Authors: Laken Cane
Rune heard someone behind her before Fie jumped to her feet, squealing. “Uncle B’serk!”
She closed her eyes, unable to turn and look at him.
She knew what she’d see when she did.
Owen, how the fuck could you?
“Fie,” she said, keeping her stare on Elizabeth’s body, “was Owen one of the bad men?”
“I like Owen,” Fie said.
Rune climbed to her feet, her pants soaked through with blood, and walked to where Strad held the little necromancer. “Did he kill Elizabeth?”
Fie hid her face against the berserker’s neck. “He made me not look.”
Fuck.
Rune shuddered, and finally, she looked at the berserker.
He met her stare calmly, his eyes filled with worry. Pain. Pity.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he told her.
“Why would he do this?” she murmured. “Why?
Don’t trust Owen Five.
But she
had
trusted him, just a little fucking bit.
“We’ll ask him when we find him,” he replied, handing Fie to Denim. And then, he let his rage peek out at her. But only for a second.
“What the fuck went on here?” Jack asked, striding into the room. He stopped when he spotted Elizabeth’s body. “Shit. Son of a bitch.” And then he whispered, so low no one could hear him,
“Mom.”
But Rune heard and her heart broke for him. Bill and Elizabeth had become sort of a stand-in mom and dad to the crew.
“Owen’s work,” Strad growled.
Jack shook his head. “No. He wouldn’t have done this.”
“There has to be a reason,” Rune said. “Something…”
“It doesn’t matter if he had a hundred reasons. He’s a dead man,” the berserker said.
The cowboy had left them no choice. She could no longer defend him.
Owen had betrayed them all.
He’d betrayed her.
But at the back of her mind was a tiny, insistent voice, telling her that maybe, maybe…
Maybe there was a good reason. Maybe he wasn’t a traitor.
Maybe he hadn’t killed Elizabeth.
She had to find out.
She didn’t want to say the words aloud, not right then, with the crew confused and angry and hurt. Not with Strad glaring around the room with death in his stare.
She did anyway. “Before we kill him, we’re going to give him a chance to explain. We’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt and not judge him as guilty until we know for sure.”
Her voice was hard, but her stomach rolled so violently she was sure she’d throw up if she opened her mouth again.
Owen.
Fuck you.
Bill flung himself into the room, his eyes wild. “Oh, no. Oh, not Elizabeth.”
Then, he saw her.
He went to her, slowly, and dropped to his knees. He picked up her hand. “She’s gone, then. Really gone.”
Annex ops came into the house, guns drawn.
“Put those away,” Rune snapped. “You’re a little too fucking late.” She pressed her palms into her eyes and tried to breathe through the pain. Elizabeth was dead. Dead.
And Owen…
“What happened?” Bill turned his tortured eyes to Rune. “My God, Rune. What happened?”
“Some bad men,” Rune murmured.
“Pardon?”
“Fie said some bad men came in and killed Elizabeth.” Rune looked at Fie, frowning, suddenly remembering what Fie had said. “She said she killed them.”
“Elizabeth did?”
“No. Fie did.” Rune motioned at Denim. “Take her to…”
Take her where? The Annex, to Eugene, so he could put her in a sterile cage and study her for the rest of her life?
“Take her to Ellis,” Strad said. “We’ll figure it out later.”
Rune nodded, relieved. “Yes. To Ellis.”
Denim headed out the door with the unprotesting child.
Rune stood beside Bill and put a hand on his shoulder. “The men killed our ops,” she told him. “They killed Elizabeth. From what I can understand, Fie killed the men. I don’t know how. I didn’t know she could…”
She shrugged and continued. “Fie killed the ones she called the bad men, except for one.”
He looked up at her, a spark of interest cutting through his grief. “Who?”
Rune opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She couldn’t say his name.
Strad had no such problem. “Owen.”
“No,” Bill said. “Owen loved Elizabeth. They were close.”
“Yeah,” Rune said. “Maybe not so much.”
Bill’s cell rang but he ignored it.
Rune’s began ringing as soon as his stopped, and she felt a deep stab of pain when she realized Elizabeth would never call her again.
“It’s Eugene,” she said. “I don’t want to talk to fucking Eugene.”
Raze took her cell. “I’ll do it.”
He stomped from the room, his deep voice rumbling, the cell to his ear.
Strad’s gaze went with an almost weary hesitancy to the splashes of blood coloring the floor. He glanced at Elizabeth’s cold, sad body, at Bill, hunched and devastated, and then, he looked at Rune.
“Strad,” she said. “Wait.”
But he turned and strode from the room, beginning a search for Owen Five that wouldn’t end until one of them was dead.
