I'm still alive.
That's about all I can make out through the haze of agony filling up my body. My muscles feel heavy, numb, but my veins and arteries burn like they're on fire. I don't think there's enough blood left in me to move, though I try, anyway, when Valentine hisses into my ear and draws my arm toward him. He untied my hands some time ago, biting my wrists until the pain turned into paralysis.
The stars swim in the sky, fading away as clouds gather, heavy and low, thunder rumbling in the distance. It turns the air sticky, humid, but even though I'm sweating, I feel myself shiver, too.
Valentine notices. "I know you're enjoying this, but we're going to stop soon. One of us better show some control, Nina."
When I bare my teeth at him, he laughs and shows me his own, testing my arm the way a lab technician does to find a vein to draw blood from. "Just one more for the trip home."
"Mercywing?" The word scrapes over my tongue. I don't want to talk to him. I don't want to do anything except rip his heart out. But the small part of me aware enough to plan realizes there's a better chance of getting away in an area I know than in a strange landscape.
"You're still very alert," he says, and I can't tell whether he's pleased or disappointed. "Better take my time with this one."
As he holds my arm, head tilted like he's listening to the pulse, his teeth slide out. Fear flares up, giving me enough energy to flinch. He can change their shape and amount to whatever he wants. His mouth bristled like a shark's for the first bite, the one on my neck that throbs in agony with each breath. But sometimes, he gives himself fangs like a snake, puncturing my skin instead of ripping it open, leaving the flesh there numb, paralyzed.
His skin feels stretched and flushed as he prods at me, like he overstuffed himself on my blood. Nausea chokes up my throat. My body is cooler than his at this point, but even as he hisses in satisfaction over finding a good vein, I realize there's a warmth growing up my arm. It feels familiar, flickering bright and easy like... Like ink. I twitch as something drifts through me, rising above the numbing fear. Hope.
The warmth matches my pulse, and a glance at Valentine tells me he doesn't suspect anything. But I do. It's the same arm Gideon used to watch my heartbeat. No, how had he put it? Track my heartbeat. Is it really him? Do I have that much of a chance?
Valentine shifts his grip on my arm, and I have a split second to tense, something clawing up my throat as his teeth gleam despite the dark. Then he bites, lips clamping down to get as much of the blood as he can. I hear myself make a noise, the agony driving the breath out of me. The feel of him licking and sucking at my vein overwhelms any other sensation, and tears run down my face from pure frustration over losing the feeling of ink.
But after a few seconds, the warmth floods through my arm again, spiking into prickling heat where Valentine drinks from. He jerks back, snarling like he was burned by silver. Seeing him being the one to flinch gives me energy, and I use the last reserves in my free arm to scrabble at the collar around my neck, trying to find the catch. He notices and grabs my hand hard enough to make the bones throb. The look on his face is terrifying, but I've been terrified the entire fucking week, and now I'm coming out on the other side. He's going to hurt me anyway, so I'm going to dig into him as much as possible, and at least ruin his great night. "Go on, motherfucker. Keep drinking."
I'm rewarded for that with a punch to the gut that leaves me gasping, but I don't care. The pain from it simply merges with a strange sort of glee at seeing him gagging on my blood.
Lightning flashes close by, and thunder shakes the ground around us. Growling, Valentine drags me up by the collar, cutting off my breath as he pulls me backward toward his truck. My fingernails rip into his arm, stopping only when a lightning bolt strikes a nearby tree, sending us both flinching away. The air sizzles against my skin. Valentine must feel it, too, because he picks up his pace, and when I twist around, trying to get a better target on his grip, I can see the new wariness on his face, his confusion as he glances up at the roiling sky.
We're at the truck. He's not letting up, and I'm starting to black out, fingers clawing air as much as him when he opens the door. His hand tightens around my throat, just above the collar, and I think he's going to throw me in, but he only slams me against the side. As a fresh wave of pain rolls up my spine, his fingers dig in, still slick with my blood. When he speaks, there's real frustration in his voice. "What the fuck are you doing?"
Then the air falls very still, and the look on his face changes. I feel it too, skin prickling even as I use his distraction to scratch at his face frantically. It works, getting him to let go long enough to slap me. I scramble back into the truck just as light blasts over us, overwhelming the stinging in my face with clean heat. I squeeze my eyes shut against the blinding brightness, feeling waves roll over me, pulling me away from the raw pain of my body, the crushing thunder, and Valentine's screams. Pulling me away from everything.
