Chapter 222: As far as you go
ÉTIENNE
I kept my eyes fixed on the road, using the last known location of that probably fucked phone as our only anchor, though I understood well enough that a phone thrown from a moving car told us nothing about where its owner had ended up afterward. The mate bond gave me more than the phone did, technically, except it had thinned to something so faint I could barely trust it. I felt her out there, somewhere, a pulse of presence rather than a direction, like trying to navigate by the memory of a smell instead of the smell itself.
My phone rang.
An unfamiliar number lit up the screen, and I answered before the second ring finished.
"Hi, it’s Laurent."
"Where are you?" I said, no greeting following my words, and with no patience left for one.
"Some road not too far from the crash." Laurent’s voice came through rough and distorted by something that wasn’t quite static. "I’m using a pay phone. There aren’t many of those left, believe it or not, but I found one." A pause followed. "Étienne, I’m sorry. We failed. A sentinel is dead."
"I’m sorry," I said, and I meant the words the way you mean something you’re saying purely to get past it, "but I don’t give a shit about that right now." My grip on the phone tightened until the plastic groaned. "Where is Margaux?"
Silence stretched long enough that I already knew the answer before he gave it.
"Séverine took her."
Something inside my chest split clean in half.
"You failed me," I said, and I heard how cruel it sounded even as it left my mouth, heard the unfairness of it given everything Laurent had clearly already sacrificed on that road, and some small, distant part of me knew I would regret saying it later. But I didn’t care right now. I couldn’t afford to care right now, not when caring about anything except finding her would slow me down.
"I’m sorry," Laurent said again, quieter this time, and I heard something in his voice break along with it.
I didn’t trust myself to say anything further that wouldn’t be worse.
I ended the call.
I dialed Séverine immediately after, not expecting it to connect, already bracing myself to try again and again until either she answered or I ran out of road to drive down.
It rang once.
But for some strange reason, she picked up.
"Where the fuck are you?" I said.
She laughed, low and warm, the sound of someone greeting an old friend rather than someone holding my mate hostage somewhere I couldn’t see.
"I missed your voice," she said.
"Séverine."
"I’ll send a picture," she said, ignoring the warning in my tone entirely. "Do come alone, if you’d like to see her breathing ever again." A pause followed. It was deliberate and unhurried. "And I’m not joking, Étienne."
The call then ended.
A photo landed in my messages seconds later, the front of some gas station lit up harsh and fluorescent against the coming dark, a sign I recognized well enough once I pulled up the location on the dashboard screen.
It was not far.
But it was close enough that the drive there felt like the longest distance I’d ever covered in my life.
"This car is moving solo now," I told the sentinel driving, my voice coming out flatter and colder than I meant it to. "Tell the rest of them to attend to Laurent and the head healer. They’re on that stretch of road near the eastern arc."
"I think that’s a bad idea," the sentinel said, glancing at me for half a second before returning his eyes to the road.
"Do not question me."
He didn’t argue further, though the set of his jaw told me exactly what he thought of the order. He grabbed the walkie clipped to his shoulder and relayed instructions in a low, clipped voice, then asked where we were headed.
I told him.
I knew, somewhere underneath the fury driving every decision I was making right now, that this was reckless in every measurable way. But some smaller, more desperate part of me believed I could still talk her down. If she was as obsessed with me as everything about today suggested, then surely there existed some version of me, some sequence of words, that could make her see reason.
Somehow.
The sentinel pressed harder on the gas, and the world outside blurred past faster, streetlights smearing into long yellow streaks against the coming dark.
We got close.
"Stop here," I said, at a corner a block short of the gas station, close enough to see the glow of it without announcing our arrival. I stared at the building for a long moment, running calculations that all led nowhere, because how exactly did a person scout a witch’s position. There was no cover that mattered against someone who could move things without touching them or fucking vanish.
I reached for the mate bond instead, searching it with everything I had.
She was alive.
Unconscious, but alive. I could feel that much clearly enough to loosen something tight in my chest, even if it didn’t loosen nearly enough.
"I could go in from the back," the sentinel offered.
"Bad idea." I looked at him directly. "Stay here. Wait for my signal if things go to hell. Do not interfere before that."
"What signal?"
"You’ll know it when it happens."
I got out and walked back to the driver’s side, taking the wheel myself, and pulled the car slowly toward the gas station, every instinct I had screaming that I was walking directly into whatever trap she’d built for me.
I stopped in front of the entrance.
The second I stepped out of the car, I smelled blood.
Thick, coppery and close. It was the kind of smell that told a shifter’s nose exactly how much of it had spilled and how recently. On the glass doors, symbols had been painted, dark red streaks arranged into shapes I didn’t recognize but understood instinctively not to touch but question. They looked like... runes.
My stomach dropped further with every step toward the entrance, and I pushed the door open anyway, because there was no version of tonight that ended with me turning around.
The man behind the register was dead.
Slumped against the counter, with his organs pulled out and arranged with a deliberateness that made my stomach turn even after everything I’d already survived in my life, everything I’d already seen. He’d probably supplied the blood for those symbols on the door, whether he’d known it or not.
"Séverine," I called out.
She appeared like she’d simply been waiting for her cue.
I didn’t want a conversation. I ran at her the second I saw her face, every intention in my body narrowed down to the singular goal of ending this, of ending her, and I slammed straight into something invisible and immovable that stopped me cold three feet short of reaching her.
"That’s as far as you go," she said, almost gently.