“Broken neck.”
My eyes stung with angry tears as I dragged myself over to the cleaner I’d known for the past five years. He’d been one of the best. I placed my hand on his chest right over his heart, knowing I wouldn’t feel anything, but praying Dax was wrong and that life still beat inside him.
Nothing. As Dax called in the incident, I laid my head on his chest and whispered, “Goodbye.”
4
“Take me back to the gala,” I said from the passenger seat of Dax’s beat-up Trooper. Not long after he’d called in Franks’s death, two more cleaners had shown up, taken my statement, then hauled Franks away. Without a word, Dax had picked me up and stuffed me into his Trooper.
“Are you insane? We need to get you to a healer ASAP.” He barely slowed as he cranked the wheel and made a right turn, heading back toward Uptown.
Talisen’s smiling face swam behind my closed eyelids. “But Tal and Willow—”
“Phoebe—”
“They are family,” I bit out. “I can’t keep fucking around, knowing someone has them. Some vampire hive that is likely one of Allcot’s enemies. Who knows what they’ll do to them?”
“You know as well as I do they aren’t going to hurt Willow. If they took her, they did it for her abilities,” he said, his voice clear and assured as he slipped into tracker mode. “They’ll want to keep her strong so she can turn as many of their vamps as possible.”
“But they won’t hesitate to hurt Tal. Especially if they’re trying to make her do something she doesn’t want to do. I have to get back there and cast a tracing spell.”
He glanced over at me, his eyes narrowed. “You really think you have the strength to do a tracing spell?”
“Yes,” I said without hesitation, but it was a lie. My hands had started to shake, and I was so cold my feet had gone numb.
He grunted and continued driving.
“I can’t…” I swallowed the ache at the back of my throat.
“Can’t what?” He stepped on the gas, flying down the road, his impatience finally showing.
“It was a fucking setup, Dax. The vampire who did this to me? He baited me, toyed with me just long enough to snatch them. This was planned.”
He jerked his head, staring at me. “Planned? But how? There were three dozen Cryrique vampires at the gala. Not to mention an entire pack of shifters. There is no way a rogue hive could’ve taken them unless—”
“Allcot was in on it,” I finished for him, finally making the connection. Of course he was. He’d sent some unknown vamp to keep me occupied, to taunt me and throw me off the trail. Did he really think I was that stupid? That I wouldn’t see right through his shitty plan? If I hadn’t been so angry about Willow and Tal’s disappearance, I’d have been insulted.
“There’s no other way. No one gets past Allcot’s goons without his say-so.”
“I’ll kill the bastard,” I ground out.
“Not before the healer gets you put back together,” Dax said.
I opened my mouth to protest, to demand he turn around and head back downtown, but no sound came out. Instead, my world began to spin, and suddenly everything went dark.
* * *
The low murmur of voices coaxed me from my dark cocoon of slumber. My limbs were heavy, as if they were weighted down, and my lids didn’t seem to want to open. I tried to move my lips, to speak, to turn my head, to do anything to pull myself from a shadow world where I hovered in the in-between.
“It’s not the blood loss that’s the problem,” a woman with a silky voice said. “We’ve already hooked up the transfusion.”
“What do you mean by problem?” Dax asked.
“She can’t fully recover until we purge the dark magic that was used on her. See this?”
“Yeah?”
“These dark edges indicate a curse. A powerful one, and it’s preventing the stitching spell from doing its job. She’ll have to stay until we can figure out what to do.”
“She’s not going to like that one bit,” Dax said.
If I could’ve smiled, I would’ve. My partner knew me all too well.
“It can’t be helped.”
Ice-cold hands touched my thigh, and my voice came back as I let out a displeased groan.
“Phoebe?” Dax’s breath tickled my cheek, and my eyes finally flew open.
Pure fear stared back at me through his gaze and I suddenly pushed myself up. “What’s wrong? What happened? Is it Wil? Tal? Tell me they’re all right.”
Dax’s full lips curved into a pleased smile. “Welcome back, Phoebs.”
I scowled at him. “Dax! Wil, Tal?”
He shook his head. “No news yet.”
“They why did you look like someone had…” I trailed off, remembering that we’d just lost Franks. And while that had hit both Dax and me pretty hard, it wasn’t the first time we’d lost an agent of the Void, and it wouldn’t be the last. Whatever had scared him was something different. “Uh, I mean, why were you looking at me like that?”
He shook his head slightly. “It might be because for a moment there I thought you’d checked out on me. For the record, Kilsen, you’re not allowed to pass out on me ever again. Got it?”
Jesus. The wound must be bad, because in all my years of hunting vampires and suffering concussions, bite wounds, and even broken bones, I’d never once passed out. Phoebe Kilsen, badass vampire hunter, did not faint. Ever. I cleared my throat. “That’s a promise I’ll gladly make.”
“Ms. Kilsen,” the silky-voiced woman said. “Welcome back.”
I blinked up at her. She had lush auburn hair that was pulled back into a long ponytail, wide-set blue eyes, and flawless porcelain skin. She was also wearing a silver-gray lab coat with her name embroidered on the left side. Healer Imogen.
“Hello,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Are you new in town? I haven’t seen you here before.”
Her lips morphed into a radiant smile. “Just arrived last week. I have to say, New Orleans has had some of the most interesting cases I’ve ever had the opportunity to work on. This week has been incredible. But then you walked in.”
“Um, and now it’s not… incredible, I mean?”
“Oh, it is. Definitely,” she gushed. “But that wound, and the way you forced the curse out of your body. I’ve never seen a witch do that before. Not on herself. Are you a healer too?”
I snorted out a chuckle. “No, just stubborn.”
“Thank the gods you are,” she said as she flipped the heavy blanket covering me off my leg. “If you weren’t, we’d have lost you.”
A sick ache suddenly materialized in my stomach. I pressed a hand to my stomach and said, “I didn’t have much of a choice.”
“I wish all my patients were as stubborn as you. Now, what can you tell me about this curse?”
“Nothing.”
The left side of Dax’s lips twitched. I knew instinctively they’d already had this conversation. Well, if she thought she was getting details on my family curse, she’d lost her mind.
“You don’t know anything about it?” she said, her tone incredulous.
“No, I do,” I said, shifting position and swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. “I just can’t tell you anything about it. Family secret.”
“Ms. Kilsen, if we’re going to heal your wound, I’m going to need to know something about the curse. I need a starting point.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, inspecting my thigh. I didn’t exactly remember what it looked like after the vampire had stabbed me. My recollection was hazy. But considering I’d been running out of strength and blood when I’d forced the magic out of my system, the fact that there was only a thin outline of the curse still remaining meant I’d done a damn fine job. The area wasn’t even red or swollen.
“The curse will spread,” she insisted, sounding frantic.