The Change (Unbounded) (19 page)

She stiffened, and I looked behind me to see Ritter. The bleeding of his wound had slowed, but the bloodstains down his arm made him look gruesome. “He’s with me,” I said. “Come, let’s get to Dad and Jace. See what we can do.” I kept my arm around her. All my life, she’d been the rock of the family, the source of all organization and determination, and I’d mostly resented her strength because of how weak and directionless it made me feel. But in an instant our roles had been reversed. Everything was different now. I couldn’t give in to my urge to scream and weep. I had to be strong for her as she’d always been for me.

As I passed through the door to the bedroom, I heard Ava calling to Ritter from the main floor. “Up here,” he directed.

My father and Jace were sprawled several feet from the door. My father lay with his arms askew, his chest covered in blood. Jace was also unconscious, his hands clutched over his stomach, blood welling between his fingers. More blood pooled beneath his head. Beyond them the pristine expanse of tan carpet and the untouched bed made a startling contrast to the blood and gore. A sound escaped me that was a mixture of horror and despair. Releasing my mother, I fell to my knees between the still forms of Jace and my father. In one hand I still carried my gun, which seemed to gleam at me accusingly.

Ava hurried into the room, followed by Stella and Dimitri and two mortal men I didn’t recognize. One was stocky, with olive skin and dark hair; the other was a very dark black man with a wiry body and corded muscles. Both Unbounded and mortals alike were armed with silenced handguns and rifles that weren’t much smaller than Ritter’s machine gun. Dimitri went at once to check the wounded.

“What can we do to help?” I asked through my tears.

“Get towels,” Dimitri ordered. “Press them over the wounds.”

I hurried to my parents’ bathroom. When I returned, my mother was kneeling near my father and brother, alternately stroking their cheeks while her own ran with tears and blood. Horror washed over me anew, followed by a tremendous load of guilt.

This is my fault,
I thought.
If I hadn’t been so impatient to see them, they would all still be safe.

I gave Dimitri the towels. “Are they going to be okay?” I asked in a trembling voice I didn’t recognize as my own.

“Your brother should make it if we can stop the bleeding, but your father’s chest wound is bad. If I don’t operate within the hour, he’ll die. Even with the operation . . .” Dimitri shook his head. As he spoke, he had me press a towel over Jace’s head wound. My brother looked so pale. My father was worse, though, his face now a grayish color. Without machines or a thorough examination, I didn’t know how Dimitri could be so certain about their diagnoses, but I believed him completely. He’d had a thousand years to develop his skill in medicine.

“Oh, Grant, please don’t leave me,” my mother moaned, grabbing my father’s hand.

“Go then,” Ava told Dimitri. “Take Grant to the clinic. You’ll have to come up with an explanation, but you’ve saved enough lives there this past year that they ought to cut you some slack. I’ll work on Jace and bring him as soon as he’s stable. I know enough. Go.”

I hadn’t realized Dimitri was working regularly as a doctor, but it made sense. Like Ava, he’d want to be useful during their down time. And he’d somehow been able to get me out of the burn center.

Dimitri gave a short nod and motioned to the men I didn’t know. “Marco, Gaven, help me get him to the van. And I’ll need you, too, Stella,” he added. “You’ll have to call ahead, let them know we’re coming and make up some excuse for the emergency surgery, something that doesn’t include bullets. Meanwhile, I’ll try to slow the bleeding with what I’ve got in the car. Ritter, come down to the van with me. I have supplies Ava will need for Jace.” His voice became gentle. “Annie,” he said to my mother, using her name though to my knowledge they had never officially met, “you can come with us.”

Everyone jumped into motion. After Ava took over with Jace, my mother hugged me and gave a last pat to my brother’s still face. “He protected us,” she murmured. “Without him, we would all be dead.”

I nodded, guilt now the only feeling coming through the hazy numbness that had settled in my heart. My family was being ripped apart—and it was all my fault. “Go with Dad. We’ll take care of Jace.”

She nodded blindly. As she left, I wondered if she would ever forgive me for what I’d done.

Ritter returned with the medical supplies, and Ava deftly wrapped the wounds on Jace’s stomach and head, and the smaller flesh wound on his upper arm. Afterward, she gave him a shot of antibiotic and morphine. “This’ll hold him until Dimitri or Laurence can look at him.”

