Blindside (13 page)

The black cape pooled down at his feet, the leather flaps hanging loose to reveal an opened zipper of a jacket. And as she lay there, fighting to breathe, helpless to move, he brought her helmet back.

“You do wear a vest. Officer safety.” Last rays of daylight drowned in the dark, the red and blues below cutting into the sky with razor-blade precision. He knelt beside her and, still fighting for breath knocked by the punch of a bullet into Kevlar, Lana couldn’t find strength to crawl away.

“I’m not going to hurt you.” Above the roar of her pulse, a door slammed shut under the pressure of the wind. Williams’s lips stretched into a grim smile. “The loss of life is necessary but not easy. I hated killing Nicky. Maybe, after tonight, you’ll find peace.”

Pressure and pain ravaged her chest as she struggled to think, to move, to warn the figure coming toward him. Over Williams’s shoulders, her blurry vision revealed Mac.

Clutching the gun aimed at her head, Williams backed away, his posture tense and steady. “I shot the Rook. Avalon’s down!”

And Lana focused on a naked needle of a syringe glinting with rhythmic red and blues.

Mac’s fingers clenched over the vial with the serum. He forced himself not to snap the plastic into pieces, feeding the precious poison to the night. “She doesn’t need the serum.” He didn’t look at the reporter lying on the concrete. All he could see was Lana, her face pale, shocked with tears in her eyes.

She had to face the consequences of her actions. Power, his or hers, made no difference now.

“We have to take her in while her shields are down.” With his gun aimed at Lana’s head, Williams produced a pair of handcuffs. “She pushed that guy off when he rushed her. Shot at Amy. I’m going to need help taking her in.”

Lana said nothing, her blonde curls a dirty halo in the approaching night. No sign of injury and, somewhere under the ice freezing Mac’s heart, he found he could still be grateful.

Amy Avalon sprawled less than a yard away.

“She doesn’t carry firearms.” Violence, yes, sometimes excessive. None of the reports he’d combed through mentioned her carrying guns.

Williams crouched by the reporter, his hand gloved in black leather, searching for a pulse under her wet mass of hair.

Mac frowned at that hand, the shiny leather. A whistling breath as Lana’s pale lips shaped words she wasn’t yet able to speak. She looked at him, blown out pupils wide and begging. Then she glanced Amy and, silent, wordless, shook her head.

His gut churned while the water sliced him with lashes edged in crimson. Amy Avalon scrambled to crawl away from Williams’s grip.

“Get”—cough—“away from me. She didn’t do this.” Raw savage whisper while Williams got up on his feet.

“You’re hurt, Ms. Avalon. Stay calm, help’s on the way,” Williams shouted over the hum of an incoming chopper.

“No…Narc.” Avalon tried to push Williams away, clutching her side as if to staunch the blood flow. Under the whip of wind, the chopper split the air with eye-searing lights.

“She didn’t do this.” Barely whispered scream.

“And you should’ve stayed dead.” The gun was shoved into Amy’s ribs. “Go to him. Slowly.”

Shocked wide eyes full of pain met Mac’s, a begging plea, a silent question. He shook his head. He had no powers.

“Guess that means you’ll be playing hero,” Williams boomed a desperate laugh as the roar of the chopper grew stronger.

When Avalon reached him, Mac pushed Lana behind his back and heard leather scraping against the roof.

He willed the heat into his veins, searched for it, begged. Found nothing.

“Self-sacrifice. A true mark of a hero.” Disgust marring his features, Williams shook his head. “You shouldn’t have come back.”

“You asked me to.” Nothing but ice in his useless, shuddering veins. He’d shot up poison at four in the morning, with a dosage specifically calibrated to last twenty-four hours.

About eight hours to go. No fire in his veins, not even a whisper.

“You delivered, as promised. Unfortunately, the game changed.”

For all purposes naked, Mac took a step toward the gun. He made himself the target, protecting Lana and the reporter while the gleeful wind slapped his cheeks. Ice floated through his veins, his power dead, his shields non-existent. The gift he’d cursed for the past three years became the one thing he craved.

“I have no shields, if you fire.”

“Tempting.” But he was nervous; Mac could see the strain around his mouth—the tick of a tight jaw, steady clench on the wet gun.

