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C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

W
e walked forever.

I floated in and out of the ether, but every time I drifted back, Asher’s green eyes watched over me. He never tired, and it reminded me of that other time he’d carried me. He’d almost died, and I’d thought I would die in his place when I took his injuries. It seemed like one or the other of us was always on the verge of death. We swirled in a mad waltz with the Grim Reaper, balancing on our toes to keep from falling.

A dark gray haze coated the world, and Asher looked fuzzier than before. I blinked, but that only made it more difficult to keep my eyes open. It didn’t seem right to give in to unconsciousness. It occurred to me that I was losing too much blood, but I couldn’t open my mouth to tell Asher. I couldn’t fight the desire to close my eyes anymore.

“Remy?”

I’m not sure how much time had passed before he abruptly stopped and shook me. Someone had replaced my insides with dust and left me a bloodless human sandbag. The beat of my heart slowed and stuttered.

Asher whispered to me, but the words no longer made sense. He laid me on the ground, and his hands pressed into my chest.

CPR. I
was dying. Asher would want me to heal myself.

I tried. Really, I did. But I was so tired, and the
humming
wouldn’t start.
Let me sleep.

“Damn you, Healer! Fight! Don’t you dare give up!”

The furious cursing wouldn’t stop. It badgered and prodded, screaming at me to heal myself.

“You can do this. Come on!”

I dug deep for a spark of energy and forced it straight to my heart. My entire body jerked into an arch and then slammed into the ground. It was like launching back into myself, and the reentry brought with it such a fiery storm of pain that I screamed. Then I did my best to make the bleeding stop.

“That’s it, Remy. You did good. I’m here.”

Arms encircled me, cradling me against a chest once more. If I could have fought him, I would have. The hold was tender, but not Asher’s. Reentry brought more than physical pain; it also brought me back to reality. He’d called me “Healer.” I didn’t need to open my eyes to see the truth of who held me, but I made myself to do it anyway.

Green eyes studied me with concern. Gabe’s green eyes.

I shuddered and hated him for making me come back to this hell.

If Gabe had a choice between saving his brother or me from our prison, he would always choose his brother. Gabe held me now, and that could only mean one thing. Asher really had died.

 

Gabe took me to a motel. He left me propped against a wall in an alley, while he went inside to secure a room. I’m not sure how he got away without questions, covered in bruises, dirt, and blood as he was, but Asher had always said that money could move mountains. God knew the Blackwells had a lot of it.

He’d died in that damned prison. What had been the point of my coming to San Francisco? I’d been trying to save us, but I’d gotten him killed instead. The Protectors had made it clear they were after me, not Asher.

I’d screwed up and lost the one person who mattered the most.

I should have died in that prison.

Gabe returned with a room key in his hand, took one look at the tears streaming down my face, and picked me up again without a word. Somehow he managed to work the key in the lock and get me into the room without having to set me down. He carried me straight into the bathroom and set me down on the toilet.

Standing over me, he examined me with a grimace. The look was one reserved for a task that you hated, like cleaning the hair out of a drain or taking out the trash.

He reached for me, and I shoved his hands away with my good arm.

“Go away, Gabe.”

One of his dark eyebrows peaked. “You know who I am?”

“Yes,” I answered bitterly.

“Good. That will make this much easier.”

He didn’t give me the chance to protest again. He gripped the hem of my tank top in both hands and yanked it up and over my head. Covering myself didn’t even enter my mind. Biting my lip bloody to hold in the screams pretty much took up all my strength as bits of the material that had stuck to my stomach wound loosened. The skin tore open again, and blood trickled down my belly and my back where the bullet had exited.

Gabe sucked in a deep breath and cursed.

I cursed right back at him, until he smacked a hand down over my mouth.

“Remy, shut up. We have to get this wound taken care of. I can’t take you to a hospital because they’ll be looking for you. So you and I are going to do this together. Got it?”

I didn’t want Gabe touching me. I could tell I didn’t have the ability to heal myself—I’d shorted out my powers and it would be hours or days before they returned. It didn’t matter, though. I didn’t deserve to be healed.

