I took another step, keeping my eye out for the rat, and saw instead a small, gray kitten nuzzling the hand of a dead man.
Good loves. Could this day get any better?
I am not a cat person. Not that I hate cats or anything. It’s just that I have not been around them much, as my father never allowed pets in my life. I developed a sort of cautious distance from all things four-footed. Especially cats, with their curiously intelligent eyes and sleek, unpredictable motions.
But this little guy was hardly moving and his eyes were closed. He mewed, a tiny, pitiful sound. What was I supposed to do? Leave the poor thing there? Even if all I did was drop him off at a shop or on the street as I ran through town, he might have a better chance of surviving. Maybe someone at the police department could get him to a shelter or something. He was so small; if I left him here, a seagull would eat him for lunch.
Of course, there was the complication of the dead body next to him, and if there was one category I needed less of right now, it was “ten interesting things I don’t want to tell the cops about,” dead bodies being right up there at the top of the list.
I took another step and the wind changed, lifting the sulfur and rotten garlic smell of a magical Offload from the mess at my feet. The kitten? Who would use a kitten as a Proxy? Maybe the dead joker next to him.
This was so none of my business.
While I am not a cat person, I am even less a dead-body person. But it’s not like I hadn’t ever been to a funeral before. I could handle seeing dead people. I didn’t much like touching them, but in order to get the kitten out from under his arm, and maybe then to a shelter, or at least away from the dead jerk, I had to move the dead arm.
I took a deeper breath and bent down. I plucked at the dead jerk’s sleeve and tried lifting the arm, which was heavier than I’d expected. Deadweight. Ha.
Not funny.
I couldn’t get good enough leverage, so I took hold of the jerk’s wrist.
Warm wrist. Supple wrist. Alive wrist.
Quite clearly alive, or at least I sure as hell hoped so, because he moaned.
The kitten mewed and I yelped, which, I suppose, was better than the scream I’d felt like belting out.
Hells. Double hells. A dying person was a lot more of a problem than a dead one. I glanced back down the beach. A wall of gray rain blocked my view. I looked up the shore, and got the same—rain.
I wiped my face with the hand that hadn’t touched the not-dead guy and bent over again to get a closer look.
He was lying on his stomach and just half of his face was visible. He looked younger than me, and had narrow features leaning toward delicate. He reminded me of a boy who played violin down the street from me when I was ten. His skin was the color of fog and rain, and his lips were blue. Not dead yet, but not much alive either, I decided.
Thinking about back and neck injuries, and the inadvisability of moving someone who was hurt, I gently pushed him over onto his back anyway.
Thin. Malnourished, and bleeding from somewhere under his shirt.
I tugged his sweatshirt up, and hissed at the gash in his chest.
Someone had gone all stab-happy on him, and recently. The wound oozed a little, but wasn’t gushing, which didn’t make sense until I placed my finger at the edge of one of the puncture marks.
Magic.
I could feel it, a slight, warm tingle like I’d just stuck my tongue on a battery. There was magic sealing this wound. I glanced at his face—still unconscious—then leaned down close and sniffed his blood.
Magic had created the wound, and magic had sealed it, perhaps keeping it from killing him. I’d never seen someone use magic like that before, though I supposed doctors might during surgeries. It was a beautiful, simple glyphing, and I wanted to trace it with my fingers and see just what kind of glyph could hold a man’s soul to his bones, but if I did I would have to draw upon magic and Hound him.
Sure, I wanted to know who had felt the need to stab him with a knife and magic several times. I wanted to know if the person who hurt him and the person who sealed the wound were one and the same.
But now was not the time. Any draw I made on magic would light me up like a neon “get me” sign, and I needed that as much as I needed an almost-dead guy and a kitten.
I pulled his shirt back down and considered finding a safer, warmer place for him to rest while I found the cops. I stood and looked around. I thought I’d passed a makeshift tarp strung between rusted shopping carts a minute ago.
“Please don’t leave me,” he said.
The sound of his voice, high, frightened, gave me the instant creeps and sent shivers down my spine.
His eyes, blue as a summer afternoon, were open.
“Please,” he said. “I need you.” He swallowed. “You and the powerful man. The dead man. I know how. I was there.”
The chills just kept coming.
Okay, sure, it might be incoherent babbling. It might be some sort of elaborate trap, though I couldn’t believe anyone would go through staging an almost death here on garbage shore just on the off chance I’d dodge by on my way to the cops. No one needed me dead that much.
So if it wasn’t incoherent babbling, then maybe the guy knew something. If not about my dad’s death, about someone’s death. Maybe someone who was willing to stab him and dump him down here to get rid of him.
It could have been a gun deal gone bad, a drug deal, a fight over a girl, a fight over a boy, hell, he could have been fighting with a girlfriend over who got to keep the cat. Whatever had happened to him, it was none of my business. I wasn’t a cop, wasn’t a doctor, wasn’t anybody who was in any kind of position to help him.
“You stay here and rest,” I said. “I’ll try to get you some help.” I started unzipping Zayvion’s coat, figuring I could at least give him some shelter from the rain while I called the cops and probably the hospital now too.
“No,” he said, his voice lower and somehow older. “Your father, Bed—Beckstrom. I was there when he died. I was you. I did—” He ran out of breath and worked hard—too hard—to pull air into his lungs.
Holy shit.
“What? What’s your name?” I asked him.
When he could talk, when he could breathe, his voice was high again, scared. It was eerie, like maybe I was suddenly talking to someone else behind those baby blues. “Cody. Cody Hand,” he said. “And Kitten. Please? Take us. Away.”
Take him away? Not likely. Haul his pretty blue eyes down to the cops? No problem.
“This is going to hurt,” I said.
“Okay,” he said in a small, childlike voice.
I bent and pulled his arm up over my shoulder and heaved back, getting him to his feet. He moaned and whimpered and breathed in loud, raspy gasps. I gave him a minute to get ready for the fun ahead.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Kitten,” he said. “Don’t leave her.”
Hells.
I half bent and held out the one hand I sort of had free. Luckily, the kitten was either too tired or too sick to back away. I picked her up and stuffed the poor thing down the front of my zipped jacket. If she fell out, there was no way I could go back for her. The kid might be slight of build and short—his head barely came up to my shoulder —but his legs weren’t working too well, his lungs weren’t working too well, and I figured his eyes weren’t working well either.
Still, we hobbled along. I took us closer to the water because trying to pick our way over the slime of garbage and shin-bruising rocks wasn’t doing us any favors.
So I was out in the open with a mostly dead guy on my shoulder and a cat stuffed down my bra.
Living the good life, oh yeah.
It took some time to get anywhere. The kid blacked out once or twice, and I had to wait until he came to before moving on again. The good thing was I didn’t see Bonnie, didn’t hear Bonnie, didn’t smell Bonnie. The bad thing was the rain never let up and the cat peed on my shirt.
