You will listen! I shouted into my mind, staggering into David as I struggled for control, beating the thousand voices back, demanding that they heed my one. You will listen to me!
“It’s okay! I’ve got them cuffed!” the Were in the borrowed FIB hat exclaimed as I fell back in apparent terror. “They gave themselves up.”
“I never agreed to killing masters,” the vampire in the raggedy T-shirt said, his hands indeed pulled tight behind him, but if they were FIB-issue cuffs, they wouldn’t hold.
“Is that the woman Ayer has been going on about?” the other vampire said, and I hunched into a ball, my feet in the gravel and my hands clenched and breath held as I tried not to kill them. The scent of my cotton shirt filled my nose, and I focused on it, picking the details of the aroma apart to distract myself. Dusky, dry stones in the sun. “It’s okay, ma’am. Ayer’s crazy. We won’t hurt you.”
David pulled me to my feet and drew me past them into the shadows. “She’s not scared. She’s trying not to kill you,” he muttered. “Let’s go. Where is everyone?”
The man with the FIB cap pushed the vampires into motion. “Tailing them. They had a back door we didn’t know about, and most got out that way.” He hesitated. “Is that Morgan?” he asked, his voice holding disappointment as I stumbled, head down and not watching where I was going.
“It’s been a bad day,” David said, his hand still on my elbow. “Edden, where did you leave the car?” he asked, and Edden pushed his mustache out as he scanned the long-abandoned streets. Behind us, something exploded in a harsh pop.
“South,” Edden said, and we started up the crumbling abandoned roadway in the dark. I didn’t know why the mystics accepted David’s touch when everyone else was considered a threat, but I needed it, and I lagged, head down, as the mystics demanded I follow the splintered majority and wipe everything clean. It was a bad day, indeed. “Help me,” I whispered, and his grip tightened. “Don’t let go.”
“We’ll get you sorted out,” David said. “Try to numb it,” he suggested, thinking it was battle rage.
But that would only make things worse. If I numbed myself, the mystics would overrule my single voice and take control. Heart pounding, I refused them any sway. I moved under David’s hand, not seeing the abandoned homes or the cracked, potholed street. The sky was red, low clouds reflecting the light from the fires burning in the Hollows, and slowly I began to think again as the mystics became bored and drifted away.
“Is she okay?” Edden questioned, looking back at us.
“Ask me later,” I panted, leaning heavily on David, dizzy as the mystics darted away from me and back, bringing to me confusing visions of what they saw. There was a rustling about us, a wind that wasn’t born from rising air or lowering masses.
“Where’s the van?” Edden said in affront as we halted at an abandoned gas station.
David’s wide shoulders slumped. “You lost the van?”
Edden spun. “I left it right here!”
“We’re in the wilds! You can’t leave a working car in the wilds!”
Most of the mystics had left me, and my head came up, daring to believe that I might be rid of them altogether. “There’s a bus stop. You want me to see what the schedule is?”
“They don’t run buses out here,” Edden said, reaching under his cap to scratch his head. The soft glow of a screen shone, lighting up his face, showing the worry wrinkles around his eyes. “Give me a second. I’m not getting a good signal.”
“Because they don’t put towers out here either!” David muttered, peeved as he turned his back on us, watching the dark as we stood under the gas station awning. In the nearby distance came a rustling in the weeds, and I staggered as a hundred different mystic perspectives of the same view hammered at me. I wondered if I looked that ill or if it was just my imagination. Nauseated, I shoved away all views but the one coming from my eyes. The mystics buzzed over it, clouds of them following the electrical impulses through my brain to analyze how I put it all together. My head hurt.
David’s concern was obvious when he turned back to us. He’d heard the rustling as well. “We need to keep moving. Who are you calling?”
Mood somber, Edden put the phone to his ear. “Ivy.”
“Ivy?” Mistrust surged, and I banished it with a vengeance.
Edden smiled. “She’s downtown, under the streets with Jenks looking for you. Bis, too. Apparently your aura has shifted and he can’t find you. Ah, Rachel? I don’t want to know about those two cadavers in your front room, but they’d better be gone tomorrow. Okay?”
Nodding, I turned away, blinking fast. The memory of Ivy’s last expression passed over me, confusing the mystics and prompting a flurry of discussion over I, us, and we. Ivy and Jenks were looking for me. I knew they would, and I felt loved.
Edden pulled the phone from his ear, ended the call, and hit Jenks’s number instead. “Half the city is looking for you. The only reason we found you first was because of Trent.”
Trent? How had he known where I was? And why hadn’t he come to get me?
Betrayed, the mystics hummed, and I shoved it aside. Trent hadn’t betrayed me. He’d told Edden how to find me, and that was more than he really needed to do.
No, betrayed! a single mystic screamed, and I spun, hearing a new meaning in the rustling from the dark. An image of glowing eyes burst in my thoughts, ignored until now.
“It’s them!” I shouted, wild magic a sudden, painful pulse.
“Down!” David shouted, falling on me.
I hit the ground, watching as the two surrendering vampires with us fell, groaning. The soft retort of twin shots echoed an instant later. Swearing, David shoved my head down and crawled to them, Edden joining him with a frantic haste as they jammed whatever was handy onto gaping wounds that glinted wetly in the dark.
We were under attack and I could do nothing, struggling with a splinter of a Goddess bent on revenge. “Not this time,” I gasped, wrenching control back. “Make a circle. A circle!”
I gave them an outlet, and a circle sprang up around us, humming with an unreal but familiar sensation. I wasn’t connected to a line. It was as if I had a direct line to the divine, my every wish granted. Even the ugly ones, if I wasn’t careful.
“Damn, Rachel, you’re glowing,” David said as he glanced up, his hands bloodied, and I looked at myself, scared. I was, the mystics’ energy leaking out of my pores.