EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Forty-Nine

It was the SOS signal that had saved us.

Adam explained that when he saw the ICD pulsing out the dots and dashes on the table, he ran to the hotel to find me. By the time he got there, Sage had already shown up, having changed her mind about offering help. But they both arrived only to find a desperate Piper, who informed them that Robbie and Mom were missing.

Together, they had all put the puzzle pieces together. Sage knew there was only one place Alexei would have taken everyone: the room under the rose bush. And so she had led them there.

Hours later, when we finally emerged into the world above, the rising sun was already beginning to stain the sky pink. Robbie had called Piper by that point to tell her where we were, and she was now running around the rose garden like a mother hen bringing everybody blankets and pouring iodine in people's wounds. John had come, too, and Robbie had stepped up to explain to him that Mom was gone. I had meant to do it myself, but I still couldn't bring myself to say the words.

Now John sat alone on a large boulder, his brown eyes haunted as he stared into space. I knew that he and Mom had never had a perfect marriage. She'd been cheating on him with Alexei almost from the beginning.

But he loved her. In fact, she may have been the only woman he'd ever loved. And now she was gone. There was nothing I could say to comfort him. Nothing that could make it hurt less. So I left him alone.

Sage watched him from a slight distance, her hands working in nervous knots over the beads in her bracelet. I didn't know how she felt about him now, in this dimension where he had left her for Mom. And so I was surprised when she sat down by his side and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. He immediately collapsed into her, and she held him while he cried.

I felt a great swell of pain at the sight of his grief, an echo of everything I was feeling inside. So I was relieved when I looked away and found Adam's eyes on mine. His nervous shaking had stopped, and a calmness had taken its place. I offered the barest whisper of a smile, and before I knew it he had his arms around me.

Kieren was the most seriously injured of all of us. He was sitting on the ground nearby, his face an eerie shade of green as he held a hand over the bullet wound in his arm. I patted Adam's hand gently before slipping out of his arms and kneeling down by Kieren's side.

"We need to get you to the hospital," I said softly.

"They'll ask who shot me."

"Alexei shot you."

"Then they'll ask where Alexei is."

"And we'll say he's dead."

He smiled through gritted teeth, and I couldn't tell if he was amused or just biting back the pain. "And who killed him, M?"

I halted, my eyes flitting to Adam for just a moment before returning to Kieren. Adam had already been arrested once for sneaking onto the grounds of the botanical gardens. How would it look if the police knew he had come back and shot the very man he had tried to attack months before? Nobody would believe it was self-defense. Adam would end up in jail.

"I—I don't know," I admitted. "But I'm not going to let you sit here and bleed to death."

"I'll live."

"Kieren—"

Suddenly a voice came from above us. "I killed him."

My head whipped around, and it was the last person I had expected to find. Jin stood above us, his lab coat draped over his arm. He looked as exhausted as the rest of us, having been up all night trying to make sense of the fact that his new business partner was actually a homicidal kidnapper with plans of world domination.