“That’s for damn sure.” I squeeze my grip around his waist. Only something deep down inside of me knows that nothing will ever be all right again.
3
A Bloody Means to an End
Rain beats down over the island as Logan and I speed over to the Paragon hospital. It’s as if the ax had fallen and declared summer officially over, leaving both Gage and Ellis with their lives in the balance.
“Last time,” I say it without warrant as Logan parks the truck in haste.
“Last time, what?” He reaches over and pulls me in with his warm, strong hands. Instantly I feel safe. Logan is the calm in the storm, the anchor in an angry torrential sea that’s doing its best to sweep my sanity away.
“Last time I put anyone in danger.” I lose myself for a moment watching the rain fall in sheets over the windshield. “Emma is right. I’m nothing but a burden to you and your family.”
“Hey”—he pulls me in, brushing his lips soft over my cheek—“I promise you, Skyla, that’s not what she meant. She’s not thinking clearly. Besides, both Gage and I would do anything for you. And”—he pauses lifting my chin gently with his finger—“we did what we set out to do. We beat the Counts.” A heavy look of sadness weighs down his expression. “It’s all over.” Logan sweeps my hair back with his fingers and pulls me in as if we were about to say goodbye. “Let’s get Gage the hell of out here, and we can figure the rest out later.”
I nod into the idea while taking in his clean scent, memorizing how his rock hard body feels pressed against mine.
I know exactly what things are in need of figuring out, and, unfortunately, the burden of those choices lies directly with me.
***
Logan and I duck into the ER and dash room to room until we find Emma and Barron speaking with a group of nurses.
“They’ve got him in surgery.” Barron hardens his gaze over at me. “They think his vocal cords might be severed. There’s a damaged artery on the left side of his neck.”
Shit. Gage—his beautiful voice. I’ll die if I don’t hear it again. A surge of heartache pumps through me, and I wish I were the one in surgery. Although, I’ll take a quiet Gage over a dead one any day. Not to mention, the severed artery sounds far more dangerous.
We wait hours for them to finish up and wheel him back to recovery. Then another half hour before they’ll let us see him.
Logan and I have discreetly decided it would be best if Gage had a Celestra-based infusion, ASAP.
“You’re going to distract them,” I say. It comes out more of a question than a command. I glance around for something knife-sharp to slice myself with. I’m still wearing these ridiculous sky-high heels—the dress with its shivering filaments as if a thousand jellyfish had to be sacrificed just to create it and knowing Marshall, they were. “I need something to cut myself with.”
Logan flips his keychain around until a tiny blade protrudes from the multi-use tool dangling from the end.
“I don’t want your blood on my hands.” He pushes out a quiet smile. “Just enough to touch over his incision.” He shakes his head. “Don’t turn this into a bloodbath.”
We enter the recovery room, and Logan joins Emma and Barron as they speak with the doctor.
This isn’t Gage’s first rodeo. He’s been laid out in the hospital a time or two, and it consistently has to do with me, well, because of Chloe to be exact. But deep inside I know I’m the root of his troubles, everyone’s troubles.
I head over to him. Gage is filled with tubes and pumps and it breaks my heart in every single way. His eyes are closed, and he’s sleeping peacefully. An IV runs to his arm, supplying him with the much-needed fluids he requires to get better. His neck has a thick layer of gauze strapped over it to hide his sutures, and I gently lift it on one end until the entire band slips off.
I turn slightly in the event Emma grows suspicious before slicing a clean, deep line up the inside of my arm. A seam of red velvet erupts, my Celestra blood with all of its curative properties. Crap. It would figure the common denominator with just about everything in my life has to do with blood. My heart races as I listen to the doctor finishing up with the three of them. I lean in and swipe my arm over Gage’s tender purple neck as if I’m simply giving him a hug.
Skyla. His lids open groggily as his eyes struggle to find me. Gage still has God’s own breath filling his lungs, which in and of itself is a remarkable gift. I cover his wound with the gauze and brush my fingers over his temple. The color perks back to his cheeks as he blinks to life. Everything in me sighs as his breathing restores itself to a normal pace.
