Compassion Be Damned Read online

  She was my lady. My Sister.

  I turned away from Titus. He didn’t need to see me break down, and I could feel it coming. A lifetime of not and here it was.

  “Paden?” Titus’ voice was low. “We have to find the others. We have to follow Reed. Can you do that?”

  I heard him but his question seemed nonsensical. “What is the point of anything if there isn’t Krystal here?”

  “I know. And I… Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have to believe there is something we can do. Maybe the Sisters or the ravens drove it but someone brought her to us. She’s ours. We have to get to her. I have to believe that she’s still alive because she’s going to stay that way. With us.”

  I almost snapped at him. Since when was Titus an optimist? Out of all of us he was the most likely—even more than Ryland—to see the end of the world coming and not get out of the way because why bother.

  But if he could believe when he never did didn’t that mean we all should feel that way? Shouldn’t every one of us therefore be seeing this rosy path he imagined could exist and say sure I’ll walk that one too?

  I turned to stare at him. “I can remember her from the other place, from wherever it was we were before here. I… I’ve been remembering her and there a little bit every day since I got out of the pit.”

  His eyes widened. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Because it seemed like you should all remember on your own.”

  Titus shook his head. “I’ve still only got the barest recollection of Reed. That’s it. Nothing else. What did you remember?”

  “Things were always warm. We were always training.”

  I spoke the words as they came to me, in the starts and stops that came with vague recollections of time long ago. Titus didn’t interrupt me, not even to ask questions. Instead, he just let me talk.

  “It was obvious you were going to lead us although I think you would have been just as happy to let one of us do it. The five of us were joined at the hip. If other teams became attached over time, we knew from day one and never wavered. Then Reed came. He was unofficially the liaison between the guards and the Sisters. We were always called the Ravens there. Guards is a word down here. Anyway, he came. He was just one of us. But he said that we should go see Sister Superior. She had someone for us.”

  I looked away. These memories were different. Fighting was one thing. Loving Krystal was something entirely different.

  “She was so bright. Like the sun. Or the whole universe. We all just… gave in to her glow like we had the right to do so, and for some reason, she thought we were the most wonderful souls she’d ever seen.”

  Titus stepped toward me. “I sort of remember. I wanted to do whatever it took so that she never dimmed. I wanted her to stay like that. I just wanted her.”

  I grinned at him. Yes, I’d felt the same. I was pretty sure we all had. “And then something weird happened, right? Didn’t something go wrong? That’s where I lose focus. I can’t for the life of me figure out what happened but something did, right?”

  Titus scrunched up his face. “It’s like it’s on the edge of my mind. I can’t quite touch it.”

  That’s how I felt, too. That ball of light that was Krystal’s soul… I needed to feel it against my own again. I needed to know she existed in the universe.

  And I would not let her be dead. She got to stay here and exist. If they needed to take someone, they could have me, but so help me, we were all going to live for a while and that was that.

  “Yes, Titus, I can pull it together, find the others and get to her. I can do whatever Krystal needs. Whenever she needs it.”

  That was the only answer I’d ever give because it was my entire truth.

  Now and always.

  Krystal

  The only thing Teagan had been able to tell me in the end was that my guards moved with Divinity. I had to believe that was good. It couldn’t be bad. I sighed. I didn’t understand any of this, not at all, and at some point I had to be comfortable with that. I had to somehow live in the mess of things and just float without worrying so much.

  If such a thing was possible.

  I sat on the ground, the children who had been around Mika, now sitting with me as we braided grass. I hadn’t done this activity since I was a kid, but the movements came back easily. Those had been simple days. I’d believed I’d have a future as a Sister, and I knew what that was.

  Until my powers turned on and they were so… wrong.

  As if on cue, they were suddenly available. I looked around. Who needed me? That was when I noticed one of the little boys in the circle seemed to be holding onto his head. Did he have a headache? I put out my arms.

  “Come sit next to me. I can make that headache better.”

  He scrunched up his face. “I don’t feel bad.”

  He didn’t? Then what was…

  “Zombies.” The shout went out from one of the guards, and I whirled around to see where they pointed outside of the gate. Yes, zombies were coming. I sighed. It seemed we weren’t immune to them even here at Anne’s Sisterhood.

  “Kids.” I motioned for them all to rise. “Go inside the house. Don’t come out, okay?”

  One of the little boys—Brian—tugged on my pants. It was bizarre to be in anything but my Sisterhood skirts, but Anne had given me some pants, and they fit, so I was glad to be in them. Someone else here had to be around my size. Or maybe they’d belonged to my doppelganger. It didn’t matter now.

  “We know where to hide, Sister.” He grinned at me before they lined up single file and took off toward the house.

  Well, that was good. One less thing to worry about. It shouldn’t surprise me that Anne had already worked this out. They’d been living here for some time. This couldn’t be the first zombies they’d seen.

  “Hey,” one of the guards shouted out to me. I think he belonged to Anne, but I was having trouble keeping which guard belonged to who in order. “Sister Krystal, please go back in the house. Zombies are a very bad deal. They’ve gotten through, taken some of the Sisters before. We’re not that good at dealing with them. We’re working on it.”

