“No…” Just a little breath of a word, but as it escaped my lips, it got bigger. “No!” Dave turned to me, the same savage grin on his face. “NO!”
My voice echoed around the street, bouncing off buildings and cars, announcing my dissent over and over. It didn’t matter. Billy lay there, completely limp, Rutherglen’s hands still filled with bright crackling lightning. My heartbeat roared in my ears, beating its frantic morse code over and over. Save them, it said, save them. But with what?
With this, Lilith hissed.
The sound persisted long inside my mind as I felt the pull. I looked away from Rutherglen, something that was downright suicidal right now, but I couldn’t seem to care. I heard it, like a far-off sound or the memory of one, hissing and whistling as I pulled them close. They came as they had when I rescued Jen and Vervain and Marlow, the shadows, but now we stood on the street in the dead of night, so there was just so much more of it.
Do tsunamis sound like this? I wondered, hearing the low roar grow and grow. The shadows had become a living, breathing beast, rubbing up against me, and when they saw one of their own lying on the ground, they were pissed.
And so the fuck was I. My eyes jerked up, fixing on Rutherglen right as I felt the darkness rush inside me.
I was light as a feather, insubstantial as a breeze as I strode towards Dave, yet somehow, I carried with me the weight of the entire night sky. Darkness swallowed the police lights, the gleam of painted metal, the glare of the streetlights. It eradicated evidence of everything in its path, and when Dave looked up, his eyes were wide now, a thin rim of white betraying his mental state. I walked towards him, feeling the shadows shift with me.
He raised his hands, the crackling rising as his heartbeat did, something frantic and desperate as he flicked them out, as if that would be enough to stop me. It stung, the lightning leaving nasty bites all over my skin, but the darkness took that too. I strode forward until I stopped just short of Billy, the shadows seeping out from under my control, running like black ink down the drain, towards my love.
“Billy…” I whispered, my voice ragged, dropping down by his side. I touched him carefully, fighting the urge to flinch when I felt how cool his skin was, the slow, too slow beat of his pulse when I grabbed at his wrists. “Billy…” I dropped my ear to his chest, wanting, needing to hear the rasp of his breath, something made impossible by Dave’s laugh. When I looked up, he grinned like a loon.
Fuck. This. Prick.
I raised my talons to the sky. Let Sky Daddy mark them, the nails growing into foot long blades of dull gleaming darkness. Boom…boom…boom… Like the ticking of a clock or the slow beat of a drum, my head jerked up as I heard the sound, partially cloaked by the rumbling of thunder. This just made Rutherglen laugh harder.
I came for him, flying through the air that was mine, striking out with blades of blackness, but when I sliced into his skin, he just kept on laughing. I saw muscle part, gushes of blood. I saw more of his internal anatomy than any other person, but he didn’t care. Probably because he healed from every injury almost as soon as I hurt him. I paused, frowning.
Boom…
Boom…
The beat came slower, so much slower, a show of lightning across the sky as it did so.
“They scream so loudly, kids,” Rutherglen said, edging out of the grip of my shadows. As if summoned by his words, I heard the wails from farther down the street. “Like so intensely. Disproportionate for their size. Scientists reckon it’s an evolutionary thing. They’re so bloody useless, what can they do but use this primal wail to make adults rush to help them?” His nose wrinkled as he looked down the street. “Does nothing for me. I’ve been lighting these fires all over the world, trying to draw you out. I wonder how many have screamed because of me?”
I growled, seeing the little boy inside Aragide, tears streaming down his face. Saw a much younger Jake and Johnno and Billy… My eyes slid back to the man himself, lying on the ground, unmoving, the dour child briefly overlaying the unconscious man.
Boom…
Boom…
So slow, the sound reverberated throughout the streets, the beat lazy now. The beat inside…
You have to follow the beat inside.
“Billy…” I hissed, hearing the sound finally for what it was. “Billy?”
“So easy to distract. I just have to direct you at a target, and you flounder along, attacking like a wild animal. No strategy, no finesse. I can’t hurt you, you made that clear, but those you love? Your consorts, Lucas, that faithless daughter of mine, your grandmother…”
I went stock still. Nan had been the furthest person from my mind, but as soon as he said the words, I saw her, felt her, smelt the sweet herbal scent of her tea inside the round tin.
“I don’t have to fight you. I just need to hurt what’s yours. You showed your hand, I know what your weakness is, and I fully intend to exploit it.”
I didn’t hear his words. I knew they were sharp, and I’d feel the cuts of them later, but right now, there was only Billy. I landed on the ground by his side, hauling him up and over, his hair falling over my arm like a fallen flag. He was a dead weight, those words exploding inside me like shrapnel.
“Billy…?”
I was pleading now, a fucking tide of tears swelling inside me, and I just swallowed them back. I could hear it now—a million years between each heartbeat. That beat was him, all I had left.
“Billy.” I stroked his face, feeling my muscles spasm when Dave hit my unprotected back with another lightning strike, but unable to look away. “Love. I need you to wake up.”
As if to contradict that, the world got closer, darker, the sounds more muted, the shouts and Dave’s inane Bad Guy 101 babble all falling away. Instead, there was only this—the howl of wolves on a winter’s night, the crackle of a fire, and that damn fucking beat. Initially, I held my breath between each one, but soon grew too lightheaded from lack of oxygen to do that.
He’s slipping away, Lilith said.
No.
He took the full brunt of the sky father’s power. Most cannot wear it like you can.
No.
Let’s get him back to Aragide, away from this place.
NO!
I wasn’t denying her, him, anything. Just this place, this…event. This could not be the way things ended, my mind was very sure of that, despite all the considerable evidence to the contrary. I clawed his hair back from his face, but somehow, that was worse. There was no Billy here. No sneer, no smirk, no mystical dark-haired wizard with magical fingers, picking out tunes as he told me things I’d never understand. I didn’t know him, I realised that. He was standoffish as a cat, distant.
Until he wasn’t.
That conversation, that raw pain on his face in his consort’s room. Those words.
Boom…
No!
Boom…
No!
Boom…
NO!
I stepped into the darkness, and it rushed towards me like a wave, no longer held back. It swallowed everything—the street, the sounds, the fight, the screaming children, the exploding buildings, and him. My love.
For a moment, there was only black and the howl of the wind, the only sound able to ably communicate the pain rising in my chest.
Please, no. Please, no. Anything, anything but this.