Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (28 page)

“He’s not going to die,” Jason said. The bullet, bearing the unmistakable mark of the triquetra, now rested in a little blood smear against a folded washcloth that he held in his hand.
He can heal now,
he thought.
It will take time, probably a long time, but he’ll recover now, just like I’m healing from Nemamiah’s stab wound. With the bullet gone, he’ll be okay.

Dean shot him a withering glance. “Under ordinary circumstances, I’d be flattered by your confidence in my surgical skills,” he said. “But considering I just shot a priest up with heroin and performed an impromptu exploratory laparotomy here in the rectory at my own parish, you’ll excuse me if I don’t share your conviction.”

He stood, shouldering the medical bag. “He needs antibiotics,” he said. “But there’s no way I’m writing out a prescription. You’ll have to come by the hospital to get them.”

“I’ll go,” Sam said quietly.

“No, I will,” Jason said.

“No,
I
will,” Mei growled, stepping between them. “I’m the third wheel around here now. I should be the one to go.” To Dean, she added, “You can give me a ride, right?”

“Yeah.” Dean rolled his eyes. “Great.”

****

“Thanks, Dean,” Jason said in a soft voice, watching as Dean shrugged his way back into his coat. Moments earlier, Sam had walked with him into the living room, and from the doorway, Jason had watched them exchange a quiet conversation. It had ended with Sam rising onto her tiptoes, putting her arms around Dean’s neck. When he’d hugged her back, his expression had been pained.

“You heard me,” Jason said. “What did I ever do to you? Is it just about Sam? Or is it about getting even for punching you in the face? You picked that fight, man, not me,
and I went to jail for it. I paid a fine, I paid all of your bills, to the point where I went damn near bankrupt. Isn’t that enough? Why do you hate me so much?”

Dean blinked at Jason, red-faced and incredulous. “Because I don’t get what the fuck she sees in you. Well, no.” He uttered a bark of laughter. “I know what she
sees
in you, but that’s all there is. All you’ve got is your goddamn face.”

His brows furrowed as he stepped toe to toe with Jason. “Do you know why I came out here tonight? Here’s a hint—it wasn’t to help out the guy who’s fucking my girlfriend behind my back.”

Jason balled his hands into fists. “News flash, asshole. She was
my
girlfriend first.”

“You
died
,”
Dean seethed. “I was there. I saw it! You should be nothing
to her now—you should have been
nothing
to her all along. You’re not good enough for Sam. You never have been. What were you going to offer her in that pissant dive you own? A lifetime supply of Bud Light on tap? Let her roll up her sleeves and use be the executive chef over your fry kitchen, plating up cheese fries and hot wings for the rest of her life? Sam deserves better than that. She deserves better than
you.
”

He jabbed the blade of his hand into Jason’s shoulder, knocking him back a stumbling step. “I came here tonight for Sam. Just like five years ago, when I tried to save your life after they wheeled you into my ER, when by rights I should I have let you die right there on my goddamn table. And don’t think I wasn’t tempted. But I didn’t—not because of you, because frankly, Sullivan, you’re so beneath me, you don’t even matter, but because I loved Sam. I
still
love her—more than you ever will.”

He shoved past Jason, heading for the door. “Everything in my life is
just
about Sam, you stupid fuck. And it’s never made a difference.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“I told him it was over,” Sam said softly as, through the window, Jason watched Mei and Dean walk along the sidewalk below toward Dean’s car.

“Be careful,” he’d told Mei moments earlier as they’d left.

She’d smiled at him, but she was nervous and he knew it. The Eidolon inside him had been drawn to her anxiety, her tremulous fear. “You’re cute when you’re worried,” she’d said.

He glanced at Sam now and found her gaze wistful and somewhat sad, her eyes glossy with a thin sheen of tears.

“I can’t give him what he wants,” she said with a small shake of her head. “Not now. Not ever.” Turning to Jason, she managed a smile, even as a solitary tear stole past her lashes, trailing down her cheek. “Because my heart belongs to you.”

