She didn’t hear his words, was unmoved by his begging, even when he crawled to her feet and sobbed. How many others were there? How many for Gordon? At least a dozen over the years; she could feel it. A dozen women’s voices cried out to her as if they stood beside her. The choir of the dead, her own voice joining them, once an angel’s song but now a scream.
Snap.
Slowly, she turned back around, her eyes falling on the one thing that made any sense: her guitar. They had left it unmolested on the ground, near the strewn contents of her purse. Cell phone, discarded; wallet, emptied; girl, fucked.
It occurred to some part of her to wonder what time it was, how long she’d been in this alley waiting to die. It was still wet, but the rain had passed. She was soaked, and the cold was gradually penetrating her mind, her body shaking so violently she couldn’t stay on her feet.
She fell hard to her knees, feeling the pain distractedly. It faded into the din of other injuries. Her whole body was on fire, even her skin.
Her eyes lowered, as always, this time to her hands. They were bloody and filthy, her bitten nails crusted with the remains of Gordon’s eye and dirt from her feeble struggles on the ground. Such small hands. Mike had always said she had lovely hands. He’d loved holding them, her palm disappearing into his broad one. Once, her hands could have done anything. She’d majored in psychology for a while, anthropology, even considered med school. She wanted to make a difference. She might one day have been a counselor assigned to a young woman like her.
She was sobbing quietly, but she heard the footsteps and froze.
Someone was coming toward the alley. Someone familiar.
She recognized it immediately: the darkness from earlier tonight, a time that felt like a thousand years ago. She knew it was the same person and wondered how she had mistaken it for the men who now lay dead around her. They were nothing alike.
Fear gripped her again, but she couldn’t stand. She couldn’t move. If he had come for her life, he could have it. It didn’t matter anymore.
A shadow fell over her.
Suddenly something took hold of her mind, and the cacophony of emotions and voices that had moved through her the entire night cut off, the silence inside her so complete that it hurt. She would have screamed, but her throat was full of shards of ice. She didn’t know what to do with silence. She no longer understood it.
The silence was followed by something else she hadn’t felt in months: warmth.
She tried to shrink back from the hand that cupped her chin, but she had no strength left. She remembered—slender fingers, black cuffs, taking a basket from her. Those same fingers gently turned her head this way and that, looking her over, while she felt that warm energy gliding through her, cataloging her wounds, assessing her crumbling mental state. The touch was the most intimate she’d had in years, aside from what the men had done to her, but it was so different, she couldn’t be afraid.
Finally, a third pulse of energy touched her, and it felt like her entire body had been massaged and oiled. Pain faded, and she collapsed, limp, into a fold of black held out for her.
She could barely see, but a faint red light caught her eyes, and she stared into it, wishing she could draw the glow into her . . . she lifted one hand and touched the light, feeling something cool and hard, like stone.
She heard him speak, but not to her. “Star-three.” After a pause, he went on. “Faith, I need your team at these coordinates immediately.”
Faintly she heard a woman’s voice reply, “As you will it, Sire.”
Then, his voice was directed into her ear: “Rest, little one. You’re safe now.”
Sleep rose up over her in sweet dark waves, and she gave in to it gratefully. The last thing she saw was a pair of midnight blue eyes.