Page 47 of Hellbound

Someone tugged on the back of her shirt. Tori. But Marian yanked free of her hold as Lloyd lurched to his feet.

The beam of Tori’s flashlight sliced across him, shining in his empty eyes. Marian twisted the hilt between her fingers, clutching the blade for a backward strike. Lloyd lunged for her, exposing the inky cord connecting him to the Remnant floating above the pool.

She sliced through it, severing Lloyd’s connection to the darkness.

The spotter convulsed as if he’d been electrocuted. The Remnant withdrew from him and recoiled like a worm in the throes of death. Its shape morphed so rapidly, Marian couldn’t track it with her eyes.

When Tori grabbed her a second time, Marian didn’t try to pull away. She collapsed back into the traveler’s chest as she stared in open-mouthed horror at the twitching body in front of her.

Empty space parted, exposing a starless void and pulled the Remnant through. For a fleeting moment, as Marian glimpsed inside the vacuum, she knew only despair. Then malice. Sorrow. Hunger. An endless yearning for something without a name. A need to possess her, consume her.

A final, world-shaking scream rang out as the void collapsed on itself in a blinding white corona. With a flash, it vanished, taking the Remnant with it.

The garage was suddenly bathed by moonbeams. Night had never been so bright. Marian registered the collapsed tables and toppled boxes in her periphery, but the edges of her vision went dark again as her world narrowed to the crumpled body in front of her.

Lloyd lay face down on the ground. Beneath him, blood mixed with pool water in a shallow puddle.

Marian stared down at the knife in her trembling grip, the blade’s surface still endlessly black and completely nonreflective, as untouched by light in life as it had been in death. Shock numbed her pain, made her forget that her arm ached fiercely, that her throat hurt like hell.

For a few seconds, there was only the sound of her own blood pounding in her ears, the tremulous wheeze of air in and out of her lungs, and white noise in her head.

Something icy stroked a soothing circle on the back of her hand, but she wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes were on the motionless body of Lloyd Wertz.

“Marian!”

She barely flinched when Tori crouched in front of her and gripped her by the shoulder. She should have shoved her away; she really didn’t like to be touched. But Marian’s reflexes weren’t working. Was this shock?

“Marian,” Tori said quietly, her eyes as big as plates. “Are you hurt?”

Marian’s gaze drifted from the traveler’s stricken face to Lloyd’s Glock in Tori’s hand. Bile crept up the back of her throat.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Tori stammered, as though she’d realized what Marian was staring at. “He was going to kill you.”

Marian began to shake uncontrollably as she swallowed what felt like a mouthful of glass. Why would Tori care if Marian died? That didn’t make sense. But nothing made sense anymore. The knife. The Remnant. The mark. The void. Was Lloyd dead? What had they just witnessed? Whatever it was, Marian recognized that everything she’d known had changed for the worse.

“I aimed for his legs, but it was so dark,” Tori said, her voice cracking.

Nausea struck in earnest as everything sank in at once. Marian clawed at her scalp. The sting of plucked hair was enough to nudge her mind back into her body, and the full weight of reality slammed into her.

And her hand—the marked one—was empty. She looked down at the floor, but the knife was nowhere to be seen. Then she stared up and saw a stream of black smoke drifting toward the ceiling.

The knife was gone.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sometime later, stomach acid still burning in the back of her throat, she and Tori went to work dealing with the fallout of what they’d done.

Marian’s movements detached from reality, as though she was observing her body rather than piloting it. But it kept the pain at bay so she could function. Together with Tori, they maneuvered an unresponsive Lloyd Wertz into the rescue position.

Marian’s first aid skills were rusty, but Tori seemed to know what she was doing. Or perhaps she just moved with the confidence of someone who refused to do nothing. The traveler staunched the bleeding in Lloyd’s backside with a gauze pad and calmly instructed Marian to apply pressure to the exit wound. Marian did as she was told in silence.

The wound wasn’t fatal; Tori had miraculously shot him in the ass instead of somewhere more important. The bullet had entered through the side of one buttock and exited out the other.

Lloyd’s intermittent groaning bolstered her hope that he’d live.

Marian was reaching for another round of gauze when the traveler exhaled loudly. There was a bloody thumbprint on her ashen cheeks.

“I think he’s stable, but I have no idea what to do next. He needs to go to the emergency room,” Tori said.