Gabriel remained unconscious. His face was warm to the touch, but not feverish, and he didn’t outwardly appear to be in any kind of pain or distress. He slept deeply but apparently comfortably, and Jason had swung the lamp back from over the bed to the desk to keep the glare out of Gabriel’s face should he stir. The light spilled a narrow circumference of yellow glow against the desk beneath it. An opened laptop computer sat surrounded by papers, as if the young priest had been interrupted in the middle of working.

“I wonder what he was doing,” Sam remarked, sifting through the papers. “These look like reprints from online, news articles he found. They’re all about people who’ve gone missing.” Lifting one closest to top of the pile, she said, “Listen to this:
Home Invasion Leaves Local Woman Missing
.” With a thoughtful frown, she added, “It happened in Seattle.”

“Seattle?” Jason remembered the glimpse of the distinctive Space Needle tower from his memories of fighting with Nemamiah. He slipped the page from her hand and stared in stricken surprise at the photograph of a woman that accompanied the article.

Not missing,
he thought.
I remember now. I remember her.

“What is it?” Sam asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I know her,” he said quietly. “I know this woman. I’ve seen her before.”

Natalie Reynolds, 22, was reported missing from her Ravenna Park apartment late yesterday, the result of an apparent home invasion,
the cutline read.
Neighbors reported the sounds of a struggle but no suspects were observed entering or leaving the premises. Police have found no signs of forced entry, but say the condition of the apartment indicates the victim fought back against her attacker.

In his mind, he could see it clearly—throttling the girl, slamming her backward into a wall hard enough to crack the plaster behind her. He’d held her pinned here, hoisted aloft so her bare feet kicked and flailed in the open air a foot above the carpet. Her face had flushed nearly purple with the desperate strain to breathe. Her hands slapped weakly against his, her fingernails digging into his flesh as she tried to claw him loose.

Just as her eyelids had fluttered, her eyes rolling back into her skull, her struggles waning, he’d turned, throwing her with impossible force, sending her flying across the room and slamming into the far wall. With a breathless cry, she’d crashed to the ground, shattering a glass-top coffee table beneath her in a sudden spray of glass fragments.

When she’d pushed herself up from the shards of ruined glass, her face had been riddled with cuts, smeared with blood. She was gritting her teeth, and she had no pupils, no irises, nothing discernablediscernible at all, just twin orbs of dazzling white fire, so brilliant, he’d drawn back, squinting against the glare.

“You…won’t take me…so easily, Wraith,” she’d wheezed, her voice damaged from his choke hold, and when she’d stumbled to her feet, he saw she’d grabbed hold of a weapon that had been lying on the floor within her reach, a single-barreled pump-action shotgun. Grasping it in one hand, her blond hair clinging to her bloodied cheeks, she chambered a round with one furious jerk of her arm, then leveled the barrel at him.

He remembered dissipating, the Eidolon shifting into shadow form and transporting him instantaneously behind her. As he coalesced back into human form, he saw the wink of light against something metallic in his hand, a knife with a hilt engraved with the same triangular knot design he’d seen on Nemamiah’s sword.

He’d clapped his hand over the woman’s mouth, grabbing her from behind and wrenching her head back with enough force to snap her neck with a horrible, audible crunch. He’d felt the sharp intake of her breath against his palm as she’d sucked in a breath to scream, her lips mashed back into her teeth, and then he’d dragged the edge of the knife blade beneath the shelf of her chin, opening her throat in a hot, sudden flood.

Before she’d even hit the floor, her body had begun to run like molten tallow, just like his Wraith opponent in the medieval great hall had. The girl had drooped to the floor in a bubbling taffylike heap, and a thick stench had risen as her body had dissolved.

Jason recoiled, tangling his hands in his hair, shoving his hands to his temples as if trying to squeeze the horrifying memory out of his skull.

“Jason?” Sam said, bewildered and alarmed. “What is it?”

That’s why she was listed as missing, not dead,
he realized.
They didn’t find her body. She didn’t leave one for them to find.

“Jason, talk to me.” Sam caught him by the shoulders. “Tell me what’s wrong. How do you know that girl?”

“She was…my friend.” From the bed nearby, Gabriel’s voice was fragile and hoarse.

