Bitter Night (17 page)

She yawned. “The healing help I gave you will have to be enough. I’ve got to rest. I’ll have food sent in for all of you, and then we’ll get on the road. We’ve been here too long already.”

With that she withdrew through a panel near the front of the truck. It opened on a light-sealed space. She slid it shut behind her, and the green light above turned to red and a low-pitched chime sounded. A moment later the light turned green again.

“Let him go,” Max said again, and the two men holding Alexander slowly released him.

Still reeling from Giselle’s gentle reaction, he turned around to examine Max. She was lying flat on her back, her eyes closed. The IVs continued to pour blood and clear sustenance into her veins. He could see no evidence of any injuries. The floor had been cleaned and the sharp stench of antiseptic clogged his nose and made his eyes water. Fans whirred, stirring the air.

He started toward Max’s supine body, stopping when Tyler thrust an arm out to block his way.

“Peace, Junior. Keep your distance.”

Junior? Alexander could not help his dry chuckle, though he knew there was nothing funny about the situation. Then he started to cough raggedly. Akemi handed him a bottle of apple juice and he drank it gratefully. He eyed the too still Max again, then looked at Tyler.

“She will be all right?”

“She can talk for herself,” Max said acidly without opening her eyes.

“And?”

“I’m hungry and tired. Can you people not shut up?”

“What about him?” Niko asked.

Max’s head tipped to the side and she looked at Alexander. “What about him?”

“What do you want us to do with him?”

“Feed him. Watch him. Put a bullet in his head if he starts any trouble.” She closed her eyes again, rolling her head back up to face the ceiling. “Whatever you do, keep it quiet.”

As promised, Giselle sent in food. The chime on the door sounded and the light turned from green to red to green. Akemi opened the door, picking up a stack of pizza boxes, followed by a gallon of milk and a six-pack of beer. Last came a stack of paper plates and a roll of paper towels.

She set the food on the nearest gurney and piled several slices of deep-dish pizza on a plate. She carried it to Max, along with a cup of milk. Max groaned and sat up slowly, swinging her legs over the edge of the table. She eyed the milk and then the beer, then grabbed the cup and drank it in one gulp. Next she started devouring the pizza.

“Damn, that’s good,” she said.

Alexander waited until the others had begun eating and served himself, pouring milk into a paper cup. All of them ate steadily without speaking. Before they had emptied the boxes, the door chimed again. This time the offering was Chinese food. They all piled their plates with lo mein, fried rice, General Tso’s, cashew chicken, egg rolls, and barbecued pork.

A half hour later, Alexander was beginning to feel comfortably full. He felt his healing spells drawing on the energy of the food, and though exhaustion still weighted him, he felt no worse than if he had been in a fistfight. The pain in his stomach was completely gone. For the first time he became aware of two bandages pulling at the skin on his chest’one low on his left side, the other higher on his right. His gaze drifted lower. He was still wearing his bloodstained jeans. They were all he had left to call his own.

His food churned uneasily in his gut. He had been alive for more than a hundred years, and it was like he had been born again. He did not like it. He felt too new, too vulnerable, and entirely alone.

He set aside his plate. He had no place in Giselle’s coven. He could challenge Max for Prime, but after tonight, he was not sure he could win. And even if he should happen to defeat her, her Shadowblades were clearly too loyal to suffer him to live. That left serving under her, if she could learn to trust him. He dragged his hands through his hair, then shoved them into the front pockets of his jeans. It was impossible. She would be stupid to. She was anything but stupid. And yet’I don’t leave any of mine behind.

The door chimed yet again, and now Niko fished out two grocery sacks stuffed with pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. He pawed through them, grabbing a carton and taking it to Max, along with a spoon. She pulled off the lid and scooped out a spoonful, her eyes closing as she savored it.

“Food of the gods,” she murmured, a look of heavenly satisfaction on her face.

“Want some?” Niko asked Alexander, surprising him.

He shook his head, his hunger gone. Tiredness netted him. Without another word, he climbed onto his gurney. He lay on his back, feeling entirely too exposed. His stomach clenched rock hard. He was entirely at their mercy. Even if he escaped, he doubted he could go back to Selange. Did he want to? He thought about it. His initial knee-jerk reaction was yes. But when he considered ...He realized he felt free in a way he could never remember feeling. It was as if everything he was and had been had burned up in a fire, and he had walked out nameless and without any shackles tying him down. He was free.