“Why would they kill Elizabeth?” Levi asked, as he drove Rune to Wormwood.
“I think they were after Fie. She…” She stared out the window, unsure. What the hell was the child?
“Yeah,” he said. “The net didn’t just change her physically, did it?”
“I don’t know what it did to her.” But the girl was as deadly as anyone Rune had ever met.
They’d examined the bodies before they’d handed the horrific crime scene and Elizabeth over to the Annex housekeeping. The corpses were covered with blood, but it was as though it’d exploded from their pores. There were no wounds.
The wounds were on the Annex operatives. Their attempts at defense had been shut down quickly and quietly. They’d been stabbed, and some of them had broken necks.
No one had been shot.
Eugene told Raze it might have been the Next, but he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about anything.
None of them were.
After all, they’d thought the Next was responsible for the rotting sickness.
“And Owen,” Levi said. “That was some bad shit back there.”
“But you don’t think he did it.”
He shook his head, and his long braid slid over his shoulder. “I don’t know. He was there. Fie couldn’t make that up. But
why
was he there?”
“Fie said he made her turn away when Elizabeth was killed.” Rune put a hand to her throat, her breath hitching. Dammit. She would have to mourn Elizabeth.
She’d hide from it for as long as she could.
She punched her leg, suddenly, then winced at the pain. The disease was making her weaker. “Owen is not the enemy. Owen is not the bad guy. He’s
not,
Levi. Oh, fuck.” She crossed her arms over her midsection and leaned forward, glad Levi was driving. “
Is
he?”
Levi patted her shoulder. “Maybe, Rune.”
When they arrived at Wormwood, Strad’s car was already there.
“You called it,” Levi said.
“I knew he’d search Wormwood first.”
The huge graveyard was a perfect place to hide. It was huge.
But if Owen was inside the gates, Gunnar would know it.
He wouldn’t help Strad find Owen—but he’d help her.
Owen
was
there. Bill had him tracked through his cell phone. Strad wasn’t the only man who wanted a piece of the cowboy.
She wanted to get to Owen before the berserker did. She wanted answers.
Strad just wanted to kill him.
She and Levi stepped into the graveyard, and Gunnar was waiting.
He didn’t speak or wait for her to speak, just turned and ran.
She and Levi were right behind him.
Gunnar slowed when he reached a copse of trees—the very trees that he’d once been buried beneath, in a box too small for his long body.
He turned to look at her then, and with his dark stare pinned upon her, he pointed. “There are your men, Your Highness.”
She’d underestimated Strad. Or maybe, Owen had never meant to hide when he’d gone to the graveyard.
It didn’t matter. Not then.
What mattered was that the cowboy and the berserker were facing off, and Rune wasn’t ready to let either one of them die.
Too many people were dying.
She was suddenly, inexplicably furious.
“I have questions,” she screamed, breaking the skin of her palms with her nails.
She was aware that she looked and sounded like a mad woman, and she didn’t care at all. She streaked into the clearing, screaming. Raging.
She was hurting.
And that made her want to hurt them.
They both snapped their heads around to look at her, their eyes a little wide, concerned, and familiar.
Oh God, I do love them. I love them. I
love
them.
That helped her go quiet, just a little.
“Bastards,” she said, breathing hard, understanding in that moment how easy it would be for her to snap and kill them both.
Shhhh. Shhhh…
Her monster rubbed against her insides, purring, eager to get out. Eager to kill.
But she wouldn’t let it kill them—she was there to save them.
Her mind was overwhelmed, and her heart had broken too many times. That made her a very dangerous monster, even to the ones she loved.
Because they were pissing her the fuck off.
She felt Levi at her back. Gunnar was there somewhere, as well, probably peering around a tree.
And I’m here, sweet thing.
She nodded.
Finally, she looked at the two men.
She pointed at Owen. “Explain, if you want to live.”
Her voice was like gravel, hard and bumpy and covering secret dark things that had gotten stomped below the rock.
“No,” Strad said, his own rage boiling over. “I’m killing him. Levi, take her the fuck out of here.”
As if.
As if anyone could take her somewhere she did not want to go.
She glanced at Levi.
He held up his palms and backed away.
She shuddered with the effort it took her to remain composed. “I will hear his story. There are things we need to know. Let him explain.”
“He’s full of lies, Rune,” the berserker roared. “He will tell us no part of the truth.”
“Owen,” she said. Begged.
“I…” But then, he shook his head. He’d lost his hat. He watched her, something in his eyes she couldn’t decipher. But for one brief second, pain flared. Then there was nothing on his face but resignation. “I’ve got no excuses.”
