Menace emerged from the bunker, saw me, and shook his head. “He’s not in there. He was supposed to be with Juliet in the east wing.”
I keyed the mic on my jacket. “Parker, any location on Papa?”
A hesitation. “His GPS is down. The last ping was by the west perimeter two hours ago.”
I jogged to the fence line, heart a snare drum. The path was churned mud, littered with shells and scorched by the fires from the last wave of fighting. The air tasted metallic, like coins held on the tongue. I ran to the first bend, then the next, scanning the ground for any sign of him.
A pair of prospects trailed behind me, but I barely registered them. I checked the drone feeds on my phone, fingers numb with cold. There was movement by the northwest sector—something big, collapsed near the tree line. I zoomed in, and my heart sank.
“Got him,” I said. “Northwest edge, by the old cattle gate.”
Arsenal and Menace followed, limping and cursing as we navigated the mess of downed fencing and debris. We rounded the last corner and saw him.
Big Papa was down, sprawled on his back, arms outstretched like he’d been nailed to a cross made of dirt and snow. The front of his shirt was black with blood, soaked through to the skin. There were bites on his arms, deep enough to show bone, and his face was battered, one eye swollen shut. He looked smaller than I remembered. For a man who’d once carried two full-grown wolves out of a burning house, he seemed impossibly diminished. Like someone had taken all that gentle, stubborn weight and wrung it dry.
Menace dropped to his knees, hands going to Papa’s chest, pressing hard, desperate. “Hey, J.T. come on now, wake up.”
Papa’s eyes flickered. His mouth worked, trying to shape a word.
Arsenal stumbled forward, cradling Papa’s head in his hands. He was crying, nose running, voice gone to mush. “Fuck. Fuck, don’t do this, brother. Hold on, you big bastard. Just hold on.”
Pearl and Parker arrived next, skidding to a stop. Pearl gasped, and I thought she might faint. Parker looked at me, then at Papa, then at her phone, like she could logic her way out of it.
Lucia, the vampire, materialized from the woods behind us. She wore a black coat with red piping and walked with the casual indifference of someone who’d seen this scene a thousand times. She knelt by Papa’s side, and with a gentleness that belied her seeming indifference, placed two fingers to his throat.
“He is not dead,” she said, glancing at the group. “But he is close.”
Bronc and Juliet joined the circle, Bronc’s breath coming ragged. He knelt beside him and took Papa’s hand, the way you’d take the hand of a dying father. There was a moment where no one spoke, the only sound the distant caw of the birds and the low, painful sound that came from Bronc’s chest.
Parker knelt, hands shaking. “Can you help him?” she asked Lucia.
Lucia shook her head. “The wound is not natural. Demon. It eats the soul before it kills the body.”
Juliet knelt and took the other hand, murmuring a prayer in a fervent way I’d never heard before. Pearl just stared, tears streaming, unable to move or speak.
I looked at Menace and saw the ruin on his face. Even though Papa was the youngest of us, Menace had always looked up to him, saw him as a sort of moral center. Now the man was dying, and there was nothing any of us could do.
Menace pressed his forehead to Papa’s, sobbing quietly. “Don’t go,” he whispered. “We still need you. I need you.”
For a second, Papa’s eyes fluttered open. He looked at each of us in turn, then tried to smile. The effect was more grimace than grin.
He tried to say something, but all that came out was a wet gurgle.
Arsenal bent low, whispered in his ear, “It’s okay, brother. You can rest. We’ll take it from here.”
Papa’s hand twitched, squeezed Bronc’s once, then went slack.
The silence was total. For a moment, the world stopped.
Then, as if on cue, the wind picked up, and the crows started in, a hundred black shapes swirling over the tree line, hungry and merciless.
I closed Papa’s eyes and stood, head spinning. I wanted to hit something, to destroy the world that had done this. Instead, I stared at my feet, felt the blood soaking into my boots, and waited for someone to say anything that would make this less pointless.
No one did.
We all knew the price of war. But it never got easier.
We were still standing around the body when the air changed. The wind stopped, and the world dropped a degree colder, like the sun had blinked out for just a second. Then, from nowhere, a voice—soft, maybe even amused—cut through the silence.
