Vishous frowned as the image of his forsaken mother lying on that bedding platform came back to him.
You’d better fucking make good on that promise, he thought at the heavens. You’d better man up and take care of the two of them.
Mary fell to her knees by Rhage’s head and put her ear down to his mouth. The fact that the medical staff backed off was no doubt lost on her, but Vishous knew what that meant and it was nothing good. That heart rate that was being monitored so closely wasn’t getting more stable. That blood pressure wasn’t getting stronger. That bleeder wasn’t fixing itself. And the tube and the needle hadn’t gone nearly far enough.
V looked over at Butch, and as the cop stared back across the drama, V thought about how the three of them had formed such a tight bond. The troika, they were called. Tight as ticks, and annoying as shit, in the words of Tohr.
V glanced around. The other Brothers had all circled in close, forming a barrier of protection and worry around Rhage and Mary. None of the fighters had put their weapons away, however, and from time to time, a gunshot rang out as they picked off slayers whose bodies were showing too much animation.
As Mary began to speak with soft desperation, Vishous cursed again as it dawned on him that even though the couple had an endgame that resulted in them being together, the rest of them were going to lose Rhage—and Mary. Goddamn it, it was impossible to imagine the mansion without them.
Shit was not supposed to go down like this.
Strike that, he thought, as he remembered his vision. He didn’t want it to end like this.
V shifted his eyes to his mate, and as Jane just shook her head, his blood ran cold.
Jesus Christ, no.
Abruptly, an image of Rhage at the Pit’s Foosball table came to mind. The Brother hadn’t been playing at the time; he’d been standing off to the side, chowing down on some kind of bedroll-as-burrito from Taco Bell. He’d been double-fisted eating, actually—with a chimichanga in the other hand. Alternating bites, the SOB had gone on to consume about four thousand calories, what with the mint-chocolate-chip ice cream he’d macked from their fridge and the half a chocolate cake he’d had for dessert before coming over from the main house.
Hey, V, the Brother had said at one point. You ever going to shave off that ugly bath mat around your piehole? Or are you gonna keep looking like an Affiliction reject as a public service for what not to do with a razor?
So fucking irritating.
And wouldn’t he give his remaining nut to have any part of that again. Even if only as a good-bye.
Time was way too finite: no matter how much of it you had with someone you loved, when the end came, it wasn’t nearly enough.
“I love you,” Mary croaked. “I love you…”
As she stroked Rhage’s blond hair off his forehead, his skin was so cold and strangely dry. His blood-speckled mouth was moving, but he didn’t have enough air in his lungs to speak—and oh, God, they were gray … his lips were turning …
Mary looked up at Manny. Doc Jane. Ehlena. Then she met the eyes of the Brothers. John Matthew. Blay and Qhuinn.
The last one she stared at was Vishous … and she was horrified by the distant light in his eyes.
They had given up. All of them. Nobody was rushing to push her out of the way so they could intubate her mate, or shock his heart back into a rhythm, or crack his rib cage open and do whatever it took to get whatever was wrong back in working order.
Rhage arched with a groan and coughed some more blood up. And as he began to choke, she knew a new definition of terror.
“I’ll find you,” she told him. “On the other side. Rhage! Do you hear me? I’ll find you on the other side!”
The gasping and rattling, the pain on his face, the agony of the group around them … everything became so crystal-clear that it hurt her eyes and ears, staining her brain forever. And strangely, she thought of Bitty and her mother and what had happened at the clinic.
Oh, shit, if she left the planet … what was going to happen to the girl? Who was going to care as much as she did for the now-orphan?
“Rhage…” Mary pulled at his shoulders. “Rhage! No! Wait, stay here—”
Later, she would try to tease out why the synaptic connection got made when it did. She would wonder how she had possibly thought of it all … would get into cold sweats about what would have happened next—and what would not have happened next—if that bolt of lightning hadn’t come out of the blue when it did.
Sometimes the near miss was almost as traumatic as the impact.
But all that came afterward.
In the moment of her beloved’s demise, at the very instant that she sensed he had left his body to make the trip to the Fade … suddenly, and for no reason that she could think of, she barked, “Roll him onto his side. Do it!”
She started pulling on him herself, but got nowhere—he was too heavy and she couldn’t get a good grip on his massive torso.
Looking up, she motioned at the Brothers. “Help me! Fucking help me!”
V and Butch dropped down with her and eased Rhage onto his right side. Arching around her mate, Mary recoiled for a split second. The bright colors of the dragon’s tattoo were fading, as if the brilliance of the depiction were a barometer of Rhage’s health. Snapping back into focus, she put her hands on the beast’s form—and, God, she hated how sluggish the response was.
“Come with me,” she said urgently. “I need you to come with me.”
This was crazy, she thought as she slowly drew her palms around Rhage’s torso—but something drove her on, some kind of will that certainly didn’t feel like her own. She wasn’t going to argue, though, as the representation of the beast followed her touch—and it was strange: It wasn’t until she made her way onto his ribs that she realized what she was doing.
Crazy, she thought again. Completely nuts.
Come on, it wasn’t like the dragon had been trained in emergency medicine—much less cardiac surgery.
But she didn’t stop.
“Help me,” she choked to the beast. “Oh, please … figure it out, help him, save him … save yourself by saving him…”
She just couldn’t let Rhage go. It didn’t matter in these last few moments that there was a cosmic out for the two of them, that because of what the Scribe Virgin had given her, they didn’t have to worry about some kind of separation. She was going to try to save him.
Working with her, the Brothers eased Rhage flat on his back again, and Mary’s tears dropped onto her mate’s bare chest as she transferred her hands over to the deceptively small hole about an inch to the right of his sternum.
God, she felt like the wound should be the size of a grave.
“Just fix it … somehow, please … please…”
The tattoo settled where she stopped.
“Fix it.…”
Time slowed to a crawl, and through watery eyes she stared down at Rhage’s chest, waiting for a miracle. As minutes passed and she transitioned to a wretched emotional plane that was more keyed up than full-on panic, much lower than totally depressed, and so vast it was twice the size of the galaxy, she thought back to what Rhage had said about the hours he’d spent at her bedside in that human hospital: knowing she was going to die, unable to affect anything, lost even though he knew the address of where his physical body was.
It was as if gravity had no hold on me, he’d said, and yet it was crushing me at the same time. And then you would close your eyes, and my heart would stop. All I could think of was that, at some moment in the future, you were going to look like that forever. And the only thing I knew for sure was that I was never going to be the same, and not in a good way … because I was going to miss you more than I would ever care about anything else in my life.
But then the Scribe Virgin had changed all that.
Yet here Mary was … fighting to keep him alive.