She took a staggering step back, stunned.
“Nothing?” Levi said, baffled. “Owen?”
Owen shrugged. “I’m so sorry. But I couldn’t—”
The berserker hit him, his fist crumbling Owen’s face like a sledge hammer on plaster.
Rune couldn’t move, couldn’t process that Owen was unable and unwilling to vindicate himself.
To give them something.
He was fucking
crew
.
She’d clung to hope, but hope had kicked her away and flung her into the darkness.
And nothing made sense.
For a long, long minute of agonizing confusion, she was unable to move.
Strad was gone, lost in his own world of madness and rage.
She was a child, suddenly. Muddled and hurt and helpless. “I’m rotting.” She held up her hands and looked at them, then showed them to men who were not watching. “See? I’m
rotting.
”
Levi grabbed her wrists. “Rune.
Rune.”
And she came back.
Strad dragged Owen from the ground, Owen, who was somehow still alive, and began to beat him with a rage that no one could have forced him to contain.
Not even Rune.
But she would try.
“Berserker,” she yelled, and ran to him.
Her legs were shaking, and her mind was full of chaos and noise.
So she listened to her heart.
“Rune,” Owen said, barely understandable as he managed to speak through swollen, torn lips. “You know me.”
She grabbed Strad’s huge arm. “You can’t hurt him like that,” she whispered. “You can’t do that.”
He looked at her, but there was only rage in his eyes.
“Okay,” he murmured, surprising her.
For one second, her heart jumped with gladness. With relief.
Then the berserker yanked his arm free from her grip, pulled his gun, and shot Owen in the chest.
The cowboy dropped like a stone, his hand to his wound. He didn’t make a sound.
“Ah,” Rune said. “No.”
As she stared, shocked and disbelieving, Owen climbed somehow to his feet. Bent forward at the waist, his hand to his chest, he staggered away.
Strad grabbed her arm, hard, as she started after the cowboy. “No. Let him go. Once and for all, Rune, let him fucking go.”
“I can’t.” Her voice was shaking, but calm. Deadly, horribly calm. “I won’t let any of my crew wander off to die alone.”
And though he held her in a grip too powerful for any human to break, not even the berserker was strong enough to hold her monster.
She was too late.
She flew through Wormwood like a monster possessed, but not as fast as she could have for fear of running right past his hiding place and his shot, damaged body.
Owen was gone.
Blood remained, droplets of Owen’s life that had drained from his body, decorating the hard earth.
She was too late.
He was gone.
She knew he was gone because the infinitesimal spark that was Owen wasn’t there anymore, and the world was changed.
The cowboy was dead.
She felt the absence of him.
She stumbled as her tears blinded her. Life was impossible and she had so much more of it to get through. An eternity of losing people. A forever of pain.
She’d lost Gunnar, the berserker, Elizabeth, Owen…
Gunnar and Strad had come back to her.
Elizabeth and Owen would not.
She even mourned the vampire master and his colorful sidekick. She grieved for the death of River County Others.
For her city.
Lex was dying.
Fie was a monster.
Rune was rotting.
She fell to her knees and let her head hang, too tired to keep going.
The rotting disease was getting stronger by the minute, and she was getting weaker. She could feel it streaming through her body, blackening her insides, pulping her organs.
Wearying her brain, her thoughts, her spirit.
She wanted to scream in rage but all that came out when she opened her mouth was a wail of anguish.
She didn’t like change. She didn’t like death.
And she had no control over either of those things.
At last, she got to her feet and started back through Wormwood.
There was nothing else to do.
Owen was dead.
Dead like Z.
Levi was waiting for her, but the berserker had gone.
“He said he knew you’d want some time,” Levi told her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Time.”
Jack and Raze waited by the gates, and she caught herself looking automatically for Owen before she remembered.
“What exactly happened?” Jack asked Levi, as they exited the graveyard.
“Strad beat Owen nearly to death. Then he shot him.” Levi’s voice was grim, but still a little disbelieving.
“Owen’s dead?” Raze asked. “Strad killed him?”
Levi looked at Rune.
“I couldn’t find him. He’s…” she shrugged, and forced back tired tears. “He’s gone. He was shot in the chest. He won’t live through that.”
“How did he get away?” Jack asked. “Beaten and shot, how did he get away?”
“I don’t know how one human could take so much damage,” Levi said. “Remember the first time Strad beat the fuck out of him?”
“Maybe he’s not human,” Raze said, not looking at any of them.
“He’s human.” Rune pushed her hair out of her face. “Just some kind of super human.”
“Rune.” Jack frowned. “How sick
are
you?”
