Stopped.
Except for Nate and herself. And others that she extracted from the tableau as she required.
With hands that shook, she had rifled through his pockets, found his cellular device, and put its screen close to his face. When the recognition succeeded, she had gone into the favorites in his contacts, grateful that he had taught her how to use the unit. The first call she had made had been to his adopted father, Murhder. When that had gone to a recorded voice-over, she had tried his mother. Also a recording.
The third one had been Shuli. Again with a recording.
All the while, Nate had been gasping for breath. And then he had stopped gasping.
Blessedly, the fourth number had been answered, an elderly, solicitous voice announcing with good cheer the name Fritz Perlmutter.
She had no idea who the male was, but within five minutes of the call, a tremendous-sized healing vehicle, like a mercy ship on wheels, had pulled up.
A human wearing loose blue clothing and the Brother Vishous had jumped out of the back with a pallet and removed Nate from the scene. She had gotten into the rear with them, and had sat out of the way as the Brother Rhage arrived to drive them off.
It had been whilst they had pulled away from the scene and turned around in the center of the lane that she had allowed Caldwell to resume its churn. A glimpse out of the pane of glass up in front had shown the clutch of humans reanimating out of their freeze. There would be confusion for them, but she didn’t have the energy to manipulate their memories. They would just have to make peace with what they believed they saw—and when they went over to speak unto the man outside of the club, he would inform them that, yes, there had been a discharge of a firearm, and a stray dog had been shot, but the thing had run off.
And that would be that.
On the way unto this facility, she had been too scared to speak, especially as so many things were done to Nate, so many… tubes, patches, cuffs, and machines connected, implanted, stuck into him. The two males treating him had spoken in a volley of words, the syllables outside her understanding, a language foreign.
It had been a lifetime, the traveling, yet a clock with red, glowing numbers, mounted atop a glass-fronted casing of supplies, had informed her that only seventeen minutes passed. When their destination had been reached, the lumbering, rumbling vehicle of healing had come to a stop. As the double doors had been opened a woodland landscape was revealed and the scent of pine and earth had flooded in, replacing the blood smell and the heat. Rahvyn had followed behind as Nate had been removed upon a rolling table along with a host of beeping, flashing equipment and those wires, those tubes.
From what had appeared to be an earthen mound, a male with tortoiseshell glasses and a white coat had thrown open a well-disguised door, exposing a brightly lit interior. Females in white uniforms had accompanied him. Brothers had come forward.
And so had Sahvage.
Her cousin had rushed to embrace her and she had collapsed into him, babbling details about what had occurred that were not terribly relevant. The one bullet was all that mattered. Well, that and whatever happened next.
Nate and the various uniformed attendants had gone down in a steel box first. Then she and Sahvage and the Brothers had followed, a mechanized contraption lowering them into the earth.
They had been so kind to her, the fighters. And in the face of their gentle compassion, so at odds with their weapons and their protective leather clothing, she had finally cried, tucking her face into Sahvage’s chest, just as she had when they had been youngs…
When her pony had died from eating that weed. And her cat had wandered off.
And her parents had been killed.
Now she was here, sitting on this tiled floor, in a maze of lemon-scented hallways and closed white doors, wishing she had not left the club when she had. If she had waited only a moment longer—either when Nate had suggested their departure or perhaps right before they had stepped out onto the street.
A moment was all it took to change the course of everything. The problem was… one never knew which moment was going to matter, and there were so many, so very many, even in the lives of mortals—
The muffled scream from inside the treatment room rippled out from behind the closed door like a shock wave, the bodies of the Brothers weaving as they put dagger hands unto their faces, the fronts of their throats. Their hearts.
There followed the weeping of the mahmen.
Horrible, ear-stinging weeping from her, behind that closed door.
He was gone. Rahvyn did not need to be told.
As tears welled in her eyes and slipped down her cheeks, she too placed her hands unto her cheeks in a vain attempt to hold herself together, contain the horror, understand how an evening on a whim had ended in a life-defining tragedy.