Bullet Page 0,109

road through his eyes.

He pushed me out a little, so that he was driving with only himself in his head. “Sorry,” he said to the empty air, “but hard to drive that way.”

“Sorry, but there’s a contract killer out for you, me, and Jean-Claude.”

“The council works fast.”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t matter who ordered it, Richard, just come back. We stay underground until we have a plan.”

“I can’t hide forever.”

“Just for now, please, Richard. I’ve had enough emergencies for one day.”

He started to do the turn to the last road. He caught a flash in the trees. I had a moment to feel him see it, and then the windshield cracked in front of him, and he was fighting the truck not to go into the ditch.

I screamed, “Gun!”

The second shot hit him, and I fell to my knees in the hallway. It didn’t exactly hurt; in fact, my shoulder and half my chest felt numb. I couldn’t catch my breath. It did hurt to breathe. Nicky was holding me. His face was frantic. “Anita!”

“Shot.” I gasped it out, there was no air. They’d hit his lung, but his heart still beat, strong and thick in my head. I could see sunlight through the trees as the truck went over the side of the road, and there were trees, and we were falling, and there was no air.

29

JEAN-CLAUDE’S FACE ABOVE me. “Ma petite, what have you done?” He looked into my eyes and he saw it, felt it, but he dragged me away from it. He shut the link down. He left Richard bleeding and alone.

I gasped air in with lungs that worked, and said, “No! They’ll kill him. They’ll drag him out of the truck and kill him.” I dug my hands into his white shirt.

“If he dies, I can keep us from dying with him, but if I open the link between us all to feed him enough energy to heal in time, if it does not work, one or both of us will die with him.”

“We can’t let him die knowing we didn’t even try. Let me feed the energy; you pull me back if it doesn’t work.”

I watched the struggle in his eyes.

“Jean-Claude,” I said.

He nodded. “What energy will be enough to get him up and moving in time? Nathaniel is still hurt; you cannot give the energy of your own triumvirate. It could kill them both.”

“He is our Ulfric and we are sworn to protect him with our lives,” Shang-Da said, kneeling all that long, dangerous body down next to us. “If by my life, or my death, I can save him . . .”

“Do it,” Jamil said, and he was kneeling closer to my face.

“There isn’t time for sex,” I said.

“We saw what you did to Chimera. We felt the power you took from that feeding. Do it,” he said.

There should have been time to look into his handsome face, admire the cornrowed hair and all that he offered, but the one thing we didn’t have was time. I said, “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he said.

I put my hands on his arms, bare skin to bare skin, and just as when I’d done it the one and only time to Chimera, there was no time to find the power, or worry over morals, it was a moment of do or die. To raise zombies I put energy into the dead; the more energy the better the zombie, the more completely the dead will rise. This power was almost a polar opposite to that. One second it was just Jamil’s warm skin under my hands, and the next my necromancy spilled down my hands and onto that dark, muscled skin.

Jamil’s brown eyes widened. His lips parted. He whispered, “God, it hurts.” Then his smooth dark skin began to run with fine lines. I was taking back whatever it was that let me fill out a corpse so it was plump and smooth and rosy-cheeked. I took that from Jamil, and he stayed on his knees and let me do it. The first time I’d done it I’d thought it was watching decades catch up with the man, but watching Jamil’s skin collapse around his bones, I realized it wasn’t time I took from it, but literally life. I fed on the very essence of what made his body move and function. I fed on him, and the rush of power was as strong as and felt better than I remembered it. I think I’d been afraid to