A smile curves my lips. “My uncle doesn’t hire the incompetent.”
“Oh, I think he does. Particularly when he wants to scare you instead of kill you.”
“You think they’re a warning? To whom?You?”I almost laugh at the idea. Lynx wouldn’t waste his time with Storm Leary. He’s not even helping me in my revenge now.
Even bringing Hawthorn to the hospital has to have a reason, and Storm isn’t bringing it up, so the motive isn’t him.
“No.” He flattens my palm to the wall, his hand over top my own.“You.”
The door behind us thuds again, then once more, and this time, it sounds like it’s on its last leg. There’s a creak, another thud, and Storm says calmly, “To the left.”
Then he releases me and we don’t bother looking for the weapons in the dark as another bullet goes off, lodging into the door with a sharpthump,but it won’t hold them off for long.
Storm easily moves the way he told me to, and I sense him throw open another door in the dark. I follow close, and when I pull it shut behind us, it clangs closed and I realize it’s steel.There’s a single lightbulb illuminating this space. I see it as I flip the heavy steel lock closed and note a staircase of metal, decrepit looking stairs, and nothing else.
Storm doesn’t stop to look back as he jogs up them. His form is tall and lean and I note the muscles in his back beneath his white T-shirt.
Cursing myself for paying any attention to that, I get moving when another deeper thud resounds against the door from the room we just escaped. As I follow Storm up, my breath comes in shallow inhales and exhales and I smell something meaty, pungent and strong, enough to make me gag. Storm rounds the landing to the next staircase and he glances down at me, his eyes connecting with mine. He smells it too, I know. I can tell in the way his body tenses for one second, but there’s another gunshot from down below and we keep going. I’m sprinting now, but at the top of the stairs, the next door is propped open and Storm only stands there. I crash against his back because I expect him to move through, but he flings out an arm to hold me back. When I grab his wrist to move him out of my way, he shifts his stance and circles his arm around my front, yanking me back and close to his body, nearly choking me with his forearm. I almost slip and the stench here is stronger and I stop digging my claws into his skin and I… freeze.
He says nothing, but his grip is like a violent embrace and a way of keeping me safe all at once. Because when I look down, there’s blood on the pale gray cement floor. Oozing onto the stairs. I was lucky to have missed slipping on it when I ran up here.
The thing keeping the door propped open is a person.
Or…was.
They’re curled into a fetal position, eyes open and unseeing, staring up at the bulb dangling from the ceiling.
Bloated and gray skin, mottled blue in places, arms curled into their chest. They look like my brother did before his seizure.
And it’s a man, I realize.
A moment of fear that makes me want to vomit shoots through me but I push it aside when I realize it’s not Lele.
Storm is unmoving at my side.
And all I can think to say is, “I could use the bones.” It’s a desperate grasp to keep from sinking into the past. To hold onto the now when I’m not a child and my mother isn’t the one leaking all over the floor.
There’s still no movement from Storm, but he says, “What are you?” in a voice that scares me. Eerie, toneless, utterly empty.
He still has his arm around my throat as he half-cradles me, half-traps me to his side. My nails, all ten, are pushing into his skin. I’m not fighting him, but I’m not sure I’m holding on either.
Would I fall if he wasn’t here?
The Lydia who walked into Orange without a flinch, without a word, all to find my brother, she wouldn’t. The Lydia who regularly meets with a table of all men, she wouldn’t. The Lydia who rose from the ashes of her mother’s brain matter, she wouldn’t.
But the one who kneels at Lele’s bed, the one who casts protection spells for him every night—spells which obviously failed—the Lydia who wakes up crying, cold and shaking from a dream that was real…she might.
I don’t know Storm and what I do know, I don’t like.
He can have the bluest eyes and the biggest dick, but at the end of the day, he’ll be lucky if his corpse gets a coffin.
But I don’t let go of him.
“I use them for rituals.” I answer his question without directness. I don’t know what he means. Is he shocked too? At the body at our feet? The stench of meat? The death in themarina? How does he know so much about this place anyway? What is he asking me?
The laughter from before echoes downstairs.
There’s thudding, movement, bumps in the night.
