Chapter 36: They weren't leaving. They were gathering.
Hours later.
Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a lightning strike of pure, white-hot agony.
A groan tore from Nate's throat, a raw, animal sound that was swallowed by the oppressive darkness of the bookstore. Every nerve ending was a live wire. His left shoulder was a universe of pain, a deep, throbbing fire where the bullet had torn through muscle and the knife had been twisted. His leg screamed where the screwdriver had been driven into the muscle. His face was a mask of dried blood from the cut on his cheek.
He tried to move his left arm. The response was a seizing, electric jolt of such intensity that his vision swam, and he nearly passed out again. He lay there, panting in shallow, ragged gasps, each breath a fresh torment to his bruised ribs.
Skylar.
The thought cut through the pain haze sharper than any knife. The memory flooded back in a nauseating rush. The trap. Kaelan's monologue. The beating. The sounds of her screams. Her voice, desperate, claiming it was all her.
"He didn't steal anything… It was all me…"
He forced his head to turn, ignoring the protest from his neck. The weak moonlight filtering through the broken window illuminated the spot where she had been. Empty. He saw the crowbar on the floor. The bloody smears where he had lain.
They were gone. They had taken her.
A fresh kind of pain, cold and hollow, opened up in his chest, worse than any wound. They had taken her, and he was here, broken and useless. The image of her, bound and terrified, being dragged back to that compound, to Kaelan… it was a poison in his veins.
Despair threatened to swallow him whole. It would be so easy to just let go. To let the darkness take him. The pain was a persuasive argument for surrender.
Then his good hand, scrabbling weakly at his side, brushed against something. Not the rough, grimy floorboards. Something smooth and cool. A plastic vial.
He fumbled for it, his fingers clumsy and weak. He held it up to the faint light. Antibiotics. Next to it, a roll of bandages, a packet of antiseptic wipes, and a few painkiller tablets. A small, neat pile of mercy left in the midst of the carnage.
She did this.
Even in her own capture, facing an unimaginable future, she had fought for him. She had bargained for this. She had left him a thread, however thin, to cling to.
The hollow ache of despair in his chest ignited, burning away into something else. Something hard. Something sharp.
A cold, focused rage.
It wasn't the hot, blinding anger of the fight in the armory. This was different. This was a fundamental recalculation. Survival was no longer the equation. It was a given. The new variable was vengeance. The new constant was her.
Gritting his teeth against a wave of nausea, he used his right arm to push himself into a sitting position against the bookshelf. The world tilted violently, and he vomited a thin, bitter bile onto the floor. He sat there, head spinning, sweating and shivering.
Move.
The command came from a place deeper than thought. He had the medicine. He had the knowledge. He had the will.
With agonizing slowness, a journey of inches that felt like miles, he cleaned the bullet wound as best he could with a shaking hand, the antiseptic setting the raw nerves on fire all over again. He packed it with gauze and clumsily wrapped the bandages, his breaths hissing through clenched teeth. He dry-swallowed the painkillers and the antibiotics, not knowing if they would stay down.
He would not die here. He would not leave her there.
The game was far from over. Nate, the ghost, the handyman, the survivor, was now something new. Something Kaelan had not calculated for.
He was a patient. He was wounded.
But he was now, irrevocably, a hunter. And he knew exactly where his prey lived.
***
The weak, gray light of dawn was a betrayal. It did nothing to warm the cold that had seeped into Nate's bones, a deep, marrow-deep chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. He had drifted into a fitful, pain-riddled unconsciousness, his body shutting down to try and repair the catastrophic damage.
He was jolted awake not by the light, but by a sound.
A soft, wet, dragging sound.
Then a low, guttural sniff.
His eyes snapped open, every nerve screaming in unison. He didn't move. Didn't even breathe. He just listened, his entire world narrowing to the acoustics of the ruined bookstore.
The sound was close. Just outside the shattered window he'd used as an entrance and an exit. The sniffing again, more deliberate this time. It was the sound of something tasting the air, searching for a scent. His scent. The scent of blood, which saturated the air around him, soaked his clothes, and had dried in a dark, sticky pool on the floorboards.
They've found me.
The thought was ice in his veins. He was a trapped animal. A piece of wounded bait.
A shadow fell across the window, blocking the meager light. A hunched, ragged silhouette. He could hear its ragged, phlegmy breathing. It was just on the other side of the wall, separated from him by a few inches of brick and rotten wood.
Slowly, with an agony of effort that made black spots dance in his vision, Nate shifted his good arm. His fingers crept across the floor, inch by silent inch, searching. They closed around the cold, solid steel of the crowbar Skylar had been forced to hold.
It was a pathetic weapon against even one of them in his condition. It was everything.
The Ripper at the window let out a curious grunt. Then, a clawed hand, caked with dirt and what looked like old blood, gripped the windowsill. Nails, broken and black, tapped against the wood.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It was testing. Probing.
Nate held his breath, his heart hammering against his bruised ribs like a trapped bird. He willed his body to be stone. To be part of the building. To be dead.
The tapping stopped. For a heart-stopping moment, there was only the sound of his own pulse thundering in his ears. Had it moved on?
Then, a second shadow joined the first. A low, conversational growl passed between them. They were communicating. They knew.
A third shadow. Then a fourth.
The sniffing became more frantic. He could hear them now, just beyond the wall, a small pack of them, their excitement growing as they zeroed in on the source of the blood-smell. The soft drag of their feet became a restless shuffling. The low growls escalated into eager, hungry snarls.
They weren't leaving. They were gathering.
The first one, the one who had tapped, suddenly thrust its head through the broken window. Its milky, dead eyes scanned the dark interior. Its head swiveled, and those eyes passed over the shelves, the corpses… and then locked directly onto him.
A deep, rattling growl of triumph erupted from its throat.
It began to claw its way inside, its body contorting to fit through the frame, snapping the remaining shards of glass.
This was it. There would be no grand last stand. No final, heroic act. He was going to be torn apart in this dark, stinking hole, and Skylar would never know.
As the first Ripper tumbled into the room, landing with a heavy thud and immediately starting to rise, Nate's grip tightened on the crowbar. He would not go quietly. He would take one of these bastards with him. He prepared to lunge, to meet the horror head-on, a final, futile act of defiance.
The decision was made for him.
From the rear of the bookstore, from the direction of the stockroom, came a sound that froze the blood in his veins more completely than any Ripper's snarl.
It was the distinct, heavy thump of a body hitting a door. Then the splintering crack of wood giving way.
They weren't just at the window.
They were coming in through the back.