Heat Stroke

I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had been ruptured. My body—human, not human, whatever it was—was shutting down. That wouldn’t kill me, I sensed, but it would trap me inside of a dead shell. Not the way I wanted to escape, especially since it meant I wouldn’t be going anywhere.

“Yo!” Kevin’s pimply, pallid face appeared in my field of vision, pointed at a weird horizontal angle. He was bending over, staring at me. He waved a hand in front of my eyes, snapped his black-fingernailed, blunt-cut fingers. “You okay?”

I couldn’t answer. I slowly blinked my eyes, which was about all that my body was capable of doing for me at the moment.

“Oh,” he said, and straightened up. He prodded me with the toe of a particularly crappy-looking sneaker. This close, the smell of his feet was rancid, like mold-ridden buttermilk. “She got to you, huh? Yeah. Thought so. So, can you fix yourself?”

I blinked again. If ever I needed the kid to catch a clue…

“You can’t, can you? You need me for that.” He crouched down, staring down at me. “You need me. How about that? Not so high and mighty now, are we?” A thick finger prodded at my flaccid arm, and broken bones grated together. “What if I just leave you here, huh? What’s your game plan then, bitch? Lay there and bleed on me? Some fucking guardian you are.”

He sounded surly, but there was a tremor deep down. He was scared, all right. Not of me. He knew what she was capable of, and he wanted a friend. Protection. Something.

I tried to move my lips, but it was useless. I couldn’t even blink anymore. My eyes were fixed and staring. I heard my heart murmur one last, regretful beat, and then the blood in my veins slowed and stopped.

Death was anticlimactic, as a Dji

Kevin’s bedroom door suddenly blew open. Locks tore off of the frame and hit the far wall with enough force to put holes in the Sheetrock. I didn’t have a good view, but I heard Kevin’s pacing stop and stagger backward. He stumbled right into me, lost his balance, and fell. I felt him roll across me, hot and sweaty and tense with panic.

The swirl of power that went through the room was unmistakable.

David was here.

Kevin grabbed my limp, broken hand and yelled, “Fix yourself, dammit! Stop him! Don’t let him hurt me!”

Game on.

I felt my body instantly begin to heal, drinking in power from him to rebuild itself, and before I was anywhere near better I rolled away from him, away from his grip, and came fluidly to my feet to stand between him and David. Blue sparkles flashed all over me with false Vegas cheer.

Yvette was with him, of course. Still smiling.

“You left.” She pouted. “It was just getting interesting. We’re going to have lots of fun, sweetie, aren’t we?” The butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth tone turned cold and cutting as she focused past me, on her stepson. “Tell her to submit.”

“Yeah?” His voice wavered, but didn’t break. “Maybe I won’t.”

Why the hell had she ever taken a chance and given him a Dji

David moved a step closer. I matched him like a mirror image. Kevin’s order had me, of course. If David made any aggressive moves at all, I was free to stop him, and to use every ounce of power Kevin possessed to do it.

“News flash,” I said aloud, straight to her. “Not the submitting type. You want to take me, you can try, but it’s going to be one hell of a fight, and believe me, the damage won’t be anything you can patch up with base makeup and a couple of Band-Aids. I will hurt you.”

“Yeah,” Kevin agreed. “And I’ll let her. No, I’ll order her to do it.”

Her green eyes flicked to him, and the look on her face… If I’d had any doubt that she’d played her sick little games with him, that put them to rest. The pure, nauseating hatred made me feel filthy to see it.

“You stupid little bastard. I give you a toy, and you try to threaten me with it? You’re pathetic. David, I want you to—”

“Kevin, I want to take you out of here,” I interrupted her, and looked straight at the kid. “I’ll take you out of here if you want me to.”

He was no fool, even with the obvious social handicaps. He smiled, showing me crappy dental hygiene, and said, “Yeah. Take me somewhere. Somewhere else.”

It meant leaving David, oh God, I didn’t want to do that, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to do what I could. Patrick had said it. First, preserve your life. I didn’t think I could die here, but I’d damn sure wish I could.

I grabbed Kevin, wrapped him in my arms, and pulled on that vast pool of energy stored inside of him to take him…

… back to Patrick’s apartment.

Not a smooth ride through the aetheric. I tried to avoid the worst of the blue flares, but it was worse now, burning everywhere. A cheery fairy-dust snowstorm.

Patrick’s apartment place was empty. Bloodstains on the carpet, already dried. No sign of Lewis, or Patrick, or Sara. No sign that Rahel had ever returned.

I let Kevin go, shook off another thick moving layer of sparklies, and knelt down to touch the stiff brown-soaked fibers on the floor. Lewis’s essence. Through it, I could trace him. Find him…

“What now?” Kevin asked me. He avoided the bloodstains and went around to the other side of the couch, where he wouldn’t have to look at what he’d done. “She’ll come after us, you know. She’s not going to let us go. All she has to do is tell him to find us.”

He had the perfume vial in his pocket, stuffed in among a pack of condoms that at this rate he probably would never need. Nothing hard enough for me to shatter the glass against. Pure luck, probably. He wasn’t clever enough to protect it on purpose.

I stayed where I was, in a crouch, touching the evidence of his guilt. “Yeah, well, if you still want me to kill her, I’m up for it.”

“Really?” Hope and dread, all packed into one word. “Holy shit.”

Lewis, where the hell are you? I really didn’t feel well. Maybe it was the cost of David’s deconstruction of my body. Dying had to come with a price. I needed Lewis, not just because I was worried, but because as a human he could physically take the bottle away from Kevin and shatter it. Lewis was my only real hope of freedom, unless Kevin made a monumental error. Which was not beyond the realm of possibility, if I stayed alert.

Speaking of being alert… my brain finally caught up with the fact that Kevin wasn’t giving me orders, he was listening to me. And my clothing had stayed the way I’d chosen.

He wasn’t seeing me as a slave just now. He was seeing me as a friend.

“I need some help,” I said aloud. “Your stepmother’s got power, and now that she has David, she can do a lot more. We need to talk to the Wardens. They can help neutralize her without too much of a fight.”

All true, again. I was trying not to lie to him, because I knew it would come back to haunt me later.

The blood told me that Lewis had lain here unconscious for a long time—hours, maybe—before he’d finally come to his senses and left. Things were vague, from then on. He might not have been thinking clearly. Still alive, though. That came through with a clarity that eased a knot deep inside of me. I’d really feared that we’d left him here to die.

“The Wardens would never take my side,” Kevin said. He flopped down on the leather couch, folded his hands on his chest and stared up at the mullioned ceiling that had previously been far too X-rated for a kid his age. “They’d kill me. The old guy said so.”