He glances down at my bloodied arm lying over his chest.
I didn’t want this. His eyes sharpen over mine as if he’s genuinely pissed. His cobalt spheres glow in a bed of crimson railroad tracks.
“Skyla!” Emma breaks loose from Logan’s conversational stronghold. She speeds over, and for a second I’m sure she’s about to smack me, but she doesn’t—instead she locks me in a wild, rocking hug. “Thank you. Thank God, you never listen.” She whispers thank you in my ear, but from over her shoulder Barron doesn’t bother to hide his disappointment.
“You deliberately disregarded what I said.” It depresses from him with a marked sadness. “I gave Gage my word, and because of you, I couldn’t keep it.” He reverts his eyes to Logan. “Just like I promised my father something a long time ago, and again I couldn’t keep my word.” He walks out of the room without even acknowledging Gage’s remarkable state of recovery.
“Barron.” Emma takes off after her distraught other half.
It seems every move I make is the wrong one—even when it means saving Gage.
Skyla. Gage latches onto my hand so I can hear him telepathically. Go home—get some rest. Let the doctors do this. I want it that way. I’ll be OK, I promise.
Logan comes over and takes his other hand. Logan still has his Celestra abilities even though he’s “officially” pledged over to the Counts. He sold his soul for the win and now we’re still not sure if it was worth it.
Gage looks up at him, and his dimples sink in. Dude, get her home. Both of you get some rest. He gives a slow tired blink up at Logan. Figures. The golden boy comes out unscathed. That last part came out more as a passing thought, although I did make the same observation. I guess it’s true—my mother favors Logan the most.
Gage blinks over at me as if he heard.
“I’m so glad you’re alive,” I say, sniffing back tears. “I couldn’t live without you, Gage Oliver. I love you so much.”
Ditto. Gage presses in a smile, and his dimples blink in and out of existence.
I glance over at Logan—so quiet with his thoughts just out of reach. He looks devastated by my spontaneous declaration of love for Gage.
I can’t do this anymore with the two of them.
I wish I knew how the hell to stop.
***
Logan and I make our way back to the truck before racing to Devil’s Peak. The rain continues to beat down over the island, punishing us for ever thinking summer was better. Logan’s windshield wipers are no match for nature’s wrath tonight.
We turn into the lookout, and Logan comes around to my side to help me out.
“You sure you want to do this?” he shouts over the driving rain.
For the first time tonight, I flick off the alloy heels Marshall gifted me and chuck them into the cab of the truck. It feels so good to have them off as my feet sigh with relief.
“I’m positive!” I’m not waiting around for Marshall to get me. I’m the one who sliced a perfectly good Ellis Harrison in half. I’ll be damned if I go to bed before rectifying the situation, that is if there’s anything to rectify.
Logan takes up my hand and points to the left of the cliff where the fence is bent to the ground. We take a running start, never letting go of one another’s hand. The cliffside comes upon us like a mouth ready to swallow us whole. We dive off the edge and leap down toward the rocks below wher
e the water glows neon against the shore in a beautiful, frothy white.
The ocean, the jagged Paragon shoreline, rises to meet us like a necrotic promise.
I’m going to save Ellis Harrison. And I’ll give up just about anything to do it.
The earth gyrates and warps as Logan and I push right through it. The sleek walls of the Transfer appear around us, white as a shock of lightning.
“Skyla,” Logan moans as we lie flat on our backs in the main artery of Ezrina’s lab. “You OK?”
“Yes.” I roll over and take up his hand again. We’re sopping wet with our clothes suctioned to our bodies. “You?”
“I’m better than OK.” He helps me to my feet. Logan looks even more like an Adonis with his hair slicked back, the water beading over his skin, and my heart palpitates at the sight of him. “You’re with me. That makes everything OK.”
I give a little smile as he draws me in.
