A Sinister Game (25 page)

She looked down to find it broken.
Not again
. It was just like before. It was just like when she and Andromeda had been playing in their father’s study and she’d climbed the library ladder. The bone had come completely out of her leg that night. She could still see it
, just as she could see
her bone now – its
jagged,
brown-
white edge surrounded by blood,
torn muscle
,
and tissue.

Bile rose in Victoria’s throat as the strange memory took over, her pain setting it free from where it had been suppressed so long ago.

* * * *

“No
!” Victor pushed off of the wall that Victoria had just slipped through and moved to the window adjacent to it.

Down below, Victoria lay on the hard
-
packed ground, her right leg
twisted beneath her at an unnatural
angle. From his distance, Victor could just make out the flash of white midway through her calf
,
and the blood that seemed to baptize the ground
all
around her. It was spreading to
o
quickly.
The break was a compound fracture. She’d never
before
been w
ounded so badly in a Game
.

And it was his fault.

There hadn’t been enough time to attempt a time sto
p, which was horribly ironic. T
elekinesis had never been able to stop a falling body.
In the end, he’d been helpless to help her.

Oh gods
,
he thought
as she stirred slowly, gradually coming out of the initial shock of her impact. She was clearly dazed and most likely didn’t even know how badly she’d been hurt. If she didn’t heal herself soon, she would lose consciousness from
the
blood loss.

S
he was the only one among them with the ability to heal. If she passed out, there would be no one remaining to do it. She would bleed to death.

Victor reared back and, with the elbow of his leather jacket,
he smashed out the glass of the second
story window. It wasn’t large enou
gh for a human to fit through, b
ut he didn’t always have to be a human.

Below, the giant of a man with blonde hair was racing toward Victoria.
He
called himself
Anders, but Black wasn’t a fool. H
e knew that wasn’t his
real name. The man was a liar; t
here was much more to him than he was letting on. Victor had tried to read his thoughts as he’d watched him sit
ting
with Victoria last night over dinner. He
’d
failed
– there was
even more of a wall around that man’s mind than there now seemed to be around Maxwell Blood’s.
Neither was natural.

Black
watched Anders
skid to a stop and kneel beside
Victoria.
Hard emotion, torn between jealousy and protectiveness,
caused Victor’s worl
d to flash the color of shallow
green arctic ice
.

As if he knew he was being watched, Anders looked up
. When
he met Victor’s gaze
, something very strange flickered in the depths his brown eyes.

“Captain Blood!” the man bellowed
, his voice deep and booming
.

Victor’s
eerie, glowing gaze narrowed. H
e stepped back from the
window and
transformed, using his dark power to morph
into a large black bird with feathers the same
iridescent blue-black hue
as
his
hair. The giant
bird’s wings flapped once
against his sudden lack of legs
before Victor
shot through the window
. He dove downward, drawing his wings in tight
and aiming toward the woma
n he love
d.

Wind whipped past him for the short
space of time it took to reach the ground
.
Just before landing, he reclaimed his human form
and landed with his boots firmly planted beside Victoria –
directly across from the man who claimed his name was Anders.

Anders stood, but Black was ready for
him. With
one
over-powered thrust of his
d
ark telekinesis
,
he managed to ruthlessly shove the large man away from Victoria’s body, sending him flying twenty yards down the street. 

Anders hit the ground and rolled, but Victor paid him little heed. His attention was immediately turned to Victoria. He knelt beside her.

He could detect so much wrong with her. He could heal none of it, but the same powers that gave him telepathy allowed him to scan her body, zeroing in on the damage it had
taken. She had a broken rib,
several jarred and dislocated spinal discs, a
punctured lung, and a compound fracture in her leg. For the life of him, he couldn’t comprehend why she was still conscious.

She had always been
stubborn.

Against all odds, s
he’
d
somehow managed to sit up. F
rom the sound of it
now
,
she was trying
not to cry.

“Victoria, can you hear me, love? You need to heal yourself.”

Her eyes were shut tight, her teeth clenched, her face growing
paler
by the second. He was afraid to touch her, but he
wanted to pull her into his arms, give her some of his strength, give her anything and
do
anything to make this horrible mess disappear. At that very m
oment, he would have traded his soul
for the abil
ity to turn back time rather than
freeze it.

But he never had a chance to help
her in
any way because at that moment,
Maxwell Blood came sprinting around the corner
two houses down. His
long sword
was drawn, and his
ice blue eyes
were
glowing with the kind of magical heat that once and for all proved he was no mere team captain.