Gabe sighed. “Fine. You just sit there, and I’ll take care of it. But you should know, I’m tired and pissed off. Fight me once, and I’ll make you sorry.”

The threat in his voice sounded real enough that I sat very still. For a long moment. As soon as his hand lifted from my mouth, I shoved him again and ran, aiming for the door to the next room.

I’d gone a single step before I collapsed on the floor in a huddle, too weak to go any farther. I moaned. Gabe crossed his arms and stood over me, looking patient and arrogant all at once.

“Finished?” he asked.

It hit me how ridiculous I must look lying on the bathroom floor in my bra and jeans. I hated Gabe at that moment more than I’d ever hated anyone in my life. He bent and picked me up. After propping me against the wall, he stripped off my jeans so I stood before him in just my underwear. Then he spread a clean towel on the linoleum floor and laid me on top of it. He set to work on my injuries.

I decided the best way to deal with the situation was to pretend he didn’t exist. He pressed a towel to my stomach to stop the blood flow. That red-stained towel landed on the floor with a
splat
and was replaced by another.

At one point, he disappeared into the other room and made a call. I didn’t move when he answered a knock on the door a short time later. What was the point? Blood loss had made me too weak to fight, and I would never make it past him. The reason for his call became clear when he returned to the bathroom with a first aid kit and more clean towels.

Using alcohol wipes, Gabe cleaned the cuts that Xavier and Mark had taken their time giving me. I hissed and sank my nails into his forearm when he dug around in the bullet hole to clean it, and he didn’t react, even though I’d drawn blood. His touch remained impersonal, almost like a doctor working on a patient, but that didn’t take the sting of humiliation away. Laid out before him almost naked, I felt unbearably vulnerable. As I used to with Dean, I retreated into my oldest defense. I cut myself off from my emotions, refusing to cry in front of Gabe.

Once he’d bandaged the worst of my injuries, Gabe sat me up and knelt beside me, wiping his bloody hands on a hand towel. A sudden wave of dizziness hit me, and I glued my gaze to the wall, straining to stay upright.

Unable to stand the strained silence anymore, I said, “Are you finished?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shake his head. “Why aren’t you healing yourself?” he asked.

The blunt question startled me into looking at him. I swayed, and he pushed me upright again, guiding me to lean against the wall.

“Your arm is broken—”

“Whose fault is that?” I broke in.

He acted like I hadn’t said anything. “I’ve managed to dig out the bullet. We’re lucky it missed any vital organs. But it keeps bleeding.”

To prove his point, he tugged on the fresh towel he’d pressed to my stomach a short time ago. Fresh blood coated it. Well, that explained the light-headedness. How much had I lost? I started to explain that I couldn’t heal myself, even if I wanted to. My powers had shorted out. He didn’t give me a chance, though.

“You have to stop it,” he demanded, putting the towel back. “Heal yourself.”

The order infuriated me. For the last two days, every decision had been stolen from me. I’d been beaten and tortured. Toyed with by the bastards who’d killed Asher. And I’d been able to do nothing but take it. No more.

“No,” I whispered to Gabe. “Maybe I don’t want to live.”

“That’s bullshit. Help me heal you, Remy.”

He meant use his energy to heal myself. Asher had helped me that way a hundred times, but I couldn’t bear the thought of my energy mixing with Gabe’s like that. His touch and the way he resembled Asher hurt badly enough.

“No!”

Gabe didn’t listen. He started talking and wouldn’t stop. He badgered me. When that didn’t work, he ordered me to heal myself. His voice droned on. Fed up, I shut down. I sat in a motel bathroom with Gabe, but I had retreated inside myself. I wasn’t anyone’s property to be ordered about. I’d rather be dead. Without Asher, that seemed a real possibility.

At last, the words stopped. I watched Gabe give up, his shoulders sagging in defeat. He leaned against the opposite wall. His feet almost touched my bare ones. Resting his elbows on his knees, he cradled his head in his hands. He swiped his fingers across his face, and I realized with surprise that he was crying. Gabe, the big bad Protector, was crying. I hadn’t known he was capable of sorrow.

