Lock & Key Page 14

  If only she’d had time to train with her magic. But A9 had never let her rest. The only real rest Kat had gotten since her escape had been the night at Liam’s house.

  Frustrated, Kat pushed through the vortex and stumbled out the other side, leaving the A9 goons and Marta to find a way around it before they could catch up. She pushed her legs even harder, trying to funnel as much power into them as possible. Her joints were screaming, knees like rusty hinges, hips like sandpaper, toes tingling as if suspended above a crackling fire. If she’d still been normal, she’d have stopped out of fear that her body would rip itself apart, but she knew any damage would heal.

  So she kept on pushing herself to run faster and faster, even when the pain sent bile rushing up her throat. Even when something popped in her abdomen, and her guts threatened to unspool. Even when a thorn caught her cheek and ripped a deep, jagged line across her skin. Even when she bit her tongue by accident, and it bled so much she had to spit out a mouthful of red six times.

  Kat did not stop running until she reached a creek, and had left the majority of A9’s henchmen behind. The only one still in pursuit, Kat could sense, was Marta, who was probably tracking Kat the same way Kat was keeping tabs on her. They were each letting out obvious magic pulses, because this was a game of speed and strength, not one of subtlety. That being said, however, Kat thought as she hunched over, hands on her knees, on the muddy bank of the creek, watching the water rush by, if I can turn this into a game of ingenuity, I might be able to overwhelm Marta.

  She peered back the way she’d come, and was shocked to find total destruction everywhere she’d stepped. There were downed trees, deep gouges in the soil, walls of vines that had been shredded like paper, and the whole area was obscured by the haze from her dirt twister trick that had now dissipated. Kat had to strain her eyes harder than ever before, magic squeezing her optic nerves, in order to find the approaching silhouette of Marta in the expanding cloud of debris. She was about a hundred feet away and closing fast, using magic to propel herself along in a series of massive leaps, covering about twenty feet with each burst.

  Kat had just enough time.

  Chest still heaving, Kat slipped off her shoes—whose soles had been worn down flat, and whose fabric was torn in a dozen places from the force of Kat’s running—dunked them in the water, and then launched them all the way across the creek. One of them landed right near the bank, sticking in the mud, and gave the impression that Kat had lost it when climbing out of the creek. The other landed farther up the embankment, as if Kat had kicked it off so she wouldn’t have to deal with the imbalance. Satisfied that the ploy looked realistic enough, Kat backed up a few steps then charged forward, jumping off the bank with about half as much strength as would be needed to clear the creek.

  As predicted, she landed roughly in the middle. The water was frigid, but Kat hardly noticed with the magic fire burning inside her. The current was swift, but Kat surrounded herself with a bubble of power that acted like a magic anchor and dragged her all the way to the bottom. When she hit, she crouched low and peered through the murky water at the surface twenty feet above. Then she waited. Dirty hair floating about her face. Lungs slowly squeezing out the minimal oxygen she’d inhaled. Muscles winding up for another overpowered burst of magic.

  Kat noticed, with a niggling worry, that there was a deep, growing exhaustion hiding behind the rage that scorched her bones. She did not have limitless power—she wasn’t any sort of god—and she’d used up a great deal of magic to blow up the van and flee from the roadway. She couldn’t make any exact calculations for how much longer she had until her flared magic fizzled out with a puff of smoke and left her a sitting duck, but she guessed it was a few minutes. Which meant she had to make this move count for something. She had to use this opportunity to defeat Marta once and for all.