Judging from the scrape of sound behind him, Avalon managed to get Lana up. Under the lash of helicopter blades, Mac took another giant step toward the gun, the dripping metal aimed at his naked forehead.

“There’s still a way out.”

A thoughtful nod under the chopper blades. “You’re right.”

He had no power. He was nothing. All he could do was rush the loaded gun.

Lana gasped and clawed for air. Immense heat punched through her lungs and lights from above blinded her with fire.

“Oh God! Oh my God!” A woman’s voice made the past two seconds rush back. Mac running at the gun; Amy kneeling beside her. Lana’s body a mass of burning muscles as she shoved Amy out of the way.

She couldn’t see under the burning floodlights, her eyes, tightly closed and burning from the avalanche of pain. Something round and smooth was shoved into her palms. Her helmet.

Amy’s hoarse breath came at her over the snarl of vicious air. “You saved my life.”

With light exploding in her head, Lana shoved the helmet on.

“Mac?” Pain screamed out from her lungs, she couldn’t make out his shape in this razor-bright night, despite the face shield.

Somebody clutched her right over the cut stinging her elbow. She didn’t realize Amy was pulling her away until she banged her knee on concrete. The wind shrieked, teasing them with pushes to the edge.

“Where’s Mac?” No power, not even a glimmer. Empty veins, ; empty, terrified heart.

“I…I think he’s shot. Williams is waving down the chopper.” Steady voice and shaking fingers, as if thin willpower held the reporter together.

“I have to help him!” She barely heard herself over the chopper blades.

Amy dug into her forearm. “Come on.”

She was the Night Rook, with her helmet and the augmented voice and tinted vision and depleted power. As shadows twisted with the tears, she ran forward, only to be jerked back.

“Get your arms up!” The chopper snatched away the words but not the grim intent behind them. Stumbling toward the cutting lights, she made out two shapes fighting over a gun. “Stop! You’ll be—” The wind cut off the rest.

Pointless to scream, useless to fight without power. She raised her hands above her head under the guiding beams of rifle sights.

“The Rook!” Another gunshot went off wild into the air, and she struggled to see, to scream for Mac. “Control the Rook!”

Shadows slithered around her, lasers refracting in the spit of water. “Don’t move,” a voice yelled by her ear followed by another shot.

Pain, a long, sweet needle, pierced her shoulder. Unholy roar coalesced somewhere behind her back. As if the world had slowed, she tried to cover up a patch of skin somehow exposed through Kevlar and came away with crimson staining her hand.

Someone yelled, “No!” a desperate roar of the past as her knees buckled under her, the world dipping in a slow languid motion. No burn this time, no smoke, just cold and stinging pain. Soft light searing her vision, she couldn’t stop looking at the streaks of crimson on her hands.

“No! Stop!” The voice enhanced by loudspeakers faded into a swarm of bees. Hands closed over her helpless wrist. “Jesus, he’s really going to do this.”

She pried apart her sleepy lids —somehow she knew the action to be vital. Under the slaps of rain and shrieking lights, she made out Mac dangling a figure over the roof’s edge.

The freeze in her veins burned away seeing Mac’s ravaged expression as he gripped Williams’s throat.

“Mac. No.” She thought she screamed, but the sound came as a whisper. Strength she didn’t know she had allowed her push off the hands trying to hold her back. Cops, edged in crimson, held countless laser sights trained on Mac’s unshielded back.

In the chaotic lights, William’s lips stretched to smile, an eerie, happy, knowing gaze.
Do it
, he seemed to say, and God help her, she almost tasted the sweet bitterness of death.

She wanted it. The thrill, the power of vengeance.

“Don’t. Don’t do this.” She used the last burst of strength to make her voice carry over the humming chopper.

She moved through water, deep and heavy, surrounded by blinding beams of laser sights. The cops silent and tense, allowed her to pass. Rivulets of crimson on her hand, she reached out to touch Mac’s shoulder. “You do this, you become him. You become everything you fight.”

Four steps. Three.

“You’re still a hero. You’re still Narc.” Lasers silent on his back, bright and deadly. Under the tint of Lana’s face shield, the beams sparkled and winked on the wide playground of his back.

“Mac.”

Endless moments passed before he glanced back at her, Williams dangling from his outstretched hands.

“You do this, and you’re everything he said.”

