But sometimes, fate is on my side. As we reached the table where Frank sat, the little action figure fell from Asa’s pocket. Before Reza could stop me, I lunged down and picked it up, expecting to end up on my feet with the power to hurt or influence anyone who came near.
Instead, as soon as my fingers touched it, my head filled with flashes of bloody images: Asa with his gun to Jack’s head, Jack bleeding and dying in agony. Confusion gripped me in the split second before it was knocked from my hand. I sank onto all fours, blinking the real world back into my vision as realization hit me hard and fast and stranger than any dream. My heart knocked against my ribs as Asa’s hand appeared, and I took it. “I . . . you dropped it,” I said weakly, afraid to look at him.
He pocketed the action figure again.
I raised my head to see Frank watching me with his eyebrows halfway up his shiny forehead. “You weren’t hoping for a weapon, were you, Mattie?”
“No. I’m just in the habit of cleaning up his messes,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. Had I really seen what I thought I’d seen?
“Here it is,” Asa said to Frank, holding up the panel, his hands shaking slightly. And while the three men were focused on the panel, I slipped the vial of sensing magic out of my stocking and surreptitiously began to unscrew the cap.
“Magic’s all in it,” Asa said, looking down at the mosaic. “If you can figure out how to use it, it should tell you what you want to know.”
Frank beamed. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? More beautiful with the magic inside.” He leaned forward to get a good look at the ghastly mosaic of the man being slaughtered.
Asa shuffled toward Frank, and I glanced down at his boots in time to see his toe catch on the floor. As he pitched forward, his muscles tensed, and in the split second before it all happened, I saw the future and knew my part in it. In those seconds, all the time we’d spent apart evaporated.
The vial in my hand, I spun toward Reza and saw the unfolding craziness reflected in his eyes—Asa regaining his grip on the panel and the steadiness in his steps. Frank yelped as Asa charged, but the high-pitched sound was suddenly cut off when Asa slammed the edge of the mosaic into Frank’s throat. As soon as the boss was silenced, searing pain tore along my bones—Reza joining the fight. Asa had it worse. He retched and collapsed over the table, convulsing just like Urasov had.
I managed to veer toward Reza and smacked into him with all my weight, my arms wrapping around his narrow waist and my knee slamming into his thigh, my other hand reaching up and dousing his face with Theresa’s magic. He screamed and flailed at the agony of his own magic. As soon as I broke his laser focus, the pain dimmed a little, and I hoped that it would give Asa enough time to recover. I turned away from the still-screaming Reza, but his hands closed around my throat, the pain turning my brain into an erupting volcano of molten hurt. Both of us were shrieking as he tightened his grip.
But then a chair slammed into him, knocking Reza and me to the ground. I rolled to my hands and knees to see Asa on top of the Strikon assassin, pistol-whipping him so viciously that I knew it was personal. The smack of metal on flesh and bone turned my stomach, as did the waves of pain that rolled through me, weaker and weaker the harder Asa punched. Fueled by rage, perhaps protected by the Ekstazo magic in his collar, Asa brought the weapon down again and again, destroying a face that had once been the most handsome I’d ever seen.
Just as Reza went limp, Asa’s body did, too, and he groaned and slid off the Strikon. “Stop,” he whispered, then moaned. “Stop.”
Frank rose from his chair, his gaze intent on Asa. “Very naughty, Asa. Guards!”
No. I raked my fingernails down my forearm, hard enough to draw blood, and then I ran at Frank. I picked up a chair of my own and swung it at him. He might have been a big man, but he was ponderous and slow, and I managed to land a blow to his head that left him staggering backward. He crashed heavily to the floor, his skull colliding with the edge of the electric fireplace as he went down. I braced for the heady pleasure of his magic to loosen my resolve, but he lay limp on the floor, unconscious.
I grabbed the priceless panel and whirled around, thinking to use it as a shield against bullets. But all I saw across the hangar were the henchmen calmly playing cards. I set the panel down and sank to my knees next to Asa, who was sprawled half-conscious next to Reza’s bleeding body. “You didn’t kill Jack. You just needed me to think you had. I felt the glamour as soon as I touched the action figure.”
