Lily had meant about Malcolm doing the unexpected, but it was more complicated than that. The problem wasn’t that he—and Odessa, and the witch in Reno—always did what you least expected. It was that they mixed the expected and the unexpected, so you never really knew where you stood. Like combining underground explosives with a sniper rifle.
Simon went down hard on his back with a whoooosh sound as the air was flattened out of his lungs. I had to force myself to drop my hands—the Unsettled were still screaming, but covering my ears didn’t seem to be doing anything to help anyway—and crawl over to pull up his shirt. He nodded at me, panting a little. I saw, rather than heard, him say, “Vest caught it.”
I had forced everyone to wear them, even Tobias. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Odessa had found a way to get silver bullets.
The red dot appeared again, this time on the ground in front of me, moving toward Simon’s head, and without thinking I grabbed a fistful of his shirt with my right hand and threw myself on him, using my momentum to roll us both sideways toward the nearest tree. “Move!” I shouted, remembering only belatedly that no one could hear the screaming but me. Simon half crawled, half dragged himself behind the thick tree trunk, as another bullet smacked harmlessly into the ground where we’d just been. As fast as we’d just moved, the Unsettled had moved with us, still screaming.
I hadn’t been able to find my gun in the fog and move Simon at the same time, so now I was unarmed. No, wait, that wasn’t true. I had a shredder stake in one forearm holster, and Cole had found a folding knife that fit in the other.
Pulling out the knife, I snapped it open, but what was I going to do with it? While Simon could put up his shield thing to protect me, I couldn’t chase Odessa down, not with the screaming. I needed to make the screaming stop.
I was desperate, so I did the first thing that came to mind: I slashed the back of my left arm. I’m not sure what I expected would happen, but as the blood welled up and began to spill down my arm, the screaming closest to me abruptly cut off.
The men crowded tighter around me, their eyes alight with hunger.
“Lex!” I got the impression that Simon had been yelling at me for a while. I risked looking away from the Unsettled long enough to glance at him. He was holding a cell phone to his ear. “Lily and Tobias took down three of them, two witches and another guard. Two more definitely ran away from the group, but that leaves two witches plus Odessa on the run. What are you doing?”
We both looked at the line of blood dripping off my arm, and then I glanced up at the Unsettled. They didn’t look like they wanted to eat me, the way wraiths do. I’m not sure how to describe the look, exactly, other than that they seemed to want orders. No, it was so much more eager and intense than that. They were desperate for orders.
“I’m getting my bloodstone back,” I mumbled.
“What?” Simon asked.
I raised my voice. “I’m going to try something. Don’t let anybody shoot me. And don’t freak out.”
He had a response to that, of course, but I tuned him out as I straightened my arm and began to walk through the Unsettled. This time, they didn’t move aside. They allowed me to pass my outstretched arm through them at chest height, and as my blood touched each man, he closed his eyes briefly and began to glow. Well, glow more, I guess. It was as though they’d been frozen, and I’d thawed them out, only the thaw stretched behind the men I’d specifically touched, passing from one interconnected soldier to the next.
I kept going until all the men close enough for me to see had that glow. Behind me, I heard Simon gasp.
“That girl, the one who was standing on the bench,” I said to the Unsettled. “She’s the one who destroyed your bones. She’s been trapping your friends and turning them into weapons. Now she’s trying to run. Stop her.”
I expected them to hesitate, or maybe silently confer with one another. But almost instantly, the tide of ghosts flowed away from me, in the same direction as Odessa had run. They didn’t seem to be running,