  Her fingers brushed the creek bed as she searched for an appropriate weapon and slid over the rough contours of a large rock that had apparently been washed into the creek in recent weeks. She grabbed it and held it tightly, winding her arm back into a throwing position she thought resembled a baseball pitcher’s stance. Frozen in place, body coiled like a spring, she locked her eyes on the air directly above her head, and counted down the seconds until she reached the end of her estimate of how long it would take Marta to—

  Marta soared over the creek and landed right between Kat’s discarded shoes, then bent down to examine them. Kat adjusted her arm, but didn’t throw the rock. Not yet. Marta was hunched over, with her head bowed, as she poked at the shoe, and Kat wanted to take that head off her shoulders. So she waited, waited for Marta to realize the shoes were a red herring, waited for the magician to stand up again, look left, look right, turn around, and—

  Kat propelled the rock upward with a mighty burst of magic, and it blew out of the water at well over two hundred miles per hour. Marta had no chance to react, but it turned out she didn’t have to in order to not die instantly. She’d shifted slightly to her right and a few inches up the bank, having taken a single step just as Kat threw the rock, and instead of the hard stone shearing through her neck or disintegrating her skull, the rock hit her left shoulder instead.

  Her arm tore free with a spray of blood and shattered bone and shredded muscle, and Marta went down with a shriek that Kat couldn’t hear beneath the water. Cursing, Kat pushed off the creek bed with another pulse of power and soared out of the water with a splash, landing in a stumble on the embankment a few feet from the collapsed magician.

  Marta was gripping her bleeding shoulder, teeth clenched, agony whining through her sealed lips. The bangle on her good arm glowed a couple times, and Kat realized she was performing healing magic on herself. The blood flow was already slowing down.

  The rock had tumbled off who knew where, so Kat climbed up the bank to the nearest tree and ripped a solid branch free. Makeshift spear in hand, she wheeled around to pounce on Marta, only to find Marta standing already, huffing deeply as she stared in utter disdain at what remained of her left arm, the ruined appendage lying in a halo of blood soaking into the mud on the bank.

  Marta’s glare slowly crept up Kat’s body, until their gazes collided like meteorites strike the earth. “You little bitch. I’m going to rip you apart.”

  Her orange aura flared so bright, Kat had to close her eyes, and the next thing she knew, Marta’s knee was in her gut, and then she was flying. Kat didn’t even register the pain of her shattered ribs until she slammed into a tree back first and broke the rest. She rebounded off the trunk, hearing the bark crack and crumble behind her, and collapsed into a breathless pile of tenderized limbs at the base of the tree. Something like a tightly bundled cord in her back snapped in half when she hit the ground, and the spark of intense pain resonating through her body shorted out.

  With a jolt of terror, Kat found she couldn’t move. My spine. Shit. I’m paralyzed.

  Even though Kat healed super fast, it wouldn’t be fast enough this time. Her head was turned slightly up, cheek pressed against a prominent tree root, and her eyes were pointed directly down the bank, which Marta was storming up so she could make good on her promise to return Kat to A9 in an assorted bag of bloody pieces. It didn’t matter what condition Kat arrived in, as long as she was alive. So if she didn’t get the hell out of here in the next thirty seconds, she was literally mincemeat.

  But she couldn’t move. And her magic wasn’t obeying her commands anymore. She’d used too much. All that was left inside her was being automatically directed to her injuries, and no matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn’t make it do anything else. A9 had clearly wanted to create some kind of magical soldier that was almost impossible to kill, and they either hadn’t considered or hadn’t cared about the tradeoffs. So now Kat was stuck watching her tormentor and kidnapper reach the top of the bank, Marta’s good hand raised, a crackling orange ball of power concentrated in her palm, a spell that would strike Kat down in a way that perhaps she couldn’t heal from…and
there was nothing Kat could do but watch in fear.

  Marta loomed over her, the glowing sphere casting harsh light across her blood-stained face, her lips drawn back into a victorious sneer that Kat was sure would haunt her even in the afterlife. “Finally got you where I want you, little kitty cat.” She raised her arm higher, and the ball brightened even more as it grew in size, until the sparks arcing off it were so long they struck the overhanging pine needles and caught the canopy on fire. “All this time of mine you’ve wasted, all the resources you’ve destroyed, all the humiliation I’ve had to face when telling the bosses I lost you again…No more of that. No more. Now you’re going to pay for your sins, you stupid bitch, and I’m going to enjoy every moment of picking up the bloody bits of you and tossing them in a sack and carrying you on my back all the way to Georgia. And when we get there, I’m going to take so much pleasure in stitching you back together one piece at a…”

  Marta stopped talking and dropped her gaze—to the knife that had suddenly driven itself into the center of her chest. A knife that Kat recognized. Marta stumbled back, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, as if it was an error in reality, and if she simply retraced her last few steps, she could fix the glitch and make the knife disappear. But she couldn’t make the knife that had clipped her heart vanish any more than she could make her ruined arm reattach itself to her body.

