Ilona Andrews - Magic Breaks

He smelled like Curran. He felt like him. I buried my face in the bend of his neck. His skin was so hot, it burned.

“Don’t die on me.” He kissed my face, pulling off his jacket. “Don’t die on me.”

I couldn’t stand. I just slumped there on top of the grate, holding on to him.

He wrapped me in his jacket, closed his arms around me, and jumped. Then we were in a narrow hallway. He carried me through it.

“I love you,” I told him.

“I love you, too.” His voice was raw. “Stay alive, Kate.”

“Ghastek . . .”

“They’ll get him. Don’t worry. Stay with me.”

“Where would I go?”

He squeezed me to him. “I’m going to kill that fucker.”

“Dibs,” I told him. “He broke my sword.”

“Fuck the sword. I almost lost you.” He kicked a door open and lowered me to a fire built on the concrete floor. “Andrea, clothes! Quickly.”

Curran ripped my shirt in half. My pants came off—someone was pulling off my sodden clothes. The heat of the fire swirled around me. Christopher swung into my view, his hair snow white, and held a thermos to my lips. “Drink, mistress.”

I sipped. Chicken broth. I drank again and he pulled it back. “Not so fast. You’ll get sick.”

“Hang on,” Andrea told me, and slipped socks on my feet. “Don’t ever pull this shit again, you hear me?”

“Sure,” I whispered.

“Here.” Robert handed Curran a shirt.

“What are all of you doing here?” I whispered, as Curran put it on me.

“We came to save you.” Christopher smiled. “Even me. I didn’t want to come back to this place, but I had to. I couldn’t leave you in a cage.”

He gave me more broth. I drank. Curran hugged me to him.

We were in some sort of large room. A fire burned in the center, eating the remains of office furniture. A pile of cubicle partitions rested against one wall. There were windows in the ceiling. The room looked like it was on its side. That made no sense.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

“You don’t know?” Christopher’s blue eyes widened. “We’re in Mishmar.”

Roland’s tower prison. I only knew what Voron told me of it. When the business district of Omaha fell, my father had bought the rubble from the impoverished city. He had taken colossal chunks of fallen skyscrapers, two, three, four stories tall, pulled them into a remote field somewhere in Iowa, and piled them onto each other into a huge tower, held together by magic and encircled by a wall. It was a vicious place, an ever-changing labyrinth, where exits sealed themselves and walls took on new shapes. Feral vampires roamed here. Things for which nobody had any name because they had no right to exist hunted here. There was no escape from Mishmar. Nobody ever got out.

“You came into Mishmar for me?”

Curran hugged me to him, cradling me like I was a child. “Of course I did.”

I loved him so much. “You’re a fucking idiot.” My voice was hoarse. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“Because I love you. Give her more broth. She’s coming around.”

“We have to get out of here,” I said. “Hugh checks up on me in my dreams.”

Curran’s eyes went gold. “Let him come.”

“A vampire!” Andrea shouted.

The window above and to the left of us broke. Shards of glass and wood cascaded to the floor. A vampire fell into the room, its mind a hot spark in front of me. It landed on all fours, old, gaunt, and inhuman. A sharp bone crest protruded from its back. Another ancient one.

The vamp shot forward and then stopped abruptly.

“I’m still . . . a Master of the Dead,” Ghastek said from a blanket on the floor. “Kill it before I lose consciousness.”

I OPENED MY eyes. I lay on a blanket, wrapped in several layers of clothing.

I couldn’t see Curran. He’d been holding me for what felt like hours. Every time I woke up, he was there, but not now. Anxiety spiked.

Okay, I had to snap out of it. He wasn’t going to evaporate. He wasn’t a hallucination. He was here . . . somewhere.

Above me small hateful points of magic moved back and forth. Vampires. One, two . . . Nine. I pushed back the blankets. The room was mostly empty. Christopher napped, leaning against the wall. To my left Ghastek lay on his blankets. Robert, the alpha rat, sat next to him. No Curran or Jim. I also thought I saw Andrea, but that couldn’t be right. Andrea couldn’t be here. She was pregnant. She wouldn’t risk the baby.

A brown-eyed woman knelt by me. She was my age, with dark hair, a full mouth, and brown skin. She wore a black loose abaya, an Islamic-style robe, and a matching hijab, a wide scarf, draped over her head. She looked Arabic to me. I’d seen her before among Doolittle’s staff.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Nasrin.” She gently touched my face, examining my eyes. “I’m here to heal you.”

“Where’s Curran?”

“He’s checking the barricade,” Nasrin said. “Jim and others are standing guard there. How do you feel?”

What barricade? “The room isn’t blurry anymore.”

She smiled. “That’s good. We’ve had a short magic wave, and I’ve worked on you a little.”

“I think I remember.”

I had passed out at some point, but Curran woke me up every five minutes to eat. At first it was broth, which I vomited once or twice. I vaguely remembered Andrea passing me a wet rag to clean my face and Nasrin murmuring something and holding a canteen to my lips. Whatever I’d drunk had made me feel better. Then I was given some mysterious concoction Doolittle had made up and sent with them especially in case we had been starved. I asked what was in it, and Christopher very seriously told me, “Forty-two percent dried skimmed milk, thirty-two percent edible oil, and twenty-five percent honey.” I was afraid to ask about the other one percent and I had trouble keeping it down. Then a magic wave came and someone chanted over me, and suddenly I was ravenous. I had gone through two quart containers of the stuff and my stomach wanted more, but I had passed out. It seemed like that whole sequence happened more than once, but I couldn’t be sure.

“What was in the bottle you gave me?” I asked.

She smiled. She didn’t look a thing like Doolittle, but something about her communicated that same soothing confidence. “The water of Zamzam.”

“The blessed water from Mecca?”

“Yes.” She nodded with a small smile and held a bottle to my lips. “Drink now.”

I took a sip.

“When Prophet Ibrahim cast Hajar and their infant son, Ismail, out into the barren wilderness of Makkah, he left them there with only a bag of dates and a leather bag of water.” Nasrin touched my forehead. “No fever. That is good. When all the water was gone, Ismail cried for he was thirsty, and Hajar began to search for water. She climbed the mountains and walked the valleys, but the land was barren. Any dizziness?”

“No.”

“That’s good also. Finally at Mount al-Marwah Hajar thought she heard a voice and called out to it, begging for help. Angel Jibril descended to the ground, brushed it with his wing, and the spring of Zamzam poured forth. Its water satisfies both thirst and hunger.” Nasrin smiled again. “We brought some of it home with us when my family went on a holy pilgrimage. My medmagic encourages the body to heal itself by making it metabolize food at an accelerated rate. You had no wounds, so as your body absorbed the nutrients, they all went directly to where they were supposed to go and the water sped up the process even further. If we can keep this up, you’ll be walking soon. Not too bad for thirty-six hours of treatment, and it looks like we might have avoided refeeding syndrome. Without magic, restoring your strength would take a few weeks.”