“On three, and no tricks this time.” They counted it down and she loosened the tourniquet.
Immediately, the dark mist raced back into Reese, flowing in through the gashes on her wrist. Going on instinct, Dez poured his energy into her, all of his reserves and more. Fight, he told her. Fight, damn it! Don’t you dare run away this time! It wasn’t until he said it that he recognized the truth of it, but the realization was quickly lost as his perceptions wrenched suddenly, and then he was back in his own head, his own body. He wasn’t connected to her anymore, though he still held her hand in a bloody clasp, still felt the buzz of the uplink. “Reese,” he shouted. “Godsdamn it, Reese!”
A long shudder ran through her body, and then she arched against him, trying to pull away from the blood-links. A deep, guttural moan tore from her throat and her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Gods!” Sasha gasped. The dark, wounded flesh rippled, runneling along her arm as though turbocharged worms were writhing beneath the skin, whipped into a frenzy by the poison. Michael’s eyes went silver as he channeled more energy into Sasha’s healing bond, but that didn’t seem to help. Through the last little bit of the uplink, Dez could feel Reese slipping away. Dying.
Panic lashing through him, he shouted “Do something! We’re losing her!”
“Call her,” Sasha said. “Make her come back. If she’s not conscious, she’s not fighting it!”
But he had been calling her, and it wasn’t working. He needed something better, something more. Something that would matter to her. He looked deep inside himself to the place where he normally kept the past locked away, but that had been breached the moment she lunged back into his life, wearing combat clothes and wielding an autopistol like she’d been born a warrior.
“Think about the dream,” he whispered alongside her temple, feeling the words rip from his chest. “Think about Montana, all those mountains, and the streams, and the big open sky. I bet you never went there, did you? So fight, damn it. Get your ass back here. If you do . . .” He paused, feeling the churn and burn in his gut, but went for it. “Wake the hell up and we’ll go there together.” His throat closed on the ache of guilt, sadness, and regret that washed through him as he turned his lips to her temple. “Please, baby. Don’t let it end like this.” Please gods.
A long shudder wracked her body and she twisted against him, nearly bowing herself double.
“Shit,” Sasha hissed. “Convulsion. Help me grab her and—”
Energy detonated soundlessly inside Dez, hollowing out his diaphragm and making him feel like his elevator had just hit bottom. At the same moment Sasha jolted, and Michael said, “What the fuck?”
Then Reese sagged, going utterly limp.
“Reese!” Dez surged out from behind her, rose over her with both hands wrapped in her shirt. “Reese, damn it!”
Sasha grabbed his shoulder. “Look!”
Dark mist was churning angrily from the weeping cuts, boiling out of Reese. It formed an angry, pulsing blob that went from black to green as it emerged.
Then poof. It disappeared.
He stared for a second, blinking at her arm. The X-marked cuts still bled and the bite was a dark, angry red. But the blackness was gone and the swelling was abating even as they watched. More, he could feel her breathing grow steady, her body temperature level off. And when he looked away from her wrist, he found her watching him with eyes that were blurry and unfocused, but held every ounce of now-Reese: a mix of the stupidly brave, crime-fighting girl he had known and the woman she had grown into, who dared him, challenged him, stood up to him.
She was back.
His throat closed on a hard, hot surge of emotion. “Hey.” It was all he could manage.
Her eyes fluttered shut, but she whispered, “Montana, huh?” And she drifted off with a smile on her lips.
He let his forehead drop to his hands, which were still clutched in her shirt. Despite what he’d been through with the Triad spell, he still wasn’t all that religious in the worshipping sense. Now, though, he sent a fervent thought-stream skyward: Thank you, gods. And he got, in return, a flare of heat that radiated through him, washing inward to his head and heart. He wasn’t sure if it came from magic, the exhaustion he felt bearing down on him freight train fast, or some celestial source. But it made him feel a little less alone.
Groaning, he dragged himself to his feet, then reached down and gathered Reese to his chest. He felt the pull of muscles as he lifted her, the ache of fatigue as he held her tightly. But neither Nate nor Michael offered to take her. They were mated magi; they knew better.
He fixed Nate with a look. “Is the mansion safe?” Part of him wanted to hit the road again, find some anonymous hotel where nobody would think to look for them. He was never truly comfortable at Skywatch.
But Nate nodded. “We know how they got in.”
“How?” Dez grated the word.
“A delivery van came through an hour ago and set off the ward. JT looked over the truck, didn’t see anything, and figured it was another false alarm, so he waved them through, then reset the system.”
“You’re kidding. He fucking waved Iago and a truckload of makol through the front door?”
Michael’s glower promised dire retribution. “Yeah. They crashed the system from the security hub to get out.”
“Shit.” Dez needed to get Reese someplace safe. But he also needed to crash. Another few minutes and he wasn’t going to be worth shit. He glanced toward the garage. “I need to—”
“You need to get Reese settled and then get some food and rest yourself,” Nate interrupted. He gripped Dez’s shoulder. “We’ve got your back.” Behind him, several of the others nodded, including Sasha, who for a change wasn’t looking at him with trepidation.
It seemed that for all that he’d worked his ass off to earn their trust, it had taken him stepping up for Reese to win them over. And, oddly, he was okay with that. He nodded. “All right, I’m going. But first, what was with the coyote?” When he got blank stares, he briefly recounted the strange incident, which he would’ve been tempted to think he had imagined, only he hadn’t. “It took off right as you guys got there. Big son of a bitch.”
“We’ll check it out,” Nate promised.
“And remind Lucius there’s still one more artifact out there. If we can—”
“Go.” Sasha pushed him toward the door. “Turn it off for a few hours. We’ve got this, and you’ll be useless until you recharge.”
This was part of being a member of a team, he realized suddenly—not just having the others trust him, but trusting them in return. Which he hadn’t done before. He nodded slowly, letting the others see that he got it. “Okay. Thanks.”
Sasha followed him to the residential wing, ostensibly to make sure Reese’s condition stayed stable but also, he suspected, to call for help if he went down flat on his face. He stayed on his feet, but just barely, hesitating at his own door and then continuing down the hall to the apartment Reese had claimed for herself.
Their suites had the same footprint, with a main room, small attached kitchen, two blocky bedrooms and one bath, but she had given hers more character in a handful of days than he had in more than a year. She would probably call the maps tacked to the wall “research” and the huge bulletin board and the smaller wipe board “practical necessities,” but to him they were, quite simply, Reese. So, too, was the fat pottery jar in the kitchen, which he would lay money contained cookies. The air was lightly tinted with a spicy floral scent he suspected was her chosen shampoo—as opposed to the No-Tell Motel’s finest they had been sporting the past few days—and a hint of coffee.
He carried Reese into the main bedroom. There was a pile of research books on the nightstand, a pair of silver-toed cowboy boots in the corner, and a trio of potted cactuses on the windowsill. One was blooming.