Deceiver's Bond: Book Two of A Clairvoyant's Complicated Life (38 page)

Ow.

I blinked back the sudden burst of daylight illuminating the hallway. The piercing wail of an engine at full throttle drilled at my ears, vibrating the entire house, and it resonated from
inside
the living room. Jackie sprinted toward me, her expression a grim, determined line. She unceremoniously dragged me back into the bedroom while I feebly pushed along with my feet. Just inside the doorway, she dropped me, kicked the door closed, and then launched herself toward a stunned Kim.

“The ward’s breached. Get to the circle,” she barked at Kim, first pushing and then pulling the petite woman around the foot of the bed, toward the closet. “Planned for a lot of things. Never counted on a truck plowing through the fucking living room.”

The smell of dust and exhaust seeped in from under the door.

Oh God! Kieran!

I jumped to my feet, casting an anxious gaze toward the two women. Jackie bent down to throw aside an oval, multicolored braided rug, which had been placed in front of the open closet. Underneath, I spied the edge of a thin strip of copper imbedded into the wood floor. When I craned my head to peer over the bed, I could see it formed a roughly four-foot diameter circle.

“We can’t just leave them,” Kim exclaimed.

Jackie glanced up at me, narrowing her eyes. She snatched the leather backpack from the end of the bed and threw it over her shoulder. “My portal can only take two. I’m getting her out.”

I nodded and strode to the door. “I’ll find Kieran. Don’t worry. We’ll be right behind you. Meet up at my building—Talisman Towers, downtown. I’m sure you can find it. If we’re not there, ask for Dan Johnson or Michael Thompson.”

Kim snatched her overnight bag from the bed and stuffed her purse inside before hastily zipping it shut.

“Here.” Jackie reached into her backpack and tossed me a thin rectangular case. “Throw this into your purse. My business cards. In case you need my cell number.” She pulled out a pocketknife, extended the stainless-steel blade, and deftly cut her middle finger. After squatting down and wrapping her free arm around Kim’s legs, she touched her bloody finger to the imbedded circle and muttered several foreign-sounding words. They both vanished, accompanied by a low-pitched
pop
.

I tugged open my purse and dropped the case inside. “Shit’s hitting the fan, Red.”

“So I gather. Ready yourself.”

Shielded and TK at the ready, I yanked the door open and hurried down the hall in pursuit of Kieran. The blasting howl of the still-revving engine compressed my eardrums. The last time I’d felt him, Kieran had been inside the kitchen. I knew, without a doubt, something was wrong. If he’d been ambulatory, he’d have found me already.

Without his boost to my focus, I struggled to penetrate the wreckage. Debris was everywhere, shards of glass, jagged chunks of drywall and siding, pillows, broken furniture, upturned book cases, strewn books, fireplace bricks, and, right in the center of the former living room, a silver Ford F-150. Biting my lip to the point of pain, I searched frantically under the truck for Kieran’s mangled body. I didn’t see him, or any signs of blood.

An eight-foot by twelve-foot jagged hole gaped where the front picture window used to be. The pickup canted at a downward angle, its grille smashed against the leading corner of the room’s brick fireplace and back-end suspended by the now overturned couch. The rear tires spun at an alarming rate. I shuddered to think where the vehicle would be if it hadn’t gotten hung up on the couch. As it was, the hearth had taken major damage and looked as if the firebox had been pushed several feet toward the back of the house. The smell of singed fabric, exhaust, and, more disturbingly, gasoline coated the inside of my nose and throat.

I covered my ears against the whining engine and tried to peer into the truck’s side window, reluctant to get too close. A fine layer of drywall dust and the deployed airbag obscured my view, but my magic web revealed the slumped form of a man in the driver’s seat, his foot still planted on the accelerator. He wasn’t moving. I levitated his foot from the gas and turned off the ignition. The ensuing quiet cocooned me, and my ears buzzed. I detected the rising and falling of the driver’s chest. He was alive.

I hesitated, torn. Should I help him or continue to look for Kieran? After just a moment’s thought, I swallowed my guilt, giving Kieran the priority. Maybe a neighbor would come and help, and I couldn’t be sure the man wasn’t in on the attack. Heart in my throat, I flew over the cab, landing just inside the kitchen doorway.

