"I think he fell off the roof."
"He's going to be—" She coughed, struggling to get to her feet. Gio gave her a hand up. "—urk—having a heart attack right about now. I need to get to him with the Narcan."
After watching Javic almost kill Max, Gio thought it might be easier to just let him die. But then they wouldn't have answers. And it felt wrong anyway.
Max staggered on her first couple of steps, but she was running steadily a moment later. Gio caught up with her as she clambered over the rubble from Gio's destruction of the wall.
Javic was down on the other side of the cabin, thrashing in the grip of a seizure. Max dropped to her knees beside him and opened the case at her belt.
Before she had time to do anything, Javic's eyes snapped open. They were filled with flame. His robe began to char and smoke.
Max reared back. "What—"
Gio cursed. "Forget the Narcan! I'll hold him down. Get the cables around him,now."
He shifted, barely aware that it was happening with more smoothness and ease than he had ever experienced before, and planted his stone paws on Javic's chest, pinning him in place.
Javic's eyes and mouth were both open, hollows filled with flame. Creeping up his neck from under the robe came a series of spreading, glowing cracks, as if his skin was splitting to let out something inside.
"Whatever is in him, it's getting loose because he's dying," Max argued back. "If he dies, we're screwed anyway. I'm saving him."
She rammed the needle into Javic's neck, then leaped to her feet and sprinted off.
Gio didn't know where she was going or what she was doing. He heard the car door slam. Then she sprinted back with a red metal canister. It was so unexpected in this setting that Gio genuinely didn't recognize what it was until she aimed the hose, pulled the lever, and white powder sprayed all over Javic.
She'd just used a fire extinguisher on him.
It was hard to say if it was the Narcan or the fire extinguisher or some combination of both, but Javic relaxed; the fire ceased to flicker, and after a moment he coughed weakly. Gio shifted human again and rolled him onto his side.
"I'll start the car and grab what I can of our supplies," Max said.
"I can stonewalk—"
She was already shaking her head. "Not yet. We'll do it if we have to, but we need the gear, and we need to put some distance between ourselves and here."
Gio nodded wordlessly. The way he felt right now, another stonewalk would wipe him out for hours, maybe days. And they would need multiple trips to bring everything. Until his strength returned, stonewalking was for emergency use only.
He finished tying Javic and picked him up like an unwieldy roll of carpet. The man was no longer unnaturally hot to the touch, but his robe was charred in multiple places, flaking away and displaying flashes of skin and an equally ruined shirt and jeans underneath. White powder from the fire extinguisher sifted down when Gio moved him.
"You must go through a lot of clothes," Gio told him as another burned scrap of robe fell off.
Gio carried him to the car and deposited him in the backseat. Javic groaned faintly and stirred. Gio made sure he was lying on his side in case he got sick.
"You better be worth this," he muttered.
Max was making quick trips inside the cabin, grabbing items and hurling them out the door.
"I thought I saw another portal start to form in the corner and then disappear," she panted as she switched to flinging things willy-nilly into the Jeep. Some of them pelted Javic, who made a faint, protesting moan when canned goods bounced off his head. "I thought only he could do that."
"I did too. Maybe they're getting better at it."
"Great. We better move." She slung a jug of water into the back, narrowly missing bouncing it off Javic's rib cage. "Okay, that's the important stuff. We can come back and get the rest later."
Max made a sharp three-point turn and tore out of their campsite, bouncing over the ruts of the faint track leading away from the cabin. It could barely be called a road.
There was a louder protesting groan from the backseat.
"Can you get back there and make sure he can't talk but doesn't choke?" Max said, focusing on the road. "If we have to do this all over again because we killed our hostage, I'm going to be very annoyed. With you!" she barked over her shoulder at the hostage. "Don't die, we went to a lot of trouble to catch you alive."