“We’re going to have to do something special to commemorate the fact we kicked some serious Count ass,” I say as we stride down the hall with our arms threaded around one another’s waist.
“Just you and me?” He cuts a sly smile.
“Sure.” I was thinking about a few more people, but I leave that part out. It was Logan and I that got this psychotic ball rolling in the first place.
Logan pulls us to the side and wraps his arms around me tight. He gazes into me with a tiny smile playing on his lips. An intense wave of love pulsates from him, and I’ve never felt so completely wanted, needed, desired.
“I bet”—he bounces his nose to mine—“the old Skyla and Logan, the ones that sat in the butterfly room and openly declared they would take down the Counts, would love a victory celebration, especially if it were private.”
A silent laugh rattles my chest.
“I remember that,” I whisper over his mouth. “It was after you and Gage helped free me from Ezrina the very first time. I remember how you held me.” I trace his lips with my finger. “I memorized all of your sweet kisses.”
“I want that again with you—what we had at first, all of that magic, all of the wonder we had before the Counts forced us to complicate things with Gage. I know you love him.” He sags. “And I know all of his visions will come true.”
I shake my head, trying to stop him from going on, to stop him from burying our relationship alive under the avalanche of Gage and his prognosticating nightmare that has plagued us from the beginning. It turns out knowing the future isn’t the great gift it’s cracked up to be.
“Back in paradise you said you knew we would happen.” I swallow hard. “Let’s just focus on the positive.”
“I said that?” He glances down, riffling through his thoughts a moment. “Focus on the positive.” He nods, pressing out a dry smile. “We’re going to happen, Skyla.” He picks me up and spins me as if realizing this for the very first time. “I promise you, we will.” He dots a kiss over my lips, and my body seizes with pleasure. “God, I love you.”
I can feel his heart beating against my chest with relief as if he just escaped a fire. These last few hours have been more than a little taxing, so I leave the conversation there for now, but there’s still so much more to say, so much more ground to cover with both Logan and Gage.
We make our way down a dark carpeted hall, and a blue glow emanates from the entry to the left where dead Counts are bagged and tagged and stored in floating coffins.
Row after row of elongated glass capsules run across the room, creating their own blue haze of longitude and latitude. I try not to look too closely at the bodies floating inside dressed in their cobalt-colored wetsuits as their hair sprays out like floss, their hands pressed helpless against the glass.
We find Marshall sitting on the counter reading from a luminescent clipboard, his face shimmers a soft blue hue.
I’m about to open my mouth and greet him just as Ezrina pops in with her unearthly form. She hunches over a large stainless tub on the other end of the room. Just past her shoulder, red surgical tubes flow into the oversized tub.
“Shit,” I hiss as I come up behind her.
Ellis Harrison lies beneath her naked as the day he was born. His body lies transversely dissected while Ezrina digs her hands in the bloody trenches. His eyes are closed, his hair clotted with blood on one side.
“What the hell are you doing?” I squawk at the stomach-churning sight.
“Fusing his spinal column,” her voice resonates the hellish scenario.
I turn and bury my head in Logan’s chest.
“Crap,” I whimper. I’m pretty sure people were never meant to be reconnected like Lego pieces.
“Bowels are intact,” Ezrina grumbles, her voice echoes through the room like a static vibration.
“Good,” I say, trying to sound cheery over the state of poor Ellis’s crap factory while his body lies drawn and quartered thanks to yours truly. “When do you think he’ll be ready?” I ask as if he’s a pizza I’m expecting to be delivered in thirty-minutes or less.
“Fantastic,” Ezrina says with no rhyme or reason behind it.
I glance up at Logan, temporarily ignoring Ezrina’s brain malfunction.
“Isn’t it amazing you came out unscathed?” I marvel. “I mean, Chloe chopped your head off and everything.”
He presses his lips together and intensifies his gaze into the metallic coffin Ellis is splayed out in.
“What’s this?” He leans in and touches one of the long red tubes that circulate from our favorite stoner.
