No pain.
There was no pain from the gunshot in Rhage’s chest. And that was his first clue that shit was critical. Wounds that hurt tended not to be the kind that put you into shock. No sensation? Probably a good indication, along with the fact that he’d been blown off his shitkickers and the hit was right at his breastbone, that he was in mortal danger.
Blink. Try to breathe. Blink.
Blood in his mouth, thick in his throat … a rising tide that went against his efforts to get oxygen down to his lungs. Hearing had been reduced to a muffled version of same, as if he’d lain back in a bathtub and the water level had come up over both his ears. Sight was in and out, the night sky above him revealed and obscured as things failed and kick-started again. Breath was getting harder and harder to draw, a gathering weight settling on his chest, first like a duffel bag, then a linebacker … now in station wagon territory.
Fast, this was happening very fast.
Mary, he thought. Mary?
His brain spit out his shellan’s name—maybe he was even saying it?—as if his mate could hear him somehow.
Mary!
Panic flooded into his bloodstream and poured right into his rib cage—along with the plasma he was no doubt leaking all over the fuck. His only thought, more than of his death or the battle or even his brothers’ safety, was … oh, God, let the Scribe Virgin hold up her side of the bargain.
Let him not end up in the Fade alone.
Mary was supposed to be able to leave the earth with him. She was supposed to be allowed to follow him when he went unto the Fade. That was part of the arrangement he’d made with the Scribe Virgin: He kept his curse, his Mary survived her leukemia, and because his mate was infertile from her cancer treatments, she got to stay with him for however long she wanted.
You’re going to fucking die tonight.
Just as he heard Vishous’s voice in his head, the brother’s face shot into his vision, replacing the heavens. V’s mouth was moving, that goatee shifting around as he enunciated his words. Rhage tried to bat the male away, but his arms weren’t listening to his brain.
Last thing he needed was someone else dying. Although as the son of the Scribe Virgin, V was probably the least likely to worry about something as vanilla as popping his cog. But as Butch, the number three in the troika, arrived on a slide-in and started yapping, too? Now, there was a guy with no Grim Reaper hall pass—
Shooting. Both of them started shooting.
No! Rhage ordered them. Tell Mary I love her and leave me the fuck here before you get—
V recoiled as if some kind of lead had found something of his.
And that was when it happened.
The scent of his brother’s blood was what did it. The second that copper sting hit Rhage’s nose, the beast awoke within its cage of his flesh and began to come out, the change initiating internal earthquakes that snapped his bones and shredded his internal organs and transformed him into something else entirely.
Now there was pain.
As well as the sense that this effort was a waste of fucking time. If he was dying, the dragon was just taking his place at the crap table.
“Tell Mary to come with me,” Rhage shouted as he went completely blind. “Tell her…”
But he had the sense that his brothers had already taken off, and thank God for it: V’s blood was no longer on the air and there was no reply coming back at him.
Even as his life force ebbed, he did his best to go with the flow as the ripping and tearing racked his dying body. Even if he’d had the energy, fighting that tide was wasted effort, and didn’t make things any easier. Still, as his mind and soul, his own emotions and consciousness, receded, it was eerie that he didn’t know whether it was the death, or the transformation that was backseating him.
As the beast’s nervous system took over completely and the sensations of pain disappeared, Rhage retreated into a metaphysical float zone, like who and what he was had been put in a snow globe up on the time continuum’s shelf.
Only in this instance, he had the sense he would not be taken back down.
And it was funny. Each and every entity that had consciousness and an awareness of its own mortality inevitably wondered, from time to time, about the when and where, the how and why of its demise. Rhage had been guilty of that morbid drift of thought himself, especially during his pre-Mary period, when he’d been alone with nothing but a catalog of his failures and weaknesses to keep him company during the dense, deserted hours of daylight.
For him, those rambling questions were being unexpectedly answered tonight: “Where” was in the middle of the field of conflict, at an abandoned girls’ school; “how” was by bleeding out at the heart, as a result of a gunshot wound; “why” was in the line of duty; “when” was probably in the next ten minutes or so, maybe less.
Given the nature of his work, none of that was a surprise. Okay, maybe the prep-school part, but that was it.
He was going to miss his brothers. Jesus … that hurt more than the beast stuff. And he was going to worry about all of them, and the future of Wrath’s kingship. Shit, he was going to miss seeing Nalla and L.W. grow up. And Qhuinn’s twins being born hopefully alive and well. Would he be able to see them all from the Fade?
Oh, his Mary. His beautiful, precious Mary.
Terror hit him, but it was hard to hold on to the emotion as he felt himself weaken even further. To calm down, he told himself that the Scribe Virgin didn’t lie. The Scribe Virgin was all powerful. The Scribe Virgin had determined the balance needed to save his Mary’s life and had given them a great gift to counter-balance the fact that his shellan could not have children.
No children, he thought with a pang. He and his Mary would never have children in any form now.
That was so sad.
Strange … he hadn’t thought he’d wanted them, at least not consciously. But now that it would never happen? He was totally bereft.
At least his Mary would never leave him.
And he had to have faith that when he went to that door to the Fade, and he proceeded through it to whatever was on the other side, she would be able to find him.
Otherwise, this whole death thing would have been unbearable to go through. The idea that he could be dying and would never see his beloved again? Never smell her hair? Know her touch? Speak his truth even though she already knew how much he loved her?
All that was why death was such a tragedy, he thought. It was the great separator, and sometimes it struck without warning, a vicious thief robbing people of emotional currency that would bankrupt them for the rest of their lives …
Shit, what if the Scribe Virgin was wrong? Or had lied? Or wasn’t all-powerful?
Abruptly, his panic refueled, and his thoughts began to jam up, getting stuck on the distance that had come between him and his shellan lately, distance that he had taken for granted that he had time and space to correct.
Oh, God … Mary, he said in his head. Mary! I love you!
Shit. He should have talked out the stuff with her, dug down deep to discover where the problem was, mended them back so that they were once more soul-to-soul.
The trouble was, he realized with dread, when your heart finally stopped beating in your chest, everything that you wished you’d said but hadn’t, all the missing pieces of yourself that you had yet to give, all the failures you had stuffed under the rug in the guise of life being so very busy … that stopped, too. The mid-stride step, never to be completed, was the worst regret anyone could have.
You just maybe didn’t learn that until all the things you’d ever wondered about your death actually happened. And yup, those questions you’d wondered about, the how’s and why’s, where’s and when’s … turned out to be pretty goddamned immaterial when you left the planet.
They had been losing ground, he and Mary.
Lately … they had been losing touch with each other.