“I’m sorry, Edie. I never meant to hurt you.”
“I know,” I whispered. “And you’re not. It just takes some getting used to, is all.”
“I just wanted to help,” he continued writing. “All this will heal in time.”
“I know that too.” I took the pencil from him. “How long?” I wrote down, and nodded to the front seat, where the vampires couldn’t hear us.
He took the pencil away and wrote back. “Depends.”
I wanted to ask on what, but I was afraid I knew. Y4, at least for him, was for show. A place where he could heal incrementally, in the time frame it might take a normal human to heal, so that when he went back to his job, nothing out of the ordinary would be noticed. I found another pencil on the floorboard.
“Don’t do anything stupid for my sake.” I underlined the word “anything.”
“Too late,” he wrote. And another smiley face.
“Dammit, Ti—” I forced myself to look up at him, to try and see past the mess he now was, to rewind the time back to this afternoon. I reached up to push an errant lock of hair back up over his ear. Then I discovered it wasn’t hair, but a piece of scalp. I inhaled to scream, or at least squeak really loudly—but what came out was a snicker, then “Ewwww!”
I laughed at myself, and I carefully cleaned my finger on his shoulder. “You know, I’ve had men tell me I’ve fucked their brains out before. I just never thought they meant literally.”
Ti drew another quick smiley face. “We’re okay?” he wrote down, right afterward.
“As okay as people like us ever get. Messed up in the head, yeah—but okay.” I smiled up at him. He was disgusting and smelly and falling apart and he looked like half of death warmed over—but he was here, now, with me. I took his good hand and squeezed it.
“Thanks, Edie,” he wrote when I was done. He paused, then continued. He finished an “I” before I snatched the pencil up from him, and put it behind my ear. Any statement beginning with “I” was bound to be bad. I didn’t want to hear “I am sorry” ever again in my life or, God forbid, “I love you.” Loving someone had never gotten me anything good. Silence, right now, was better. I closed my eyes, leaned over and aimed high, to kiss him near his temple on his unmarked cheek.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
I made Ti wait in the car while I went up to Madigan’s door. Rita answered the knock, though I heard dogs barking farther back in the house.
“Ti needs a favor, Rita,” I said.
She took me in, and then one eye squinted in disapproval. “You look a mess, and smell worse than that. Come in!”
I shook my head. “I can’t. You should send the little ones away. There’s been a fight, and Ti needs someplace to hole up for a while.”
Jimmie’s black wide-jawed face made it up to the screen door. Too late. I made a shooing hand gesture and he yawned, then sat down.
“What’s this?” Madigan asked, coming in from the back.
“There was a vampire fight. Ti was injured—it’s gross, and I’m telling you that as a nurse.” I glanced over my shoulder back at the car, glad the windows were tinted black. “We found the girl I was looking for, and I’ve got until tonight to finalize things.”
“So everything’s okay?” he asked.
Was it? It didn’t feel okay. Then again, how often did anyone see their boyfriend blown to bits in front of them, and manage to survive? “I think so. I hope so. But really—your kids don’t want to see this.”
Jimmie pressed his nose up against the screen door and whined. He might not be able to see Ti, but he could smell me.
“All right.” He leaned down and swatted Jimmie’s rear. “Go to your room. All of you,” he said to the other dogs I hadn’t had the chance to see. I heard nails on tile through the mudroom until they hit carpet again.
“Do you have a sheet you don’t mind losing? So that no one else can see?” I asked. Rita nodded and ducked away, quickly returning with a blue cotton sheet. “Thanks,” I said to her, and louder, so that anyone who could hear—as I imagined werewolves and weredogs had pretty good hearing—could hear what I said. “Thanks, really. I mean it.”
Rita nodded, and crossed her arms up over her chest.
* * *
I ran back out to Sike’s car and opened the back door. Ti was waiting there. His eyes appeared dark with concern, and I tried not to look at the rest of him.
“They’ll take you in for now.”
He nodded. I handed him the sheet and he unfolded it one-handedly, draping it around himself to look like a spectacularly creepy ghost.It was his turn to reach up and put hair behind my ear—no, to retrieve the pencil I’d tucked there. He wrote down, “Don’t trust anyone” on the pad, before he stood up and saw himself out. I didn’t have to ask who it was that he meant.