The kitchen was a disaster. The force of the crash had pushed the fireplace through the wall, which, in turn, had shoved the refrigerator out of place, spilling much of its contents. Containers of food, condiment jars, an overturned microwave, and other kitchen items were strewn over the tile floor, interspersed with chunks of fallen masonry. Pickle juice mixed poorly with the potent odor of exhaust and burned rubber. I faintly registered the gaping hole in the roof, directly overhead, where the chimney had collapsed into the kitchen. Not far from the back door, Kieran sprawled on his side, partially protected by the small kitchen table. Bricks littered the area around him and a chunk of the roof covered his lower legs.

“Kieran!” I levitated over the rubble to land next to his body. “Oh, God. Please, please be okay.”

I scuttled under the table, put one hand on his back and the other on his chest, and focused my magic on him, praying for a pulse. The beat of his heart and the rise and fall of his chest pounded against my telekinetic web, vibrating up my arms.

“Thank God. He’s breathing,” I told Red.

Looking down at his body, I levitated the slab of roof off his legs and cast it aside. A blotch of blood had seeped through his now-filthy khakis, just above his left knee, where a roofing nail had pierced his pants. He moaned as I carefully rolled him to his back, first brushing the bricks and bits of mortar out of the way. I smoothed his tangled hair away from his face. His eyes were closed, his lips parted.

“Shit. He’s not conscious.”

His second head injury in forty-eight hours. People died from shit like this. My stomach clenched, forcing an involuntary whimper from my mouth. And if I hadn’t pummeled him that first day, this would just be his first. Of course, if I hadn’t, right now we’d probably be in the Otherworld and I’d be facing a whole different set of problems.

I shoved the guilty thoughts aside and removed the glove from my right hand. With painstaking deliberation, I eased my bare fingers through his hair, over his scalp, lifting his head to examine every square inch, twice over. Both times, my fingers came away clean.

“Nothing,” I told Red. “No lumps, no sticky spots. No blood, except there, on his pants. So why is he unconscious?” I considered his leg. “Is the myth about cold iron true? I think a roofing nail stabbed him. Would that do it?”

“Another ridiculous exaggeration. One sidhe with an allergic reaction and suddenly iron is fae kryptonite.” He huffed at the sheer stupidity of it. “If Kieran suffered from this vulnerability, we would already know. It is impossible to live here without contacting iron on a continual basis.”

I frowned, remembering Kieran’s stumble when I’d sensed his return after checking on Jackie’s wards. I’d attributed his discomposure to exhaustion, but perhaps he’d somehow gotten injured outside and then blundered into the house in a stupor. Maybe he’d fallen from the roof, or even a deck, and broken his neck or his back.

And I’d moved him! The very thing they tell you
not
to do if you suspect someone has a neck or spine injury.

In the adjacent living room, the popping and clicking of the cooling truck’s engine kept my nerves on high alert.

Whatever had sent the car crashing into the house wasn’t going to walk away without their quarry. Jackie and Kim’s sudden exit may have drawn attention away from the house, but I couldn’t count on it. We needed to get out and far away, but I didn’t dare move Kieran for fear of crippling him.

I started to brush his long hair away from his face and neck for closer appraisal but stopped short.
Idiot
. Only an x-ray was going reveal whether Kieran had a broken neck. There was a reason paramedics put anyone suspected of having a spinal injury on a backboard as a matter of course. You couldn’t tell by simply looking.

You’re wasting time when you should be calling 9-1-1!

Before I could ask Red to pass me my cell, a pattern of red marks trailing down Kieran’s neck caught my eye. I peered closer, smoothing aside his hair. “Whoa. What’s this?”

The crosshatch of fine lines extended from just below his ear toward the open collar of his rugby shirt.

“A most distinctive ligature,” Red observed.

I lightly coasted my bare index finger across one of the red lines, curious to see if the mark was raised from the skin. It wasn’t.

It looked like damage caused by cat o’ nine tails, except that type of weapon wouldn’t leave crosshatched markings like this. Wounds from a whip would be raised. No. The pattern was flat yet distinct.

“It almost looks like he’s been burned,” I said.

I rubbed my index finger and thumb together, detecting something sticky, but spied no evidence of blood. Something else then? Whatever it was hadn’t given me a psychic reading. So, something plant-based? Maybe Kieran had stumbled into some kind of vine out in the garden that he was deathly allergic to, like poison ivy, except with thin tendrils.

