Raven stopped kicking the wall. Behind a silver swath of duct tape, she said something that might have been my name.
“We’ve got you,” I promised at a whisper, eyes filling with tears of relief as I stooped to begin seeing to the witches’ bondage. Their wrists were all cinched tight with two layers of zip-ties. Joanna’s fingers were a deep purple at their tips. “Roy—do you have a knife?”
“Do I have a knife?” he snorted, as if the question were absurd. He plucked one from his jacket pocket, flicked it open, and—
The wall outside the boiler room exploded in a cloud of plaster. An inhuman howl went up from inside the new hole a skinwalker had made in it, followed by a wet gurgle.
My jaw hung slack. Roy shrugged and said, “One down, too goddamn many to go.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said to my friends as I tore the duct tape from their mouths. In the meantime, Roy set about freeing their hands, though he eyed them warily each time he did so.
Raven winced when the tape pulled, then wiggled her nose. “Shit, it could be worse. I needed an upper lip wax, anyway.”
Another crash, this one more distant, blew debris down the hall. An animal snarl rippled in reply. Roy abandoned Joana’s hands to peek out past the door frame.
“They’re takin’ the fight out into the hall,” he said grimly. “The skinwalkers are on the retreat.”
“Good,” Raven hissed, spitting on the ground for emphasis. “Bastards.”
“We gotta hurry,” Roy continued. “C’mon, let’s—”
A hot lance of pain tore through my shoulder, and for a moment, I thought I’d been shot. I screamed, clutching at an invisible wound somewhere deep in my bones. My vision blurred as a second wave of agony rolled up my spine, and I doubled on myself, one arm hanging uselessly at my side.
“Liv!” Roy bellowed, trying to turn me toward him, but moving even an inch hurt. “Liv, what’s wrong?”
My lower lip split, blood gushing down my chin from it and my nostrils. I was so small in Roy’s massive hands, and I thought maybe I was safe too, but that illusion was quickly dispelled as my knees and elbows cracked like I’d just slammed face-first into the floor.
“I don’t know!” I whimpered, pulse hammering, tears streaming down my face in cold trails. “What’s happening to me?!”
Fingers curled around the door frame from the opposite side. Roy pulled his gun, aiming it at the bloodied face which appeared next.
Kevin. He was dragging himself along the floor, leaving a thick trail of blood behind him. One of his arms was clearly broken, tucked against his body on the same side as my own injured arm dangled.
Joana began kicking at the wall now, and she didn’t stop until I braved my own pain enough to free her from the duct tape across her mouth. As soon as I did, she shouted, “Warin! No! You can’t hurt him! Kevin’s still part of the coven!”
And that was when I knew. When I understood why I felt like I was dying.
It was because Kevin was dying. And Joana’s curse still linked me to the coven.
30
Roy looked back at Joana, arching a brow. “You got funny priorities, lady.”
“Joana,” I croaked, desperate for her not to tell. Even though my life was on the line, I really didn’t want Warin to know what I’d done. Some part of me trusted he’d save me, and that part didn’t want to deal with the fallout of what he and his court would surely see as a betrayal.
But while Joana’s priorities weren’t exactly what Roy assumed, they were vastly different from my own. She shot me a sympathetic look before continuing, “Olivia made a pact with our coven. If Warin hurts us, any of us, it’s Olivia who will bear the pain.”
Roy’s brows both lifted this time. Disappointment flickered in his eyes, but it was swiftly subsumed by horror. “Oh, shit.”
“You bitch,” Kevin rasped from the floor, pulling himself up to his knees. I looked up at him, at the red coating the bottom half of his face. Just like mine. “You weak, simpering cunt.”
“Go to hell, Kevin,” Joana countered, lip curled in a sneer. “After what you’ve done here, it’s the least you deserve.”
“What I’ve done?” Kevin spat blood onto the floor. “You did this! You and your waiting, your wishful thinking about the vampires. I used to worship you and your wisdom. It took me far too long to see you’d always been soft. Incompetent. Unfit for you position as our High Priestess. Our blood is on your hands.”
Cutting words, especially coming from one of the coven’s own. But Joana only regarded him evenly, offering a slow blink. “You started a war, Kevin. Did you not think there would be casualties? Or were you just arrogant enough to believe one of them wouldn’t be you?”
“I can shoot him,” Roy offered, pulling the hammer back on his gun with a shrug. “I ain’t Warin.”
Kevin bared his teeth. But before anyone could do anything else, his eyes widened and he screamed as he was yanked back down the hallway by his broken arm.
I screamed too, the agony enough to make my stomach turn. The edges of my vision blurred, then blackened.
“C’mon,” Roy said, forcing me to my feet. I tried to sit back down, but he pulled me in close and added, “Liv, we gotta tell him. He’s gonna kill that guy. He’s gonna kill you.”
Roy was right. Warin was going to kill me. And he wouldn’t even know. Not until it was too late.
Leaning against Roy for support, I let him guide me out into the hallway, now slippery with blood. Drywall dust choked the air, whole pieces of it crumbling beneath our feet as I staggered toward where Warin and the others were fighting.
Carina had a skinwalker on the ground, straddling his enormous wolf form with one hand on each of his jaws. He bucked and writhed beneath her as she pulled in opposite directions, the dark glint in her eyes telling me she could be breaking him apart faster, but that she preferred to do it slow. His eyes bulged as she snapped back his snout inch by inch, bringing his lower jaw all the way down to his chest. Blood rattled in his throat, spraying over her face as the skinwalker desperately tried to keep breathing—and then stopped.
Aleric was humming as he tore through bodies, lithe body slipping easily between combatants to come up behind them and go in for the kill. Throats dislodged. Severed jugulars sprayed in wild arcs. And when Aleric did suffer a scratch, he gasped, looked offended, and then proceeded to give new meaning to the term “slaughterhouse.”
But Warin—Warin was the most terrifying creature of them all.
He held Kevin by his broken arm, staring deep into the other man’s eyes. Kevin must have felt he was gazing into the abyss, because I could feel his horror as if it were my own, could see even at a distance the nothingness reflected in Warin’s eyes. That eerie blankness spread over his entire face as with his other hand he closed his fingers around Kevin’s throat, lifting him up into the air as he helplessly kicked several feet above the ground.
I immediately gasped for breath, hands flying to my own throat as oxygen refused to come. Pressure pounded in my head, my face flushing with constricted blood flow as Roy called out.