“Of you having to see me like this. Ever,” he continued on the page.
“I’ve seen worse,” I said bravely, when it wasn’t true. The worse that I’d seen—well, they’d already been dead. Or on the way. Not trapped in some freakish limbo. But that was the only thing freakish about Ti—he’d been injured while
“Where are we taking the stinking zombie?” Sike asked, angling her mirror so that she could see me in the backseat.
I looked over at Ti. We couldn’t go to the hospital—there was no way we could walk in during the daylight and try to explain this. I wasn’t sure how big an envelope of safety the Shadow’s abilities provided. If even one person in the parking lot saw him like this … damn. Besides, Ti didn’t actually need any hospital’s care; he wasn’t crashing. He just needed someone to watch out for him, till nightfall at least. “Madigan’s?” I asked aloud.
Ti nodded. I tried to remember the address—then Ti wrote it down. I gave it over to Sike, who programmed it into her car’s GPS while steering with one knee.
Anna leaned back, the fabric looped high up over her head, to look at me. “Why are you with a zombie?” She definitely, self-righteously disapproved, the way only children, vampires or not, can. She didn’t seem at all fazed by the rime of drying red around her mouth.
“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” I said, and turned to Ti. “Was that a trap?”
He shook his head, and began writing. “Tip was good. But the informant was dead when I got there.”
“Oh. Well. Saved you some money, then, I suppose.” I went back to staring straight ahead. I heard more scratching on the legal pad and glanced down.
“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.
