waiting so long!”
“Oh God.” Rae started running that last goddamned part of the circle, and Tucker turned his body, trying to stay in the now, trying to stay with her, to protect her and the kids, but Damien was—
“Tucker, you killed me! You didn’t do your fucking job, man. I wanted a kiss, and you let me get shot!”
“Damien,” he mumbled, working not to squeeze his eyes shut. “I… I was so lonely….”
“But you’re not now!” Angel appeared, right in his line of vision, and Tucker startled.
“How are you staying in the circle?” he asked muzzily and then focused. “You’re floating.”
“Yes, Tucker, I do that.” The words were Angel’s usual tone, but irritation glared from those bright green eyes. “Tucker, focus. Please. Please! You’ll never forgive yourself if you fail.”
Tucker nodded, swallowing the bile and the failure. Angel’s hands on him, his innocence, his willingness to learn, his tenderness with the kitten, his gentleness with Tucker—all of it washing over Tucker in a wave of lavender and citrus, and he suddenly wanted nothing more than to cuddle in that warmth, in that smell and—oh God.
Tucker could lose Angel in this. They were making a giant pagan symbol, and Angel wasn’t great with those. It had burned Tucker at first too.
“Yeah. Yeah. Careful, Angel. You’ll get burned.”
“Augh!” Angel’s scream was enough to snap Tucker out of his haze completely. “Tucker, focus on yourself!”
“Angel, I can’t see—where’s Josh?”
“He’s about a hundred yards away,” Rae said calmly, securing the anchor wire and tugging another length for the final leg. She pulled out her snippers and clipped. “There’s another man there, yelling at him to get up and then pushing at him to stay down.”
“Oh thank God. That’s James Beaufort. He should be on our side.”
“That’s reassuring, because the rest of these fuckers want to eat us. Tucker, what makes you think Josh can get to the center of this figure? Your ghost friends seem to think it’s off-limits.”
“Conklin has a body,” Tucker told her grimly. “He can go anywhere. If he hadn’t been trapped inside the boundaries of the house and yard for a hundred years, he would have realized he could have been halfway to Auburn as soon as Josh touched the paperweight.”
“So why’s he going to try to get you, again?”
“’Cause he hates me,” Tucker said. “He may not look like it now, but I did beat the shit out of him that night he broke my nose.” He tracked Josh’s painful progress toward the gate, grateful for the time Beaufort’s ghost was buying them and knowing it was going to get harder to see him as he got closer to the phosphorescent crowd grouping along the pentagrams. “I exorcised Sophie and Bridget. He didn’t have anyone left to bully.” Damien screamed his name particularly loudly, and his attention wandered.
“You can’t have him,” Angel screamed. “He’s mine!”
Damien and the ghosts grouped around him laughed openly. Tucker recognized them, recognized them all, the people he’d failed. The people who had died because Tucker hadn’t gotten there in time. Tucker had dragged them here. In his unconscious self-loathing, he’d brought them here, and now they were going to try to make sure a good man died.
“Tucker!” Angel’s hard slap at his cheek didn’t have full impact—but it had some. Tucker swallowed and tried hard to focus.
“Angel?”
“Tucker, you’re mine. They can’t have you. You tell them that.”
“I’m yours,” he told Angel, a modicum of peace seeping into him. He still felt his injuries, felt his pain, but for a breath, a heartbeat, he had the strength to put things in their box, deal with the important things first.
“Tell them,” Angel said, and he was just solid enough for Tucker to feel his hands on Tucker’s shoulders and the little shake he was giving. A hug would have been sweeter, but the shaking was real.
Angel was real.
“I’ll tell them,” Tucker promised, swallowing hard. “Rae, where’s Josh?”
“Getting closer. Are you with me?”
“Mostly,” he said, forced to honesty. She gave another tug on the wire, and the last spool completely unwound. “Are we going to have enough?”
She ran the wire toward the final spike and grimaced. “We’re about a foot short. Oh, gross!”
Tucker had been soaking up the blood from his head pretty steadily, and he pulled the bandages out of his pocket. “It’s a head wound,” he mumbled. “It won’t stop bleeding.” He handed her two bandages, and she tied them together and then secured them to the end of the wire. She stretched the line