  Well, that was interesting. My guards had taken out a town’s worth of zombies without seeming to break a sweat.

  “I…” I took a deep breath. “This might not be helpful. I don’t know. Um, I watched my guards to this. In pairs. It seemed to work well to take them out in twos.”

  He scratched his head. “Rather than one-on-one. I wonder why that works. We could give it a try.”

  In the meantime, my powers were blasting. Who was I supposed to be helping? The Zombies climbed over the walls. I stumbled backward. They could climb? How could they do that? Was that… typical?

  And suddenly I knew who I had to heal. The zombie didn’t run toward me, I charged toward it instead. This was different than my last encounter. I needed to heal this crew of them.

  Or at least do… something to him. I grabbed onto its shoulders, sending my power outward. One second the zombie wanted to kill me, the next it was slack, dead in my arms. I dropped it. I hadn’t expected that. Clearing the demon had been different. But okay. That happened. Wide-eyed and breathless, I grabbed onto the next one and then the next one.

  Over and over.

  This time I was one of the people fighting.

  The only way I could.

  Zeke

  “No.” I wouldn’t accept it. I couldn’t. I took a long pull of the water Titus had given me and then another one. “She’s not dying.”

  Paden nodded and then so did Titus. The former spoke first. “On that, we’re in agreement.”

  They both looked like hell, which told me how I must appear, too. I never wanted to hear Katrina’s voice in my head again, and according to Titus she was officially out forever.

  I rubbed at my eyes. But Krystal dying? No, that wasn’t happening.

  “Why does it have to be borrowed time?” We needed to follow the bird to the others, and without conversa
tion, we started to chase after it. “She’s here. Maybe she’s going to stay here.”

  Titus shook his head. “I suppose it’s possible but that wasn’t what the Sister said.”

  “Well, the Sister also told you she didn’t know what was going on. Maybe she’s just wrong.”

  Paden patted me on the back. “You’re usually the glass half empty one in our group. Why are you suddenly a believer?”

  “Because Krystal is here in the world. And if she’s here in the world, then anything is possible.”

  The bird swooped down and we all jolted left. In the distance were Jett and Ryland. They both leaned against trees. Behind them, I saw zombies moving away from us in a huge crowd, stretching as far as I could see. Where were they going?

  Titus ran toward our brothers, and I grabbed onto Paden’s arm. “I’m going to go see if I can figure out what’s going on while you fill them in.”

  “Good call.”

  I tended to be the one who rushed forward. I didn’t want to lead, despite Titus challenging me to take it from him every other day. He and I both knew I preferred the big decisions to come from him. But I didn’t mind risking myself, and I’d continue doing so without asking if it helped the others.

  Titus knew I’d always have his back if he needed it.

  Sometimes, it was about giving him what he didn’t know he had to have. In this case, it was information. If we were going to go ahead and get to Krystal, we were going to have to go to the mob. Where were the zombies headed?

  I ran after them.

  We’d know soon. There was one thing I was sure of, there was nothing that was going to get in between me and my girl.

  Borrowed time? Screw that.

  Krystal

  Sweat had long since soaked my clothes. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d ever been more drenched. These were the end of days. Perhaps they were literally ending these very moments. I’d never seen so many zombies, and I didn’t see how any of us were going to survive this.

  The guards fought and so did the Sisters, everyone together, working as best we could. So far, I hadn’t seen anyone fall to the zombies but that wasn’t to say that we weren’t going to. There were just too many of them.

  “Enough.” A booming voice sounded, and a second later the house behind us started to shake.

  Behind me, Mika laughed. “I wondered if he’d notice this. Guess it’s time to see if the house can do what we built it to do, withstand Bob’s comings and goings.”

  Bob? I turned to look at her, my powers still raging. “Who is Bob?”

  She nodded toward the house, and I spun to get a better look. Looming over the crowd was the biggest demon I’d ever seen. Not that I’d seen many of them in my brief foray out into the world but still… I would place money that the demon in front of me was huge even for people who saw them all the time.

  I tried to swallow and Mika nudged me with her arm. “It’s Beelzebub, but we call him Bob. He lives under the house.”

  I grabbed her arm, forgetting about the zombies for right now. “One of the original demons lives under the house?”

  “Weird, right? But he’s claimed it as his, and he pretty much wants to be left alone. He doesn’t like to be woken up, and once we convinced him not to sleep on the boiler, things went better. He broke our last house so we worked on seeing that didn’t happen again. In any case, I hoped this would wake him. He’ll get rid of the zombies so he can go back to sleep.”

  The demon Beelzebub that they called Bob was going to get rid of the zombies? She had to be out of her mind and yet…

  He raised his arm and sent them all flying. One second the zombies fought, the next they flew through the air so far out of view I couldn’t see them land. Beelzebub made a sound that was more like a sigh before he turned around and crawled back under the house.

  My mouth fell open. Mika laughed. “Well, that went well.”

  I shook my head. “Why is maybe the most powerful demon to walk the earth living under the house?”

