“Fallen angels use the truth to lie,” I told the lunatic’s cell.
So, what was true and what was the lie Kathan wanted me to believe?
No answers revealed themselves.
I took another deep breath and released it, then pulled my legs up tighter to my chest and rested my chin on my knees.
The skin on the inside of my thighs felt stiff with dried blood. One more thing to log away for another time when I could deal with it. If such a time ever came.
But was it just blood? Was some of it amniotic fluid? Was some of it…fetal?
“No,” I said. Because I couldn’t be pregnant.
But the pain seemed to flare up from all directions at once. I hurt. All over. Inside and outside and deep in my chest so badly that the pain climbed up my throat and clawed its way out in loud, sternum-cracking sobs.
I was never getting out of here. Unless I died or Kathan made me his joint-familiar, this torture was going to go on and on until I died.
The sobbing cut off sharply and a new sound filled the cell. Screaming. It took me a second to realize that sound was me. I smacked the floor with both palms as hard as I could.
I didn’t want a baby. I hated Tough and whatever faulty condom he’d bought. I hated him for pumping sperm into me and I hated my body for sucking that jizz up and turning it into a living organism. I hated the foot soldiers. I hated Kathan. I hated the God who had brought us here, who stood back and watched it all happen to us poor, pathetic humans, watched us get raped and broken and torn apart by life.
I hated everyone and I wanted them to pay.
Tough
I’ve done exactly eight minutes of research in my life, back in tenth grade, when Jax told me that there was an anatomy book in the library that showed an up-close and personal view of the human vagina. I searched for that book for eight minutes over lunch one day, then gave up. A couple months later, Mitzi and Jason hired me and I forgot all about paper vaginas. Who needs a book when you can get the real thing for free? Or in my case, in trade for your reputation, your dignity, and eventually your soul.
Research wasn’t my thing, it had been Jax’s. It’d been Desty’s thing, too, but screw her. If you run out on your boyfriend and hop into bed with the asshole who killed your boyfriend’s whole family, you automatically get excluded from the list of people whose thing research is.
So research was Jax’s thing. And when Jax was alive, where did he go when he needed to know something?
The Witches’ Council.
After I told Lonely, he rounded up his little cousin, Cash, and a crow girl I hadn’t seen since elementary school—Talitha something—then they headed across town.
It didn’t occur to me until right after they left that they were going to be close enough to the trashed bakery to smell Colt’s blood. That sick, dizzy feeling of having two brains—one that wanted to suck up my dead brother’s blood with a crazy straw and another that wanted to curl up and bawl like a baby—swam up around me.
Scout looked at me and opened her mouth at the exact same time as Clarion took a breath to say something.
A shiver rolled down my spine and twisted itself into the muscles of my back and neck. I had to get out of that damn attic.
I headed for the pull-down steps, grabbed the two-by-four frame and swung myself down to the first floor.
The tattoo parlor was at capacity, maybe a little over. Eight or ten crows were hanging out by Lonely’s chair, all pierced to hell and dressed in black. Half of them had on leather jackets even though it’d been in the low thousands every day this summer. They weren’t cold like me. Some vampire heat-sense made the crows pop up at right around human temp in my brain. I figured the coyotes would be hot, but something about the crows—maybe the all-black dress code or maybe just the way they moved in those jerky bird-movements—made them seem like they should be icy. Whatever passed for logic in my brain thought if your magic could turn a person into a cold, dead NP, then you should be cold yourself.
I got so caught up in thinking about the heat signatures of the gang of crows that it took me a few minutes to realize everybody was looking at me. The crows and coyotes I could handle—you grin sideways at a crow and you stare down a coyote, everybody knows that—but it was the humans who got to me. Kids from Scout’s army. Tawny Hicks, Jim and Drake, and at some point, Addison had showed up. People I saw every night at the bar and every day around town.
They were looking at me—really looking—like they’d been waiting for me.
That was how the grown-ups had looked at Dad when he told them what they were going to have to do. Fourteen years ago, in the basement of Halo’s church, Dad had stood up in front of his congregation, one hand in his jeans pocket and the other holding a cup of coffee, and he’d told them that they were going to have to fight, that most of them would probably die, but they were going to stop the fallen angels before their evil spread any farther.
No one should be looking at me like that. I was the fuckup, the disappointment, the weak link. They knew me. They
