me from above the bed, clearly pleased with the proceedings.
Dammit, Pal, where are you? I thought again.
Still nothing. Panic started creeping up my spine. Would Sara bother to keep Cooper from killing the Warlock? My gut told me she wouldn’t. And what had happened to Pal?
So I started hollering again, my voice getting hoarse: “Somebody! Get me out of this thing!”
Charlie stuck her head in the doorway and goggled at the chair, the straps, my bared breasts. “Whoa. What happened in here?”
“Please get me out of this. I gotta get downstairs—I think Cooper’s gonna kill the Warlock!”
Charlie came in and started undoing the straps. “Were you and the Warlock … uh. Fooling around on this thing here?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath. “It’s complicated. But Cooper thinks we were.”
“Oh.” Her cheeks reddening, Charlie finished freeing me.
When she opened the last strap, I muttered, “Thanks,” and jumped up, ignoring the pain in my joints, ignoring my dizziness and sudden headache. I yanked my bra and shirt back into place and ran down the hall to the elevator to try to stop Cooper.
chapter
twenty-four
Sprung Traps
I got downstairs as fast as I could and ran out into the courtyard, breathing hard. If I’d been thinking straight I would have stopped for my shotgun and to grab a cat, but between my fever and my panic I was lucky to be able to speak in complete sentences. All I could think about was getting to Cooper. Dark spots were blooming in my vision, but at least I wasn’t seeing the fey again. I scanned the courtyard, but couldn’t see a ring of curious cadets surrounding a fight; I listened, but couldn’t hear grunts of men laboring to murder one another, nor the thud of fists hitting flesh.
So I hurried over to an airman who was reading a gun repair manual at one of the shaded picnic tables. “Did you see those two guys who were fighting? Did you see where they went?”
He looked up, blinking at me from behind glasses that were held together with duct tape and electrical wire. “Uh. Yeah. One of the dudes swore at Sara and then started yelling these crazy-sounding words at her, and she got really mad and had ’em both thrown out of the compound.”
Panic crested in me like a tsunami. “Thrown out? Where?”
“Just over there.” Looking puzzled, he pointed at the main entrance we’d come through the day before.
I swore and ran to the gate; thinking back, I still don’t know what the hell I was planning to do. “Let me out!”
The guards shrugged at each other and pulled the chain-link panel aside. I sprinted into the empty streets, hollering the men’s names until my voice was nearly gone.
After a few minutes of running, sweat and tears were streaming down my face, my blood was pounding in my ears, and the edges of my vision were starting to darken. I stopped, leaned forward, hands on my knees, trying to catch my wind.
“Jessie …”
I looked up. Miko was standing right in front of me.
She smiled down at me. “I’ve got your men. Give yourself to me, and they’ll go free. If you don’t … well. I’m sure I can find lots of delightful uses for their bodies once I’ve taken their souls.”
I swore and yanked open the Velcro cuff of my bull-riding glove, intending to strip the deerskin off and slash the bitch in the face. But in a blink she had me by my flesh wrist and just as suddenly I was at her mercy as she flooded my nerves with ecstasy one moment and agony the next and I fell to my knees on the pavement.
“I think that deep down, you like the taste of murder just as much as I do, little girl … I think you and I could make a great team, if you would just learn to cooperate a little.”
The pleasure turned to pain again, and one of her memories rose in my mind:
I flipped on the light in the motel bathroom and examined my body in the full-length mirror. The pain had worsened as my body had made more blood and my nerves reawakened. I looked ghastly, even by my standards. There was a baseball-size entry wound in my back above my left kidney and a saucer-size exit wound above my belly button. Buckshot ground between my vertebrae. The ragged ends of a few broken ribs had pierced my skin. My T-shirt was almost a vest. I