  All she could do was choke on her angry diatribe and lose control of her magic, the powerful spell firing off randomly into a nearby tree and blasting it into a rain of charred wooden bits. All she could do was stare, first at the electricity that was building in the knife’s grip, and then at the person who Kat could hear approaching from behind. All she could do was whisper, “This isn’t fair. This isn’t right. I was supposed to win.”

  Then the electricity spell discharged into the magician’s bleeding heart.

  And Marta died.

  15

  Liam

  Liam’s hand was still shaking when he made it to the bank of the creek. He’d tossed the knife as a Hail Mary from almost fifty feet away, and though he’d propelled it with the ounce of magic that had replenished since the last fight, he hadn’t been sure it would strike anywhere near his mark. He’d honestly been shocked when it nailed Marta in the chest. What kind of luck he must’ve been running on tonight, for the magician to have let her defenses lapse at a critical moment.

  He stumbled over the lip of the steep bank, trees becoming sparse as the land dipped toward the water. Marta was about five steps down, right at the edge of the mud, the upper half of her body lying face down on the grass, the lower half sinking into the wet earth. Kat was about seven steps to his left, crumpled at the base of a tree that had nearly split when she had been thrown into it a few minutes ago. The trunk was sagging backward, its bark heavily splintered, and Liam figured it would fall on its own in a short time.

  Liam shuffled up to Marta first and bent down, searching for signs of life. He found none. Hesitantly, he yanked his knife from her chest, and when she didn’t rise from the dead and attack him, he wiped as much blood from the blade as possible then stowed it away in his pocket for safekeeping. A9 would almost certainly retrieve Marta’s body, so he didn’t think he needed to worry about the cops looking for a murder weapon. Plus, it was his favorite knife.

  Satisfied that the magician was well and truly dead, Liam hurried over to Kat, who hadn’t moved since he caught sight of her. She was still breathing, he could see, but her body was worryingly still, and her eyes were open wide. As he crouched next to her, her eyes suddenly flicked toward him, and she blinked a couple times in confusion, taking in his beat-up appearance, the splint on his arm, the stitches on his head, before her lips parted and released a faint breath.

  “Hey,” he said softly, “you all right?”

  “Not exactly,” she rasped. “I can’t move. Marta threw me into the tree so hard it snapped my spine. And my healing is slower than normal because I used so much power to escape and fight. I don’t know how long it’ll be before I can walk.”

  Liam swallowed the knot in his throat. If Kat had been anyone else, she’d be dying right now, judging by the damage to the tree. To hear her speak in an almost nonchalant manner about a spinal cord injury threw him for a loop. But then, it shouldn’t have. He’d seen her recover after her collision with the car in the McDonald’s parking lot. If she could heal from that, she could probably heal from anything that did not immediately kill her.

  He ordered his pounding heart to calm—he’d run here as fast as he could after they located the ruined convoy on the road—and did his best to project confidence he didn’t have. “Okay then, I’ll just have to carry you.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What about your arm?”

  “We’ll manage. Somehow.”

  She seemed skeptical.

  And she was right to be. It took almost ten minutes of maneuvering Kat’s body in different ways for him to hoist her onto his back at an angle that would keep her from falling off while Liam held on with just one arm. He had to hunch his back at an uncomfortable angle too, and he was already hurting before they cleared the bank and the ground evened out. He tried his best not to show the strain, but he couldn’t hide his heavy breathing.

  “We could just wait until someone else comes around,” Kat suggested, breath hot in his ear. She sounded almost amused, like she found his efforts endearing in a funny way.

  “Nah,” he panted out, “I’ve got this. Yun and the others are busy mopping up the rest of the suits. So they won’t be following anytime soon.”