He recoiled from the thought. He did not want his freedom. He was a Shadowblade and he needed a coven and a witch to serve. He neither knew any other life nor wanted to. All he could do was wait to see what Giselle would do with him and hope Max had meant what she said.

Mine.

9

MAX HAD NEVER BEFORE IN HER LIFE BEEN QUITE so close to death. Surprisingly’no, shockingly’she found that she did not want to die. Even when the velvet darkness had beckoned so closely, even when it seemed she did not have the strength to climb back up from the abyss, still she couldn’t give in to the ease of rest. She felt compelled to return. No, it was more than that. She wanted life. She wanted to tease Niko and Oz, drink beer with Tyler, needle Akemi and Lise, walk through the forests at Horngate and swim in the high mountain lakes ...so many things.

She ate her ice cream slowly, reveling in the sweet richness, her nose wrinkling at the smell of antiseptic cleaner and, beneath it, the tang of blood, sweat, and old fear. She felt shaky, but the food and IVs would fix that soon enough. In another twenty-four hours she’d be completely healed. She glanced at Alexander, lying two tables down. He appeared to be sleeping, though she would be surprised if he was. She frowned. Just what the hell was she going to do with him? What was Giselle planning to do with him?

“What happened?” Niko asked, coming to sit beside her and digging into his own ice cream.

Max gave him a sidelong glance, raising her brows quizzically.

Niko’s jaw jutted. “What?

“Getting a little pushy, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “But now I’ve seen you naked. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it?” He paused, humor draining from his face. “Of course, you were almost dead.”

“Don’t tell me you’d miss me,” Max said wryly, digging another spoonful of ice cream from the carton.

His reaction stunned her. “Fuck you,” Niko said, throwing his carton. It dented a cabinet and clanged loud in the truck trailer. He jumped to his feet, spinning to face her. “Just fuck you. I don’t deserve that. None of us do.”

Max looked at him, taken aback. He was quivering with fury. The muscles in his arms and neck corded as if it was taking all his control to hold himself back from hitting her. She set her ice cream down and held up her hands.

“Down, boy. It was a joke. What crawled up your ass and died?”

He sneered, “If it wasn’t for us calling you back, you’d have died on the table. Wouldn’t she?” he demanded, looking at Tyler and Akemi.

They nodded slowly, faces tight and cold, sharing Niko’s anger.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you were as good as dead. Giselle said you were keeping her from fixing you. She told us to talk to you, call you back. So we did. You want to know why? I’ll tell you. All three of us are still alive because of you’because of your training and because you’re not a stupid Prime. You always watch out for us. We can trust you. We like you a lot, when you aren’t acting like an asshole.” Niko’s gaze slid to Alexander, who had sat up when the ice cream had hit the cabinet. “We don’t fucking want any other Prime. We want you. We belong to you. Get it?”

Max couldn’t find any words. She’d never really thought of what her Blades might think of her. If anything, she’d imagined that they looked at her with a mixture of resentment for beating survival skills into them, flavored with a bizarre gratitude for keeping their skins intact. She’d always thought of herself as infinitely replaceable and preferred it that way. That way she didn’t have to worry about them if she got killed.

“Okay. Got it,” she said finally.

“And?”

“And what?”

“And turnabout is fair play. If we belong to you, then you belong to us and you’ve got to start acting like it.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “What does that mean?”

“It means we’ve got a right to watch out for you, too,” Tyler said suddenly.

“That’s not your job. You exist to protect Giselle.”

“We’re calling it our job,” Akemi said in a quiet, ironhard voice. “Protecting Giselle means keeping you around. All of our compulsion spells know it. I don’t know why you don’t.”

That floored Max. She looked at each of them, her mouth gaping. “What do you mean?” Then her stomach clenched and she felt sick. Had Giselle woven an extra compulsion into their spells? “No. You are not responsible for me. I won’t be the reason you guys get killed.”

“You’re the reason we have stayed alive this long,” Niko countered. “Get this straight. We want to be responsible for you and we mean to be. The hell with whether you agree or not.”

He went and picked up his ice cream, then came and sat back beside her. “So what happened?” he asked conversationally.

