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I swallowed hard enough that it hurt. My throat burned as if breakfast might be trying to come back up. I tried a deep breath, but the smell of burnt flesh also wasn’t an improvement. I ended up breathing shallow and trying not to think too hard.

“I will find her heart for you,” Olaf said, and I was glad my hearing wasn’t quite working right. It made his voice sound flat and lose a lot of the inflection. If I’d heard all the longing in his voice that I saw on his face I might have shot him. I was betting his special ammo would have made a really big hole in a human body. I thought about it, I really did, but in the end I gave him back his gun. He extinguished his torch. Someone brought us an axe and a freshly sharpened knife. I was really missing my vampire kit, but it was at home, no, at the Circus.

Her spine was brittle from the fire, easiest decapitation I’d ever done. Olaf was having to dig in her chest to find the pieces of burnt and bloody heart. We’d made a mess of her. I kicked the head a little ways from the body. Yeah, I wanted to burn the head and heart and scatter the ashes over moving water, but she was dead. I kicked the head again, so that it skittered across the floor, too burned to bleed.

My knees wouldn’t hold me anymore. I collapsed where I was standing with the axe still in my hands.

Edward knelt beside me. He touched the front of my shirt. His hand came away crimson like he’d dipped it in red paint. He ripped my shirt open to my chest. The claw marks looked like angry, jagged mouths. There was something pink and bloody and shiny bulging out of one of the mouths like a swollen tongue.

“Shit,” I said.

“Does it hurt yet?” he asked.

“No,” and my voice sounded amazingly calm. Shock was a wonderful thing.

“We need to get you to a doctor before that changes,” he said, and his voice was calm, too. He wrapped his arms around me and stood, cradling me. He started back the way we’d come at a fast walk. “Does that hurt?” he asked.

“No,” I said again, my voice distant and too calm. Even I knew I was too calm, but I felt sort of distant and unreal. Let’s hear it for shock.

He started running down the hallway with me in his arms. “Does it hurt now?” he asked.

“No.”

He ran faster.

33

EDWARD HIT THE door to the main trauma room with his shoulder. We were inside, but there was no one to pay attention to me. There was a white wall of doctors and nurses, and some of them in civilian clothes, but they were all around one gurney. Their voices held that frantic calm that you never want to hear when you’re on your back looking up at doctors.

A spike of fear got through the shock—Peter. It had to be Peter. The adrenaline rush of it stabbed through my stomach like a fresh blow. Edward turned, and I could see more of the room. It wasn’t Peter. He was lying on a different gurney, not that far away from the one that had everyone’s interest. Who the fuck was it? We didn’t have any more humans on our side.

The only person with Peter was Nathaniel. He was holding the boy’s free hand. The other hand was hooked up to an IV. Nathaniel looked at me, and his face showed fear. Enough that Peter fought to turn and see what was coming through the door.

Nathaniel touched his chest, held him down. “It’s Anita and your…Edward.” I think he’d been about to say your dad.

I heard Peter’s voice as we got closer. “Your face, what’s wrong with them?”

Nathaniel said, “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my face.” He tried to make a joke of it, but the noises from the other side of the room made humor sort of hard.

I couldn’t see past all the white coats. “Who is it?” I asked.

Nathaniel answered, “It’s Cisco.”

Cisco. He wasn’t hurt that badly. I’d seen shapeshifters heal throat wounds that bad. Were there more bad guys in here with us? “How did he get hurt?” I asked.

Peter actually tried to sit up, and Nathaniel kept him down with that hand on his chest, as if he’d been having to pin Peter to the gurney for a while. “Anita,”