Laurel vanished. One moment she was there, struggling against Drake’s coercive pull, and the next she was gone.
“What?” Drake appeared to be as perplexed as Nick was angry.
The distraction was all the time Nick needed, however, as the crushing weight of Drake’s powerful hand eased from his chest. Pulling together the raw, spiritual energy that had been surging into his body, Nick was able to bring his left arm across his body with hammerlike force to Drake’s elbow. The reprieve allowed much needed oxygen back into his lungs.
If Drake had not taken Laurel, where in hell had she gone to? She was their way back. If she was gone, they were as good as dead, and all this was moot.
Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw Shelby come barreling at Drake. She must have realized as well the seriousness of Laurel’s disappearance. Behind her, Jackie lay prone on the floor, curled up in the fetal position, unmoving. It occurred to him then that Shelby was not hell-bent for Drake because of Laurel, but because Jackie had finally died. The one truly living being in this cold and barren Deadworld, and he had let her slip away, unable to overcome the fear of what he was. Too little too late.
Drake turned back; the hand once outstretched to get Laurel balled into a fist to smash Nick in the face. The half second Nick spent staring at Jackie’s unmoving body would have been enough for it to land, but Shelby took Drake out at the knee, buckling him to the floor.
The ghosts, ready for the opportunity, rushed in upon Nick, flowing up his arm in a mad rush of energy. It was almost enough to fry his synapses. The kinds of things possible with such power were limitless, far more than he had imagined back in the days of drinking real blood. The prospect was terrifying. Shrouding it all in a smoldering, dark haze was the image of Jackie’s dead body. Such power meant nothing now. He had wanted only to save her, get her back to the world of the living where she might be saved. She deserved no less. It was his fault for letting her get dragged into this mess. He should have forced her out, broken the law, tied her up, or taken whatever means necessary to ensure her safety. He should have done a lot of things that had been necessary. Now, however, only one necessity remained.
Nick leaped on top of Drake, funneling the raw energy into his clenched fists, burying them again and again into the pale, haughty face. The rage and frustration of the decades suffered at the man’s relentless vengeance poured out of him, finding release but little solace or satisfaction in the rupturing of skin and cracking of bone his fists inflicted.
After the seventh or eighth punch, Drake’s broken mouth twisted into a smile. “You can’t kill me here, Nicholas. Your friends are dead or dying. Good show, though. I did not believe you had it in you.”
Nick clamped his hands around Drake’s head, thumbs digging into those soulless gray eyes. “You’ll die, you fucking bastard, even if I have to twist your withered head right off your body.” He began to bear down, pushing against the force of Drake’s will that worked to pry his fingers free. “Even if I burn myself away, you’re going to burn up with me.”
Drake’s hands locked onto Nick’s wrists, squeezing down against the bones, and Nick could feel the pressure building, beginning to grind bone and ligament together.
Behind him, Shelby’s voice was strained. “Goddamnit, Nick. Hurry up.”
She was clamped around Drake’s legs, but her strength had waned with the time among the dead. Her help would not last much longer. Nick pushed back with everything he had, hoping to crush Drake’s skull. His thumbs ground down, fluid beginning to seep out.
A lightning jolt of pain flew up his arm along with the sound of cracking bone. Cornelius had begun to break his left wrist. The smile on Drake’s face remained unflinching even as blood begin to drip from his sockets. Doubt crept into Nick’s mind. Perhaps the vampire could not be killed in this place. A few more seconds, and it would not matter. His wrist was going to give out, and his viselike grip around Drake’s skull would fail.
Then something was on his back. For an instant Nick thought it one of the goons come over to try to pry him off, but the voice in his ear could not have been any sweeter, any more of a relief to his guilt-ridden conscience.
“Take us out, Nick. Now!”
Jackie. But the words were Laurel’s. Somehow Laurel was in control. Her voice whispered through all the rampant energy supercharging his body, urgent and insistent. “Cynthia,” she said. “Hospital.” Jackie’s arms wrapped around his neck, and Nick understood where they needed to go.
Open the door and push them all through. Nick let her in, using her guidance to open the doorway back to the world of the living. The change of focus diverted his energy away from Drake’s crushing grip, and Nick felt his wrist give way, grinding to pieces beneath his skin.
For the first time, Drake’s victorious smile faltered. Going back through did not appear to be on his list of options. He tried to throw them off, push them aside before that door could be opened.
Pushing three people from one world to the other had been rough, but now there were five, one of whom was doing his best not to go through. They had to overcome not only the tension of the doorway itself being pushed open beyond its rightful bounds, but Drake’s panicked efforts to pull it closed. For the first time in 180 years, Nick realized he had more strength than his nemesis. The unharnessed energy, with which he had been unsure how to focus before, exposed itself with its true power. The power did not give him the ability to wreak havoc upon another, but the power to manipulate that fabric of time, space, and spirit between the living and the dead.
The door yawned opened beneath them, and Nick rolled over into it, his good hand hooked into the bones of Drake’s face. Jackie’s body clung to his back, and Shelby wrapped herself about his legs as the pull of the other side stretched him. The pathway was hardly big enough to let them through, but the tug of life grabbed a hold of the part of him that still lived, conforming his body to it, bending and twisting bones and stretching him to the point of breaking as they were drawn through.
Laurel’s voice yelled in his head, full of a panicked urgency. Push, Nick! You’ve got to push us through.
I’m trying. The door was meant for one, not five.
She’s almost dead. Get us through. Now, damn you.
Like he did this every day, just dragging people around between the lands of the living and the dead. It didn’t help that one of them had a very strong desire not to go through. Push as he might, however, the doorway was not big enough. All the focus in the world could not direct enough energy to widen the opening. They were not going to make it.
You’re trying too hard, Nick. Let us go.
The voice was not Laurel’s this time. It might have been Gwen’s, or some conglomeration of all the spirits that swam through his veins. Laurel had spoken of it before when they had traveled through. But to just let it go now, when using spirits’ energy was all that was giving them the chance to get out, made Nick hesitate. Everything had been put into his hands. Jackie was on the verge of death, and vindication for all that had happened, all that he had done, surged within him. He was finally able to do something to right these wrongs, and he had to just let it all go? If this was wrong, there would be no strength left to do anything, and they would all be dead.
The time to ponder was gone. Fate, he supposed, would have to decide. He could only hope the dead were right. Nick relinquished control, effectively letting go of his grip on the door. For a moment, they were all pulled back, swayed toward Deadworld by Drake’s force of will.
The dead within Nick dispersed from his body in a blinding flash of white light, pulling at every cell from the inside out. It was the intense, painful relief of pulling a knife from a wound, at once agonizing and then a flood of relief.
Awareness of his body and everyone around him began to dissipate. Fog and darkness seeped into his pores, filling every opening, saturating him down to the marrow with a cold that felt like it must have come from the dead void of space itself. Nick wanted to scream, tried to, but he could not tell if he actually did. Was this it? Had death finally come to embrace him, mocking him in the end with this final failure? The moment lasted a second or eternity. There was no point of reference. He could only hope and pray.
Nick fell through, tumbling into the nothingness between the worlds, the desperate grips of those around him clinging for dear life. At the last, he focused his awareness on the one good hand he had left. If there was any justice left in the world, its grip would not fail.