“Okay, who wants to go first?” the Zotovic thing said, standing in front of them with an auto-injector in either hand. He looked from Izzie to Daphne and then back again. “Let’s start with you, Agent Lefevre. I’ve never had a chance to really repay you for stopping the professor from finishing his work the last time around, so it seems the least I can do.”
He leaned down, bringing the auto-injector close to Izzie’s neck.
“You had a good run,” he said in her ear, while she struggled to pull away from the auto-injector’s tip. “But it’s time to let someone else drive now. So why don’t you . . .”
His next words were drowned out by a sudden echoing boom.
The shadows above the Zotovic thing’s head spiked in outrage, and then as the body fell to the ground they began to dissipate like drops of water on a hot stove. The back of his shirt was shredded with dozens of tiny holes, their edges singed.
Izzie could feel the hands that held her arms relax their grip.
“Patrick?” Daphne said beside her.
Izzie turned in her direction, and saw that Patrick had rolled onto his side, holding Izzie’s fallen shotgun in a one-handed grip, smoke still trailing up from the wavering barrel.
“Is Joyce . . . ?” he said weakly before trailing off, his voice scarcely above a whisper.
The Ridden who had held her were still standing behind Izzie, but motionless, like mannequins. When she climbed to her feet, they made no move to stop her. Izzie looked around the room, and saw that the rest of the Ridden were in the same state, standing stock still, expressions vacant as the inky blots on their skin began slowly to fade.
Daphne was already at Patrick’s side, helping him up into a sitting position.
“Is Joyce . . . okay?” Patrick croaked.
“I don’t know,” Izzie said as she bent down and tore a strip of cloth from the hem of Zotovic’s ragged shirt. Then she tied a makeshift tourniquet around Patrick’s right leg below the knee. “Let’s go find out, shall we?”
Patrick’s eyelids were heavy, his breathing shallow, but he was alert and conscious as Izzie and Daphne helped him stand. With one arm over Izzie’s shoulder and his other over Daphne’s, he was able to keep his weight off of his right leg.
Bodies began to fall to the floor all around the room, first singly or in pairs, and then in increasingly large numbers, like dominos being toppled one by one.
“What’s happening to them?” Daphne said.
“Minor . . . shareholders,” Patrick managed. “They were connected to the loa through . . .”
He left off, struggling to catch his breath, but rolled his eyes toward the lifeless form of Martin Zotovic on the floor at their feet.
“With his connection cut,” Izzie finished for him, “the loa must not be able to maintain its hold on the others.”
Patrick nodded once, the most he was able to muster.
“Come on,” she went on, maneuvering Patrick toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”
As she and Daphne worked together to steer him toward the stairway door, Patrick rolled his head to the side to look at Izzie through half-lidded eyes.
“I could hear you,” he said. “In the dark. You pulled me back.”
She wasn’t sure if he was in shock, or brain damaged, or just delirious from loss of blood.
“Like a bird,” he said sleepily, his head forward, chin resting on his chest. “A spark . . .”
He trailed off into silence.
Tightening her hold on his arm to keep him from falling, shouldering his weight, Izzie continued to walk forwards. The light and flames still shone all around them, but the shadows were beginning to fade.
EPILOGUE
The trees in the park beside Powell Middle School were a riot of color, tinted with blooms of bright pink and purple, and the spring air was thick with the scent of them as Patrick made his Saturday morning rounds though the neighborhood. He leaned heavily on the cane in his right hand with each step, still unable to bear his full weight on his right knee, but as the months had gone on the pain of his injuries had faded, though the memories remained. There were other gaps in his memory, of course. Moments from childhood and the years since that he continued to find were missing. But he retained the broad sweeps and bigger picture, and was thankful that the losses had not been greater.
The marks on the buildings that he checked were clean and well-tended, though some of them had been joined by graffiti tags that identified which of the neighborhood kids had claimed the right to maintain them. A competitive streak had taken hold in the neighborhood, with different factions of students vying to see who would earn their new gym teacher’s most effusive praise. Since leaving the force and starting to work for the school full time, Patrick had done his best to be as impartial as possible, though he found that Regina Jimenez and her brother seemed to be responsible for the greatest number of well-kept markings. Hector had watched from the window of the house as the Ridden had been shot in the forehead from Patrick’s pistol and kept on standing, which had scared him straighter than any lecture could have ever managed to do.
When he rounded the corner at the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony, Patrick saw Izzie parking her car on the curb in front of his house, and by the time he was crossing Almeria she was already standing on the sidewalk.
“I thought you weren’t due back from Quantico until tomorrow,” he said, as she opened the rear door on the passenger side and pulled out her bag. Then he waggled his eyebrows at her suggestively.
