since she worked such long hours—had been there. The place smelled like lemons instead of stale wine.
She reached over to flip on the light switch and tossed her keys in the bowl on the table by the door.
And then the world exploded.
…
Lights, flashing.
Darkness.
Pain.
Bane’s face, a cruel slash with red, red eyes.
Darkness.
Pain.
Annie, bending over her, tears welling in her beautiful eyes.
Darkness.
Pain.
The O.R.—except the perspective was all wrong. She was on the table, instead of standing over it, and Meara’s piano was crushing her chest. She couldn’t breathe, and they wouldn’t listen to her. Nobody wanted to dance; the music was dying.
Darkness.
Pain.
Annie, again, this time in a brightly lit room filled with flowers.
Trying to speak. Her voice broken and rusty. “Bane?”
Tears on Annie’s face. “Oh, honey, I know there’s pain. But you’re alive, and you’re going to stay that way. It was touch and go there for a while, but we got you back.”
“Bane,” she tried again but then slipped back into the darkness and the pain. So much pain.
A nurse, one of her favorites. Henry.
The pain, again—and then the coolness of relief.
She let the ocean of waiting dark pull her back down. Bane would come. He’d said forever.
He would come.
…
He didn’t come.
But, at dawn, her father did, and he took the darkness and the pain away.
Chapter Forty-Four
Bane lost his mind to berserker rage when the explosion harmed Ryan, and he never found his way back to reason.
When the bomb came through the window, he’d thrown himself between it and Ryan, but he’d been too late, too slow, too useless, too fucking arrogant in his belief that he could protect her. He’d expected magic, not technology. The walking dead, not human-made explosives.
By the time his body had healed itself enough that he could open his eyes, the humans with their fire trucks and ambulances had arrived, and he’d had barely enough strength to conceal his presence from them. He’d watched them take her, hooking her up to needles and tubes, knowing that he was too broken and weak right then to try to heal her himself.
Knowing that she’d never once even evinced interest in the Turn, as applied to herself, so he had no right to force it on her, even to save her life. And she was Nephilim, which meant the Turn wasn’t even an option.
That was the realization that had sent him into the darkest reaches of hell.
She could have died, and it would all have been his fault.
Entirely his fucking fault.
After the ambulance had screamed away with its precious cargo, he’d managed to call the Shadows and crawl into the Between. Managed to make it to his house, where the byways dumped him out in the middle of the ballroom, where everyone still gathered.
Bram Stoker let out a mighty woof when the blackened, smoke-smothered thing that was Bane’s broken body fell into the room. After that, Bane switched into and out of moments of lucidity while Meara and Edge and Luke all gave him blood, since theirs was so much more powerful than bagged blood.
While they talked over him about retaliation and revenge and plots.
When he finally looked up at them, finally had enough strength back to stand, he only said three words:
“They all die.”
That night, Death rode the highways of Savannah, borne on currents of air and on steel horses. Bane, Meara, Edge, and Luke tracked them all down—every single one of the blood-thralled humans and any of the werewolves still at large—any and all who were bound to the necromancers.
They killed them all.
They found the man who’d made the bomb and killed him, too.
The Chamber’s messenger, they found in a hotel on the river, cringing in a corner when they smashed through the door to get to him.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to happen,” he babbled. “They called it off, once they learned what she was, but it was too late. The bomber was already on the job. But Constantin would never, they know what she is. Please. Please! They don’t want her harmed, they just…”
His frantic begging faded off when he realized that what he’d been about to say—that they only wanted to abduct her for her blood—was no better.
“Where are they?”
The man cringed, and hopeless tears started to roll down his face. “I don’t know. They don’t trust anybody with that kind of information.”
Bane left the messenger alive so he could deliver a new message.
“You tell Constantin, Sylvie, and the Chamber this,” he told the terrified messenger, whose mask of calm had