There had been no accident. Justin was alive. Bear was alive. Maybe I’d been thrown off one of the three-year-old colts as I introduced him to the saddle. That would explain the pain in my back and legs. The thrumming pound of my head. The ache in my wrist.
But it did not explain away the ache in my heart, nor the taste of magic at the back of my throat.
I groaned and tried to shift my position—when had our bed been this hard under my back? A sharp pain made me suck in a breath, the pain of a knife cutting through my ribs, sticking me hard.
A deep voice I almost recognized, with the accent hailing from the East Coast, rolled through the shadows of my slow awakening.
“The wife is alive, boss. You want me to finish it?”
Finish it. Those two words reverberated through my brain like a gong and the accident welled up in my mind, washing away the last of the lies I so desperately clung to.
The truck rolling and going into the river, Justin’s neck, the gunshot, the green swirling auras of magic . . . Bear. Reaching for me, crying for me. Screeching metal, cracking ice, the cold of the water seeping around me, the blood dripping into the slow lazy current, the violent explosion under us as we slid down the hill . . .
I opened my eyes, found myself looking at an unfamiliar ceiling, pocked with scars like someone had thrown pencils up to stick into the cheap panels, over and over. Cracks ran through the dirty gray panels, and I stared at them while my consciousness caught up to the fact I was no longer asleep.
I made myself turn my head to the right where the voice had been speaking, only to see the edge of the speaker’s body as he left the room. Dark pants underneath a doctor’s lab coat, but the unmistakable outline of a gun under the back of that white coat. Tall, easily over six foot, but lean, not the beefy muscled man I’d already imagined. I watched the door, waiting for him to come back, and when he didn’t, I couldn’t deny where I was any longer.
Or why I was there.
Hospital. Accident. Death. Magic.
I couldn’t close my eyes, because when I did I saw my boy. I saw his hand reaching for me, then slowly, slowly dropping into the water as his life slid away from him.
“Bear.” His name was on my lips, and I knew the answer to the question I was asking because my heart didn’t beat the way it had yesterday. Today it was hollow, empty as it had been before my boys.
Grief roared over me like a lion swallowing me whole and I couldn’t see past it. I didn’t want to see past it. I let it take me, and I don’t know for how long. I only knew the light in the room from the only window shifted over time, slowly darkening. A nurse came in and tried to give me something. A sedative.
“Get the fuck away from me!” I screamed the words, hurling them like the weapons I wanted in my hands. The nurse rushed out of the room with high spots on her cheeks, the needle clutched in her left hand. I leaned forward, watching her, suspicion slicing through me. Did she throw the needle out? Had she been told to give me that sedative? Was it even a sedative or something more dangerous? I put my hands to my head, rocking slowly. The killer I’d been reared up inside of me. The one that had been taught to survive no matter what. To be a weapon. I’d put her away and thought she was gone forever.
Hard.
Violent.
Dangerous.
I’d cast off those chains when I’d met Justin, when I’d found my first taste of love and safety. When I’d first felt Bear growing inside me and I had more reason than ever to fight for a life I’d never thought was possible. Whatever love I’d learned with Justin was nothing compared to what Bear’s life had brought to me.
But he was gone. Dead. They both were.
I threw up, the nausea hitting me so suddenly that I didn’t have a chance to even look for a bucket. I turned my head to the side, splattering the sheets and the floor with clear liquid.
“I’ll get a bucket.” Someone said, I assumed a nurse. I didn’t even look up, couldn’t move from where I was.
Despite the pain in my ribs and legs from the angle I lay, I stayed in that position.
Pain was good, it cleared my mind like nothing else. It always had. It would allow me to set the mind-numbing grief aside long enough to make sure I was seeing what had happened clearly. That I wasn’t remembering wrong the things that had happened as the truck went out of control. That I wasn’t putting things into my memory because I wanted to blame someone for what happened. That my paranoia hadn’t got the better of me.
I played the accident over and over in my head, looking at it with a calculating, experienced eye, avoiding the scenes of Bear and Justin and focusing on the feel of the truck as it slid, the way it had flipped, the man outside the truck. The color that had suffused the truck, the way the green swirls had held us in the air.
The brakes had been tampered with, of that much I was sure, but that had only been the beginning of things.
Three of the tires had blown out, which was impossible, unless there was a spike belt, which would have blown all four tires. They had to have been shot. Which meant there had been at least two shooters, and one of them had been able to work death magic.
The explosion that had gone off under us had been powerful, yet directed. The only way to manage that was with someone who had great control over their abilities. Had the magic been under the truck, attached, or launched at us in the last seconds? I pulled the sensation of the explosion going off through me again. No, the magic had been in the bush under us, not on the truck itself, I was sure of it.
That girl I’d been, all that training I’d thought I’d left behind, shoved everything else aside and showed me what I didn’t want to believe.
Justin’s and Bear’s deaths had not been accidental. Not for one heartbreaking second.
The past, who I’d been . . . I didn’t want to be that girl, and I’d run to escape what I’d been made into. There was no way my father had found me. Yet . . . the truth was in front of me.
I needed to get out of here. Because the girl from my past was laughing maniacally, enjoying the pain I writhed in. She knew the truth and so did I. Someone had found me, and the deaths of the two souls I loved more than my own life was the result.
Pain and grief rapidly shifted into dangerous territory inside me. Rage fired at the edges of the grief and burned away the emotion.
Another nurse came in, this one with a bucket and mop. He cleaned up the mess at my feet, a sad smile on his face. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with a hairline that was already receding, and I knew just by the edges of his face he was an abnormal. The hair grew wonky along his jaw line, like a beard gone wild. But the hair was coarse, and multiple colors. I looked him over for the lines of a weapon under his scrubs but saw nothing. He didn’t notice my intense perusal of his body, or if he did, he ignored me. More like he was used to being checked out. Abnormals were rarely trusted.
“You have a visitor,” he said. “Says he’s your uncle. You good with him coming in once I’ve got this cleaned up?”
The tremor in my legs and arms was nothing I could control. If it was my uncle, all was good. But that was what the hitmen I used to work with would say to get close to their marks. They could be your uncle, your godfather, your cousin. Anything to get within striking distance. And if it was a magic user, I was royally screwed. I had none of my tools to block the magic, none of my weapons to stave off a power that I’d never had, nor ever would have.