same way it had deleted him from mine.
This is what we deserve! Valarmathi howled. Burn us all!
twenty-eight
SIMON WASN’T moving.
His limbs sprawled limply, both legs bent at impossible angles, blood, so much blood, and the white gleam of bone.
My hands stumbled to staunch the bleeding, to find a pulse, but the furred corpses pushed in on my consciousness from all directions. Simon had made them less than hellhounds, but Simon wasn’t here anymore, couldn’t tell me they were only fairy stories constructed by a malicious villain.
I groped for his thoughts, his emotions, his pain, and found nothing.
A pulse stuttered against my fingers. Barely.
The dead shapes in my peripheral vision began to rise back up as ghosts, into ominous shadows of pestilence and war. I had to get out of here.
I got my arm under Simon and hauled. One of his broken legs caught on a shrub and wobbled grotesquely. I tried to get a better hold on him, to lift him, but my foot buckled under me.
My heart ramped faster, more adrenaline leaking into my bloodstream. I tried to keep my eyes on Simon, on Simon, but murdered nightmares punched through the edges.
I stumbled and almost fell, and squeezed my eyes shut. Run, I needed to run.
No. Fight.
My hand tightened on the hard grip of my Colt.
My other hand was fisted in Simon’s clothes. I focused on the roughness of the fabric. The heat from his body, still living, still living. Get him out. Get out.
Somehow, I managed to begin dragging us, unseeing, across dried grass and ridged, uneven ground. My mind extrapolated the curve beneath my feet, guiding my stumbling steps. But aberrations in the curve’s assumed smoothness kept pushing up and tripping me, catching at my boots and making our progress a jagged stumble in the dark.
I didn’t open my eyes until we’d gotten back to the road.
Simon’s skin had gone so pale and waxen, he was an inert dummy, texture stretched over misaligned bones in an attempt at a human form.
Heartbeat, still a heartbeat. I had nothing to splint the bones with. Tore my jacket at the seams to bind the worst of the bleeding and tourniquet him. Groped for a phone, he needed a hospital—but mine was gone, dropped or lost. Simon had a burner in his pocket, but its face was cracked and dark.
I pressed his wrist again—then harder. The weak tap of a heartbeat was gone. His chest wasn’t moving.
Fuck. No. I pressed my hands against his sternum, the dimensions of his ribcage building themselves for me faster than thought. The success rate of CPR was somewhere in the single digits, but that was when people who weren’t me did it.
Compress, the force waves radiating downward, the impact rippling through the flesh, pressing the blood into circulation. Exactly the pressure to beat the heart by hand, pushing oxygen to his brain, pushing his body into functioning. Compress again. Again. Again. Fast and rhythmic, exactly in time, exactly consistent, a scrupulous substitute, until the flesh fluttered back against my hands, and I pressed one more time before laying my hand flat across his chest to feel.
The beats pushed back small and labored, and I’d broken two ribs, but his heart was working again.
The distant hum of an engine rose in my hearing. A vehicle. I leapt up, and my foot almost went out from under me—fucking stupid ankle, it’s a sprain, it’s just a sprain. I pushed at the ground, willing myself upright, and staggered out into the street.
The silhouette of a semi cab rose behind headlights, taller and taller, and then brakes squealed as it skidded and swerved. The rest of the truck fishhooked around in slow motion, almost going over onto its side as the cab ran off the road and up against the brush.
“What the fuck, get out of the road!” the driver screamed at me.
I limped up to the driver’s window. “There’s a man dying right there, on the side of the road. Call 911.”
The man’s hands had gone up, even though I wasn’t pointing a weapon at him. He was a large, mustached fellow, burly and dark. “What? There’s what?”
“A man. Dying,” I said. “Call the fucking ambulance.”
He slapped at his pockets. “I don’t have a cell phone, man!”
Who the fuck didn’t have a cell phone?
The man had started babbling. “I don’t got it, man, I don’t got one! I’m sorry!”
“You have a radio!” I yelled in his face. “Use it, now!”
He couldn’t obey fast enough. Even without drawing on him,