  “He hasn’t deigned to explain his reasoning to us.” Teagan stormed by me, throwing her hands in the air. “But he’s useful to have when things get out of hand. If they make enough noise to wake him, they’re gone. I suggested we should bang around with pots and pans every time a demon shows up, but I was overruled.”

  Anne shrugged. She joined Teagan and now Mika while they ran to the house. “You’d miss getting rid of the demons. Admit it, Teagan.”

  She shook her head. “Not hardly.”

  Where were they running to? The answered dawned on me quickly. They had to check on their children. Every one of them was a mother. And the men hot on their heels weren’t just their guards. They were their husbands. They’d all made a life here. Tears flooded my eyes. I’d been keeping it together pretty well, but now I was just done.

  I sunk down onto the ground. I needed my five guys. I wiped at my eyes. As soon as I got up, and I would give myself two minutes to cry on this ground, I was going to walk straight through the gate and find them.

  Even if the idea was preposterous. I would make it happen.

  Ryland

  There were zombies flying through the air. Or possessed people, whatever we were calling them at the moment, and I could barely focus on the oddity of it because I was too busy holding it together. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried. Tears were for people who had something and therefore could experience loss.

  I’d long since stopped expecting anything. Until Krystal.

  Now there was light in the world, hope, and someone to believe in outside of my blood brothers. We’d shed some together and it had a way of bonding people like they were family.

  But even these men who I would die for… I had every reason to believe we could lose each other. We fought dirty battles. We took on monsters. I wasn’t likely to live very long and if I did there was every chance I’d do it alone. Oh, I’d fight until I had no more blood in my body to keep them all alive. The fact still remained we’d been born to shed blood and die.

  Until Krystal. Now, there was purpose. There was the possibility of the oh so elusive love actually happening. And she was living on borrowed time. I slammed my fist into a tree because pain was something I was used to, something I knew and understood. At least the physical kind. This emotional battement was something else entirely.

  “Shit.” Jett rushed past me. “That’s the Sisterhood. Can you see the tower? I mean, that’s what it should look like. Last time we were here it was destroyed. But that’s what the pictures looked like that we’d been given. They must have rebuilt.”

  The Sisterhood? How had we gotten so close? We should have had a ways to go. There was magic involved here and more than just the white feather raven that had apparently shifted, talked to Titus, and led him to all of us with his powerful hand that removed a curse when nothing else could.

  I shook my head. “Why are the zombies flying?”

  That was as much an important question as anything else.

  Titus rushed forward. “Let’s go find out. She’s there. She has to be. Isn’t she, Reed?” He shouted at the sky but the bird didn’t answer him. Instead, it took off at a pace we couldn’t follow and went straight toward the Sisterhood. My guess would be he didn’t know what made zombies fly either.

  I held out my hand. “One second.”

  “Ry?” Paden walked toward me. “What’s going on?”

  Jett jumped from one foot to the other. I could feel his need to go like a palpable energy around us. “Hurry up.”

  I took a deep breath. He might feel fine taking his mood out on me. I wouldn’t do the same. It solved nothing. “What are we going to tell her?”

  “That we’re sorry and we won’t hurt her,” Zeke spoke from the heart, and I sighed. He’d completely misjudged what I meant.

  “No, I mean, yes. That is what we will say. I mean about her situation. Hey, Krystal, you’re actually dead?”

  Zeke turned his back on me. “She’s
not dead. She lives and breathes.”

  “By some kind of magic that could end any day. Are we going to tell her? Titus?”

  Silence greeted my query until finally Titus met my gaze, lifting his eyes from where they’d seemed fixated on the ground. “We tell her. Or I will. I’ll tell you. If it were any of you, I’d do the same and I’d expect you to do it for me. It will hurt her, but she does well with truth. The ravens said there was one path that got her to the Sisterhood and in that path she saved everyone. She’s done that. I… I’m worried if we don’t hurry up that path is going to be over and we’re going to lose her because the magic these other beings are gifting her with will run out. So let’s overthink this later? Okay.”

  He had a point. “Sure. I follow where you lead.”

  Titus snorted. “Not one of you exactly follows very well. We’re more like the merry bunch of guards trying to navigate a shit storm all of the time.”

  Jett laughed, a long hard sound. He grinned, which seemed inappropriate until I found myself doing it right back. Soon we were all cracking up then just as fast the joviality passed. Titus took off running, and I went after him.

  She was close. Whatever had to happen now, we’d work it out.

  We always did, even if we were stumbling through things. Being with Krystal had been the first time I’d ever felt like I had direction.

  I’d follow her forever. Even to death. If that’s what it took.

  I’d never been long for this world anyway.

  Krystal

  I opened the gate. Everyone was pretty busy, and really, what business did anyone have to tell me I couldn’t go. Anne didn’t act like Katrina. She didn’t give orders, and she’d not told me I had to stay put anyway. I had to find my guys. I just… had to.

  The ground beneath my feet seemed to shift, like the world tilted, only it wasn’t. I stared down as my powers burst to life. Again. I trembled from the effect. I’d never had my powers used as much as I was that day. I wasn’t sure I was going to get through the onslaught. Were the zombies coming back?