The cuff fell to the forest floor, and sensation flooded her arm, painful and wonderful. Red drew back on the flames, let her power ebb, and blinked down at her wrist.
Her skin was pink, but not burned like it should have been. She rubbed the bones, smearing blood drops into a grisly bracelet, and tried to catch her breath. She trembled, drained in the low-sugar way that always followed a power usage of that magnitude. But she was still on her feet, and she cultivated a little flame, no bigger than that of a cigarette lighter, in her right palm.
She looked at Rooster.
He was gaping at her. “Your hair…” he said.
He sounded delusional; blood loss. There was no time. “Your leg,” she prompted. “Rooster, come on.”
He moved to comply, wincing.
And she heard the bullet take him in the shoulder. The soft, fierce thump as it bit through meat and muscle. He shook, pushed forward by the impact. Red grabbed at his shirt, tried to catch him, and only succeeded in slowing his face-plant.
He landed on his side with an animal sound of pain, teeth gritted, face white from blood loss and shock.
Jake stood five paces away, hands steady on his gun, expression hard to read in the shifting, wind-tossed shadows. Behind her, Red heard the rustling of brush: the rest of the team, moving into position, surrounding them.
Rooster twisted with a low groan, glancing back over his good shoulder. “Vest, huh?”
Jake’s eyes flicked to him, briefly, before coming back to Red. He did in fact wear a vest, visible between the torn-open halves of his shirt.
“Shoulda shot you in the fucking head,” Rooster said. He forced a wheezing, humorless chuckle.
Red had been angry before.
She didn’t have words for the way she felt now.
Banking on the fact that they wanted her alive, she slowly straightened, empty palms turned toward Jake. Her bare hands were more dangerous than any weapon, and the way his throat jumped as he swallowed told her he knew that.
“I didn’t want it to be this way,” Jake said.
“Me neither,” Red said. She felt the power gathering beneath her skin; it hummed like a colony of bees. She could see the shimmer of heat above her hands, little curls of steam lifting up toward the last flare of the sunset. The wind shifted, pulled in toward her warmth, coming at her from all sides now, tree trunks groaning. “This is going to hurt very badly,” she said, quiet, bored, almost. “And I’m not sorry.”
She called the fire, and it came.
It erupted from her hands. From the ground, a protective circle around the two of them, a huge, blinding white column of fire. She felt her hair lift in the draft; felt the heat enfold them. Rooster looped a weak arm around her legs, held her steady, and the fire never touched him. It was Red’s to command, and it knew that she loved him, that he was to be protected.
She was aware of a sharp pain in her right arm, like a bee sting. The fire danced. Wavered.
Two men, nothing but dim shadows on the other side of the fire, circled them. Red gathered the flames in close, into her open palms, and then shot it toward them.
Screams. Stink of scorched flesh.
Another pain, this time in her leg, and her knee buckled.
They were shooting at her, now.
She gathered the flames to her, swirling them around herself like a cloak, preparing to send them–
It felt like she was shoved. Like someone hit her across the backs of the thighs and shoulders with a monstrous baseball bat. One moment she was standing, and the next she was on the ground, twitching, teeth closing on her tongue until she tasted blood. The fire went out. Her power fritzed, and flickered, and died in her veins, leaving only weakness, and a horrible twitching.
She’d been electrocuted.
The woman from before, dark-eyed and fierce-looking, stood over her, holding the Taser whose leads were now attached to Red. Her hair was frizzed from the heat, soot marred her forehead, but she seemed otherwise unharmed.
“I need the cuffs!” she called to Jake.
Rooster, curled on his side in the dirt, moved like a striking snake. Red saw the flash of silver as light caught the blade of his knife, and he sunk it in the woman’s thigh.
When she yelled and went to her knees, Rooster sat up and cold-cocked her in the face. She went over like a felled tree, unconscious. And dropped the Taser.
Bleeding, shaking, hardly able to sit upright, Rooster leaned over and pulled the leads from Red’s twitching body. The spasms lingered, but they were already fading, the last of her energy funneling power through her, healing her; she could already feel the bullet wounds starting to close.
She was so tired. If she closed her eyes, she would fall into a deep sleep, and when she woke, she’d be only a little sore, but mostly whole.
Rooster was looking down at her, swaying; a little trickle of blood leaked from one nostril. “Finish him, sweetheart.”
That’s right: Jake was still on his feet somewhere, cowering from the fire. But he would come soon.
She gathered air into her lungs. “Leave him!” she shouted, and hoped Jake could hear her. “You can have me, but you leave him alone! Understand? That’s the deal: take me, but leave him. Don’t you dare hurt him!”
Rooster’s face blanked. “Red–”
She reached up and pressed her palm to his forehead. Drew on what little of her strength remained, and pushed it, just like always, through his skin, and bone, through all his atoms.
Please let it be enough, she thought.
She retained consciousness just long enough to see his eyes roll back. To watch him collapse.
Was just drifting into the black when Jake came to stand over her, a pair of fat silver cuffs in one hand.
31
The Ingraham Institute
The baroness had brought him a mirror. A compact, folding one of the kind ladies carried in their purses. “I know you think you’re so slick,” she’d said, laughing fondly, “but I see you trying to fix your hair. I just thought.” She’d grown serious. “You might like to have this. And this.” A simple plastic comb that nearly brought tears to his eyes.
“I don’t need these,” he’d said, gruff to cover the emotional clog in his throat. “I can make myself look however I want when I go dream-walking.”
“Sure. But that’s not the point, is it?”
“No…no, I suppose it’s not.”
He pulled the mirror now from its hiding place under his sleeve, in the crook of his elbow, where he tucked it when one of his guards brought his meals so they wouldn’t see it and take it from him. A man with a small token was somehow more pathetic than one with nothing, and he didn’t trust their indifference; in his experience, no one ever missed the opportunity to inflict little tortures when it was convenient.
He opened it and tilted it to catch the meager light of his cell. His reflection – his true one, and not the glamour he conjured when he went wandering – was a horror. Sunken cheeks, sunken eyes, chapped lips. His hair hung in greasy snarls; it had bypassed dirty, and then filthy, and become the lion’s mane of a wild man. Humans would have said he looked like someone raised by wolves, and the irony of that thought sent him into a fit of laughter, his voice echoing off the bare walls around him, sounding more than a little insane.
“My,” he murmured, quieting, dashing the tears from his eyes with the back of one trembling hand. “Radu the Handsome. Look at you now.” He snapped the mirror closed and slipped it back up his sleeve. Later, he would open it back up and prop it as best he could on his cot; get out his comb and, perhaps with the aid of a little of the olive oil-based salad dressing stolen from his next lunch tray, he’d begin the laborious task of working the knots free. Now, though, he wanted to be somewhere else. With someone else. Not with any of the immortals and their allies whom he visited, no. They were diversions, possibly assets, but they weren’t…they weren’t people who saw him. They saw Valerian the Brother-Killer. Radu the Handsome. They saw someone who wasn’t to be trusted.
Sometimes he was summoned.