“Yes.” I rubbed the heels of my palms over my face, but it did nothing to erase the lines of text burned into the backs of my eyelids. “I have the worst headache.”
Boaz peered over Linus’s shoulder. “You’ve got what you need?”
“Yeah.” I swayed when I attempted to step around Linus. “It feels like you stacked all those books on top of my head, and if I don’t balance them, they’ll fall.”
“Let’s get her out of here.” Boaz crossed to the panel and entered the code. Throwing his weight into it, he swung open the massive door and led us back into the antechamber. “I need a second to lock this.”
Sweat poured down my spine, and the room began to spin. The edges stretched and twisted until they resembled the cramped handwriting I had spent the past four hours reading, but I couldn’t make out the words. They were gibberish no matter how I squinted.
“Hush,” Linus whispered in my ear. “You’re reciting from the books.”
Mashing my lips together got us past Marx, but I was babbling again by the time we reached the first elevator. All we could do was hope a verbal purging wouldn’t erase my temporary memory bank.
Linus held me and stroked my back, guided me and shielded me, as Boaz led us to the surface.
“Hey, handsome.” The female guard sashayed over to Boaz and all but climbed up him as she wrapped her arms around his neck. “Miss me?”
“Actually, no.” He clasped her wrists and peeled her off him. “I didn’t.” He strapped on a stern expression. “I already told you. I’m engaged. That means I’m off the market. I appreciate your help, but I’m not pulling down my pants—or yours—to pay for it.”
What a fine time for him to sprout a conscience. Goddess preserve us.
Fury turned the scorned woman incandescent. “You’ll regret this.”
Uncertain if she meant to bash his head in with the radio she snapped off her belt or commit career suicide by admitting to her peers she had let Boaz in without authorization, I couldn’t take the chance.
Using the twist tie I hadn’t returned to Linus, I pricked my finger again and wrote a sigil on her forehead that caused the harsh lines to soften and her lips to go slack.
“This is front gate,” a man barked. “Visitation, do you copy?”
Boaz took the radio from her limp fingers and held it to her mouth.
“Ten-four,” she said dreamily. “Have a nice day.”
Boaz caught her when her knees buckled and laid her out on the floor. “What was that?”
“I don’t know.” I massaged my temples. “I reached for a solution, and that sigil presented itself.”
“The information is fighting to get out.” Linus hooked an arm around my waist. “I feel it too, pushing at the edges of my brain. Just hold on a little longer, and try not to use what you’ve learned until we can examine the sigils outside of our heads.”
“Sure thing.” I slumped against him. “Can I nap now?”
Without hesitation, Linus scooped me up in a bridal carry. “Of course.”
Given my history with the prison, the guards didn’t ask too many questions about why Linus had to carry me out. The chuckler, having recovered his bravado, made a snide comment about me being too weak to make it in Atramentous, like I hadn’t already done my time. I squeezed Linus’s arm, but I could tell it cost him to do nothing.
Just when I thought we were in the clear, a high-pitched shriek raised the hairs down my arms.
Sirens.
Ten times louder and harsher than the severe weather sirens in town, these screamed warning. Danger. Escape.
“That’s the emergency siren.” The chuckler glanced around before zeroing in on us. “You’ll have to come with me.”
Panic unfurled wings in my chest and took flight, and I wriggled against Linus until he hushed me.
“Sorry, man.” Boaz knocked him out cold with a single uppercut. “But you had that coming.”
Another guard swung his gaze to Linus then backed away slowly before breaking into a run.
“You won’t make it.” The remaining guard, just as wary of Linus, raised his hands. “No one does.”
Boaz took the guard’s weapons then ordered him back to visitation.
“How do we get out?” Linus asked Boaz when we were alone again.
“People don’t get out of Atramentous.” He worked his jaw. “I thought we had time.”
“We’re not in Atramentous.” Linus maintained his cool. “We’re in a yard surrounded by a fence.”
“You’re splitting hairs, Lawson, and you know it.”
“Grier, you’re going to have to wake up now.” Linus bit the cap off his pen then swiped a sigil across my forehead. “How do you feel?”
The fog swirling through my head began to lift, and clarity seeped in. “Like I should have whammied that guard harder.”
