I wondered if he needed to change to heal. I wondered if he was dying and I should get him out of here fast, before he disappeared in front of everyone.
He sighed, another awful gurgling sound, and lifted a melted mess of a hand that was clutching a charred object from which white stuffing exploded.
“Ah, Christ, Mac,” he whispered, and blood gushed from his mouth.
He collapsed to his knees and I raced to his side to catch him, but he roared with agony when I touched him. I yanked my hands quickly away and took charred flesh with them.
As he fell to the ground and rolled over on his side, he convulsed with pain. “She went back in there for this, Mac.” He thrust it at me.
“I don’t understand,” I said wildly. “That doesn’t make any sense. What the fuck is that?” I knew what it was. I wanted him to tell me I was wrong.
“What the fuck do you think? A goddamned stuffed animal.”
Part IV
You looked.
Point?
Stare into the fog long enough, you start to see shapes everywhere.
Point?
Staring at nothing is dangerous. You gotta make something of it, dude! Fill it up. Color it every shade of the fecking rainbow, with big, laugh-out-loud stuff. Otherwise some ghost ship’ll come sailing right out of the fog with Death on the prow, bony finger pointing right at you. You look into the abyss, dude, the abyss always looks back.
What the bloody hell do you know about the abyss?
That we all got one. Bottomless, black, and chockfull o’ monsters. And if you don’t take control of it and fill it up with the good stuff, it takes control of you.
—From the journals of Dani “the Mega” O’Malley Conversations with Ryodan
34
“The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload…”
“Christ, Mac, what the bloody hell do you and Barrons do in this place?” Lor said as he walked in the front entrance of BB&B.
He stood looking around the room, at the broken furniture I hadn’t been strong enough to move, the crimson paint sloshed everywhere, and the small area of organization in the rear I’d set up for myself with a love seat and a table that looked like a very small eye in a very large storm. He whistled low and shook his head.
I knew what it looked like. A battlefield.
“Never mind,” he said. “I don’t wanna know. Guess there’s a reason Barrons keeps you around. So, where’s my little honey?”
“Upstairs. In my room,” I told him. We’d brought Jada and Ryodan back to BB&B, with Barrons working more of his Bewitched magic to get us through the funnel cloud. “How’d you get in through the storm?” I wondered if they all knew the same spells. I’d somehow gotten the impression Barrons was by far the most proficient, that Ryodan had some degree of skill but preferred to leave the heavy lifting to Barrons, and I’d assumed Lor was mostly oblivious to…well, everything but blondes with big boobs. And recently, Jo.
“There’s a way,” he evaded.
“Then why haven’t I been using it?” I said pissily. Sometimes I almost wanted to be one of them. Almost. The Hunter wasn’t willing to fly me anymore. I was going to be even more dependent on Barrons in the future. Or have to give up coming home for a while. A sudden chill kissed my spine, and I wondered if for some reason, soon, I wouldn’t be here much at all. I shook it off as exhausted brooding.
The owner of Chester’s had insisted on returning to his club, but Barrons had flatly vetoed it, saying BB&B was more heavily warded, and besides, Jada couldn’t go far if she decided to try, with the Fae-tornado surrounding the area. Both men seemed to think she’d run the second she was coherent again.
She’d been unconscious since the abbey. I’d tucked her into my bed upstairs, pulled the covers up to her chin, and sat beside her for a long time, trying to understand what was going on with her, touched and troubled by how fragile she looked, young and vulnerable.
It was sometimes hard to remember Jada was only somewhere between nineteen and twenty years old. If she were a normal girl, in a normal world, she might be a sophomore in college. She presented a facade that packed the presence of a woman of thirty. But she wasn’t. She’d been a fourteen-year-old who’d had to grow up too fast. Now she was a nineteen-year-old that had grown up even more, faster