“Just because I did . . .” Asa let out a shaky breath. “Don’t think I’m—”
“Where is he?”
Asa made a pained face and nodded toward the other side of the hangar, where all the henchmen sat. “There’s a room. A closet, more like.”
“Why aren’t they attacking us?”
“The kid. He’s holding a glamour to keep those guys seeing nothing over here but Frank eating his dessert.”
I stared at him. “This took planning.”
“Don’t read too much into it.” His fingers rose to his collar and fell away again. It was obviously still pumping him full of magic, but somehow, he was fighting it. And apparently he’d been fighting it all along.
I touched his cheek, and he winced and drew back. “Go get Jack,” he said. “They won’t hurt you as long as the kid stays where he is. You can just walk out.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“You’re gonna have to,” he said as the floor began to hum in earnest. When he saw the puzzled expression on my face, Asa pointed toward the closed hangar doors. “That’ll be the Headsmen. It sounds like they’ve brought half the Russian army with them.” Our eyes met. “And if you and Jack don’t make yourselves seen, my guess is they’re going to come in with guns blazing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Asa pushed himself up from the floor on trembling arms. “Go, Mattie. Get Jack out of here. The kid, too.”
I hesitated, not wanting to leave him when he was so weak. His jaw clenched. “Go. They need you.”
So do you. But now wasn’t the time to argue. “What about the other children?”
He shook his head as his eyes met mine. “No others. I knew you’d cave on the first one.”
“I’ll be back.” I got up and jogged past the plane, slowing as I neared the henchmen, but they took no notice of me. Peyta gave me a frightened look as I approached, but I offered him a reassuring nod and smile. He clutched the blue teddy bear he was holding a little closer to his chest, focusing once more on the deadly men surrounding us.
I headed straight for the only door on this side of the hangar. It was open just a crack, and when I swung it wide, there was Jack, lying on the floor, gagged, bound, and only half-conscious. “Jack,” I whispered as I turned him over.
No gunshots except the one he’d taken in the shoulder. He’d never even been in that storage room with me. His eyelids opened just slightly. “Mattie,” he whispered.
“I think your colleagues are about to bust in here.”
“I’m wearing a tracker,” he mumbled. “Knew it was only a matter of time.”
“I think Asa knew it, too,” I said as I worked at the tight knots at his wrists. “He just took out Frank and Reza.”
“Huh?”
I couldn’t suppress my smile. “We haven’t lost him. Whatever he’s up to, he wasn’t going to let Frank get the magic. It’s back in the panel, but Asa has it.”
“Where is he?” He rubbed at his wrists, then hissed when the movement pulled at his shoulder. He lay still as I yanked at the ropes around his ankles, feeling the vibrations of heavy machinery through the floor.
“He’s still in the hangar. He’s weak and hurt. We have to get him out of here.”
Jack was frowning as I pulled him up to a sitting position. “You sure he’s on our side?”
“He won’t admit it yet, but I know he is.”
Jack didn’t look convinced. With my help, he got to his feet, and I pulled his
good arm over my shoulder and supported him as we walked out of the storage closet. He tensed when he saw the men arrayed in front of us, smoking and relaxing, but then I pointed to Peyta. “He’s the conduit who did the transaction with me.”
“I wonder why they didn’t use me.”
I closed my eyes, pushing away memories of what I’d thought were Jack’s final moments. “Because they needed me to be desperate enough to cooperate. Asa used a glamour. He killed you in front of me.”
Jack’s eyes were wide. “No shit?”
I swallowed back nausea. “I don’t know how he got hold of that magic, but it was really realistic.”
“Could have made it himself with the right juice and proper know-how.”
“His imagination is pretty vivid.”
Jack snorted. “He probably enjoyed it a little bit. Where is he?”
I looked over but all I saw was Frank, calmly eating his cheesecake.
Jack squinted. “I still don’t see him. Only Reza.” He whistled low, but the sound was drowned out by the roar of engines.
