Page 170 of Tar City
She recovers enough to explain. “You know I take the shot,” she says. “But it’s only ninety-nine percent effective.”
“And you needed one hundred.”
Her eyes hold on mine. “Yes. He gave me something experimental,” she continues. “Long-term suppression. Strong enough that it shouldn’t be possible.” She’s crying now. “I thought… if it can’t exist, it can’t be taken.” She takes a longbreath. “I’m sorry, Jax.” She wipes at her face angrily. “Up until that night I never thought about children. Not really, but the moment it asked for it…” She presses her fist to her mouth. “I didn’t know what to offer. I didn’t know how to bargain. I just begged it to save us all. And when you started to pull me out I thought it worked.”
She looks at me.
“Then it asked what I would give. And we were almost out and I just said anything.” Her shoulders shake now. “When I climbed out,” she whispers, “it said that’s what it wanted, and if I didn’t give it willingly, it would find a way to take it anyway.”
The tar inside me shifts, telling me it’s listening.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “I wanted to live. I wanted you alive. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
I step forward and pull her into me. I cup her face with my uninjured hand and kiss the tears.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say.
“It was,” she breathes against my chest.
“You were trying to save us.”
She presses her face to my chest. “Do you think Murtaugh’s right?” she whispers. “That it doesn’t just want my baby. That it wants our baby, a St. Clair baby?”
A fucking war starts under my skin. “I don’t know,” I admit. “He keeps talking about bloodlines. I don’t know what to think anymore.”
She pulls back slightly, her eyes searching mine for something solid to hold onto. “But we don’t have to worry, right?” she says quickly, desperate for logic. “I take the shot. It works. I’ve never even had a scare.”
“I don’t know what the fuck my father gave you, but I’m not gambling with this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll get the surgery. First thing tomorrow.”
I look down at my hand. The blood isn’t blood anymore. Thick, oily tar drips from my hand onto the dirty snow at my feet. Her eyes go wide when she notices it. The tar hits the snow and spreads in thin, branching lines like veins beneath us.
YOU CANNOT BARGAIN TWICE.
The voice lands in my head like a fact carved into stone.
Sisk stiffens in my arms. “Did you hear that?” she whispers.
Another drop falls.
“I’ll burn this whole fucking city to the ground before I let that happen,” I snarl, pulling her tighter against me.
There’s a pull in my palm and the tar on the snow stops moving, then it begins to crawl back. Upward.
Sisk grabs my wrist before I can jerk away. “Jax?—”
The black veins retract across the ground, threading back toward me, sliding over my boot, climbing my wrist, pouring into the split in my skin. The cut seals but it doesn’t heal clean. A thin black seam runs down the center of my palm. Halfway down, it forks and two smaller cracks branch off.
It’s raised like a brand, black, settled deep as if it’s been there for years. I flex my hand.
Sisk is staring at my palm, her face pale.
“Jax,” she breathes. “That’s the symbol.”
“What symbol?”
