Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes Read Free

until they lose their power. Everything you locked away.”
    “No,” I said, my voice thin and uncertain. I was seventeen again. “I can’t look at those things. I can’t let you see them. I can’t.”
    You’ll despise me.
    But they weren’t listening.
    “Love you.”
    “Trust us.”
    All their voices whispering.
    “We can’t make those memories painless,” Diana said, “but we have to make them less poisonous. We have to share them so we can build you back up. And you have to lead us. You have to want this.”
    “Please, honey.” Jen pressed my hand against her lips.
    “No,” I said again.
    I shook my head from side to side. I ached all over. I felt weak.
    “Whether you lock them away or not, every event stays part of you,” Diana said. “Today’s Amber is always built on yesterday’s. Now you have to unlock those memories. Only you can do it.”
    I felt like I was falling.
    I remembered Martha, talking about the little cemetery nestled in the arms of the yew tree hedge, behind the ranch at Coykuti. Parts of the yew die and rot and feed the rest of it. It lives off itself. It makes itself new from all it has ever been. The pack’s like that. It’s all the things it’s ever done, all its loves and hates, all its desires and fears, all its triumphs and failures.
    I was all the things I’d ever done. All the things that had ever been done to me. I couldn’t escape that. I couldn’t escape.
    But there are parts of me I can’t let them see.
    Diana’s fingers were pressed into my forehead. Cold as ice. Deep. Remorseless.
    My body fought to escape against hands holding me down.
    No! So many things I can’t let them see.
    “Calm, Amber.” Diana’s voice, seeming to echo down a corridor. “None of these memories are easy, but we’ll start earlier… here .”
     
    I’m falling through the depthless night. Ahead, somewhere in the dark, there’s a massive rock emerging from the jungle. Rendezvous point. Hacha Del Diablo, the Devil’s Axe. The mission where my team died. I can feel the blood pulsing from the wound on my neck as I collapse against the rock which blocks out the stars in the sky above me. The despair. My team. All of them. Dead. The blood lust, the elation, as my knife skrees off his cervical vertebrae, telling me I’ve cut through every blood vessel in his neck and he’ll die before me, this thing that killed my team. Killed me.
    No. That’s in the wrong order. Jumbled. Chaos. That Athanate died — the crazy descendent of the Carpathian House Chrysos — he bit me and I killed him. But I didn’t die. I became Athanate and lived.
    Start again.
    Step through it.
    Start at the beginning…
     
    I’m falling. It’s night. Ops 4-10’s Cyclops system readouts tell me where to head for. How far. When to pull the cord. My batsuit and brake will get me there in one piece. My team is behind me.
    The wind is screaming past my face…
     

Chapter 4
     
    It was light. The blurry passage between dreams and memory and reality had a feel of familiarity now.
    This was real. This was now. Lying down with my head in a lap.
    Diana’s lap. This was her leaning over me, not Speaks-to-Wolves or Martha or any of the phantoms from my head, and we were alone.
    A Diana whose face was slightly younger every time I woke.
    She’s recovering. We’ve spoken about that. The lock the Adepts used had drained her energy, made her age. Now she was recovering. When had we spoken?
    “How long?” I said. My voice felt rusty, my throat sore.
    “Nine days since we left New Mexico.” She spoke carefully, watching me intently.
    Watching for what?
    Watching me because sometimes I’m crazy.
    Wait. What did she say?
    “Nine days? Where am I? What’s happening?”
    A little tick of panic beat at my ribs, and there was an answering pulse of soothing pacifics from Diana.
    “We’re in Los Angeles. You’re in therapy, and you’re doing well.”
    Doing well. Something they say that doesn’t mean what it