Mac’s wild gaze focused on the rip of Kevlar on her shoulder.

“I’m fine. Though I’ll hurt like hell tomorrow.” She tried a smile. Failed. And because she had nothing left, she closed a fist over his shoulder and pulled him and the man who killed her brother away from the roof edge.

Coughing, clutching his throat, Williams fell to the concrete.

No one so much as blinked.

Mac’s hands hung fisted at his sides, his face a wall of nothing, devoid of pain or any semblance of emotion. Lana didn’t know if he felt her when she touched his chest. “You’re bleeding.” Something wet and thick and horrid spilled from a horrid hole on the right side of his chest.

“I’ll live.” Low quiet voice, a well of darkness. AR lasers trained on their heads.

“Commander?”

More coughing. “What are you waiting for? Take them in, now.”

“I got everything, Commander.” Amy stumbled forward, waving an object that in the piercing floodlights looked like a silver pen. “Everything. How you killed Jonny. How you—”

She turned just in time to see Williams shuffle toward the edge. Two cops caught him before he leapt, and his eerie silence did nothing to dampen the screaming in his eyes.

Almost over
.

A few more seconds, then Lana could close her eyes and rest. Mac’s hand against her waist kept her from floating under. The water drops swept soft tight circles over the shield of her helmet, a lazy patter in a soothing rhythm.

“Sir, you need to get down on the ground.” Somber voice somewhere in the distance, full of both shock and respect.

“Turn off the sights. We aren’t going anywhere.” Mac’s voice, low and tired above her head, his arm a reassuring presence. The weight at her back was gone, and when her lids snapped open to the murder of the red and blues, Mac was on his knees, that hero’s chin angling up.

“Hey, you.” She tried but couldn’t remove her face shield with rapidly numbing arms. It was important that she tell him, before she closed her eyes and floated up in all this lovely darkness. “I love you, Mac.”

“Lana….” The words left his mouth and he crumbled.

She hated hospitals, with their stench of desperation and their forcibly cheerful staff. “You’ll let me see him. Now.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” Lana couldn’t see much under the heavy-duty tinted goggles, but the cop at Mac’s door didn’t seem impressed. “Our orders state no visitors.”

Wojo had threatened certain death should anyone come near Mac’s recovery room. The surgery to remove the bullet from his shoulder hadn’t lasted long but nobody knew how fast a hero healed.

She’d been in the ER when Wojo made the order, barking instructions as if he’d never left his desk. She didn’t know how he constructed the minor miracle of everyone leaving the Rook long enough for her to emerge as Lana. In the ensuing chaos, nobody questioned why she appeared beat to shit.

The past six hours had been nothing but a blur, the heat roaring back through her veins and suffusing her with fire.

“Just tell me he’s all right.”

“I’m unable to release that information.” Stone hard voice, cold, hard facts. She’d been able to bully her way past the nurses, refusing to spend another minute in the hospital bed.

The cop at Mac’s door wasn’t as easy.

“I have to see him. Now. This instant.” Fists clenched against her sides, she fought the urge to blast the door, and tried to use her brain instead. She was just Lana here. Not the Night Rook.

“You can stay in the room if you think it’ll be safer. Or call Wojo, right now. I’m going in. Back off or—”

“I think it’ll be safer if you let her.”

She might have pushed the guard out of her way—Lana had no idea, but she was finally in Mac’s arms, breathing his scent, reveling in his one-armed embrace.

She heard rather than saw his wince of pain. Calling herself ten times an idiot, she ran cautious fingertips over his side. “How bad is it?”

The doc who looked her over refused to talk about Mac, citing the requisite HIPPA privacy bullshit.

“I should be asking you that.” His voice was coarser than its usual rough edge. Gentle fingertips caressed her cheek before lightly tracing her bandaged shoulder.

She would’ve shrugged if pain didn’t blaze throughout her torso. “Bullet passed through. They’re saying I got lucky and can’t figure out how I’m able to get up so soon. Bet they won’t say that again when my parents get here and give me hell for it.” And she gave in to the urge to rub her face against the solid ridges of his chest. “Couple weeks of rest, then rehab. Now it’s your turn.”

He led her forward until her knees rested against the side rail of the bed. God knew she remembered what that cold metal felt like. This time, she didn’t mind his hand guiding her with its quiet strength.