I turned my attention back to the strange injury but couldn’t focus. I wiped perspiration from my forehead with the back of my gloved hand. God, it was freaking hot in here. Sweat sprung out across my back and neck. I wavered on my knees, seeing spots, and fell forward, bracing my left palm flat on the floor, struggling to keep from touching anything inadvertently with my ungloved right hand.

“Lire!” Red’s shout sounded fuzzy in my buzzing ears.

A shard of masonry gouged my palm, the immediate pain penetrating my lethargy. “Poison,” I wheezed.

Blinking and trying not to trip over my unwieldy feet, I managed to stand and stumble through the debris to the kitchen sink. I thrust my fingers under cold running water, washing them thoroughly with dish soap from the stainless-steel dispenser on the counter, not caring whether it was a psi-free brand or that I was getting my left glove soaked in the process. I blinked and waited for the poison’s symptoms to grow worse.

“I’m okay,” I assured Red after a minute, voice still raspy. “I’ve gotta get that crap off him.”

When I decided I wasn’t going to faint or get an unwanted reading from the detergent, I saturated a heap of paper towels with cold water and soap and returned to Kieran’s side. After donning my right glove, I methodically washed his neck, hoping to remove all traces of the toxic compound. He moaned, eyelids flickering, but remained unconscious.

A peculiar sound came to me from somewhere nearby. I froze. Unease prickled over my scalp. I snapped my wide-eyed gaze toward the ruined living room and strained to hear anything unusual. In spite of my racing pulse, which throbbed obscenely loud inside my ears, I heard it again—a sort of gloppy, sliding, unpleasant sound.

I swallowed hard, forcing down the half-formed whimper at the back of my throat.
Keep your wits!
I scolded myself. Something unearthly bad was near. Maybe even inside the house.

I cast out my magic, frightened of what I’d find.

I stifled a gasp.
Dear God.

While I’d been tending to Kieran, the house had been surrounded by dozens of irregularly shaped, blobby creatures, some the size of a mouse, others as big as a Labrador retriever. They slid over the exterior surfaces, moving like giant, stretchy amoebas, casting out thin tendrils that linked together. They covered everything they passed in a thick, web-like lattice. Even the roof hadn’t been spared. I looked up to the opening in the ceiling where a mottled-black, slippery-looking tentacle probed the ragged edges of the broken roof. Before I could even contemplate the possibility of escape through the oblong rent, three dark filaments shot across the opening. In a matter of seconds, the gaping hole had been filled in, obscuring my view of the cloudy sky. I pressed the back of my damp wrist to my lips, trying not to utter a sound.

I glanced down at Red. He’d seen it too.

Surely, this was how Kieran had been injured. He must have run across one or more of these creatures outside. Contact with just a few tendrils had been enough to incapacitate him—a formidable, six-foot-four, two-hundred-plus-pound sidhe warrior. I shoved aside my rising panic and focused on surrounding our bodies within my telekinetic web, forming an impenetrable bubble around us, in case the tendrils tried to attack.

If these disquieting creatures weren’t bad enough, worse had yet to come. I knew because I sensed it—a mind-numbing foulness, lying in wait, just outside the periphery of the house. The hunter had cornered its prey.

I levitated myself to hover just above the floor, next to the table, keeping as far from the hole in the ceiling as possible. Even though the creature hadn’t yet entered the house, I glanced over my shoulder, checking the empty air, convincing myself nothing malevolent lurked just beyond the kitchen doorframe, ready to pounce. I opened my mouth to allay my panicked breathing with a few deep breaths, promptly tasting dust on my tongue.

I turned my attention to Kieran. I picked off the remaining rubble from his body and then levitated him out from under the table, keeping his arms, legs, and neck from skewing awkwardly.

“Tuck down, Red,” I whispered. Kieran had enough problems. He didn’t need to suffer from the effects of Red’s protection spells too.

When Red had settled back into my purse, I turned Kieran upright and slid him into my open arms. His softly exhaled moan tugged at my heart.

His head rested heavily against the crook of my neck. Water from his wet hair seeped through my thin jacket. It was all I could do to keep myself from clinging to him, squeezing every bit of comfort from his warm body. As I whisked us to the far corner of the room, I pressed the side of my face against his cheek, my lips next to his ear.