Eventually, the light narrows to a white disc, fading in strength until I can look without squinting. I blink, slowly realizing I'm staring at the moon, calm and still. Stars glimmer in a cloudless sky, and I feel dirt scrape against my back and legs. Somehow, I got out of the truck. That gets me shaking, wondering if Valentine did it, if he survived the lightning strike, too. But that doesn't seem right; he'd be on me right now.
Thunder still rumbles in the distance, but the air no longer crackles with energy. And as my pulse fades from my ears, I hear a voice, familiar and urgent.
"Phoenix."
It sounds so far away, like the pain throbbing through my body pushes everything else back for miles. My eyelids feel scratchy as sand when I close them, wanting to slip away.
"Phoenix. Stay with me, love." Warmth shoots along my arm, as prickly with panic as the words.
It's too much to ignore, and with a wince, I crack open my eyes. But instead of the moon, I see...
Gideon. Smeared in blood and ash, he leans over me, gaze fixed on my face like I'll disappear if he so much as blinks. "That's it. Stay with me," he repeats.
It's hard to. My lungs struggle to take in air. I feel fingers at my neck, and realize they're mine, scratching at a collar that's no longer there.
"It's gone. I took it off you," says Gideon, words turning tense as he figures out what I'm trying to do.
"Valentine," I manage. "Is he..."
Something flashes across his face, too fast to make out. "I burned him to an ash pile."
I blink, waiting for some sense of relief or glee. Instead, I feel my throat spasm, and mumble the first words that come to mind. "I'm going to throw up."
He gets me on my side before I do, one hand holding back my hair while I retch. His other hand applies pressure to the wound in the hollow above my collarbone, the bite that hurts the most. My neck there feels like it splits open with each motion, but that's not nearly as scary as what comes out of me. Because it's not food or stomach bile; it's black, clot-filled slime.
"He bit me," I choke out, finally realizing the significance. Something I didn't think about earlier, couldn't, not with all my attention fixed on getting away, whether that meant fighting free or disappearing down inside myself. He bit me, and now I'm changing over. My stomach lurches in another dry heave.
Gideon's hand remains steady. "Yes. And you're still bleeding from one of them."
When I feel the warmth of ink join Gideon's fingers on my neck, I try tugging his hand away. "Forget it. It's too late." Something claws up inside my chest, howling over surviving only to be left with this. I think I can even hear Valentine laugh, if I listen hard enough.
But Gideon's talking, his voice breaking through the noise in my head. "If I don't work on the bite above your clavicle, you'll go into a level of hypovolemic shock I can't bring you back from. You'll die in minutes."
"Gonna die, anyway. Won't be a vampire." Made into something of his and then left sucking on pig hearts to survive? That's no fucking life I want.
"Then give yourself hours instead of minutes." The frustration behind his words is clear.
"Can't. I'm done. He took too much with him." Every part of my body goes limp, feeling the truth in those words. It's not a bad time to go, anyway. It's all over. Valentine can't hunt anyone else. Gideon is still free, and now he can disappear from Slake's radar without a trace. All that's left is for me to sink past all this pain. Even the angry thing behind my ribs feels spent, falling quiet.
But then Gideon's free hand brushes hair away from my face, pulling me back. And when I focus on him, his expression is as raw as his voice. "Don't leave me, Firebird. Not yet."
His ink prickles against my skin, and I realize it's devastating to him, seeing me slip away by the second when he could stop it. I decided to die for Elliot. Is it worth stretching this hell out if it means living a little longer with Gideon?
I take one breath. Then another. The pain scratches my words hoarse. "Patch me up."
The current of warmth in my arm flares with the ink against my skin, light and heat rushing to my neck. I flinch, expecting pain, but all I feel is a dull tugging, like getting stitches after being numbed up, first. Gideon's fingers move away from my neck. After a short silence, he says, "The bleeding stopped. Does it hurt any less?"
It's easy to read between the lines. The bleeding stopped, but the wound still exists. I glance at his hand, the one that was pressed against the bite, and feel my stomach roll again. There isn't regular blood on his fingers, but the same clotted, black gunk. My gaze jumps to his face, finding the worry behind his calm expression in how he never looks away. It takes a few breaths to feel out the dulled pain scraping in my neck. "It's not as bad."
