Pure Blood_ A Nocturne City Novel - Caitlin Kittredge [107]
“Gods!” he shouted, and we began to waver and dip above the water. “Gods, what are you doing to me?”
The pain was euphoric, a high unlike I’d ever known. We started to fall faster, Seamus screaming in fear now, not rage. The magick flowed, it Pathed and shaped into something that was mine, not Seamus’s, and I sucked in a breath and held it as we hit the water and plunged into the freezing bay. I lost my grip on everything except my consciousness, and fell through the water until the energy I’d Pathed from Seamus washed away and I was cold and broken and screaming for air as I clawed toward the surface.
I breached the surface of the bay gasping and screaming. My right arm was broken, and it felt like both of my ankles, but I was kicking like hell to keep afloat, so I must be intact.
I was alive, surfaced, floating in the icy water and fighting the current. The Skull of Mathias was not. And that was all that mattered.
While I treaded water and tried not to pass out from the cold, I spotted a black-clad lump floating facedown near me. Seamus. I stroked lamely with one arm, managing to bring him close to me and flip his body over into a lifesaving hold.
It was over now. Seamus was just another pathetic power-hungry witch who had broken himself on his grand ideas.
The zip of a siren and a motor whirring caught my ears, and I kicked around to see a police boat coming up fast. They got out their life vests and hooks and pulled us both into the boat, where I collapsed shivering on the deck. Someone wrapped blankets around me, and one of the crewmen shouted something into his radio. “Hypothermia … one DOA … have EMS meet us at the dock…”
I sighed, letting myself relax for the first time in days. The Skull was gone for good, and its temptation for people like Seamus with it.
The EMTs took custody of me as soon as the boat pulled into their slip at the port authority. I was shivering uncontrollably by then, from shock as much as from the water. That jangly feeling you get when you know, for a fact, that you shouldn’t have survived and yet you’re there, seeing the same world through the same tired eyes.
McAllister shoved his way through the knot of officers on the docks and came to his knees in front of me, taking my face between his hands. “You have got to stop doing this to me,” he declared. “Gods. Thank Them that you’re all right.”
“Of c-c-course I am,” I chattered. “I’m… I’m always okay. Never expected anything less.”
Mac looked over at the sodden body on the end of the dock. An EMT was giving him CPR, but even from here it looked perfunctory. “Hex me, is that Seamus O’Halloran?”
“Was,” I said with a slow smile. “Was, Mac.”
“Okay,” he said, spreading his hands. “I’m sure I’m going to hear all about this, like it or not, but I don’t want to right now.” His bony face crinkled, and I think the idea of hugging me crossed his mind. “Just glad you’re alive, Wilder. You’d be a bitch to replace at the salary we pay you.”
“Mac…”I started.
A scream came from the end of the dock, and I saw the EMT working on Seamus lurch backward, a line of red running from his throat. Seamus came upright, a curved silver knife in his hands—Victor’s knife, the one he’d showed me the first time we’d met.
“You,” Seamus hissed, staggering upright. “I see you!” He lunged for me, and I saw it all—the knife planting itself in my throat, me bleeding out on the scarred wood of the port authority dock, Mac and the EMTs helpless to stop Seamus as he escaped.
This time, though, I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed the first thing from the EMT’s bag that my fingers closed around, which turned out to be a pair of surgical scissors, and jammed them into Seamus’s thigh as he dove for me. He stumbled backward, and I heard a thunderclap from over my head. Three red stars blossomed on Seamus’s chest, and he went backward off the pier, splashing into the water
Mac lowered his Glock.