“What about Chris?” I looked up from where Ritter was tying my still-bleeding leg, his fingers so gentle I felt almost no pain. Or maybe that was because of the painkiller he’d injected into my flesh.

“We sent Cort and Laurence and the others there,” Ava said. “They’ll check in soon.”

Relief came through the numbness. “And my grandmother?”

Ava shook her head. “Our people got her out. At any rate, no one came for her. Probably because there’s no chance of her having more children. I’m sure they came here primarily for Jace.”

“We need to get these guys out of here before their backup arrives,” Ritter said. “But there are four of them—”

“Five,” I interrupted. “There’s another one in the basement. Four Unbounded, one mortal, altogether.” Apparently, they didn’t plan to leave any of the Emporium operatives behind, unlike the Hunters who’d attacked us. That alone told me how much more dangerous they viewed the Emporium.

“Five, then, plus Jace, but Dimitri took his van.” Ritter shoved a wad of gauze under his shirt to mop up his own wound. Apparently, real men didn’t have time for bandages.

“We’ll have to use my mom’s car,” I said. “It’s got a big trunk and a backseat we can put down. Might be big enough. We can recline the front seat for Jace.”

“Get the keys.” Ava had prepared two more needles, handing one to Ritter. “Enough for two. Give half to each Unbounded.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Something to keep them out for a few days until we can transfer them.”

“Transfer them?”

Ava’s voice was ice-cold. “To Mexico. We have our own courts there and enact our own justice. If they can’t be made to understand the wrong they’re doing, they will be executed for their crimes.”

I understood the reasoning, and even welcomed such a sentence after what they’d done to my family, but after seeing her compassion for the Hunters, I hadn’t expected this detached brutality.

“Good. I want them to pay.” I stumbled out to the bloodstained sitting room to help move the men, noticing immediately that something was wrong. The two Unbounded were still unconscious, but the mortal I’d stopped Ritter from killing was missing.

Ritter swore under his breath. “I’ll find him.”

He checked the house, while Ava and I hurried to move the unconscious men to the car. They were heavy, but Ava was strong, and I surprised myself by being able to support the load. Muscles always at the peak of performance, despite my wound. Being Unbounded definitely had its perks.

The trunk and backseat of the car were smaller than I remembered, and several of the blood-drenched men ended up on their sides, but we managed to fit them in. I felt sick by the time we’d finished and heaved several times in the main floor bathroom. Nothing came up but bile.

We carried Jace last, and much more carefully. “I’ll drive him to the clinic first,” Ava said. “You and Ritter can meet me there, and then we’ll deal with the others.”

I put blankets around Jace to make the ride more comfortable. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to him. He didn’t seem to hear me.

Ritter joined us in the garage carrying Max, who tried to greet me with his tongue. “The mortal is long gone, but look what I found downstairs behind the couch. He’s going to need attention.”

I’d completely forgotten Max, though Ava and I had gone to the apartment below for the last body. Worry about Jace and my father had crowded everything else out. “He saved me,” I said. “I hope he’ll be all right.”

“Dogs are tough.” A shadow of pain touched Ritter’s face. Or was that a trick of the light? I wished I knew. Our eyes locked. Emotions roiled inside me, so many I couldn’t differentiate them.

“Go,” Ava told Ritter. “I’ll meet you two at the clinic.”

“I want to stay with Jace.” My leg was throbbing again painfully, and I suspected my body was quickly ridding itself of the painkiller as it would any drug.

Ava shook her head. “As long as we have these men with us we are exposed to both the Emporium and local authorities. I don’t want to risk you. Go on out the back. I’ll meet you at the clinic. Move!”

My second magazine was half empty, but I picked up my gun from the floor of the car near Jace’s feet where I’d stashed it. I stared at it for several seconds. I’d shot two men with this weapon today, and though they weren’t dead, it had been the most horrible thing I’d ever had to do. How many more would I have to shoot?

Ritter carried Max as we went outside, this time using the gate between our yard and the neighbor’s. Wordlessly we slipped into the bushes, which we planned to use for cover until we got as close as we could to the Land Cruiser. We hadn’t gone far when I realized my neighbors were out in their front drive, talking to others and pointing in the general direction of my house. “We’ll never make it to the car without being seen,” Ritter said. “We’ll have to make a run for it.”

