Splinter (Reliquary Series Book 2)

  “I’m the sensor!”

  “And I outrank you, dude, so shut up until I ask you a question.”

  Daeng’s face was a mottled pink, but he didn’t reply.

  Jack turned back to me. “We’re gonna do this together. I’ll take it easy, and you let it loose nice and slow. I know it’s Strikon, but I’ve dealt with that shit before.”

  “You haven’t dealt with this.”

  “Help me, then. And I’ll help you.”

  I shook my head. I wanted so badly to trust him, but though he didn’t seem evil, I also knew I wasn’t his priority—the magic was. It occurred to me that I should tell him exactly what was inside me, but I was afraid it would only make them more insistent.

  “Mattie. I can tell it’s hurting you,” Jack said, leaning close and speaking in my ear. “You’re going to feel so much better once we get this out.”

  Or I’ll be dead, and maybe that would feel better than this. Strapped to a gurney under a harsh fluorescent light, a blade of pain slicing me down the middle. And no Asa. He hadn’t come. He couldn’t save me from this. He couldn’t carry me through.

  “Just do it,” I said in a strangled whisper. “Do it now.”

  Jack tucked his palm along the inside of my arm, and immediately the pain increased, as if someone were sawing through my breastbone. I let out a choked gasp and arched back.

  “Let it go, girl,” said Jack. “Let it go.”

  I couldn’t. I was too terrified, too incapacitated by agony.

  But it broke free anyway.

  My vision went red and bloody. It was like two hands cracked me down the middle and spread my ribs, presenting my heart and lungs like a buffet just before forks and knives dug in for the feast. I don’t know if I made a single sound, but the inside of my skull was one long scream drenched in suffering. My body contracted upward and slammed back. Over and over again until that’s all I was, a broken, limp piece of human wreckage.

  Then the hurt dimmed a little, replaced by a bubbling sting in my chest and throat. The light beyond my closed eyelids flickered. Hoarse shouting filled the room, penetrating the noise inside my brain.

  “Get out of the way, dammit,” someone yelled in a nasally voice. “Tell the ER they have incoming.”

  “What should I tell them about their condition?”

  “Aaah, car accident, maybe.”

  I turned my head as something hot and wet choked me. I coughed, gagging at the metallic taste on my tongue. My eyelids fluttered open. The sheet next to my face was spattered with frothy scarlet blood.

  “It’s going to be okay, Mattie,” said Winslow.

  “We’re taking you guys to a hospital,” Badem added. She had her hand clamped around my wrist, maybe trying to dull the pain.

  My eyes rolled in my head as I tried to bring the world into focus. “What . . .” The word gurgled wet from my throat, and I coughed again. My blood splattered onto the sleeve of Winslow’s shirt, and he made a face like he was going to be sick. “Magic?” I asked hoarsely. “Is it out?”

  “We’re not sure,” Badem said with a frown. “Daeng lost consciousness after ending the transaction. Jack is right behind us. He’s in better shape than you, but . . .”

  I cried out as we rolled over some kind of threshold, and then we were rattling across the parking lot, gurney wheels shrieking for oil, me writhing in agony at every crack or dip in the pavement. To say that something had gone wrong seemed like an understatement. “Why hospital?” I gurgled. “This . . . is . . . magic.”

  “Why didn’t that healing relic work?” asked Badem.

  “It was dumb to try it. Those things only work on nonmagical injuries—they weren’t made for stuff like this.”

  “What the hell was in her?”

  “Splinter,” I whispered, but it didn’t seem like either of them heard me. They were too busy hollering at the medical staff as they rolled me through the doors of the emergency department. Masked faces appeared over me, and something tight was wrapped around my arm just before a needle pierced it.

  After that, everything was kinda hazy for a while.

  I awoke to the sound of a door closing, my eyes fluttering open to see a room with creamy-yellow walls and a window that overlooked the sheriff’s station with the sun sinking behind it—I had been here for the whole day at least. I took a breath and whimpered as it reawakened the animal feasting on my heart and lungs.