More importantly, I already feel enough of my body against the dirt to figure out how to push myself up. Gideon murmurs something as I struggle, but his words disappear under the pounding in my ears, as hard and fast as if I've been running. The world tilts dangerously until his arm wrap around my ribs.
Dimly, I'm aware that his jacket was draped over me and is sliding off as I struggle, that my clothes are gone and nothing covers me except dirt and blood, but there's no time to be embarrassed while my muscles decide whether to work together or let me fall. It's the kind of grit-your-teeth attitude that got me through so many moments while caring for Gran, and I cling to it now.
But as soon as I'm up and sitting, feeling my hair slither down my back in dirty snarls and the skin on my legs press together clammy and sticky, I start shaking. My body feels unfamiliar, like it can't recognize itself.
"Here." Gideon's arm pulls back, and I hear the rustle of leather before he hands me his jacket.
Shrugging into it surrounds me with warmth, with the smell of rich leather. Once my shivering stops, Gideon clears his throat. "Would you like me to work on the other bites as well?"
"No." There are plenty—he went down to my breasts before moving along my arms—and they hurt like fuck. But I don't want Gideon seeing me like this.
The night air is still hot and humid from the thunderstorm, but that doesn't keep me from pulling the jacket closer as I glance around, trying to find Valentine's remains. "Where'd he end up?"
Light streams from Gideon's ink, guiding my gaze to a dark smear in the dirt several feet away. Beyond it, trails of blood splatter lead in all directions, only one ending up back at Valentine's truck. Gideon doesn't say anything, but I still answer as if he asked. "He let me escape a couple of times just so he could chase me down again. I thought I got a lot further away than I did."
It's too fresh to be fully memory, and my mind flinches away as soon as I think about it. I look at Gideon instead, suddenly realizing all of the blood on him might not be mine. "Are you okay? He didn't..."
"I'm fine. There was plenty of power to use from the thunderstorm. He stood no chance against lightning." His voice sounds careful, even, but his ink flickers in sharp patterns.
My glance turns into a stare. "You did that? The lightning strike?"
"The energy was there and I was angry."
He says it so casually, like manipulating nature is as easy as metal magic. No wonder Slake scurries around, trying to get him back. Slake.
"Slake's here," I say in a rush, ignoring how my throat spasms.
Gideon settles next to me. "At the moment, I don't give a shit about INKtech or its agents."
"No, he knows you're here, too."
He rubs the back of his neck, ink calmer than I expected. "You saw him?"
"Down at the police station in Slocata. He talked to me. Thinks I'm pulling you along. Distracting you from your duty." I twitch my good shoulder, the best shrug I can manage. There's so much to explain, and I don't want to waste time on any of it.
I glance around again, this time finding Gideon's motorcycle, parked nearby and glimmering softly. "I also heard him talking with a detective, angry like he just missed catching you."
"I was caught, but escaped on the way to Glimmer."
"What happened?"
"Bad luck. A police officer recognized my face. Since I studied their methods for chasing fugitives, I knew it'd be easier to let him arrest me and then escape unnoticed. Easier, but it also took longer. They shipped me halfway to Glimmer before I cracked the restraining code placed on my handcuffs. When I finally made it back to the motel and found the room torn apart and you missing..." Then he shakes his head. "I shouldn't have left you."
I shrug it away. Considering the circumstances, it's nothing I didn't bring onto myself. "How'd you get out of the handcuffs?"
"If you can stomach dislocating your thumbs and later snapping them back into place, it isn't that difficult. Neither was finding where they'd stored my motorcycle and sneaking it out. The local police simply aren't competent against protecting their databases."
I almost ask whether the handcuff trick would work with rope, too, not wanting to ever be in a situation like that again and unable to do anything. But I won't be, will I? The stars are fading in a sky that grows lighter by the second. Swallowing back a sudden spike of fear, I reach out and brush his ink, ignoring the pull of bites along my arm. "I'm sorry I got you into this. You'll be able to disappear later, right?"
"Don't speak as if you're already dead." His voice turns rough again, but his fingers are gentle as they cover mine.
"I'm good as."
His mouth tightens into a stubborn line. "You may not even become a vampire. Your metabolism is different than a human's; it's very possible you can fight this off."
I give him a lopsided smile. "Sound like you're trying to convince yourself as much as me."
The eastern horizon is now a periwinkle color, and the thin clouds drifting by glow pink at their edges. Fresh fear slicks my mouth, but I can't find any other words. Gingerly, I lean over and rest my head against Gideon's shoulder, ignoring how the bite above my collar bone strains from the movement.
