Bending, I scooped up the gory organ. Dirt and grass and dust clung to it. I didn’t bother to wash them away. If I could raise Sawyer from the dead, a little grit wouldn’t hurt him.
I pressed the heart back into his chest; the squishing sound nearly undid me. Someone was whimpering and so I crooned, “Shh. Shh,” as if talking to a frightened child. But I was just talking to myself.
My hand shook. My fingers were as cold as ice atop a lake, his skin the chill water beneath. I patted his chest, uncertain what to do next. Call the storm? Cast a spell? I couldn’t remember how to do one and didn’t know how to do the other.
I was in shock; I knew that, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from touching his face, calling his name. Then I was slapping him, begging him, and at last Jimmy came.
“Lizzy.” He grabbed one arm, Summer the other. I flipped my hands upward, but only Summer flew away. Jimmy was unaffected, the fairy dust spell still intact.
“Take it off,” Jimmy ordered Summer, his voice low and flat. He was angry, but I wasn’t sure why.
“Sh-she’ll hurt you.”
“Do it,” he said. “Now.”
Strange, but he sounded mad. At her.
“Hit me,” Jimmy whispered into my hair. “It might help. It usually does.”
I reached for Sawyer again, and this time when Jimmy took my arm I punched him. My fist met his rock-hard gut, and then I was crying, even though I never cried. There was no point. But again, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
The crying didn’t last, but the buzzing sense of unreality did. I kept expecting Sawyer to lift his head and demand to be released; then he’d annoy me, piss off Jimmy, scare Summer, and everything would be back the way it should be.
But, regardless of what I’d just accomplished, nothing was ever going to be as it should be again. I knew that.
I stared over Jimmy’s shoulder as he patted my back, stiffly, as if he didn’t want to hold me, to help me, but he didn’t have much choice.
My gaze was drawn to Sawyer’s tattoos. They no longer sparkled and danced; they were just ink, growing darker as his skin began to pale.
I inched out of Jimmy’s arms, and he breathed a sigh of relief. But when I reached again for Sawyer, Jimmy snatched my wrist before I could touch him.
“Take your hand off me before I break every finger you’ve got.” I met his eyes, and he lifted his arms, palms face out as he surrendered.
I moved closer to Sawyer’s body and rubbed my thumb, then my fingers, then my whole hand against the wolf on his biceps. I didn’t see a single shimmer, didn’t feel a breath of air, nor a hint of the phantom chill. I began to panic, frantically patting the tiger, the tarantula, the crocodile. None of them worked. Why would they? The power lay in Sawyer, not the ink.
There had to be a way to fix this. Maybe a spell. Hey—
“The key.”
That had been the mission all along. Find the key, send the Grigori back to hell. The spells in that book were ancient and obviously very powerful. There had to be something in there about raising the dead.
My clothes appeared in front of me, clutched in Jimmy’s hand. I’d forgotten I was naked. I had to be pretty out of it to forget that.
Yanking them on, I glanced at Summer, who hovered a few feet away chewing her nails, eyes on Jimmy. For an instant I felt sorry for her. If I’d seen this future, would I have agreed to anything to make it go away? I had no idea.
I hurried toward the porch, then walked up the steps to the place where I’d last seen the key.
It wasn’t there.
I turned right, then left, then all the way around. “You saw her with the book, didn’t you?”
Jimmy joined me, gaze becoming as frantic as mine. “What the fuck!”
“The Phoenix was reading it.”
“Then she put it down right there.” Jimmy pointed to the same place I’d expected to find the thing.
The three of us began to hunt all over the porch, in the bushes, the grass, everywhere. Once that was done, by unspoken consensus we went inside and searched the house, top to bottom. I touched everything, tried to see something, got a whole lot of nothing.
“This sucks!” I clenched my hands, frustrated, furious, and thunder rumbled in the west. I wanted to kill someone. My gaze moved to Summer, and Jimmy stepped between us.
“Not yet,” he said.
Summer’s eyes widened and, if possible, her already pale skin got paler. She’d never believed that Jimmy would kill her if he had to—she certainly wouldn’t kill him—but I think she was starting to catch a clue.
“Why not?” I asked.
“She did it for me,” Jimmy said softly.
“She’s a traitor. You know I can’t let her live.”
“You let me live.”
“You seriously think it’s the same thing? She knew what she was doing. She chose to sell her soul.”
“For me,” he repeated.
“And that excuses it? How many people died because she listened to Satan whispering? If the Phoenix had never been raised, Sawyer might still be alive.” Someone else would probably be dead, but I wasn’t exactly rational at the moment.