“Transfusion.” She openly glares at me when she says it.
“Transfusion?” I hop over to see who or what in the hell she’s sucking the living plasma out of, hopefully Demetri, but since he doesn’t meet the human criteria, I find this doubtful. In fact, I bet if we sawed the violent Fem in half all sorts of green goo—
I startle when I see what those twisted cords are connected to, and all thoughts, all autonomic responses leave my body as I forget to breathe.
Chloe Bishop lies in the stainless casket next door. Her face pale as snow, her lips a muted shade of navy. Her unpolished fingernails have turned black at the base.
“Holy shit,” Logan whispers.
This is a dream within a dream—Chloe Bishop captured and drained for a noble purpose like piecing Ellis Harrison back together again. Chloe, the White Witch, lies with her granular appearance, ashen as table salt. She looks marvelously dazed, her eyes crossing ever so slightly as she labors to breathe.
“Sky—la,” she stutters out my name while locked in her death throes. It’s such a beautiful sight, I’d whip out my cell and take a picture, but I don’t want to miss a second of the action. Watching Chloe die has been my heart’s desire for some time now.
“I’m here for you, Chloe.” I try to hide my blooming elation. “Go to the light.” But in Chloe’s case, it’s most likely the dark.
Logan thumps his finger over my leg when I say it. I’ll take that as positive reinforcement since we’re on a positivity kick.
“What’s happening?” Logan directs it to Marshall, inspiring the underwhelmed Sector to hop down from the counter and join us at the save Ellis revival.
“What’s happening is you’re witness to a selfless act on the part of Ms. Bishop. She barged in, demanding to be the one to save Mr. Harrison herself—rambling something about needing him as a future investment.”
“Figures,” I say. “Ellis is nothing more than body parts, a real life blowup doll to occupy her on those lonely Gage-less nights.”
“I’m not sure Ellis would want it that way after everything that’s happened,” Logan muses.
“Nevertheless”—Marshall nods into me—“she’s dependent on Ezrina here to administer the antidote once the blood draw is complete.”
“The same toxin you use on me?” A cold shiver prickles up my spine. Just the thought of that poison makes my stomach clench—the intense surprise of pain that accompanies it is insufferable, unbearable. I wouldn’t
wish that on my worst enemy, and now Chloe will be privy to my personal brand of suffering. Well, maybe I’d wish it on Chloe.
I glance down at her as Ezrina disconnects the wires.
“Finished,” she gravels the word out like breaking glass.
Chloe labors to take her next breath. Her face puckers. Hard indentations slice through her flesh as if she’s aged a thousand years. This must be what I look like. She looks hideous, like a thing, nothing at all remotely human.
“Skyla.” Marshall holds out a hypodermic needle. “Ms. Bishop’s fate lies squarely in your hands. Should you forgo to inject her with the toxin, she’ll expire within the next few minutes. Her body requires this to replenish her Celestra blood. Her kidneys are already in the process of shutting down.”
“Celestra,” it huffs out of me like a joke. “Chloe never cared for our people. Chloe was her own race, her own demonic species. She has her eye on one prize, and that prize is Gage.” And here she tried to kill him, Logan, too.
Chloe pries her lids open at the mention of his name. Chloe could survive a nuclear fallout with nothing more than a picture of him in her pocket. Gage is the sun—he’s nothing short of God to her.
Chloe’s body moves in slow waves like that of a worm. Her bony fingers reach into the air. That elongated forefinger, the thumb with its familiar nail bed. That’s my hand, and even with a part of me attached to her, I have no desire to save her.
“Gage shared a vision with me a while back.” I nod, pressing myself deeper into Logan’s chest. “I saw it plain as day. I was jumping up and down, and I begged for Chloe’s life. I told him to go back in time and tell me that she needed to live.” I shake my head, incredulous at the idea. “If I didn’t trust Gage as much as I do, I’d swear it was manipulation.”
“Skyla, she’s dying,” Marshall says it sweetly as if composing a lullaby.