“No. You’re the boss, and you said not to.” I opened Felix’s door and looked in. “He’s absolutely dead,” I told Eli. Just for form’s sake I put my fingers to Felix’s neck. “Shit,” I said with disgust. “I had twenty questions I wanted to ask him. When he felt better.”
“He was ill?”
“He said he’d been unconscious last night because he used so much magic in resurrecting Moses the Black. And then turning him into a statue. Maybe this morning, killing Dr. Gimball and putting everyone at the hospital to sleep so we could get you out… maybe that was too much.”
Eli slumped against the doorframe. “Lift my arm,” he said.
“Put it where?”
“On Felix’s neck.”
“We were just talking about killing him! I don’t want both of you dead from your own magic overuse.”
“Do it.”
Eli sounded pretty stern. I said a few things to myself, but I lifted his arm and blessed the length of it. I put Eli’s big hand on Felix’s neck, still warm.
“Keep your hand on top of mine.”
I pressed his fingers hard. And I felt Eli’s magic flicker into being, run through me like I was an electric cord, and magnify through my strength into something big and powerful. It passed into the blood vessels and muscles of Felix’s scrawny neck. I felt the magic falter when it met up with death, but it kept pushing at that thing in Felix, pushing it out of his body, replacing it. I was getting weaker and weaker, but I couldn’t let go of Eli’s hand.
“Eli,” I said with great effort. “I can’t.” I thought I was going to die giving Felix life. And that was not my way to go.
“Just a minute,” he said. “One more minute.”
My life was going to last one more minute.
But it didn’t have to. Felix whispered, “I’m back.”
Then I was on the ground.
I was never completely out. That meant I could hear a car coming fast from the direction of Sally. As Felix and Eli climbed slowly from the car to tend to me, I croaked, “Car! Car!”
They both turned their heads to the east at the same time, like deer on alert… or birds when a hawk flies above them.
A car pulled in behind us, and to my shock and dismay, who should climb out but Mr. Mercer. Still alive. “You took everything away from our town!” he yelled. “Everything!” He was wearing the clothes he’d had on yesterday, which had been soaked in the rain and then bled all over. And he was staggering. And he was a terrible color.
Would he never die?
Oh, for God’s sake. We had gotten away from Sally and its weirdness and nastiness. But here came Sally after us.
Mercer still didn’t know shit. As Felix and Eli raised their hands, with the slow movements of exhausted men, I eased my Colt from its holster with the sloppy movements of my weak hand. I gathered the little bit of energy I had left. As Mercer yelled at Eli and Felix, I whipped up the Colt and I fired.
Got him. In the foot.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We loaded him in his car and pushed the car out into a field,” Eli was saying. He was looking down at me, and we were moving. “We made it look like a snake bit his foot. We fired his gun, like maybe he’d seen the snake close to his feet and shot at it, and hit his foot instead.”
“Not bad,” I said. My voice was weak and faint.
“Felix made his foot swell up. What was left of it.”
I nodded. Just a little bit, since otherwise my skull might crack; that was how delicate I felt. I was not used to this at all. Also, my head was on Eli’s lap. Not used to that either. We were in the back seat. I rolled my eyes to see Felix’s dark ponytail. He was driving.
“We’re back in Texoma,” Felix said. “Just barely.”
Show-off. I’d been just about to ask where we were. From the light, it was late afternoon. Days were getting shorter. That was good.
“We’ll stop soon,” Eli said, stroking my hair back.
“Okay,” I said. Or I think I said it, before I went back to sleep.
Next thing I heard, Felix and Eli were arguing over my head. Not about my head, just over it. Two angry but quiet voices.
“We need to stick together.” Felix.
“We need some quiet privacy.” Eli.
On it went, each restating his own opinion. Finally I realized I’d have to intervene. “I’m not going to bathe in front of you, Felix,” I said. “I get a room alone with Eli.”
So then we were stumbling down a hall. Eli was laden down with our bags and his own weakness. I was walking, but I had one hand on the wall to keep me straight. He unlocked the door. Then we were in, and there was a toilet and a sink in the room. I used both, and brushed my teeth, and crawled into the bed in nothing. Oh, it felt so good. The sheets felt clean, the night was cooler, and when Eli slid in beside me, I felt like everything was right. I was asleep the next second.
After all that, I woke the next morning by five. It was dark, but dawn was approaching. Eli was still asleep. I crawled over him as careful as I could to use the toilet, and I noticed a note had been pushed under our door.
That was a bad way to start the day. No one ever slips you a note to tell you that all is well with the world, or that they love you more than anything, or that breakfast will be ready whenever you want it.
The room was too dark to read the writing, the toilet and sink weren’t in a separate room, and I was anxious. I found a match in my bag, flicked it with my fingernail, and it sizzled into life. The message read, Eli, I must go. Take the car and get out of here. They’re on our track; they’ll catch up today.
“Well, hell,” I said, loud enough that Eli made a mutter of protest.
“Shake a leg, Eli,” I said. “Your buddy Felix says you and I got to get out of here. Except he forgot to mention me.” In ten really unpleasant minutes, we were in the car and on our way. We’d left some money under our key on the front desk. For the first time, I saw that our hotel was almost by itself in the woods right off the highway. There were a couple of cottages and a body shop business.
I volunteered to drive. I was more alert than Eli. “Look at the map, if Felix didn’t take it,” I said.
Eli found it folded in the glove compartment.
“I think we need to get off this highway,” I said. “We got half a tank of gas, so if we find a good paved road to turn left on, we can dip south a bit and then meet the highway again farther west, if the roads are real bad.”
Eli had to switch on the overhead light to study the map. It was hard on my eyes. I was glad when he switched it off. “We’re coming to an intersection in seven miles,” he said.
I kept looking in the rearview mirror to see if there were any lights behind us. Not yet.
“You got any idea how Felix left?” I said, since the darkness and monotony of the empty road were about to make me crazy. I was hungry and thirsty, I felt grubby, and worst of all I felt separated from Eli in a way I couldn’t pin down. Maybe because I thought he and Felix knew each other better than he and I did, and that hurt, which was stupid. Felix and Eli had trained together and lived in the same circle for years, I figured. Felix probably knew Eli’s sisters. Maybe he partnered with them at dances, if Russians had dances. Felix didn’t think I was good enough for Eli. I could not talk to Eli about that. It would mean I thought Eli and I had a future together, which was something I tried not to imagine, because it wasn’t going to happen.