  “Easy there, girl.”

  I turned my head toward the sound of Jack’s voice. He was sitting in a chair on the other side of the bed, next to the monitors reporting on my heartbeat and blood oxygenation. He looked a little ashen and was wearing scrub pants under a hospital gown. “What happened?” I asked in a weak rasp.

  “Fubar, plain and simple.”

  “Huh?”

  “It was bad.”

  “I’d never have guessed.” I glanced down at myself. Wires snaked from my chest to the monitors, and an IV tube extended from the crook of my arm to a bag hanging above the bed.

  “They’ve done a chest scan. Their guess was a pulmonary embolism. You’re on some kind of blood thinner.” He gestured at the chart hooked to the end of my bed.

  “Oh, yeah, feel free to read my confidential medical records.”

  He chuckled. “Anything to ease a guilty conscience.” I turned to look at him again, and he gave me an apologetic shrug. “I thought I’d killed you. I thought I’d killed me, too, for a minute there.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got hit with a bolt of pain like nothing I’d ever felt, but I couldn’t get it to flow into the relic no matter how hard I tried. I couldn’t control it. So it just zinged back and forth between you and me, slicing and dicing.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Daeng pulled me away, so that ended whatever was happening.”

  “And the magic?”

  He let out a heavy sigh. “We had Daeng in here earlier.” He gestured to the little table next to my bed, at a small basket with a red teddy bear holding a card with a picture of a cat on it. Below it were the words “Stop being a pussy. Get well soon.”

  “What a lovely sense of humor. I bet he enjoyed every minute of my agony.”

  “The guy does seem a little cracked.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “He said the magic’s still inside you.”

  I closed my eyes and let out a shallow, slow breath. “I think I already knew that.”

  “We should have listened to you.”

  “I knew that, too.”

  “Not the best way to start an acquaintance. I think I owe you an apology.”

  “Yeah. I’d say you do.”

  “I hate apologizing.”

  I pressed my lips together as the memory of Asa saying the same thing rose, tightening bands of regret around my chest, making breathing even more of a chore.

  “I was angry over what happened to Gramps, okay?” Jack said. “He didn’t deserve to go out that way. And I was the one who had to tell my mom and pop, because Headsmen were first on the scene. God, it was a shit show.”

  “I get it. You don’t have to explain.”

  “It was no excuse to take it out on you. Though if I get my hands on Ward, I’m bringing him to justice. Just a heads-up.”

  “Good luck with that.” If he was saying this to me, it meant Asa had escaped the raid. They didn’t know where he was.

  “I don’t suppose you have any info—”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “We don’t have to be enemies, Mattie.”

  My eyes met his. “Then let’s not.”

  He stared at me for a moment, and then his full lips lifted into a smile. I half expected him to go on questioning me, but instead he said, “I got a few stories about our grandfathers. Did yours ever tell you what they got up to?”

  I shook my head. “I only found out what he was at the very end of his life. He kept it a secret.”

  His smile grew, and it was so boyish and excited t
hat it made me smile, too. “There was this one time, down in Rio, when—” He frowned at the sound of funk music emanating from his waist, and reached beneath his gown to retrieve a phone that he’d clipped to his scrub pants.

  “Okafor here,” he said, his voice dropping into dry professional mode for a split second before rising in alarm. “Say that again? Yes, I turned up the collar! What? How?”

  I couldn’t hear what the person on the other end was saying, but I caught a frantic note. Jack shot to his feet and strode over to the window, peering at the station. “Stay where you are,” he barked. “Do not go out there. Do not—shit!”

  I heard the gunshot and the scream all the way across the room.

  Jack tapped his phone and held it to his ear again. “Pick up, Winslow,” he muttered. “Dammit, pick up.”

  He cursed and ended the call a moment later, probably after it went to voice mail.

  “What’s going on?”

  Jack looked down at his hospital gown, momentarily at a loss. “He got out. I thought we had him fully contained.”