Victor’s
own glacial gaze
hardened
. He bared his
teeth
in what had effectively become
pure
hatred. He no longer wanted to defeat the duplicitous men who surrounded Victoria Red. He wanted to kill them. All of them.

And he was going to
start with Maxwell Blood.

* * * *

Victoria couldn’t keep track of what was happening around her. There w
as too much pain, too much nausea.
Her clothes were damp. She knew what it a
ll meant, but her brain didn’t
want to accept the truth. She was shoving it away, stubbornly refusing to deal with reality.

She heard Anders call for Max. At least, she
thought
it was Anders. And then Anders was gone and someone else was beside her. If the wave of cold fury that washed over her wa
s an accurate indication, she would guess it was
Victor.

But then he too was gone, a
nd all that remained was the pain.

You’
re going to die, Rose
. There was a voice in her hea
d. It sounded like her own. But… not
exactly
like her own
.

You’re going to pass out and then bleed to death if you
don’t
concentrate
and heal your leg
right now.

She was right
– the voice was right. Victoria
was going to die
if she didn’t do something fast
.

She
moved
, trying to see, trying to get a handle on the damage
. Her world went fuzzy and muffled. Her vision tunneled.
Still, she saw the blood.

She
swallowed hard, forming a wall in her throat to block the bile that
suddenly
tried to escape.

No, Rose.
Don’
t think about the blood.
Concentrate. Heal the wound
. There was the voice again, only this time, it sounded a little less like her – and a little more like someone else.
Someone she knew.

But
she co
uld barely
think past
the horrible, horrible pain.

Concentrate, da
mn it! Hold your hand out, Rose.
See the
leg whole again. See it whole, and d
o it
now
!

Victoria did what the voice told her to do. She held her hand out over her leg and, without looking, she tried to im
agine it as it was before, a
s it
should
have
be
en. She imagined herself healthy and
whole, mended and perfect. She saw the blood in her veins and not on the ground.

But
she had
never
before
tried to heal such a serious wound on h
er own body
. The agony was mucking things up. She couldn’t put what blood she’d lost back inside of hers
elf. She set and fused the bone, mended
the muscle, and recreated her
leg
down
to
the molecules of skin that smoothed out her golden flesh.

But when the leg was whole again, she was still in pain.

Vaguely, she realized it was hard to breathe. She frowned, turning her senses inward.
Oh no
, she thought.

There was more to heal. This was why it was so hard. She was seriously injured.

You can do it. I believe in you
, came the voice.

Victoria’s teeth gnashed together. Her hands curled into fists. She pushed
and
reached and grabbed her power by the throat and forced it to work for her. She cried out as her rib moved under her healing influence, straightening out and mending back together again. Tears streamed down her cheeks as her lung
sewed itself shut.

She coughed, and then vomited, this time unable to hold it back. When she opened her eyes, it was to find the ground soaked in bile and blood.

But she was healed.

And so, so tired. She’d put herself right, but she’d lost too much blood
,
and blood was something she could not replace. The energy she’d spent healing had sapped her dry, and it could not be salvaged.

She was exhausted
.

Somehow, she found her hands and knees.
She lifted her now-mended leg an
d tried to get it beneath her, b
ut there was so little strength to call upon. The ground had turned to crimson clay beneath her. It caused the dirt to stick to her uniform in red
dish
clumps. It stained the other knee of her pants.

And the nausea was back.

“Red.”

Victoria looked up from her position and, with Anders’
sudden and welcome
help, managed to sit back on her heels. It was as far as she could go.

“I lost too much blood,” she whispered.

“I know,” he said. From behind him, waves of cold washed over them both in coming and going tides. The sound of crac
kling fury filled
the air. Someone grunted in pain. Something
else
sounded as if it snapped. And then
there was a roar of rage or of pain
and the icy crackling began all over again.

“What’s going on?” she asked
softly. She simply couldn’t get any force behind her words.

“Your captain and the other are fighting.”

She frowned, tamped down another stubbo
rn wave of nausea, and asked, “H
ow?”

“Cold magic. They’re both quite powerful. You have to get out of here.”

“Both
?”
Cold magic?
Max was using
d
ark leader abilities?

He w
as cold to the touch,
she remembered
.

“I don’t understand
,
”
s
he whispered.
She just couldn’t; she was too sick.