Max sat a moment, then shook her head, giving in. For now. “The usual sort of thing. Selange wanted retribution for me being in Julian. I deserved it. I shouldn’t have got caught.” She did not look at Alexander. “Anyhow, she chose endurance for the challenge, with the loser Blade forfeit to the winning witch. She wanted to know why Giselle sent me to Julian and probably figured she’d be able to torture it out of me.”

“But you won.”

Max nodded. “But before we could get free of the veil, Selange ported through her Shadowblades and they ambushed us. We got out, but with a couple of souvenirs. That’s about it.”

“What about him?” Tyler asked, jerking his thumb at Alexander, who was staring annoyingly at Max.

The intensity of his look drilled through her. Like he wanted something from her. She looked away, shrugging. “What about him? He fought hard. He belongs to us now.”

“You can’t trust him,” Niko argued.

She met Alexander’s gaze again. “Yeah. I know.” Then she shook her head, grogginess making her body feel clumsy and slow. “I need some sleep.”

Instantly Niko slid off the table, taking her ice cream. “We’ll keep watch.”

She didn’t have to hear the end of it to understand his meaning’they’d watch Alexander in case he tried anything. He wouldn’t. He was too smart for that. But there was no point in telling them so. They weren’t going to listen.

Max yawned, her jaw cracking. She lay back down, closing her eyes, her head starting to ache. “Okay. Take turns. We all need to be as sharp as possible. I’ve got a feeling there’s plenty more trouble coming, and until we get back to Horngate, we can’t afford to relax even an inch.”

“Don’t need to be able to scry to know that,” Tyler muttered. “Anybody who doesn’t know it deserves to be pushing up daisies.”

Max smirked, but didn’t answer. Instead she tried to think and plan. But fractures of exhaustion opened up ribbons of darkness in her mind, and soon she found herself sinking into velvet sleep.

When she woke again, dark was falling. Though the doors remained closed on the truck trailer, she felt the surge of night deep inside the marrow of her bones. Sometime in the day the trucks had moved’she’d been aware of the rumbling and movement.

She swung her legs over the edge of the gurney and sat up. Akemi paced along the wall, while Niko and Tyler slept in the aisles on either side of Max’s perch. The moment she moved, they rolled to their feet. Alexander sat up slowly, running his fingers through his short hair, making it stand on end.

Max began to stretch and then caught herself. With a grimace she pulled the IVs from the backs of her hands and tossed them aside, then slid down to the floor. Her skin felt tight and hot and her body felt achy, as if she had a fever. She braced back against the table, waiting for her body to settle and her muscles to firm. She was sore, but that soreness was fast evaporating. Watery strength flowed sluggishly through her. She straightened, shaking herself and rolling her shoulders to loosen them.

“I need a shower,” she announced, then made for the door. She stopped before opening it and looked back. Akemi was right behind her. “Find him some clothes,” she told Tyler and Niko, jerking her chin at Alexander. “Then set up a watch outside.”

Max didn’t wait for a reply, stepping through the door into the light-sealed throughway and closing the panel behind her. When it snicked shut, a light inside switched from red to blue, and she slid open the outer panel, stepping out into a closet-size room. It contained a couple of fold-down bunks like the ones in the RV, a cabinet full of food, and another of weapons and emergency supplies.

Lise was sitting on the bunk with a shotgun across her knees. Strapped to her hips were two Glocks. She was ambidextrous and could hit two apples at the same time out of a tree at fifty yards without any trouble. She stood up when Max came through, propping the barrel of the gun against her shoulder and giving Max a quick once-over.

“Shit. They said you were alive, but I wasn’t sure anyone could survive that.” Lise tipped her head to the side. “If you didn’t want me to borrow the clothes, you could have just said so.”

Max grinned. “Sorry. Maybe next time. Where’s Giselle?”

“In the RV.”

“Where are we parked?”

“Unocal 76 truck stop in Ontario, just off the 15 and the 10.”

“Good. That puts us out of Selange’s territory. She won’t have an easy time finding us with the wards active. I’ve got time to shower.” Max turned to Akemi, who’d followed her. “Go check on Giselle, then grab some food and rotate out with Niko and Tyler so that you all eat before trouble hits again.”