  I flinched at the muffled sound of gunfire coming from outside. Jack ducked low and pressed himself to the wall as he peered out the window. “Oh my God, that motherfucker is making them kill each other.”

  “What the heck is going on?”

  He turned back to me. “I have to go. He won’t affect me.” He almost sounded as if he were trying to reassure himself.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Arkady,” Jack said as he headed for the door. “And if I don’t stop him, more people are gonna die.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Arkady. The man in the silver collar. I wondered if, when Asa had spotted him in town, Jack had been the one meeting him, maybe posing as a freelancer who wanted to help him obtain the Sensilo relic. They’d captured and caged him, but somehow he’d escaped.

  And judging from the sounds coming from outside, he was wreaking havoc.

  “Code atlas,” said a voice over the intercom. “Code atlas.” From the hallway, I heard the sound of running feet and urgent voices.

  This was bad. But it was also just the chance I needed.

  Grimacing, I sat up and tugged the IV from my arm. Blood beaded in the crook of my arm as I pulled the leads off my chest. The machine began to beep loudly, but no one came running in to see if I’d had a heart attack.

  I found my clothes in a plastic sack in the bathroom and put them on, pausing to lean against the wall and breathe through the pain every few seconds. My chest felt oddly brittle, like one sharp blow would shatter it. I had to get out of there before the Headsmen were able to do exactly that. Jack might not be willing to go for round two, but I didn’t trust them not to bring in someone else to try again.

  I slipped my feet into my sandals, grabbed the basket containing the stuffed bear and stupid get-well card, and peeked out the door. I wasn’t the only one. The code atlas had a lot of people poking their heads out to see what was going on. But since there was no immediate danger that I could see, I focused on striding toward the elevators as if I were just a visitor delivering a (tasteless) gift for a patient.

  “Miss, you can’t take the elevators,” barked a doctor as he ran down the hall, just as I hit the “Down” button. “We’re in lockdown.”

  “Oh. Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Visitors are supposed to go to the cafeteria. First floor. Take the stairs. Go immediately.”

  “I will!” I followed him to the stairs, letting him widen the gap between us as he rushed down the steps. When I reached the first floor, I slowly opened the door to see staff herding visitors into the cafeteria to my right while medical personnel rushed toward the emergency department to my left.

  The exit to the parking lot right in front of me had been barred. If the hospital was in lockdown, that meant no one in or out, but I knew that they had to let emergency responders come and go.

  So I headed to my left, wishing I could do what they always do in the movies and somehow steal a pair of scrubs to disguise myself. It turned out not to be necessary, though. I walked through the sliding doors of the emergency department to see that it was in absolute chaos. Uniformed sheriff’s deputies lay on almost every gurney, bleeding from gunshot wounds. Against the wall were a few covered bodies—the staff seemed too overwhelmed to handle the DOAs. And peeking out from under one of the sheets was a dangling wrist, a silver cuff fastened around it. A Headsman. And despite what they’d put me through, I felt a pang—of sympathy and of fear.

  It appeared that Arkady had single-handedly decimated the sheriff’s station, despite their efforts to contain him. The silver collar had looked like some kind of shock device, maybe used to break his concentration so he couldn’t influence others. I was betting the silver cuffs did something similar for the Headsmen, supplying just enough pain to enable them to see through Knedas glamours. Apparently neither was foolproof.

  I stayed out of the way, keeping my head down as I made my way to the exit. No one seemed all that interested in stopping me—everyone had life-or-death business to attend to. Two frantic medics burst over the threshold shouting, “Self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, code blue! Code blue!” I took the opportunity to slip outside, averting my eyes from the tragedy on the gurney.

  The gunfire seemed to have stopped. The sheriff’s station was ringed with New Kent police cars as well as a few Virginia trooper vehicles, along with one black SWAT truck and two fire trucks. Their red and blue lights glowed, brightening the night. I picked my way across the packed hospital parking lot—at least one news van had already arrived—and headed in the opposite direction of the carnage.