  “Others?”

  Liam bit his lip. “I, uh, conscripted some help. I knew there were too many for Yun and I to take on by ourselves.”

  “Help from where?”

  He hesitated.

  “Liam?” she pressed with a note of warning.

  He sighed. “Caoimhe.”

  She stiffened, a sign her nerves were already partially repaired. “You told me she was dangerous.”

  “She is.”

  “But you went to her anyway? And you, what, made a deal? A faerie deal?”

  “There was no other way to find you in time, Kat.” Liam hung his head. “Only the fae have the kind of intelligence network that would let me reach you before A9 smuggled you out of the state. If I had leaned on someone else, I’d have been too late. I still almost was. Marta was going to…”

  “I know,” she said wearily. “I tried my hardest to beat her, and I almost did. I took off her goddamn arm, but it wasn’t enough.”

  He’d noticed Marta’s corpse seemed to be missing a limb. “How’d you do that?”

  “Magic-propelled rock.”

  “Nice.”

  She jabbed her chin into his shoulder. “Off topic. Back to Caoimhe. What exactly did you trade for? My location and some hired help from her in exchange for what from you? Not your soul or anything, right?”

  Liam almost said no, but then realized the answer was kind of yes. “It was a favor for a favor.”

  He could almost hear Kat’s eyebrows scrunching. “It was that nonspecific?”

  “Unfortunately. She can pretty much ask me to do anything short of violating my core moral principles, AKA ‘my nature.’ The only real rule is that she has one chance to do it. Once the favor’s terms are set, there are no additions allowed.” He stepped over a large limb lying across his path, remembering it from his trip here, and then sought out the creek to his left, looking for the footbridge he’d crossed earlier. He spotted it in the growing darkness as a narrow, bowed structure hanging over the rushing waters.

  “Of course,” he continued, “that won’t stop Caoimhe from fucking me over. She’ll wait until she has a job that only I can do effectively, and I’ll have to do it to make good on the contract. If I don’t fulfill the contract terms, you won’t find my body. Namely because I’ll be dragged down into the faerie hill and…let’s leave it at that.”

  Liam had seen people who emerged from f
aerie hills after breaking deals. They usually looked about ninety regardless of their actual age, and they had absolutely no sanity left inside their shredded minds. He could only pray that whatever Caoimhe ended up asking him to do seemed like a better choice than such a terrible fate. But he had a feeling that her task wouldn’t be far from it. Caoimhe wasn’t a nice person, and she didn’t do nice things unless they benefitted her in not-nice ways. Whatever she forced him into would stain him in a way that wouldn’t come clean.

  Kat pressed her cheek against his own, startling him. “You know, this is exactly what I was afraid would happen if I got close to somebody—that they would get hurt trying to help me.”

  “You sound resigned about it though,” he said tightly, relishing the warm contact of her skin, a contrast to the cold air.

  “Because I know there was nothing I could’ve done to stop you from making the choice you did. The moment I got into your damn Cherokee, this was the inevitable conclusion.” She sighed. “Of all the people I could’ve run into in a McDonald’s parking lot, it had to be an ex-cop with a strong moral center and a penchant for saving damsels in distress.”

  “You’d have rather I been an asshole?”

  “An asshole wouldn’t have made a deal with a dangerous faerie to save me. Now I’m going to be kicking myself every time I look at you.”

  “Please don’t. It was my choice, Kat.”

  “You think that, I’m sure,” she said, almost wistfully, “but it was more a compulsion than you’d like to believe.”

  He wanted to contradict her but couldn’t. She wasn’t wrong. Liam did feel compelled to help people. He always had. He’d just been great at ignoring that compulsion for the last three years, ever since the crash, ever since Hayden and Julia had…He’d been great at ignoring it because he’d been drunk most of the time, and it was hard to hear that nagging voice, the one that told him to do good deeds, when he was totally shitfaced. Thing was, he hadn’t been drunk since Kat showed up. He hadn’t had a single drink since he left the bar the other night, before his PI surveillance at the McDonald’s.