I reached it and dropped on my knees. Clothes—T-shirt, underwear, jeans, windbreaker—car keys, a gun, phone. Yes! I swiped the screen. Password locked.
I was out in the open and the thing with needled teeth was staring at my back. Its gaze bore into me. I had to get out. I had to hide.
I tapped Emergency Call. No signal.
The thing was coming for me. Rogan was lying in the open, in the middle of a clearing. I had to get him out before it found him.
I grabbed the bag, slung it over my shoulder, and staggered to Rogan. I pulled out and tied the windbreaker over his hips. It would make him easier to drag.
The jungle wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. I hooked my arms under his armpits and heaved. My feet slid on the frost and I fell on my ass. Why was this happening? I just want out. Help me, somebody, I want out of this nightmare. I just want for this to end. I could shoot myself. Just finish it. I had a gun.
If I killed myself, who would walk them out of the jungle?
I clawed my way through the visions flooding my brain. At the right wall, thirty-five yards away, a door broke the uniform concrete. I had to get us to that door. I crawled back up and heaved his huge body to me. He moved an inch. I would take an inch. An inch was closer to the door than before.
I was warm. Dear God, I was warm. That meant I was dying.
There were stairs.
I couldn’t do stairs. He was too heavy.
Daniela would fix him. Daniela fixed everyone and everything, except a bullet to the head.
The mage hunters were coming. I could hear them breathing. I got my gun and waited.
Get to higher ground. Radio for pickup.
Jimenez was waiting upstairs with his knife. His face swam before me, hazy, his eyes two bottomless pools of darkness. “It’s not him. He would have broken by now. This is a career officer. Take him to the back and shoot him.”
I still had six rounds left.
Get to higher ground.
They were coming for me. Their voices floated down to me.
No. No, I didn’t come all this way for them to kill us now.
Something bit me. My body gave out. I crashed down. The mage hound’s maw loomed over me, all slimy serpentine tongue and thin sharp teeth, and swallowed me whole.
Chapter 14
The sheets were so soft and warm it was like being wrapped in a heated cloud.
I was alive. I smiled.
Rogan!
I sat straight up in bed. I was in a large room with a single hospital bed.
“Hello? Is anybody there?”
The door swung open and Dr. Arias strode into the room. About forty, over six feet tall, Daniela Arias was huge: broad shoulders, powerful legs, and muscular arms. Her features, large and attractive, were handsome rather than pretty, but right now her face was a cool professional mask. I’d met her before. She was Rogan’s private physician.
“Is Rogan alive?”
“In better shape than you.”
Relief washed through me. I slumped back on the pillow. He lived. We both lived.
“What happened?”
She pulled up a chair. “You dragged him out. Somehow, you managed to pull him thirty yards across the floor and up two flights of stairs. His back and ass are one long bruise with a helping of concrete road rash, so his dreams of being a nude model are shattered for a while.”
I’d laugh, but her face told me it wasn’t a good idea.
“The reservoir’s door had an excellent waterproof seal, which is what saved you. The air outside of it was at a normal temperature. You got up to the second landing, where you got a signal and you called 911 and told them that you needed a pickup because Cazadores were coming. They thought you were delusional, but we were monitoring the 911 calls.”
“How?”
“Your cousin and Bug, from what I understand. After Rogan and you disappeared and his tracking went dead, they snapped to it. Rivera’s team was dispatched Downtown, to mop up, and my team sat, waiting for any sign of you. As soon as we caught your call, we went to you. We’ve dealt with Rogan falling unconscious before, so we knew what to expect. You had a gun, so we tasered you, and then we did all the things you normally do when you’re trying to save someone’s life. Here we are, almost twenty hours later. You have two broken ribs. Howling did a number on your face, so you won’t be modeling in the near future either. I’ve notified your family that you’re safe but otherwise occupied. I figured you needed some downtime. Your cousin is fine. Melosa got him out. The summon disappeared after you teleported out, so Houston is fine as well.”
“Rogan’s cousin? She walked children onto the street to block our way. That’s why we crashed.”
She shook her head. “She disappeared.”
Of course, she did.
Daniela handed me a mirror. Bruises covered the right side of my face. A lump swelled on my right shoulder. I looked like a boxer at the end of a final round of a hard title match.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I told her.
“Oh, it will,” she said. “Once the painkillers wear off.”
“Where is Rogan?”
“He decided to give you some space.”
That wasn’t an answer. I reached for my blanket.
“I understand that your first instinct is to dramatically jump out of bed and rush over there,” Daniela said. “It’s a good plan, except you’re so medicated you’ll have trouble making it to the bathroom, let alone driving. Why don’t we sit here and chat a bit?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Her eyes were hard. “Not really.”
“Okay.”
Daniela cleared her throat. “I have a nephew. Sweet kid. Martin’s twenty-four now. He did his four years in the army, earned his college tuition, and enrolled in UNC. He wants to be a geologist. He says he likes rocks because they don’t shoot back at you.”
It sounded like a joke, but again she didn’t smile.
“He got himself expelled a month ago. You know that horror movie where the guy in a pig mask chases kids across college campus. Screamer-something.”
“Screamer-Dreamer.” Living in a household with three teenagers made me a horror movie expert. It was a stupid cheap flick, but for some reason it had caught on and there were memes of Piggy, the killer, all over the Internet with witty sayings plastered over them.
“A campus radio station was pranking people live on the air. They had a guy dressed in a pig mask and some sort of black shroud. He’d hide behind something, burst out with a big plastic knife, and chase people around. They were filming it for YouTube.”
Yep. Sounded just like something college kids would do. I knew exactly where this story was going.
“The pig guy charged Martin, and Martin took the knife away from him and hit him. He didn’t just hit him once. He went for the knife hand first, dislocated the guy’s shoulder, and then punched him four times in the head in less than two seconds. It took three people to pull him off. I asked him about it. He said something just snapped inside him. He saw a threat and reacted. He isn’t a violent kid. Never been in a civilian fight before. He felt terrible about it. He apologized. The college expelled him and there were serious charges, until Rogan’s lawyers moved in and had it dropped down to a misdemeanor. Still, it will be on his record forever. He’s going to a private university in January.”
“Piggy should’ve played dead,” I said. “If he stopped moving, Martin would’ve stopped hitting.”
“Probably,” she said. “The kid who had the bright idea to scare people with his knife didn’t expect to be hospitalized, because civilians typically don’t try to kill you when you scare them.”
“It was irresponsible either way.”
Daniela sighed. “We have rules in our society. Don’t steal. Don’t hurt others. Don’t kill. That’s the big one. We take these kids, some of them barely eighteen years old, tell them that rules no longer apply and then we drop them into the war zone. Fight or flight is a constellation response, a perfect storm within your body. It makes you faster, stronger, hyperaware, but all of it comes at a cost. Soldiers in combat are running a biochemical sprint, except for them it’s a marathon that doesn’t end. It wears the body down and it carves new neurological pathways through your brain. It changes you. Permanently. Then you finally come home and people expect you to set all that aside and immediately remember what it’s like to be a normal person.”