Reckless Road (Torpedo Ink 5)

“Get me out of here, Maestro. You have to get me out of here.”

He struggled to sit up, but the moment he did, his head exploded. Completely shattered. He actually saw the pieces rushing away from his head like tiny wedges of broken shards of glass. They spun in the air just like in a damn movie, and floated in the air, his brains spilling out like mirror images. Great globs of blood blew into the air and swirled in slow circles.

“Geez, Player, what the fuck is happening?” Maestro whispered. “This isn’t funny.”

“What’s going on in here? You’re going to wake my grandmother.”

Her voice. Soft like a summer breeze. Drifting into the room. Right into the gore of his scattered brains. There was no retrieving the rest of the pieces. It was far too late. Even with Maestro leaping up and trying to stand in front of him, how could he hide an exploding head?

“Leave the room,” Zyah ordered softly. “If you want him to live, you have to leave the room right this minute.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Player said, only nothing came out of his mouth. He couldn’t talk with his brains floating away on the shards of glass. “It’s too dangerous. I’m too dangerous.”

He tried again to shout the warning. No one heard. No one listened or paid attention. He began to build a megaphone in his mind, or what was left of his mind. There was nothing. No brain cells—they had floated away. How could he talk? How could he think to form words? He wasn’t making sense.

Maestro stood in front of him for another few seconds, staring straight into Zyah’s eyes. “You hurt him, I’ll fucking break your neck,” he warned.

“Just get out and save the drama.”

His sweet dancer didn’t sound so sweet when she was throwing Maestro out of her bedroom. Maestro was as intimidating as they came—unless you were looking at Savage or Destroyer. Maybe Reaper, although if Anya was around . . .

“I’m standing right here by the door.”

“Owww.” His eyelids flew open, and he found himself staring into a pair of stormy, turbulent eyes. “Zyah, you have to leave. There’s a bomb. I’m a bomb. It’s going to go off again any minute. You’re not safe. Your grandmother . . .”

Zyah wrapped a wide lavender scarf around his head, covering the long line of stitches Steele had put into his scalp. The scarf was soaked in something that wasn’t in the least soothing and sweet the way his dancer should be. The liquid was some kind of astringent, something that seeped into his open brain and grew hotter and hotter until he was certain flames licked at what remained of his cells.

“Stop being a baby.”

“I can see you have this under control,” Maestro said and deserted him.

Player tried to push Zyah away. “My brain is scattered. Everywhere. In pieces. Can’t you see? Like glass. I’m shattered. Like glass. I’m a bomb.”

She put her head down close to his, hands framing his face, holding him still, looking into his eyes. “I’m a glassblower,” she whispered. “No one is as good as I am at blowing glass. Just stay quiet and let me take care of this. I’ll put you back together.”

“Too dangerous. I have to get away from you.”

She ignored his warning as she began to hum softly, her body swaying as she wrapped a makeshift bandage around his head, pulling more and more of the floating debris that were the scattered pieces of his brain back inside his skull.

He saw the table he’d been using to make the bomb. All the parts were laid out, and they shimmered beneath the glass and her fire. The parts looked different from his usual ones. His tools morphed into a set of tweezers in a variety of sizes, a crimp, a taglia and straight shears.

Zyah took her time, collecting the fragments floating around the room and, with the sound of her song, fitting them together, like a jigsaw puzzle. It should have been soothing, like the first night in her company, but this was anything but. Fire burned through his brain. Hot. Searing. Like the hottest blowtorch imaginable.

Player clenched his teeth and did his best to let the pain wash over him, but the blaze only seemed to grow hotter, licking along every pathway and nerve in his fractured mind. He felt that fire, each separate flame as it glowed through his mind. To really blow glass, the temperature had to be over one thousand Celsius, didn’t it? This felt like well over a thousand degrees.

“Woman.” He attempted to raise his arm and the same thing happened. A wildfire stormed from his head to his shoulder and roared down his bicep to his forearm. “I get that you’re pissed as hell at me. You have every right to be, but aren’t women supposed to have some built-in compassion? Empathy? What the hell?”