My heart began to race as I looked over at Peyta, who was still crouched in his corner, clutching the small blue teddy bear that was keeping us alive. He was staring at the hangar door, looking ready to bolt. “This could get really bad,” I choked out. “Will the Headsmen attack?”
Jack’s tense expression wasn’t reassuring. “Given the slaughter back in the city, they might. But they have my tracker signature, so that might keep them from leveling this place. Still, we’d better get out of here. They might assume I’m dead if I’m not moving. And I’ve been not moving for quite a while now.”
“Peyta,” I said in a loud whisper, gesturing him over to us. If he stopped focusing on controlling that glamour, the henchmen would see exactly what was happening around them, but I wasn’t going to risk a child’s life just to cover my own ass.
The little boy rose to his feet, still holding the bear, and he seemed to understand instinctively that his life depended on keeping that glamour in place, because the henchmen continued to ignore us.
“Almost there,” whispered Jack, pointing to a side door. “We can—”
The huge hangar door started to slide open, and above the roof of the plane I saw a sliver of clear night sky. Jack, Peyta, and I limped along the side of the plane, our pace increasing. Were the Headsmen coming in? Where had Asa gone? I couldn’t fight the gnawing fear that had taken form in my gut.
And as soon as we reached the plane’s tail, I saw that the fear was very justified.
Arrayed in front of the open hangar door were eight armored military vehicles, like SUVs on steroids, with huge, heavy guns mounted on their roofs. Behind each was a gunner. Peyta whimpered and hugged the bear, and I pulled him close—just as I caught sight of Asa.
He trudged toward the semicircle of death machines in front of us, carrying the panel. The gunners adjusted their aim to put him in the crosshairs. My heart stopped.
“I want to talk to Keenan,” Asa called, holding up the treasure.
From somewhere inside the cluster of vehicles came the scratchy, amplified sound of Keenan’s voice. “You’ve got my attention, Asa. Is the magic inside it?”
“You bet.” Asa stopped when he was about fifty feet away from the vehicles. “Which means that if you want it, you can’t kill me.”
“Sadly,” said Keenan, the rage evident in his voice, “that’s true.”
The gunners lowered their weapons, aiming them away from Asa and the priceless relic in his hands.
“Good,” said Asa, the black collar stark against his chalky skin, sweat glistening in the harsh headlights of the SUVs. “Then we understand each other.”
Jack, Peyta, and I had reached the threshold to the outside, and Jack raised his uninjured arm, receiving a wave of acknowledgment from two of the gunners and nods from several others. Asa, holding the panel in front of his chest, looked over at us, and all my hope and joy vanished as I read his expression.
It wasn’t relieved. Or happy.
It was defiant. Asa raised the panel over his head.
As Keenan began to shout and Jack cursed, I put out my arms, as if I could stop him.
But no one could. None of us were close enough. He slammed the mosaic into the blacktop with all his strength. Shards of wood and clay and bits of stone exploded up from the ground as the thing shattered into hundreds of useless, broken bits. Smiling, Asa straightened and spread his arms. “Now do your thing.”
For a moment, stunned silence filled the air. “You bastard,” Keenan rasped. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Asa grinned, his smile a razor as the gunners zeroed in on him once more. “Found my escape clause.”
“No,” I screamed, tearing myself from Jack’s side. I barreled into Asa like a miniature linebacker, and he was too weak to hold me back. With my arms wrapped around his torso, we crumpled to the ground even as a sharp crack echoed all around. A slice of searing pain cut across my upper arm, like someone had lashed me with a whip, but I ignored it. Shouts and Peyta’s cries reached me as Asa’s head smacked against blacktop and his muscles went slack.
I glanced over at the boy in time to see the teddy bear—the one piece of magic that had been holding the bad guys back—fall from his hands as he clamped them over his ears. Knowing what would come next, fully aware that Asa and I were sandwiched between two deadly opposing forces, I found a strength I’d never known I had. Fisting my hands in Asa’s shirt just above the shoulders, I dragged him to the side as the bullets started to fly. A moment later, Jack joined me, along with Peyta, and the three of us raced with Asa toward the shelter of the Headsmen’s SUVs, with Jack shouting orders not to fire.
