EIGHTY-SEVEN

Open his shirt,” Caitlyn instructed Razor.
When he hesitated, she snapped, “Do it. Billy can’t. Theo can’t.”

Razor knelt above Pierce’s prone body and reached down, keeping his own body as far from Pierce as he could, using his fingertips to delicately touch the shirt.

“No,” Caitlyn said. “That’s not going to work. I can’t get to the wound. Get behind him, cradle him upright. Reach around with both hands.”

“I can’t. I already told you I’m freaked out by blood.”

“Watch this,” Caitlyn said. She held Mason’s knife in her right hand. She pressed the blade diagonally across her left palm. With a swift motion of both hands, she applied pressure and pulled the left away from the right. She opened her left palm to show a blossoming gash.

It shocked Razor into continued silence.

“If I can do that,” she told Razor, “you can hold him.”

Blood began to drip down Caitlyn’s wrist. Instead of letting it splatter on the ground, she held her palm over Pierce’s forehead, streaming her blood into the knife gash that Mason had left behind.

“Do it!” Caitlyn said. “Or he’s dead.”

Her willpower was so intense that Razor nodded. He reached under Pierce’s neck and lifted. Pierce was too far gone to resist. Razor pushed more and managed to get Pierce into an upright position. Then, as instructed, he reached around and lifted and held Pierce’s blood-soaked shirt away from the wound.

Caitlyn pressed her bleeding palm directly onto Pierce’s belly and held it in place.

For Pierce, the first sensation was reluctance. He was in a deep, dark peace. Now, pulled upward and outward, his peace and surrender were replaced by cold, shivering, and the consciousness of renewed pain. His belly. His arm.

Then came the sensation of pressure. Soft pressure. Against the wound.

He opened his eyes.

There she was. Caitlyn. The young woman he’d hunted for months. Her eyes open. Staring at him.

He glanced down. Her hand was on his belly.

Back at her eyes. Intensity. Compassion. Determination.

He was shaking. So cold. Arms around him from behind. He closed his eyes. He wanted to go back to the warmth. The calm. The cessation of everything.

“Don’t go back,” she said. “Stay with me.”

Pierce’s eyelids were sticky. But the blood flow from his forehead had stopped. He reached up and touched it with his fingers, expecting more stickiness. Instead, he discovered it had hardened into a scab.

“You?”

She nodded.

“And down there?” he asked.

She lifted her hand off his belly, showing a diagonal gash in her palm. “It stopped bleeding. I had to cut it again to get you more blood.”

With her hand removed and the pressure relieved, Pierce felt warmth where Mason had plunged the knife.

“The pain,” Pierce said. “It’s going away.”

This was true. Except for his arm, where Mason had snapped the bone.

Caitlyn opened and closed her palm. “Mine too. Don’t ask me how. But that’s the way it is.”

Then Pierce completely understood all that was at stake. Her blood was capable of this. Caitlyn had the gift of life. Hers to bestow. Or withhold. Unless she was a prisoner, giving her captor the same gift. And if the secret to this could be genetically unraveled…

“Mason…,” he said. Slowly. His lips were losing the numbness of cold as his shock receded.

She jerked her head toward the house. “Still in there. But it’s over.”

“No,” Pierce said. “It’s not.”

The immensity of the blessing and the curse of her gift was like a deep, black chasm in front of him. Free, she would live with it all her life, government always searching. Held by the government, the power of life and death would be taken from her, owned by the rich and powerful and the too often corrupt.

“Yes. Mason’s dead,” she said. “And some others. Like me but not like me. It’s over.”

Arm limp at his side, Pierce now had the strength to sit upright without help. That’s when he discovered Razor behind him.

“You’re here,” he said to Razor. Pierce was coherent, his pain was fading, and the concerns of the world were back on his shoulders. He was also aware that the warmth in his belly was growing more intense, and he wondered if that was part of the healing process.

“You’re surprised?” Razor asked.

Pierce rolled forward to his knees, a movement that suddenly shot stabbing pain from his broken arm. He’d broken bones before and expected the pain should have been worse. What was the extent of the healing powers of Caitlyn’s blood?

“No longer surprised when you surprise me,” Pierce answered. “Tell me what was inside.”

With Billy and Theo standing silently in the background, Razor described it with succinct and efficient detail. It wasn’t difficult for Pierce to make solid conclusions. A scaled-down genetic program needing Caitlyn or her DNA for the final pieces.

“You’ve got to run,” Pierce said. “All of you.”

If they didn’t, Caitlyn would be in agency hands. But how long before they found her?

Pierce glanced at Wilson’s motionless body. If his friend was dead, there would be less to cover up. If Wilson survived, he still wouldn’t know what was going to happen in the next minutes. And later, Pierce would be in a good position to negotiate with Wilson.

“Run?” Razor echoed.

“Get them safe,” Pierce said, nodding his head at Caitlyn and Billy and Theo. “Keep them safe. Later, get to me. We’ll talk. But I don’t ever want to know where they are.”

“We want to go west,” Theo said. “Across the Mississippi.”

“I’ll help Razor make it happen,” Pierce said. “Go.”

“You want them free?” Razor asked. Near disbelief.

Free. And with no pursuit from the agency again. He needed to get into the house and clean things up. Before he called in the agency. Maybe there was a way to stop anyone looking for her again.

“How much clearer do I have to be?” Pierce got to his feet. “And I want to recruit you for the agency after that. You’ll get immunity for killing Timothy Raymond Zornenbach.”

“What?” Razor said. “How did you figure it—”

“That was a bluff,” Pierce said. “Thanks for confirmation. If the rest of my guess is correct, you had good reason for it. My offer stands. Join the agency. Get immunity. But I can’t make any of this happen unless you go.”

“Thought you didn’t make moral decisions,” Razor said.

“I lied.” Pierce grinned. Incredibly, except for his broken arm, he was feeling close to one hundred percent. “But obviously, so did you.”