We wait some more, hands locked together. The sky grows even lighter.
"They tried to erase you from my memory," he says, suddenly, as if compelled to speak before it's too late for me to hear. "After I returned from visiting your house and uploaded my report. They realized I didn't merely think in ways they hadn't anticipated, but acted on impulse, as well. If I'd let them, I could have continued integrating at the levels they'd set for me. The engineers had arranged plans to let me develop a relationship in a few years, possibly even start a family down the road. The outlook wasn't terrible."
Sounds fucking awful to me. "Then why break from it?"
He sighs. "I'm not sure. I kept thinking of you. Not only of your predicament and my promise, but you. The engineers know how to manipulate brain chemistry to induce romantic attraction and attachment. I would have fallen in love with the partner chosen for me. But she wouldn't have been Phoenix Belmonte."
My breath hitches in my lungs as my eyes threaten to blur over. I don't want to give him tears, so instead I tug his arm closer, guiding it up until I can kiss the patterns glimmering over his skin.
We're facing the eastern horizon when the sky glows orange. Adrenaline kicks through me as we both get up. I stagger a little until Gideon steadies me. After going through so many levels of fear, it's hard to believe there's a new one to feel, but there it is in my chest, sharp and stabbing. I try telling myself that it'll be quick, that all this pain will stop. But the bites along my skin sting as I sweat and shake, nerves getting the better of my feeble attempt at acceptance. I don't want to die like this.
When I try to tug my hand free, Gideon keeps his fingers entwined with mine. "I remember dying alone. It wasn't pleasant."
"It'll change you," I say, voice trembling as the distant mountains become rimmed with gold. "Watching me die. You'll be sorry having that memory with the rest."
"No," he says, and something in his voice makes me look over despite everything. "Having it will mean I can remember you."
I want to say something, anything, but a new warmth in the air sends me turning back to the east. I have a split second to see the glaring shape of the sun, and then the pain hits me.
Brilliant heat pours over my body, blistering through my neck and shoulder, through every bite Valentine made. Oh, God, now I know why Laci shrieked. I think I'm disintegrating down to the bone, unable to get away even though I smell my own flesh smoking. My ears are sizzling as I scream myself hoarse. I can't see or hear anything, all senses reduced to agony and unbearable light. My skin burns as I ball up, trying to hide as much of myself as possible.
Somehow, I draw in a breath, the air sick and heavy in my chest. A second breath rasps against my throat, and I cough, feeling my ribs crackle. Fuck me, why don't I die already?
But then the next breath is a little easier. My bones grow solid again, their agony ebbing until I can pick out my limbs from Gideon's. He's holding me. That must mean there's enough of me left to be held. And there's enough of me left to feel his lips murmur against my ear, the words as raw as my body.
I cling to him, still blind from the sun's glare as the sensation of scorched skin fades to the itch of a sunburn. When my hand fumbles for the lingering pain above my collarbone, right where Valentine made his first bite, it comes away bloody. Clean, red, normal blood. The prickling along my skin fades to the simple warmth of sunlight. I made it through.
There's noise coming out of me, either laughing or crying, as I bury my face into Gideon's shoulder. It's too much to take in, this morning and last night, and I don't know how to react, anymore. I made it through—and everything is still so fucked up. Gideon just holds me tight.
Finally, I turn my face back to the sun, trying to soak in every ray of light. Even as my bones settle together under the heat, old worries sink back into my mind. Everything is still really fucked up. "It's not over. Slake. He thinks..."
Gideon shifts against me, lips still by my ear. "Slake thinks you're working with other wolf witches to kill people who were truly murdered by Valentine. He also thinks I'm to become another victim."
I pull back enough to look at him. "How did you..."
He smiles, grimly. "Because blaming wolf witches has been encouraged in this case from the moment INKtech joined it. I have suspicions why, but no proof."
Gnawing on my lip, I admit, "A wolf from my mom's pack is being pinned as the ringleader. Even if Valentine's gone, he's still destroying things in my life. I can't just run. And I don't know what happened to my phone, so I need to tell them in person about Slake, and what really happened. It's just something I have to do."
I word that last sentence carefully, wanting him to know he can get out of this, that the promise he made what seems like years ago has definitely been fulfilled.
But he doesn't even hesitate. "Where do we need to go?"
I suck in a breath, feeling new nerves flutter through me. "Red Devil Mountain."