Asa stirred, his long arms flexing without a clear mission, while the Headsmen sent thousands of bullets into the hangar. The henchmen went down like puppets with their strings cut. I knew Frank and Reza were still in there somewhere, probably full of holes at this point. “Plane,” Asa mumbled.
I looked up at Jack. “Brindle said the plane had just been fueled!”
He cast a single horrified look into the hangar, where the plane, along with everything else, was being shredded by the Headsmen’s artillery. “Fall back,” Jack roared, helping me drag Asa farther behind the line of SUVs. “Fall b—”
We were thrown across the tarmac as a massive boom and wave of heat plowed over us, sending some of the SUVs onto their back wheels as the gunners dove off the rear to safety. I landed on top of Asa, cradling his head against my chest and letting Jack cover us both with his muscular body. Peyta was curled in a tight ball against Asa’s side. The night was filled with flames and heat, but the staccato horror of the bullets was slowly falling silent, interrupted only by a few stuttering bursts. But Frank and his henchmen presented no threat now.
Asa’s pulse ticked frantically against my fingertips when I pressed them to the slick skin just below his collar. He was alive, even though he didn’t want to be, and I was going to make sure he kept breathing until he changed his mind.
I kissed his forehead and held him tight, finally allowing the tears to fall.
We were taken to a Headsmen facility in Warsaw. Asa was kept heavily sedated and restrained during the journey, both for his safety and everyone else’s. Once we arrived, he was wheeled into an operating room, where a bomb technician and a surgeon worked together to defuse and remove the collar from his throat.
I watched with my nose pressed to the reinforced glass of the operating room, my eyes burning.
“Coffee? You look like you could use some.”
I turned to find Keenan next to me, two cardboard cups in his hands, contents steaming. “Sure. Thanks.”
His blue eyes zeroed in on Asa, breathing mask over his mouth and nose, long limbs still and limp. “They’ve gotten through the most dangerous part.” He pointed to the technician, who was packing a section of the collar into a reinforced steel box. “That’s the piece that could have killed him if anyone
had tried to take it off.”
“It looks like he tried to do it himself.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the piece of his throat I could see, where a few short, deep wounds had been stitched up. “Did he know it could kill him?”
“Probably.” Keenan sighed. “My guess is that he tried—and that Brindle then controlled for that with the Knedas magic being pumped into him.”
“But he did try to kill himself,” I whispered.
“No, he tried to get us to kill him. Every single thing he’s been doing has managed to skirt the orders he was probably given. Brindle ordered him to acquire the panel and to give it to him, but most likely didn’t specify that Asa had to let him keep it. Brindle ordered him to capture you, but didn’t add that he couldn’t capture anyone else, so he grabbed Jack. Brindle underestimated Asa, pure and simple.”
“He thought he’d broken him.”
“Asa probably made a calculated decision. He wanted them to think they had him.”
“Why, though? Why would he willingly submit? It doesn’t sound like him. He always said he’d rather die than be in a cage.”
Keenan chuckled. “But think about it. If Asa had refused to surrender, they would have killed him weeks ago.”
I stared at Asa’s long fingers, those dangerous hands. “He decided he wanted to live long enough to kill them.” And he had. They were still sifting through the bodies in that hangar, but word had already gotten out that Brindle was dead. “He found a way around all their orders and influence, and he destroyed them.” My fists clenched. “But then he tried to destroy himself.”
“It took its toll, Mattie. God only knows what they did to him. What they made him do. He’s got to be one of the hardest men I’ve ever known, but he’s not invincible. I don’t know who exactly is going to rise from that table. Or if anyone will rise at all.”
I sniffled and wiped my face with my sleeve. “Don’t say that.”
“I know you love him, Mattie. You’ve more than proven it. You’ve also more than proven that you’re a woman of character—Jack told me you were willing to kill Asa rather than let him and Reza have their way.”