I put a hand on his arm. It felt warm and alive and I had the silly urge to rub my face against it. “Listen, there’s a siren. If we wait a minute they might leave to go take a look, but if you go out there with that machine gun and all that blood on you, everyone will see us and tell the police exactly where we are.”

“Okay. We wait. But not too long. Sooner or later they’re going to realize my car doesn’t belong here.”

We crouched in the bushes at the side of the house, with Max emitting a tiny whine every so often. I stroked his blood-matted fur to calm him. The numbness I felt was growing inside. “It’s all my fault,” I whispered. “All of this. How do I live with that?”

He was silent a moment and then, “It isn’t your fault. It’s them. It’s always them.”

“If that’s true, why do you blame yourself for what happened to your family?”

He frowned. “That’s different.”

“You didn’t know any more than I did.”

“So maybe we both aren’t responsible.”

“But we’re still the cause, so it doesn’t change anything, does it?”

“Right.” His voice grated against my ears.

I thought of the headless girl. I wanted to ask him if he knew who she was, or if I was going crazy. Instead, I said, “All I feel is nothing.” A very painful nothing. A void as deep and wide as the ocean.

He put a hand on my arm. “That will pass. Then you’ll just be angry. I’ll teach you how to fight, to get back at them. Sometimes it’s enough.”

Would I become like him? An angry, hunting, killing machine? It didn’t sound too bad at the moment. My past, my job, my life with Tom all seemed like a dream. “Okay.”

The growing crowd gravitated to my neighbor’s backyard, and everyone stood peering over the fence. Someone called out that the police were going inside my parents’ house. Ritter tossed me the keys. “You drive. I’ll carry Max.”

It was ridiculously simple, waiting until the last of them passed us and then walking briskly to the Land Cruiser. As we drove from the area, we could see more neighbors out in the streets and on porches. Already the news of my parents’ disappearance would be spreading over the once-quiet neighborhood. I wondered how long it would take before any of them felt safe again. I doubted I ever would.

Fifteen minutes later we pulled up at the clinic where Ava was coming out the front door. I sprang from the Land Cruiser. “How are they?”

“Dimitri’s working on your dad, and Jace is being prepped for surgery. No use going inside now. You’ll only raise more questions looking like that.”

I glanced down to see splotches of darker red marring the dress. Not my blood but the Unbounded we’d carried. And Jace’s. My own dried blood also covered my left leg. I resembled something from a slasher film.

Ava handed her keys to Ritter. “I parked the car in the back. Tossed a blanket over them so the orderly could help me take in Jace. Better transfer them to your vehicle. There were neighbors outside Erin’s house when I left. The police will be looking for the car.”

“I need to check in with Cort first,” Ritter said. “I haven’t heard anything.”

“Stella has. He’s on his way here. Look, there he is now, and Charles is with him.”

Cort and another man emerged from the Lexus. Charles, obviously part of our mortal security detail, was a strong-looking man with pale skin, brown hair, and a serious expression. “What happened?” Ava asked Cort.

“We got there just after the Emporium went in,” he said.

I sucked in a breath as Ava asked, “Chris?”

“He’s okay. The kids were at a cast party or something, so they weren’t even there. Nice bit of incompetence for us. First stroke of luck we’ve had all day. Laurence has gone to pick up the kids, and the others are bringing in an Unbounded we captured. We killed two mortals, but two Unbounded got away.”

“Where’s Chris?” I asked anxiously.

“With Laurence. We’ll have to hide him and the kids, give them new identities. The Emporium will be after them again if we don’t. Laurence is going to take care of it.”

There was something he wasn’t saying. I could feel it as though he were screaming the words. “What about Lorrie?”

Cort frowned and his eyes were sorrowful. “I’m sorry, but your sister-in-law was shot. She’s dead. As soon as we’re safely away, we’ll have to report it. She has family.”

Lorrie dead?

I couldn’t take it in. Not Lorrie. Not the mother of my niece and nephew, the woman who was my brother’s entire world. Tears blurred my vision. My father might die, my brother was seriously wounded, and Lorrie was already dead.

“It’s not your fault,” Ava said.