Jax turned away to the open door of the truck for a moment. She was frantically doing something. He couldn’t figure it out. It finally dawned on him that she was ripping cloth. It was the rag the knives had been in. She was tearing off a long strip.
She put the strip around his upper left arm, wrapping it tightly around several times. She used her teeth to split the end and then tied a knot. She made another knot and drew it tight.
“What are you doing?”
“He cut you. I’m tying a bandage around your arm to keep the wound closed. I need to stop the bleeding.”
Alex only then realized that blood was dripping off his fingers. He wondered how bad it was. He didn’t really feel any pain, but at feeling a warm, wet sheath of blood running down his arm he suddenly began feeling sick.
“It’s all right,” she assured him. “You’ll be fine.”
By the way her voice sounded, though, he didn’t know if he believed her.
“How bad is it?”
“It’s dark. I can’t tell,” she admitted. “But I don’t think it’s too bad. Can you move your fingers?”
Alex tried. “Yes.”
“Then you’re fine. As long as your arm still works, it can’t be too bad.”
“Thank you,” he said in a numb voice. “I don’t understand why he was trying to kill me. If I’m dead they can’t get the information they need.”
“He wasn’t trying to kill you. He was trying to capture you. If he had wanted to kill you I think he could have.”
“Well, from my side of it it sure felt like he was trying to kill me.”
She only smiled as she adjusted the bandage on his arm. Alex liked the feeling of her taking care of him. It made him feel calm, feel like everything would be all right.
She gently took the knife out of his hand. “I don’t ever let anyone use my knife. Not this one.”
Alex saw in the dim illumination of the dome light in the Jeep that it was the knife with all the elaborate engraving on the silver handle. Now it was covered in blood as well.
“It seemed rather important at the time,” Alex said. “Do you think you could make an exception to your rule this one time?”
“Well,” she said, glancing down at the dead man, “I guess that, in this case, I could.”
With a concerned, gentle look, she smoothed the hair back off his forehead. Her face warmed with the special smile she gave only him. Her hand cupping the side of his face made everything better.
“Considering who used that knife,” she said in an intimate voice, “I guess it’s all right. You’re welcome to use it anytime you’d like.”
Alex swayed on his knees. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Do it in that direction, will you? I need to send him back to my world.”
Alex was going to tell her not to bother, that they could just drive away and leave him. But as his mind started working again he realized what a bad idea it would be to leave a body lying in the street. With so many people around, the man would be discovered in short order. Alex could see people off in the darkness. Fortunately they didn’t see what was going on.
The dead people they had left in Mother of Roses would be burned up. There would be little evidence of what had really happened. But if they left this man’s body out on the street it would look like murder and raise a lot of questions.
By the time he had come to the conclusion that Jax was right, the man had already vanished. Her knife was shiny and clean.
Jax put a hand under his good arm to help him up. “Come on. Let’s get away from here before any of his friends show up.”
Alex was regaining his senses. He helped boost Jax up into the truck. The adrenaline of the situation seemed to have given them both a shot of strength. He didn’t know how long it would last. He ran around to the other side and hopped in.
When he turned the key in the ignition and the truck didn’t start, he wasn’t the least bit surprised. Trying the key had been nothing more than a token gesture. He had expected it not to start. That was just the way the world worked. For some reason it seemed that things tended not to work when you needed them the most.
Fortunately, he had planned for the eventuality. He’d parked on a hill, and he’d parked at the end of the block so that no one could park in front of him and block him in.
He turned the wheels away from the curb as he put in the clutch. The Cherokee started rolling, gathering speed. When it was going downhill at a good clip he let the clutch out. The engine turned over and caught. With a minimum of fuss, he had the truck running, but he was more determined than ever to get it fixed as soon as they got the chance.
Alex drove slowly down the hill through the residential neighborhood. There were no cars, but there were people wandering all over the place. Here and there a person in pajamas or a robe would walk out into the street without looking. In the darkness it was difficult to see them all. Alex kept a sharp lookout for any of the staff who might be hunting them.
When he turned right onto Sixteenth Street, traffic was moving slowly, pulling over at intervals for emergency vehicles. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars raced through the night toward the hospital.
Alex stayed in the right lane, pulling to the curb and stopping for every one of them. He didn’t want to be stopped by police and have to answer any questions. At that moment, he couldn’t imagine what he would tell them about what he was doing there at that time of night. He couldn’t say he was visiting his mother, not at night.
He was too tired to think. Best to avoid the problem altogether.
When the traffic cleared, he stayed close to the speed limit of forty-five as he headed toward the interstate. The interstate would be the fastest way to put some distance between them and anyone who might be looking for them. The older part of town was quiet that late at night. He kept an eye on the rearview mirror, checking to make sure that they weren’t being followed. The road behind was empty. Most of the people out that late were interested in seeing the fire.
Alex was sure that the fire department had shut off the gas to the hospital and that had minimized the explosion. It had been bad enough, but not anything like it could have been. He hoped everyone had gotten out safely. He guessed he knew that not everyone had.
Jax was slumped in her seat, leaning against the door, her hand resting on her leg. He reached over and squeezed the hand.
“We’re safe now. If you want you can crawl in the back seat to lie down and go to sleep.”
She pulled her hair back off her face and hooked it behind an ear. “Where are we going?”
“I want to find us a motel or something, some place we can rent a room for the night. We’re near the interstate highway. It shouldn’t take long to get safely away from here before we stop. We both need rest and time to let these drugs wear off.”
“I’ll wait, then,” she said. “Before we sleep, though, I’m going to need a needle and thread.”
“What for?”
“To stitch up that gash on your arm. It needs to be closed up.”
Alex nodded, but he didn’t like the thought of having her sew on his arm, at least not without some kind of local anesthesia. He didn’t want to stop in at an emergency room, though. They would have questions. He wasn’t in the mood to think up answers to questions.
He tested his injured left arm a little. It was beginning to ache in earnest. The pain throbbed with each beat of his heart. He couldn’t hold the wheel with his left hand alone. The pressure needed to turn the wheel hurt.
He glanced in the rearview mirror to look back at the fire.
Just as he did, there was a soft thud to the air that Alex felt as a thump deep in his chest. He’d felt that thump before.
In the mirror he saw a dark smudge swirl in the air behind them in the back seat. As soon as he saw it, the indistinct, dark swirl of night changed into a vortex of vapor.
The vapor condensed into a shape.
A man in a dark leather vest and no shirt lunged at them from out of the back seat, from out of another world.
