He’ll heal. You would consider it rapidly. He won’t. And it’ll be hell.
I’d pondered having the ability to simply kill yourself if you were badly wounded, so you could swiftly end your suffering and come back perfect again. It had been beyond my comprehension. What a leap of faith to bleed yourself out. I decided they must have died so many times that they either had implicit trust they would always come back or didn’t care.
He’d shot me a look. You used the spear tonight. You didn’t lose control.
I know, I’d replied. I don’t know what was different. It may have helped that I’d stabbed my first one instinctively before I realized what I’d done. And once I realized it, I’d known I could do it and it had been easy from there. I’d figured it was one of three things: the Book was neutralized inside me somehow; it was open and I was using it without being corrupted; or it was cooperating, for whatever reason.
You’re coming into your own.
I’d kept my silence. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the universe had two really nasty evil shoes and only one of them had dropped.
We’d put Ryodan in Barrons’s study on a mattress he’d dragged down from upstairs.
You could put him in the bedroom next to Jada, I’d suggested.
He won’t want her to see him like this.
I don’t think she’s seeing much of anything, I’d pointed out.
I don’t think she has been for a while. He’d glanced pointedly at the heavily smoked stuffed animal I was holding on my lap as we headed back for Dublin in one of the Nine’s Hummers.
I’d tucked it into her arms as I’d tucked her into my bed.
And I’d seen the only faint signs of life in her as she sighed and curled herself tightly around it. She muttered something then that sounded like, “I see you, yee-yee.”
My heart had felt raw and inflamed inside my chest, on the verge of rupturing, as I’d watched her. Mea culpa. I hated myself even more than I had before for chasing her into the Silvers that day. I was only now beginning to fully understand what those years had cost her.
And I’d thought then, staring down at her, what if Alina isn’t really dead? That would mean I’d chased Dani into the hall—and she hadn’t even killed my sister.
For a few really hellish moments there I’d wanted to go curl up somewhere and quietly die.
But I’d shaken it off. My dying wouldn’t do a thing for Dani. And she was all that mattered.
Lor strode past me and I followed him into Barrons’s study.
I dropped into a chair behind the desk and looked warily at Ryodan. Barrons was draping filmy pieces of fabric drenched in some silvery liquid on his charred body, murmuring softly while he worked.
“He’s awake,” Barrons said.
I hadn’t needed to be told. I was watching him shiver with pain as Barrons laid the barely-there pieces of glowing cloth against his raw flesh. One of the Nine shivering with pain was a terrible thing to see.
“Do you think maybe you should knock him out for his own good?” I said uneasily.
Lor laughed. “I’ve thought that on more than one occasion.”
“He wants to be awake,” Barrons murmured.
“Can he talk?”
“Yes,” Ryodan rasped.
“Can you tell us what happened?”
He made a wet sighing sound. “She flew into that…bloody abbey like…a mother bear obsessed…with her cub. I thought…five and a half years is a long time…maybe she’d had a child…brought it back.”
Oh, God, I thought, appalled, I hadn’t even thought of that! Had the bear belonged to a child? Her child? Just what had Dani gone through in the Silvers?
“I kept circling her, trying to keep…her from…burning, but she acted like…she didn’t even feel the heat. Christ…I could barely breathe. Beams were falling, stone was crumbling.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you change?” Lor growled with a quick look at me.
“I know,” I said to him levelly. “Surely you know I know.”
“Dunno why you’re still alive, though,” he said coolly.
“Not in…front of her.” Ryodan gurgled harshly.
“Precisely,” Lor said, shooting me a look.
I ignored him. “Are you sure he’s okay talking?” I asked Barrons worriedly.
Barrons gave me a look. “If he’s doing it, he wants to be.”
“Go on,” I urged Ryodan.
“Need to tell. You…need to know.”
“He won’t be conscious when I’ve finished,” Barrons told me. “For some time.”
“She kept saying she…had to save…Shazam. That she wouldn’t have…survived without him and she wasn’t…losing him. She wasn’t leaving him. Ever. She fucked up once and…wasn’t fucking up again. She was…ah, fuck. It was…it was like looking at her at fourteen again. All eyes and heart…blazing in her face. And she started to cry.”