Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes Read Free Page A

says.
    “What about…” I trailed off. Where would I start?
    My House was with me. Some of them at least. My kin. That was real.
    Mom? Tullah?
    Another tick of panic.
    Ingram? I said I would meet him. That was ten days ago now. What was he—
    And Felix? How had the—
    Olivia? Had it really worked?
    My mind raced in circles. It was like trying to climb out of a pit of ice. I couldn’t seem to get any traction.
    Diana said soothingly, “Everything’s being taken care of.”
    I realized I’d been blurting the names out.
    “Alex and Jen have been speaking to your mother regularly. Tullah and her parents are in hiding from the Adepts with Chatima, somewhere down in New Mexico or Arizona. Agent Ingram has been sent a message explaining you are in recovery and will get back to him. Alex talks to Felix every day. Olivia is well and enjoying being a full werewolf at every opportunity, from what I hear.”
    A breath escaped me.
    Everything is fine. Relax.
    “You have to concentrate on yourself for a while,” Diana said. “Let us worry about the rest.”
    Concentrate on myself.
    “I went rogue,” I said. That was real, too. I could remember that.
    I had a flashback to Bian’s chilling summation about how Athanate dealt with rogues: We provide a quick and humane death .
    Why am I still alive?
    “We got to you in time,” Diana said, seeing the questions forming in my head.
    “Like with David?”
    David had started to go rogue. Diana had brought him back, almost effortlessly. But that had all happened in the space of one evening.
    Nine days?
    “Not like with David,” Diana said. “You went much further, and you’re much more complicated.” She smiled to soften the words.
    I closed my eyes for a moment, lulled by the pacific pheromones she was dosing me with.
    No, not like with David.
    Only Diana could have brought me back. I’d saved her in New Mexico and in doing that, I’d saved myself. Without Diana treating me, the Athanate would have killed me by now. Or the Were would have—they took the same line with rogues. Even though what had finally sent me over the edge wasn’t my Athanate, or my Were. It was what humans had done to me.
    And that wasn’t fixed. Despite Diana’s soothing, I could feel it like a darkness moving in the deep beneath me.
    “No, we’re not finished yet,” Diana whispered. “But hear my oath, Amber Farrell, House Farrell, beloved: I will hold you, as long as it takes, as long as I am able. I will not let you fall. On my Blood, I so swear.”
    I felt her eukori supplementing the pacifics. Calm. Calm.
    She would cure me. I didn’t need to worry about anything outside of my treatment.
    That in itself was enough to worry about.
    “I’m all the things I’ve ever been.” The words sighed from my lips, as if Martha’s spirit were speaking through me. My heart rate tried to spike. “All the things that have ever been done to me—”
    “And you’re all the things you ever could be, as well,” Diana said.
    Her eukori stirred again, reached into me, synced my heart with hers until they beat together as slow as waves on the shore.
    “Sometimes,” she said, “to fix things, we have to take them all apart and put them back together again. It’s like a strange puzzle. Everything connects to something else, but it all has a place. Even the bad things.
    “This is not like a physical injury, not like fixing a bone.” Her voice seemed to float down to me. “I can’t make you like you were before anything bad happened, without erasing everything you’ve become. That same everything that we all love, and is worth having.”
    We.
    My House and…
    “Keith,” I said. “I saw Keith, didn’t I?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why’s he here? Last time—”
    “You nearly bit him. Yes, you scared him,” Diana said, smiling. “But he still cares for you, and as you judge these things, I think he and Julie are part of your House.”
    As I judge these things.
    I could tell there was an issue there,