  I had no idea how to reach Asa. I had no money and no phone. And I was already panting like I’d run a mile at top speed. But I was still alive. I nearly doubled over as the splinter cut its way along my spine, and my body convulsed as I coughed droplets of blood onto the gravel at my feet.

  “Okay, mostly alive,” I said with a grimace, wishing for a glass of water to wash the awful salt-and-metal taste out of my mouth. I was sure I had crimson teeth. If anyone spotted me, they’d most likely take me right back to the hospital. It was probably where I belonged. But I wasn’t about to sit there waiting for someone else, maybe an Ekstazo, maybe a Knedas, to come in and try to work on me again. I was so tired of them trying to control me. I was so tired of feeling like I wasn’t the boss of my own body.

  I glanced behind me at the chaos of cop cars and other emergency vehicles. I hoped they’d caught the guy now, and that Jack was okay. Magic couldn’t affect conduits like it did ordinary people, even other naturals—including reliquaries. It just went right through them, always headed somewhere else. I hadn’t thought about it much before, but it must have made them useful as Headsmen. They could see through glamours, shrug off the touch of a Strikon, laugh as an Ekstazo tried to win them over. The only time they felt the effects of magic was when it was passing through them on its way into a reliquary or a relic.

  Jack was immune to Arkady’s influence. But it didn’t mean Arkady couldn’t influence someone else to shoot him or run him over.

  That grisly thought made me shiver, and I quickened my shuffling steps, hoping for houses around the curve in the road. All I had to do was find someone willing to let me use a phone. If I called my parents, they could wire money or buy me a bus ticket or something. I didn’t know what else to do.

  I nearly cried with relief and hope as I spotted a house ahead, its windows glowing yellow and warm and safe in the siren-split night. I limped up the driveway, noting the cute little flower garden out front, purple crocuses and hyacinths, clearly carefully tended. Clinging to the porch banister, I dragged myself up the few steps and leaned on the house as I knocked on the door, my breath rattling uncomfortably.

  The door opened, revealing a round-faced old lady with glasses and curly white hair. “Can I help you?”

  “I was wondering if I could use your phone.” I gave her a closed-mou
th smile. “I managed to lose mine. My car broke down up the road.”

  The woman’s brow furrowed as she glanced up the road toward the hospital and the sheriff’s station. “You involved in that unpleasantness up there? I been in here scared to death.”

  “No, my car is the other way.” I pointed in the opposite direction of the station. “I saw a lot of police cars go by, though.”

  She nodded, then looked me up and down. “What’s your name, dear?”

  “Mattie.”

  “I’m Dolores.” She smiled. “You look pretty harmless, but I need to ask my husband if I can let you in.”

  “Oh. Okay,” I said as she closed the door in my face. I peered through the sheer curtains as she walked down a hallway on the other side of the cozy living room, praying that her husband was a nice guy who would let his little wifey assist a forlorn stranger. I braced myself for an old guy to come hobbling down the hall, ready to defend his home, but instead Dolores returned and said, “Come on in. Our phone’s right over here.” She pointed at a cordless that sat on an end table next to the slipcovered couch.

  “Thank you so much,” I said, stepping into the house and shedding a tiny bit of the fear I’d been carrying with me since my escape from the hospital. I had done it, pulled free of the craziness of the Headsmen. Now all I had to do was stay free.

  “She’s in, darling,” Dolores called down the hall.

  “Thank you, darling,” answered a Russian-accented voice. “Now please go stand by the door.”

  A chill zipped through me, and I turned toward the hall as Arkady stepped out of one of the rooms. He looked much more relaxed than he had in his holding cell, shackled and collared. He gave me a smile as he slowly walked toward me, seductive and confident. “Hello, Mattie. I remember you from the station. I saw you going in looking weak and scared. And when I saw you go out, well . . .” He clucked his tongue. “It looked like maybe it would be your final ride. I’m so happy to see you looking—” He narrowed his eyes as he glanced at my mouth. “Hmm. Well, not healthy, exactly.”