“Your brain is working overtime. The sigil boosted its capacity, but it’s depending on your body to fuel it. Holding on to all the information you crammed into it is exhausting.” Linus lowered me down until I bore my own weight. “The sigil I used on you won’t last long against the strain, but it should keep your head clear until we get out of here.”
Nodding that I understood, I searched his pinched expression. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m hypothesizing on your condition based on mine.” A tiny smile flirted with his mouth. “We’re both going to crash, and hard. Soon.”
“Then we better get out of here fast.” I picked the scab on my palm until fresh blood welled. Using my finger, I drew fresh impervious sigils on Boaz, Linus, and then myself. “We’re walking out of here.”
Any larger, and Boaz’s eyes would swallow him whole. “We can’t just—”
“I’m not going back.” I’m not proud of how my voice broke. “I am not going back.” Linus massaged my nape. “We go through. Together. All of us. We’re walking out of here.”
“We go through,” he agreed. “Together.”
A switch flipped, and a calm, cool, and collected soldier stood in Boaz’s place. “We go through.”
All the fear and concern twisting him up vanished. I wondered at that, and then I got it.
Boaz had cut the last tie between us. He was forcing himself to stop looking at me as his sister’s best friend, as the girl who had crushed on him for years, as the woman whose heart he had broken, and see me for who and what I had become. Really see me, all of me.
Thanks to his injury, he had missed out on the miracle of his healing. But he would be wide awake for this. There would be no going back, no pretty little lies he could tell himself. For better or for worse, the whole truth of my potential would be laid bare to him.
I was no longer helpless Old Grier. I was New Grier, and she was fierce.
As much as I once craved validation from him, I almost regretted the loss of the last shred of innocence between us. He would never look at me the same way again, and there was a sadness in shedding the last vestiges of our childhood.
The guard took aim, at me. He must have thought I was the weakest link, or he hoped Linus’s and Boaz’s chivalrous streak ran deep enough that it would stop them in their tracks.
“I’ll handle this.” I dipped into the knowledge filling my head to bursting and isolated the perfect sigil.
“No.” Boaz stepped in front of me. “I got you into this mess. Let me get you out of it.” He rolled his shoulders. “I want the fault for this to land squarely where it belongs—on me.”
The light trot he started off in kicked up to a punishing jog after the first bullets pinged off his ward without inflicting any damage. He reached the first man and disarmed him. Using the butt of the rifle, Boaz knocked the guard out cold then made the rounds to the others who were too stunned to stop firing and run. He disabled them, but he didn’t kill them. Maybe that would win us points when this went to trial.
Goddess.
A trial.
I didn’t have to try hard to imagine sentinels cinching their hands around my upper arms then hauling me out of Woolworth House while I kicked and screamed for Maud.
Yanking myself out of that emotional tailspin was hard, maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I got my head back on straight. Thanks to Amelie, I had money tucked away where no one would find it. I had resources, though I hesitated to use them. The pack had hidden Taz, they would do the same for me, but it would bring down a lot of heat on their heads. And that didn’t take into account Linus or his duties or the repercussions for shirking them if this all went south.
But what alternative did we have? Lacroix had Savannah by the short hairs. We needed help, or the city was going to fall, and the rest of the country would hear when she hit her knees. The existence of supernaturals would be out in the open, and hysteria would sweep across the world. True witch hunts would begin, and I would get my chance to see if torches and pitchforks were as passé as Linus believed.
Boaz waved us on, and we ran through the checkpoint to the other side.
“Ever consider marketing this?” Boaz indicated the sigil. “The Elite would pay an arm and a leg for one.”
“This magic, my magic, isn’t for public consumption.” The vague dream of becoming a practitioner, an innovator, like Maud, had died somewhere between Volkov kidnapping me and Odette’s betrayal. I had no idea what I wanted to do, aside from embrace Linus’s dream for me of running my own ghost tour company, but it wasn’t designing weapons for the Society to use against its enemies, and it wasn’t adding to the number of vampires walking the earth. “I outed myself, and I can’t change that, but I won’t sell, trade, or license this sigil or any others.”
After careful consideration, he said, “Okay.”
I could tell he didn’t get why I wouldn’t want to share this knowledge, but it was enough that he respected my decision.