So they knew. It wasn’t just Ellie fearing the worst.
“Pretty fucking sick,” she admitted. “But I can go a lot longer than Lex can. She’s the one we need to worry about.”
“Is Owen really dead?” Levi asked.
They kept jumping back and forth between subjects, but Rune knew it was because each issue was too heavy not to put away for a few seconds and concentrate on something else.
No one answered him, but they had no doubt that soon, the cowboy’s body would be found half-hidden in some hollow he’d dug into the side of a hill, or camouflaged beneath the thickness of some brambles and vines.
Or gnawed on by a starving, rotting Other.
Rune shuddered.
“Owen and Elizabeth, both on the same day. That’s fucked up.” Jack adjusted his eye patch. “That’s real fu—”
“Rune.”
Rune jerked her head around at the soft voice interrupting Jack. “What the hell?”
The crew rushed back to the gates and then inside, where Fie stood, with her feet bare and her hair still damp from the careful washing Ellie must have given it.
“Fie,” Rune said, shrugging off her coat to drape around the child. “How did you get here? Where’s Ellis?”
“I’m going outside the gates to call Denim,” Levi said, as he hurried away.
Jack yanked the child off the cold ground and held her against his chest as they waited for Fie to answer.
“I walked.” She squirmed impatiently. “Let me down. I have to go with Rune.”
Rune opened her arms. “Give her to me.”
Jack transferred the little necromancer to Rune.
“I’ll take you home, baby,” Rune told her, but fear left a bad taste in her mouth. The only way Fie could have gotten away from Ellie and Denim was if something had happened to them.
Please God, no more.
“Raze,” she murmured.
He nodded and strode away to find out from Levi what the hell had happened.
Jack squeezed her arm. “They’re okay. This kid is a slippery little thing.”
“No,” Fie cried, when Rune began to carry her back toward the gates. “We can’t go.”
And Rune got an even worse feeling.
She had to try twice before she could get the words out. “Why not, Fie?”
“You know why not.” Fie’s dark eyes, distended and grotesque in her skeletal face, held something too old and too terrifying for a tiny girl.
A lack, somehow, of humanity.
Just a cold impatience.
“Fie?” Rune whispered. “Why not?”
Fie sighed. “It’s time. The bells are ringing.”
Rune shivered. “I don’t hear bells.”
“I do,” Fie said. “I hear bells. You hear…”
“Echoes,” Rune finished.
“Do you hear the echoes, Rune?” Jack’s face had paled, and his voice rose in alarm.
“I can’t go by myself,” Fie said, calm. “You have to take me.”
“Do you
hear
them, Rune?” Jack was sliding quickly into full out panic mode.
So was Rune. “I can’t go yet,” she told Fie. “We have to get Lex.”
“No,” Fie said, then more loudly, when Rune started hurrying with her toward the gates. “No!”
Gunnar stepped out in front of her. “Rune. Stop.”
“I can’t, Gunnar.” She was almost unable to get the words out. “I have to get Lex.”
Jack grabbed her arm to drag her on. “Out of the way, ghoul.”
Fie struggled harder and began to cry. “No.” And finally, she sounded like the child she was. “I want to
go.”
“God,” Rune yelled.
Levi and Raze ran back into the graveyard.
“What is it?” Raze roared, his blades in his hands.
Levi looked around, trying to find the threat.
No one was there but Gunnar.
“The echoes,” Rune managed to gasp out. Oh, she heard them. She smelled them. She felt them.
How did I forget?
I’m here, sweet thing.
Rune, you know me.
It’s time.
Fie wrapped her arms around Rune’s neck and held on as tightly as she could, weeping.
Rune’s entire body shook with tremors too strong to stop. Her brain froze. Her voice left her.
I know you.
How did I forget?
Lex,
she screamed, silently.
Lex.
But Lex was sick and her demon, at that moment, was dead.
Rune couldn’t call it.
Lex would die if Rune left her.
She ground her teeth, moaning, shaking.
“Your Highness,” Gunnar cried, or she thought he did.
His thin hands were crossed over his chest, his mouth opening and closing as he sobbed.
Her mind swirled, swirled with a cacophony of voices and memories and dark wind. Echoes. Terrible, terrifying echoes.
He’s ours now.
Blood and Fire.
Blood and Fire.
Bloo—
And then they surrounded her, the huge animals, and she wanted to cry from happiness and cry from fear.
Sadness.
Insanity.
The berserker was there, suddenly, finally, horribly, his face crumbling, his eyes agonized, roaring, calling, pleading.
He reached for her.
He grabbed air.
Because Rune was gone.
The echoes had taken her.