Over her dead body was Mac waiting for a rescue that never came.
As she stood and moved toward the door, Ryodan muttered something too garbled for even her acute hearing to decipher.
She glanced back. “You shouldn’t be trying to talk. Rest. Heal. Get back on your feet.”
He muttered again, jerking with such violence that several pieces of spelled cloth protecting his skin fell away. When she moved to the mattress and knelt to replace them, he blew the cloth from his face and went into instant convulsions from the effort.
She didn’t tell him to stop trying to speak. Ryodan made his own decisions. Whatever he wanted to say, he badly wanted her to hear.
When he was still again, she bent near his mouth. His once beautiful face was a charred, monstrous mask, eyelids blistered, lips burned to a raw gash.
She’d done this to him. Her meltdown. Her heart the Sweeper had deemed flawed. She’d always excelled at the pretending game. But she’d taken it too far this time. She’d lost sight of what was imaginary and what wasn’t. And it had cost them all, those she hated caring about yet had never been able to stop caring about.
He spoke carefully then passed out so hard he no longer shivered. It had taken all his strength to murmur a single sentence.
Jada gently replaced the spelled cloth, eyes shining, torn between hushed awe and a fierce desire to snicker.
He’d said, Holy psychotic PCs, Robin, we’ve a murderous MacBook on the loose!
“Batman,” she said, hoping he was in a place of no pain. “This time around, I’m wearing the cape.”
She took the stairs three at a time to Mac’s room on the fourth floor.
It wasn’t there.
A room still occupied the location; it just wasn’t the same one she’d been in earlier. The cozy, messy bedroom had been supplanted in her absence by a parlor with a red crushed-velvet sofa, a faded Persian rug, crystal lamps, and a cheery fire burning in an enameled hearth.
She walked back out into the stairwell and glanced up, eyes narrowed.
When she’d left earlier to follow Mac, the stairwell hadn’t continued past the fourth floor. There’d been only a ceiling with elaborate crown molding where now a dizzying staircase ascended.
From years Silverside, Jada was accustomed to shifting spatial dimensions. Barrons Books & Baubles housed at least one powerful, distorting Silver, if not more; a mystery to be explored when time permitted. She found the Nine’s secrets intriguing to an obsessive-compulsive degree.
She located the bedroom on the sixth floor, on the left side of the corridor, not the right, shrugged out of her coat, stripped off her shirt and swapped it for one of Mac’s. Her clothing was stained with dried blood, entrails, and dusted with the pungent yellow residue of the zombie-eating-wraith straitjacket she’d briefly worn. The combined stench was overwhelming her sense of smell, diluting it. After wiping her face with a damp towel, she scrubbed down her pants and boots as well.
She grabbed Mac’s black leather biker jacket and began transferring her many weapons, protein bars, and last remaining energy pod. While strapping on the sword and tucking the spear into a thigh holster, she spotted the cuff she’d given Mac on the table by the bed.
She had no idea why Mac had taken it off but she wasn’t about to leave it lying around. She’d risked a great deal to take it. Crossing the room in a few long-legged strides, she shoved the cuff onto her wrist and pushed it up under the sleeve of her jacket.
A charred stuffed animal, wedged between pillows on the bed, stuffing-guts spilling from its slashed belly, watched her every move with round, shiny, reproachful black eyes.
I see you, Shazam.
She shook herself briskly. Emotion was deadly. Plans and objectives, clarifying.
She tucked the stuffing back in, tugged the edges closed and gently placed the teddy bear on a high shelf.
Then she turned, dashed down the stairs and burst out the back door, into the gloomy Dublin dawn.
She used her left hand, her sword hand, to trace the same spell she’d etched earlier to pass through the whirling tornado surrounding Barrons Books & Baubles. Black veins flared beneath her skin, licked up into her wrist, and her hand went ice cold. Many years ago she’d stabbed a Hunter with the Sword of Light and something had seemed to seep through her weapon into her fingers. She’d learned Silverside that her left hand cast better, stronger spells. It often itched and tingled, and sometimes at night she’d wake up to find her hand cold and black. Shazam had professed a special fondness for being scratched behind his ears with her left hand, claiming it felt different, but when pressed for more information, the grumpy, cranky beast had merely flashed a Cheshire smile and refused further discourse.
Shazam. Her heart hurt. Grief was a silenced wail that had no beginning or end, just a long, agonizing middle.