in line with Tabitha, whose face strained toward me, her chest heaving. If she keeps hyperventilating into that gag, she’ll faint, I thought.
Eh. It wouldn’t make much difference.
Fifer started creeping up the stairs backward, determined not to let me close enough to disarm her. She’d been more careful than she needed to be—the drugs were making my vision weave, as if the world were a painting being washed away by a rainstorm.
“Come on now,” she said. “Just a little more.”
Then she’d have me, unconscious, and have Pilar and Tabitha injured and bound in a basement, where she’d probably try to kill them or lock them up to experiment on.
This hadn’t been a very good plan. Why had I thought it was a good plan?
I stumbled as I hit the bottom of the steps, but caught myself. I didn’t want to know what Fifer would do if I collapsed before she got me upstairs. I rocked on my feet, determined to stay upright, and found the first step.
Overbalanced a little. Rocked again, farther than the first time.
Pilar’s gun went off.
The report echoed off the basement walls and flattened my senses, and the drugs made me clumsily slow. Fifer was snapping back and falling before I managed to hurl myself to the side, at Tabitha, because if Willow Grace managed to get her gun up—I couldn’t see where she’d been hit—
She did try. Pilar shot her again, just as I crashed into Tabitha in a tangle of elbows and brought the whole wine rack smashing to the ground. Glass shattered everywhere, shards peppering my skin among the cold splash of liquid. I tried to focus my wobbly vision back over at Willow Grace, but by then, she’d stopped moving.
I pushed myself to sitting and attempted to check over Tabitha. She was soaked in red, but the cloying scent of fermentation filled my nostrils, and I was pretty sure that was all wine. I’d been trying to wedge myself against her to make sure she didn’t get more than bruises from the fall—the breaking bottles had probably nicked her with the same tiny cuts they had me, but she was squirming against her bonds like an eel now, so she was probably okay.
I slid the broken spar of the wine rack out of her handcuffs and helped her sit up, in the direction that faced away from Willow Grace’s corpse. My fingers were thick sausages, but I managed to tug the gag out of her mouth.
She spat out the cloth and coughed a little, then took a deep breath, her eyes fixed on me in something unnervingly like worship.
“Don’t you dare say ‘cool,’” I said.
She blinked at me a few times. Then she said, “Wow.”
Maybe Arthur had a point, keeping me away from her.
“Pilar,” I slurred, my eyes tracking over to find her. “Find the damn handcuff key and get over here.”
Pilar was standing over by Willow Grace, staring down at her. At what was left of her. Now she turned toward us, her gun dangling from her hand at her side. “Cas.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good shot. Now come and … undo the…” My tongue had gone thick too. “I think I’m gonna pass out in a sec.”
“Cas, I—your ear.”
“M’what?”
“I nicked your ear. I shot you.”
I pushed my cuffed hands against the side of my head. They came away bloody. I couldn’t feel it.
“That wasn’t … I didn’t know if I could make that shot,” Pilar said. “I took it anyway.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I took it anyway, with you standing there.” Pilar still hadn’t taken a step toward us. “I might have shot you. Easily. Cas, I—I wasn’t good enough to do it and I knew it and I knew there was a good chance I’d kill you, but I still wasn’t scared.”
“P’lar,” I said. I meant to tell her to have her fucking crisis later, but instead, I passed out.
forty
I HALF-WOKE getting dragged out of the mansion by a limping, staggering Pilar, my arm slung over her shoulders, and Tabitha bending awkwardly to try to support me from the other side. Both of them were huffing hard, and I had the distinct feeling they’d dropped me several times already, but I wasn’t in any position to complain.
When I woke up all the way, I was slumped in the front seat of the car we’d taken to the mansion. The day had cycled through until the sun was low in the sky, and Pilar was driving, with a phone to her ear. It would