Chapter 140
Putting pressure on Zane’s wounds didn’t seem to be doing anything but showing Jo how easy it was to get blood to spurt through her fingers. Scott was allegedly on the way, but with every passing second, Zane was getting more and more pale as the blood that was supposed to be in his face was leaking out all over the floor of the tunnel.
“Jo,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I need to tell you something.”
“No, you don’t,” she said dismissively. “You need to save all of your energy until Scott gets here. He’ll be able to fix you right up as soon as he gets his ass over here.”
“Jo….” He tried again, and part of her thought maybe it would be a good idea to let him say whatever it was he felt compelled to get out. But she also knew that letting him tell her some mushy stuff about how he’d always loved her or how he wished nothing but the best for her would also give him no more reason to fight, and right now, she needed him to fight. She couldn’t even let herself think about the possibility of what would happen if he died.
It just couldn’t happen.
“Scott, for the love of God!” she screamed through the IAC. “Are your feet made of concrete? Did you fall in a goddamn pit filled with quicksand?”
“It takes longer to get places than you think, Jo!” Scott shouted back. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Part of her began to wonder if maybe the Healer was dragging his feet because of who it was. She and Zane had made no secret of their relationship, and that could make Scott jealous. Especially if he knew that Zane was the first person she hooked up with after she left town, after she left Scott. Surely, Scott didn’t think that she’d get back together with him if Zane died, did he? And he wasn’t shallow enough to simply want to punish her for getting over him, right?
It was stupid for her to think that Scott could ever be like that anyway. He wasn’t a monster. He wouldn’t let a teammate die because he was jealous or felt jolted.
Yet, the longer it took the man to get his ass over there, the more she had to wonder how in the world he could possibly have received two doses of Transformation serum and still managed to amble slower than a toddler in high-heels.
“Jo, listen to me!” Zane finally said after several attempts at speaking to her.
“No!” she shouted at him. “I’m not gonna listen to you, Zane. I don’t want to hear it. I’m not going to sit here and listen to you tell me about how you feel about me and wish me a happy life or any of that bullshit because you’re not dying, all right? You’re not gonna die. Not in here. Not anywhere. Not at all, got it?’
Zane arched an eyebrow at her and then a crooked grin spread across his face. “Boy, listening to you talk like that makes me think maybe you like me or something.”
“Yeah, well, just so you know, I say that to everyone.”
His smile faded slightly as he stared into her eyes. “I do love you, though.”
“Shut up.”
“That’s a new one. I was expecting, ‘I know,’ or maybe, ‘That’s nice.’ Hell, on a good day maybe even a, ‘Ditto,’ but, ‘Shut up’? I really wasn’t expecting that.”
“Zane….”
“At least it wasn’t, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ I think that would’ve been a little more harsh than necessary.”
“You know I love you, too. So… just knock it off, all right?” There, she’d said it. But it had nothing to do with the amount of blood he was losing or the fact that his eyes weren’t staying open any longer. It was just something she’d been meaning to say for a while, that’s all.
“Good,” Zane said. “Yeah, I know. It’s just nice to hear it once in a Blood Moon. Portal.”
“God, that was the stupidest joke I’ve ever heard. If you make another one of those, I’m gonna go ahead and let you die, all right? Put the world out of its misery.”
He closed his eyes all the way and didn’t try to open them. That wasn’t a good sign. But he was still smiling. Jo had already watched one man that she loved die recently, and she wasn’t prepared to watch it happen again. Was it just a coincidence that Scott had been the closest Healer to her dad, too, and hadn’t made it to help him either?
A blue light filled her field of vision from her right as Scott shot his powers ahead of him before he arrived. He wasn’t nearly as good at that as his dad was, but it should help a bit, and then, within a few seconds, he was there, his hands on Zane’s wounds.
Jo wasn’t a Healer, but she could tell that Scott had gotten there in time because Zane was still breathing. She hated the fact that Scott had just left Ryker behind, standing at the gates of hell by himself, but there wasn’t much of a choice right now since Cassidy had decided to go through the doors, and Ryker didn’t want to leave her there without her knowing where they were. Not that a simple IAC message from the team members who had those wouldn’t have been sufficient. Or a mind-reading of those who did not have an IAC--namely Ryker.
The conversation between Zane and Scott seemed to fade all of a sudden. It was strange. One second, Jo was listening to Scott ask Zane questions about where it hurt, and the next… she was listening to something else.
It was an odd sound, something she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard before. It sounded like a swooshing noise of some sort. Like maybe a fetal heart monitor. But that made absolutely no sense. Why would she be hearing a heartbeat inside of fluid?
As quickly as it had been there, it faded away.
Jo found herself getting to her feet, though, absently wiping the blood off on her pants, and turning around to look down the tunnel they were standing next to.
At the end of it, she saw something that hadn’t been there a few moments ago.
It was a soft white glow, and it seemed to be coming from the ground. It appeared to be coming up through the ground, as if the floor had cracks in it, and there was a light on in a room beneath the surface. It wasn’t very bright at all, but in the near pitch-black of the tunnel, she could see it.
“Jo, where are you going?” Scott asked.
She hadn’t even realized her feet were moving until she heard his voice. “The light,” she said.
“What?”
She couldn’t explain. Whether he simply couldn’t see it or just didn’t understand, she didn’t care, but she knew exactly where she needed to go. That light was what they’d been looking for.
It was the opening to the tunnels beneath these tunnels.
It was the place she’d seen in her dreams.
It was where she’d find her mother.