He looked in the same direction. As he did, he saw something glint.
There was no time for him to do anything.
The pop was muffled, the sound so muted by the cheers of the audience and the echo of his own voice that Winter didn’t hear it.
One instant, he was standing—the next, he was hurtling backward. The shock rocketed his shoulder before the pain hit him.
He hit the ground with a thud. It knocked the breath out of him in a single whoosh.
He heard a rush of confused gasps ripple around him. Then a couple of screams.
Winter gasped for air. Was he lying on the floor? How had he gotten down here? He tried to get up, but pain seared his shoulder and he cried out.
Now there were people rushing toward him—black-suited bodyguards, guests in tuxes screaming for someone to call the police. The tang of something metallic hung in the air.
Blood?
Somewhere far away, he thought he could hear someone calling his name.Winter. Winter!
Where had Penelope gone?
There were more people now. Pain pulsed from his upper chest, leaving him frozen. The world began to close around him, funneling his vision down to nothing. He had the vague sensation of being hoisted up in someone’s arms, his body being limp. The last thought that flittered across his mind was realization of what had just happened.
He’d just been shot.
29
The Good Daughter
For a while, all he was aware of was the pain.
It washed over him in waves—the agony rippled from his shoulder to his limbs to every part of his body, a throbbing ache that left him short of breath.
His mind swam in what felt like mud. There had been the distant sensation of someone lifting him onto a gurney and wheeling him away, of medics in forest green uniforms, of strangers shouting down at him, asking him if he would be okay.
He thought he could remember the interior of a truck. The screams of a crowd that had flooded outside to see the vehicle drive off with him in it. The shrieks of an ambulance wailing from directly outside. The rumble under the vehicle from the road. A murmur from his lips that came and went.
Sydney. Sydney.
Someone else had been sitting in the truck with him, too. Penelope Morrison.
Even in that state, he’d known that was wrong. Penelope shouldn’t have been inside the ambulance with him. She’d looked deadly calm, her voice low as she’d exchanged some words with the driver. The driver had answered her politely and turned as she directed.
Maybe he’d been having a nightmare.
Now the world around him lightened. Darkness receded to the corners of his mind. His surroundings sharpened.
He squinted immediately. Fluorescent lights glared overhead, and around him were rows and rows of shelves, each filled with identical metal canisters secured inside heavy crates.
Some part of his mind recoiled at the sight, recalling the images shown to him in Panacea’s headquarters.
Paramecium.
He squeezed his eyes shut again. The glare from the lights danced behind his closed lids. The dreamlike quality of the last few hours—days? He wasn’t sure—left him feeling unmoored. A place like this didn’t match at all with what had just happened at the party—unless he’d hallucinated that, too.
Therehadbeen a party, right? He’d hurried into the royal gardens and walked along the pool with Penelope, had spoken to her in a low, urgent voice. She had stared up at him with those wide eyes and braced herself and gone forward anyway into the pavilion, had stood beside him. He’d felt the shock from a bullet rocketing him backward, had hit the grass hard.
That was no dream. He had been shot right there and taken away in an ambulance with the crowd’s screams still ringing in his ears.
