Eventually, he just kept slashing at himself. Dying this way was going to take a while. But he had time. The pain was blissful.
“No. No no no no no no!”
Merc frowned as he tried to place that voice. The padre. Damn him. He fell to his knees in front of Merc, struggling to pull Merc’s right hand from his left wrist.
“Stop. I beg you. Stop this.” The padre was weeping. He didn’t have the strength to fight Merc, even in Merc’s current weakened state. The priest began reciting prayers, one running into the next.
Merc shoved him away and sliced his wrist again. The priest shrugged out of his robe, which he wadded up and pressed against Merc’s wrist. He set his back to Merc’s knife hand, holding Merc’s injured arm to his chest.
Merc tried but could not shake him off. Motherfucker, the padre was strong. Or Merc was getting weaker. They struggled for the upper hand. Merc started to cry as he begged to be let go. He had to finish this. The priest was crying too, appealing to God and the saints for help.
Merc’s block against his friends slipped. The bastards got through telepathically. Liege, in his astral state, gripped his right hand and pressed it against the dirt wall of the pit. Merc dropped his knife, losing it somewhere in the pit’s wall or floor. Astral Bastion had a hand on his neck and a knee on his chest, keeping him from wrestling free. Astral Acier held his other hand. Merc clenched his teeth. His friends weren’t there…but they were there, holding him, letting the priest tend to his wrists.
The unholy fucking fivesome was complete when Guerre touched his wrist. A warmth entered Merc’s body. Guerre had healed all of them at one time or another during their long years together, but Merc had never felt Guerre like this, in his heart and in his mind, tethering the broken parts of him together.
“Madre de Dios,” the priest whispered hoarsely, releasing Merc long enough to make the sign of the cross.
Merc rolled his gaze toward the priest. Guerre’s healing glow was a three-dimensional thing, humming around Merc’s wrist—and the priest saw it, maybe even felt it.
Merc tried uselessly to fight the five men holding him—four of whom were only there telepathically. “Let me go. Let me die.”
Bastion put his ghost forehead against Merc’s. Friends don’t let friends die.
You fucking hate me, Bastion.
But I love to hate you. Don’t rob me of that joy. You are too selfish. It is why I hate you.
The priest’s head shot up as he looked from the pit into the clearing beyond it. Merc heard the percussive sound of the helo’s blades slicing the air. And then his friends were there in the flesh. Or some of them were. Acier wasn’t. Liege bent over and lifted Merc over his shoulder then rushed him out of the pit. The padre watched them run to the helicopter.
Merc’s wounds had already closed, but he knew he’d lost a lot of blood. He couldn’t feel Liege’s shoulder pressing into his gut. He couldn’t feel the heat of the jungle. He couldn’t hear the chopper anymore. He smiled to himself. His vision slipped away from him. Maybe he’d closed his eyes. Maybe he was ending. He couldn’t hear the guys in his head. He’d been connected to them for so many years, but he was alone now.
Funny that they didn’t die with him. He didn’t know how to be alone.
He was nothing. Not human. Not changed. Not alive.
It was everything he’d wanted.
Liege was furious. He laid Merc out on the floor of the chopper. This wasn’t his first rodeo reviving one of his team. He’d even had his own turns on the receiving end. They couldn’t take Merc to a hospital because a transfusion from a regular would kill him. The four of them shared the same blood type and had had the same type of modifications. Acier’s mods were of a different type, so the blade smith had stayed at the fort to get Merc’s blood ready. They each kept several units of their own blood at the fort, but here in the field, the three of them were going to have to take turns giving Merc blood until they could get him home.
Guerre handed Liege a sterile swab to wipe off his arm. He cleaned his and Merc’s arms, while Guerre washed up and prepared things for the transfusion. Guerre made the connection between them. Sitting on a flight seat above Merc, Liege watched his red blood fill the tube on its way down to Merc, whose face was white and lips a shade of blue.
Bastion was staring at Merc, watching for death to steal his life. Liege gritted his teeth and gave Bastion the mental order to get the bird in the air. Bastion shouted it to the pilot. The sweltering air turned cool as they gained altitude. The wind made Liege’s tears cold. He swiped at them, unaware he’d shed them.
He’d lost men before. Too many. He had to keep these three alive. Each was rare and special and had so much to offer the world, now, in the infancy of its new mutant evolution. Liege was glad he’d brought the team out here. After Merc’s persistent radio silence, Liege knew something was afoot.
It only took a half-hour for the chopper to reach their safe house at Lautaro’s coffee plantation. Bastion and Guerre carried Merc inside, with Liege hurrying beside them. Lautaro met them with a gurney. Right there in the mansion’s big foyer, Guerre switched the transfusion from Liege to Bastion.
Liege faced his top guy in South America. Lautaro shook his head. “He never reached out. I was going to head over that way on the weekend. I shouldn’t have waited that long.”
“Not your fault.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I heard some crazy stories coming out of the village. I, too, was hanging out, waiting for Santo. But I shouldn’t have ignored my gut’s warning.” He looked at the medical procedure happening next to them. “You need to get him back to the fort,” Lautaro said, watching the proceedings with worried eyes. “Take the gurney with you.”
Liege nodded. “Go back to Valle de Lágrimas. Clean things up. I don’t want his blood discovered in that pit. And who knows what else he did in the village. He kept himself separated from us. Cover his tracks.”
“Copy that,” Lautaro said, watching them wheel Merc into the elevator that went down to the pod depot below his house.
6
Ashlyn DeWinter parked in the front lot at the huge fort where her bestie Summer now lived. For a moment, she had to pause and take in the enormous change in circumstances that her friend had undergone in the past few months.
Instead of working for a rotten boss at a company that didn’t appreciate her or even recognize her strengths, Summer now ran her own landscaping design business out of her fiancé’s home—the fort where Ash was now parked.
Summer stepped through the single door inset in the fort’s huge double-door gate. She smiled and waved at Ash, then came over to exchange hugs.
“I’m so glad you could come out here,” Summer said. The three girls had planned a big sleepover at the fort. Summer was ditching Sam in favor of a girls’ night. It had been a long time since they’d made time for themselves.
Ash carried her armload of notebooks and magazines along with her laptop bag through the entrance to the fort and into the massive kitchen. Summer carried her backpack.
“Should I set things down here in the kitchen?” Ash asked. “Or in the living room? I want to dump everything so I can help you.”