantly in agreement, scanning the horizon. “Osh’ekiel is right. They won’t be back tonight, but they will be back. These aren’t fallen. They will not die so easily.”
“There was nothing easy about that,” I said, anger over that fact spiking within me. But Reyes was certainly evidence of what Osh had said. I could hardly look at either of them without almost passing out. I never knew a body could take that much trauma and survive. I never knew bone actually looked white beneath torn flesh. They had been shredded and yet they stood, in all their glory, ready to fight again.
Then the reason we were all there hit me. “Uncle Bob,” I said with a gasp of recollection. I stumbled to my feet and took off toward the cabin again, in the back of my mind very aware that I should be dead. Instead I felt no pain. No soreness. Even my fractured ribs had healed. “Cookie, stay back!” I shouted, but before I got far, Reyes tackled me and lifted me off the ground. He then gestured for Osh to go first as I fought his hold. I’d just fought a dozen hellhounds. Certainly I could take on one crazy human. But she did have Uncle Bob. He was not indestructible.
“If this woman is here,” Osh said, jogging in front of us, “she has to know we’re here, too. No way did she miss the battle royal going down in her front yard.”
“Reyes,” I said, squirming until he set me down and let me walk on my own, like a big girl, “I’m going in there.”
“Not before I do.”
We got to the side of the cabin and hunkered down as Osh crept to the front window for a quick peek. “There’s a light on, but I don’t see anyone.”
Reyes gestured for me to stay – as if – and tread swiftly across the porch to the front door. Naturally, I followed. When he tested the door to find it unlocked, I put a hand on his. Both of us crouched on our toes as he turned toward me.
“Let me go first,” I whispered.
“No,” he whispered back.
I stabbed him with my best glare, my gaze traveling slowly, purposefully, to his mouth. Even set as it was in the grim line, it was fuller than a man’s had a right to be. Sensual. “I could make you,” I said, my voice soft with what was part threat and part promise.
He leaned forward until our mouths were almost touching and said, “You could make me do a lot of things.” After a tense moment where he studied my lips, he dipped his head as though to kiss me, before adding, “But on this, you’ll trust me.”
Then he slowed time before I had a chance to and ducked inside the cabin. From my point of view, it literally looked like he’d vanished into thin air. I cursed and hurried in after him, but by the time I stumbled over my first piece of furniture, he was in front of me.
“He’s downstairs. There’s a basement.”
I glanced around and found a staircase leading down. Osh stepped to it and looked into the cavernous opening.
“She’s with him,” Reyes added. “And I think she drugged him.”
“How is he?” I whispered, angry Reyes did the time trick thing when I’d least expected it. That was cheating.
Before answering, he took a firm hold of my wrist, as though to anchor me to him. “He’s definitely been shot.”
I took off without another thought, dodging Osh as he reached out for me. But I’d shifted time to my advantage, taking them both off guard, and flew down the stairs.
When I emerged from the darkened staircase into a half-finished, dimly lit room, I saw Uncle Bob lying on his back, his tie loose and hanging to one side, his white button-down stained a dark crimson. Blood pooled beneath him, spreading slowly as though there wasn’t much of it left. I didn’t take the time to look for Sylvia. I rushed headlong toward him.
“Uncle Bob,” I whispered, sliding next to him to examine his bindings. Sylvia had bound his wrists behind his back, but Reyes was right: He’d also been shot. And he was unconscious. “Uncle Bob,” I said again, my gaze blurring with wetness. His short brown hair and the left side of his face had dried blood like she’d hit him with something. Surely not to subdue him. Unless she hit him very, very hard, knocking him out would not have been easy.
I cradled his head in my lap and patted his cheek, leaning over and whispering into his ear. “Please, Uncle Bob. Please be okay.”
The fact that he was warm registered in the back of my mind, sending a glimmer of hope spiraling up my spine. I felt for a pulse on his neck. Strong as a mule, and just as stubborn. I kissed his forehead.
As I was about to check the wound that seemed to be centered along the right side of his rib cage, I felt a sharp sting at my neck. Reflexively, I slowed time and flung my arm back, dislodging the needle. I could only hope that whatever she’d injected me with wasn’t lethal. Time bounced back before it had a chance to stop completely. But everything else slowed.
I spun around to look at my attacker, and even she slowed. Or, well, blurred.
Sylvia Starr stumbled back when I knocked her arm away. She immediately went for the syringe again as I grabbed Uncle Bob under the shoulders and tried to drag him to the stairs. But the world toppled to the left. I adjusted, trying to topple with it, to keep myself upright. It just kept toppling, the floor beneath me tilting until it stood completely vertical. It rested against my shoulder and cheek, and I couldn’t help but wonder how gravity had maneuvered itself that way. We would all fall off the Earth if this kept up. Then where would we be?