* * *
“My car’s going to smell like zombie for weeks. You can’t detail out that stench,” Sike complained from the driver’s seat as we pulled away from Madigan and Rita’s home. “Where to now?”
Where to, indeed? “My place, I guess.” I gave her the address.
“They don’t pay you much, do they?” she stated.
“No.”
Anna tented the lightproof sheet over her head. She and Sike were sharing a low conversation in a language I didn’t understand but that I thought was Russian. I wondered if they had vampire business to discuss, or vampire gossip. I fiddled with my cell phone, feeling lost and forgotten in the expansive back seat.
Jake’s number was first on my speed dial. I sank lower in my chair. I was still mad at him for ditching me the other day. He’d keep going on his self-destructive path, but at least he’d be alive. Finding Anna had saved me that conversation. In the front seat, their conversation ended, and Anna slumped over in the passenger seat, lightproof fabric crumpled around her. Sleeping, perhaps.
I stared out the window and watched the gray of snow and gray of asphalt go by, all tinted to the same monotone moon-surface shade by the car’s windows. I fell asleep too.
* * *
“We’re here, human.” Sike pulled into a parking spot near my apartment. I got out my keys. Heat billowed out—my house was roasting inside, this month’s electric bill would be insane. And now I might actually be alive to pay it. I held the door open.
Sike had to walk around to Anna’s side of the car and prompt her awake. The smaller vampire seemed dizzy, stumbling out, and for a second I wondered what would happen if a corner of the lightproof fabric flipped back, and I watched my only hope crisp and burn in the meek afternoon sun.
Sike herded Anna toward me. She stepped up and into my house, but Sike was halted at the threshold.
“I thought you were just a daytimer?” I asked her. From the look on her face, so did she.
“I have had a lot of my Throne’s blood recently.” She stood at the edge of my doorway, looking both beautiful and perplexed. I watched her reach a hand back, into the sunlight, and it seemed no different than any other extraordinarily pale human hand I’d seen before.
Sike looked up at me. “So let me in,” she said.
I tried to remember the wording I’d used with Anna earlier, when I’d thought I was being clever. My exhausted brain wouldn’t come up with anything. “Never hurt me or my cat,” I said, instead of a more solemn vow. Sike snorted.
“I swear to never physically hurt you or your cat.”
“Good enough. Come in,” I said, and went inside. I took off my coat and set Grandfather down on my kitchen bar, where he started talking again. “Ugh,” Anna complained, on her way to my bedroom.
“Be nice.” Everyone in my house was bilingual but me. I peeked into my bedroom and saw Anna leaning against my closed closet door, the blackout fabric she had looped loosely over her head making her look like a shriveled beggar.
“I’m exhausted. Hide me,” she said, without looking up.
I walked past her and opened the other door. She knelt down and this time she shoved all of my shoes over to one side of my closet, kicking at them weakly. I tossed my extra comforter in after her.
“This house smells like zombie and worse,” Anna said, curling into a ball on my closet floor.
“Don’t worry, you’re not moving in.” I grabbed her lightproof cloth and quickly closed the closet door before slinging the black fabric up over my window to block out all the remaining light. In my kitchen, Grandfather was silent. I had collapsed onto my bed when I remembered Sike.
Home stretch, I told myself, like I told my patients when I was doing anything painful to them. Almost over. Everything’s almost over. I lurched back upright. She was standing by my thermostat in the hallway, setting it down to a more moderate setting. Should I offer her water, tea, blood? I didn’t know what I ought to be doing—all I knew was that I needed to sleep almost as badly as Anna did.
“Do you need me for anything?” I asked her.
“I presume you have a couch?” she asked.
“In the living room. You can’t miss it.” I pointed behind her, and she followed my direction. “Do I need to do anything special for the trial?” I called after her.
“Just show up.”
Worked for me, now that I might actually survive it. I sprawled atop my bed and let myself feel hopeful for the first time in what felt like forever, and then I fell asleep.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
I had another strange ocean dream. I was standing on the shore of a black ocean at night, and the sand beneath my feet kept shifting, no matter how hard I tried to stay still. I had to walk along it, faster and faster, until I was running, and it still kept sucking away. The tide went out and I ran down past the waterline, hoping the water-packed sand would be less treacherous, but then the stars were obscured by a huge wave of black and a roaring sound began—