“He knew he might die for you. Asher knew it might happen, but he loved you enough to chance it.” Gabe’s deep voice echoed in the bathroom, and he spoke in a halting tone. “My brother died trying to save you. Are you such a coward that you’d throw that back in his face?”

That accusation battered me worse than every wound on my body. I crushed a fist to my mouth to hold in the sob that tried to escape.

“I can’t,” I pleaded with Gabe. “Not without him.”

“You can. You’re making a choice, Remy. A wrong choice that dishonors my brother.” He rose up on his knees again before me, but didn’t touch me when I shrank away from him. “And what about your family? You think these people won’t go after them?”

I hadn’t thought of my family. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think of them. God, I was so selfish. All I could see was the sharp knife of my grief. What if they got to my father or Laura or Lucy? But wouldn’t it be better if I just disappeared? Everywhere I went, I brought death. If I was gone, maybe my family stood a better chance.

As if he could hear the teetering of my thoughts, Gabe touched my knee. “Think, Remy. You have to be smart. I want to get the people who did this to my family, but I need your help. Please help me.”

His words, so like Asher’s, peeled a layer of my anger away. “You’ll die, too, Gabe. If I help you, you’ll end up dead. I can’t . . .” I broke off and took a deep breath. “I can’t be responsible for another person dying. Please don’t ask me . . .”

Gabe’s touch fell away from me when he stood and took a step back. His voice sounded cold and bitter. “Then I was right all along. You never deserved my brother, Healer.”

He left the bathroom, shutting the door behind him with a quiet
click
instead of slamming it. I almost wished he had slammed it. Anger was so much easier to deal with than disappointment. Sliding to the floor, I curled into a ball, wishing I’d died in that prison instead of Asher.

 

Gabe was right.

Asher deserved better than for me to give up. The longer I lay on that stupid bathroom floor, the more a singular solution began to take shape.

Revenge. Even with everything Dean had done to my mother and me, I’d only wanted to get away from him and the pain he’d caused. I hadn’t fantasized about hurting him the way he’d hurt me. Yet, the image of Asher getting shot point-blank had burned itself into my skull, and with Gabe’s words, a fire had started in my belly.

I wanted those men dead. They deserved to die.

The only thing I could do for Asher now was hunt down whoever had betrayed us in the first place. Gabe had stayed loyal to his brother, so who had told those men how to find us? It couldn’t have been chance that they kidnapped us at Inspiration Point. They’d waited for us and used Asher as bait to catch me. They knew I had a connection to Asher. The Protectors had to be watching my grandfather’s people closely, which meant that others were in danger. My grandfather must be sick with worry, and I’d hardly spared him a thought. I had to warn his people, help them if I could. And if I died doing so, what would it matter? At least, I would be dying for something instead of giving up on the floor of some lousy motel.

Eventually, I pulled myself up. Every muscle protested, reminding me of how bad my injuries were, and I grasped the sink when the world shifted and spun. I would never be able to heal myself alone in this condition.

I opened the bathroom door and nearly tripped over a sleeping Gabe. He’d stretched himself out on the floor next to the bathroom door, either to listen for my cries or to stop me from leaving if I tried to run. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he looked like hell.

Even sprawled out, he looked more wound up and tense than relaxed. Dark circles ringed his eyes. A purple bruise colored his forehead near the hairline, and I imagined he had bruises elsewhere. Too bad I wouldn’t be able to heal him anytime soon.

I nudged him with my foot, afraid I would pass out if I leaned down to wake him.

“Gabe,” I said.

He woke completely, shaking off sleep and shooting to his feet from one second to the next. When he grasped there was no threat, he relaxed from his fighting stance and sent me a curious glance.

I inhaled and exhaled through my nose. “Let’s get this over with, okay?”

I didn’t have to explain what I meant to him, and I was grateful. I knew I sounded bitchy, but I couldn’t help that. Gabe responded by guiding me to the bed and helping me to sit. Then he tugged a chair over and sank down into it. Unsure how to go about this without Asher’s guidance, I waited for Gabe to direct me. He held up his hand until I rested mine in it.