I felt a sharp tug on my hair and then cold metal resting against my temple.
“You don’t understand,” she said, talking as though we’d been having a conversation the whole time. “He put you there.”
“Where?” I asked.
“You went to prison because of him.”
“I’ve never bee
n to prison,” I argued. “Not as an inmate, anyway. There was this one time —”
“Don’t do this, Ms. Rhammar.” It was Uncle Bob. Maybe my poking and prodding had awakened him.
“My name is Sylvia Starr,” she said, hissing at him. Then her voice changed to a pleading whine. “If he hadn’t arrested you in the first place, you would never have spent ten years in that hellhole.”
“And what do you know of hell?”
It was Reyes. He’d come for me! “Hold on!” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth as I pointed to the floor at my ear. “We’re going to fall off. Grab on to something!” How we were not sliding down the floor, I’d never know.
“They convicted you of a crime you didn’t commit,” Sylvia said.
I looked up at Reyes, baffled. “I’ve never been convicted of a crime. Well, not one I didn’t commit.”
“I told them.” She pressed the metal into my temple. A long lock of her dark hair fell into my eyes. It was very painful. I tried to swipe at it as she continued. “I told them you were innocent, and they ignored me. Treated me like I was an idiot.”
“You are an idiot.”
“They convicted you. You went to prison for killing a man who was still alive!”
I started to argue with her and explain once again that I’d never been convicted of any crime aside from that little breaking and entering gig, which was wiped from my record when I turned eighteen – but then I realized she wasn’t talking to me.
Reyes stood there, his clothes saturated in crimson, a bored expression on his face, as though he were completely unimpressed with her. I, on the other hand, was completely impressed with her ability to remain perpendicular without falling over.
“I knew all along you were innocent. But they treated me like shit.”
The emotion I felt radiate off him was not what he was presenting to Sylvia. He crossed his arms over his chest, his expression passive, but an anger welled within him, deep and turbulent and violent.
Uncle Bob spoke then. “Ms. Starr,” he said, his voice hoarse and cracked, “Charley was not on that jury. If you hurt her —”
“What?” she asked, jamming the cold metal against my skull even harder. Poor Fred. “What will happen to me?”
Uncle Bob! I’d forgotten he was shot. I’d been drugged. Ubie was shot!
I couldn’t decide which one of us needed my most immediate attention. I fought the effects of whatever she’d injected me with, struggled to right the world and see it for what it was: a big blue ball that had not toppled over, and we were not going to slide off it. Knowing that theoretically and knowing that instinctually were two different beasts. I was having a hard time marrying the two with the more logical side of Barbara, my brain, when Sylvia jerked my head back and scraped the metal along my temple until it brought forth blood.
Uncle Bob lurched, but with his hands bound could to little more than that. “Put it down,” he said, his voice even.
“Shut up!” she shouted at him before turning back to Reyes. “I had to get retribution for you.”
“You sought retribution for you.”
“No, I could tell you were innocent. I knew, Reyes. I knew you were innocent, and they bullied me and mocked me. They made me feel stupid until I changed my vote. They threw you away like you were a piece of trash. Like you were somehow less, when anyone with eyes could see you were so very much more. They don’t deserve the glorious life that’s been given them.”
“All the evidence pointed directly at me. Detective Davidson was only doing his job.”
I heard a derisive jeer directed toward Ubie. It was so time to bring it. And I planned on bringing it. I would’ve already brought it if I could’ve remembered how. Or what it was I was supposed to bring. A cheese ball, perhaps?
“You’re wrong.”
“I’m rarely wrong,” he replied, and I couldn’t argue that point. “The jurors were doing what they were instructed to do, to weigh the evidence and make a decision based on what was presented to them. You chose not to see what they saw.”
“They saw a juvenile delinquent. A hooligan. A monster.”
“Then they saw everything that I am.”
Another thought hit me. Actually lots of thoughts. I was having trouble focusing, but this one had me curious. “Did you know it was her?” I asked Reyes. “Did you know she had been on your jury when she approached you for an interview?”
He frowned at me. “Yes.”
“You saw the pictures of the other jury members. You knew she was killing them?”
“I was hardly paying attention to your uncle’s case. I had other things on my mind.”
“How could you not pay attention to something of this magnitude?”
“Two words: Hell. Hounds.”
I scoffed and tried to turn away from him, but couldn’t quite manage it with Conan’s death grip on my wet hair.