Sam whirled while Jason backpedaled in startled fright. He knocked into Gabriel’s bookcase, sending books and CDs tumbling off the shelves and to the floor. The priest struggled to sit up in his bed, propping himself clumsily upright. His face was pale and drawn with pain, his eyes heavily lidded and groggy.

“I…loved her,” he seethed. “And you destroyed her.”

“It wasn’t me,” Jason whispered, shaking his head.

But seeing Natalie Reynolds’ face had unlocked a treasure trove of heretofore forgotten, horrific memories in his mind, a sudden flood of images—a man from Paris, whose fiery white eyes had stood out in stark contrast to his coal-black skin. Jason had overpowered him, forcing him facedown and to the ground, craning his arm behind him at an unnatural angle that had wrenched his shoulder out of socket.

“I…I will be avenged…” he’d gasped as Jason had shoved the gleaming barrel of his Beretta nine-millimeter to the black man’s head. He’d said this in French—
Je serai vengé
—but Jason had still understood him somehow, impossibly.

“
J'attendrai
,”
Jason had replied, as easily and readily as if he’d known French, which he hadn’t.
I’ll be waiting,
he’d promised, and when he’d squeezed the trigger, kicking a powerful wave of recoil through his palm, up his arm and into his shoulder, the black man’s brains had splattered back at him, peppering his face with blood.

He remembered a young man in west Los Angeles, Hispanic, dressed in a wife-beater T-shirt, blue jeans and boots, a cigarillo clamped between his teeth as he and Jason grappled, nearly nose to nose, over a pistol in a cramped, squalid apartment. His eyes were ablaze with that same pale fire, his brows defiantly furrowed even as Jason forced the muzzle beneath his chin.

“Fuck you,
pendejo
,”
this man had said, his skin sweat-soaked, the stink of his fear as energizing as an adrenaline surge to the Eidolon.

Jason had leaned forward, letting his lips dance against the man’s earlobe as he’d squeezed the trigger, emptying the man’s skull against the wall behind them: “
Su esposa, quizá.
”
Your wife, maybe.

A woman in Colorado, driving a hunting knife up and through her rib cage to pierce her heart, watching as that blazing light in her eyes faded and died, a thin stream of blood burbling out of her nose, trailing down her chin; a transient man in Philadelphia, his clothes stained with his own waste, his breath reeking of booze, his eyes brilliantly ablaze as Jason had emptied a chamber round through the plate of his sternum. A man in New Orleans; a teen-aged girl in Lake Tahoe; a man in Rabbinical Sabbath garb in Cincinnati; a star high school quarterback in Manhattan, Kansas—all of them with fiery eyes, all of them dead by his hands, all of them disappearing into pools of melting flesh.

Jason crumpled to his knees. On the verge of hyperventilation, he gasped vainly for air. “I didn’t do that, any of it… I…I…” He looked between Sam and Gabriel, desperate and anguished. “
It wasn’t me!
”

****

“You have to go.”

“What?” Sam blinked at Jason, her eyes wide in surprise.

Whatever reserve of consciousness and strength Gabriel seemed to have mustered had faded within moments, and he’d crumpled back to the mattress with a groan, his eyes fluttering closed. They’d left him to sleep, keeping the door between his bedroom and living room only minutely ajar. Jason had sunk to the floor in front of the couch, exhausted and emotionally spent. Sam sat nearby, her legs folded beneath her.

“You could have been killed the other day when Sitri found us on the train too,” Jason said. “Because of me, because you were with me. And now these things I saw in my head, things I remember, all those terrible things I did…”

“Not you,” she cut in. “You didn’t do anything, Jason. It was that thing Sitri put in your head, the Wyrm. It was controlling you. There wasn’t anything you could do to stop it.”

“It wasn’t the Wyrm’s power that killed those people. It was the Eidolon. The Wyrm might be gone, but the Eidolon isn’t. And yesterday, it took over me. I couldn’t stop it.” In his mind, he could still remember the damp warmth of Natalie Reynolds’ breath against his hand, the muffled sound of her scream as he’d slit open her throat. “I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you, Sam…if I hurt you—”