Sylvia plowed forward, convinced she’d done the right thing. “They all deserve to die for what they did to you. I sat there day after day, watching as the evidence was presented, knowing you were innocent. I just wanted to make everything okay.”
Unmoved by her speech, his impatience grew exponentially. “I have been bitten, pounced on, and generally mauled by angry hellhounds, and now you dare pull a gun on my fiancée?”
“A gun?” I squeaked, catching on.
“I had to seek retribution for what they did to us.”
He paused, his anger pulsating over me before asking, “Us?”
“I could have taken care of you if you’d been exonerated. We could have been happy. I would have given you anything you ever wanted.”
He stepped closer, regarded Sylvia from behind a stormy expression. “I felt your infatuation throughout the trial just as clearly as I felt their conviction of my guilt. At the time, I thought you all imbeciles. I’ve since changed my mind.”
I became cognizant of one simple fact: He could have slowed time and ended this confrontation immediately. He was doing all of it, getting not only a confession out of Sylvia, but also her motivation, for Uncle Bob’s benefit. Ubie could serve as a witness to her ramblings, but he was still bleeding to death.
I could fight a dozen hounds from hell, I could bring down the son of Satan with a word, but put me in the ring with a psychotic chick, and I go down in the first.
“Rey’aziel,” I said, switching to Aramaic, “we need to get my uncle help immediately.”
Reyes nodded. In the next instant, he was in front of us, eyeing Sylvia as a predator eyes its prey right before it attacks.
“Don’t hurt her,” Ubie said, pinning him with a warning stare. He wanted her alive, but hardly for noble reasons. He wanted to see her face when the jury pronounced her guilty. His desire for revenge was strong, pulsating inside him, but it hadn’t reared up until she pointed a gun at my head.
Try as he might to fend them off, a tidal wave of feelings rushed forth inside Reyes as though a dam had broken. He’d spent ten years in a maximum security prison, and he’d always acted blasé, as though it hadn’t fazed him. But it had. He looked at me, the fury inside him explosive. He pulled her forward and said something in her ear. I buried my face to stop the reeling, to calm the raging seas, and to focus. I listened with every part of me as a soft whisper spilled from his mouth and filtered into her ear.
“How dare you assume so much when you know so little,” he said. Then, in one lightning-quick movement, too swift for my mind to register, he grabbed her head and twisted, causing a sharp crack to splinter the tense air. He pushed her to the side and dropped her lifeless body in front of Uncle Bob. She crumpled before him, and a big part of me wanted to scream.
This was not happening. He didn’t just kill someone in front of a police detective. He would go to prison all over again. At the very least, it would be a nightmare. There would be a trial, a media frenzy, but Reyes didn’t care. His fury scorched along my skin as he leaned down to Uncle Bob.
I rushed forward – at least
I tried to – afraid of what he might do. But he only spoke to him, his tone almost as soft, almost as dangerous as it was when he’d whispered to Sylvia. “You owe me that.”
Still unable to perform my award-winning routine on the balance beam, I stumbled into Reyes, clawing at his arms, worried he might decide to kill the only witness in the room who could put him back in prison for taking a woman’s life. But I had nothing to worry about. Reyes lifted me into his arms just as Osh rushed into the room.
He barely spared a glance for Sylvia before saying, “He’s still alive. The other one she took. But not for much longer.”
The latest suicide-note victim was still alive? “Where is he?” I asked him.
“Safe enough for now. He’s in the small outbuilding behind the cabin. But she must’ve given him something. He’s foaming at the mouth.”
“She poisoned him,” I said. Deciding to try to heal Uncle Bob, I squirmed out of Reyes’s arms and reached down to him. I had no idea if I could do it or not, but that didn’t matter.
Ubie put a hand on mine. He seemed to know my intentions. “No, pumpkin,” he said, regarding Reyes as though uncertain whether he should arrest him or give him a medal. Not that he could do much of either with his arms tied behind his back. He cringed as he tried to stand. “This has to look very, very good.”
I helped him to his feet as he examined the unstable staircase before giving us a once-over. “I’ll ask later where all the blood came from. For now, we need to get rid of any evidence that you were ever here.” He nodded toward the back of the basement. “She was going to set it on fire. The whole thing. She knew she was out of time and was going to kill me, then run off into the sunset with you, Farrow.”
Reyes blanched inwardly at that.
“So the way I see it,” Uncle Bob continued, “as she held that lantern up there —” He raised his chin, indicating a lantern at the top of the stairs. “— she doused the place in gasoline and tripped on her way up the stairs, breaking her neck in the fall.”