I didn’t want to lie, but I was afraid Luz would throw herself out of the car and race ahead without us if I told the truth. I wondered if Hector had had the sense to child-lock his car. “She was starved, but still alive. And covered with tattoos of bones.”
Catrina pulled her head back at this. “Why?”
“She couldn’t say. I don’t speak Spanish.”
Catrina’s hands found each other in her lap, and she touched the tattoo on her right ring finger. “I wonder if—”
“Don’t,” Luz advised from the front of the car.
“What?” I asked.
Catrina finally held her hand up for me to see. The tattoo there was hard to make out with only streetlamps outside the car for light. “When we were eighteen—we went out and got them done. So we’d be sisters forever. To the bone.” It was a stylized drawing of a finger bone, tattooed on her first knuckle, like the funny bone from an Operation game, only fatter. “Maybe that was why,” Catrina went on.
“No,” Hector said, looking back at us in the rearview mirror. “Who better to serve the house of Santa Muerte than a dead man? And who better to steal away than the love of a dead girl?”
“I’m not dead,” Luz protested.
“You are. You just don’t get it yet,” Hector said. “Look—whoever they are, they stole Adriana out from underneath you. Edie tells me that probably means Maldonado’s a shapeshifter,” he added, leaving himself out of it.
“That explains a lot,” Ti said, making a fist and cracking the knuckles of his right hand.
“What it means for us, though, is that we shouldn’t touch him. We should try to corner him and disarm him, but not touch him skin-to-skin. And we should stay line-of-sight to one another, so that no one gets lost or left behind.”
Luz groaned. She could be much faster than any of us. It would pain her to be so close, and be slow. I wondered if she’d still give me blood at the end of this; if my participation on this trip was enough to count. She turned back, as if she felt me thinking about her. “I know why she shunned you now.”
I nodded in the dark. People who were islands couldn’t get hurt.
“How do you know where it is?” Ti asked Hector.
“They nailed a flyer to the clinic door this morning with the address. Made it hard to miss.” Hector turned off the headlights and coasted to a stop. “It’s at the end of the block. If I get any closer, they’ll know we’re here.”
“They’re going to know we’re here soon, anyhow.” Luz sat straighter in her seat. “I’ll see you all on the inside,” she said, and she leapt out of the car.
“Reina!” Catrina called after her. I leaned over Ti to look out, but I couldn’t see her; she’d already run away.
“Think we can count on her to take out snipers?” Ti asked aloud.
“They don’t snipe down here. They spray,” Hector yelled, just barely louder than the rain coming down on the car roof. A lightning bolt illuminated him gesturing his hand back and forth, like a running machine gun.
“You two should stay here then,” Ti said, looking at Catrina and me. I wanted to go in with them, but I wasn’t supernatural, or bulletproof. And if I went, there’d be no way to convince Catrina to stay behind.
“Okay.” I looked back and forth between the two of them. It might be the last time I’d see one or both of them alive. “Protect each other, okay?”
Hector nodded and Ti grunted—and as one they went into the rain. There was a distant shout—louder than the rain—and shots were fired.
“Come on.” Catrina huddled behind the driver’s seat, where Dren had been last night, and pulled me down to do the same. “This isn’t the first gunfight I’ve been in,” she explained.
It killed me to wait there, to hear sounds of violence, guns, and not know what was going on. When I peeked up like I shouldn’t, and a lightning bolt shot down, all I could see was a warehouse down the block and gates that were wide.
“Stay down!” Catrina hissed.
“How can you be so calm?”
There were more shots. I tried to convince myself that it was thunder, but I hadn’t seen any lightning bolts to cause it.
I wanted my friends to be all right. I wanted my mother to be all right. I just wanted everything to be right in the world for once, for one soul-shattering moment of calmness when I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone else, or even myself.
Another gunshot, a scattered grouping. I pressed my forehead to the window like I shouldn’t, trying to see anything through the rain.
A bloody hand slapped against the top of the glass. I screamed and jumped back.
The hand slid down, horror-movie style, like a drowning man’s last wave good-bye. The unrelenting rain made the bloody droplets race down.
Ti wasn’t going to bleed, and Luz bleeding was unlikely. “Hector?” I said, my voice cracking in fear.
“Don’t do it!” Catrina warned me.
I ignored her and opened up the car door, glad to find it was someone I didn’t know. With the help of the overhead car light, I could see a young Latino man with three cross tattoos on the visible side of his neck. He was prone on the sidewalk, and the rain was washing his blood away.
“Oh, God.” I reached for my phone. I didn’t know where we were, but Catrina did. I handed my phone to her. “Call nine-one-one. Tell them someone’s been shot.”
Maybe I should have pre-reported our arrival here, seeing as gunfire was almost a given. This kid was technically a bad guy—but we were the ones who’d come in asking for trouble. I couldn’t just watch him die.
Hector was a doctor—he had to have a first-aid kit in his car somewhere. All self-respecting doctors did. I reached and felt under the chairs, found nothing, then hopped into the driver’s seat to pull the lever for the trunk. A spare tire, the tire iron and duct tape from last night, and lastly a paper bag full of medical supplies. I looked inside it as the rain pelted the bag and started soaking the equipment inside.
What good was gauze going to do right now? Not very damn much, in this fucking rain. I took it back to the prone man.
“Where did you get hit?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He was far away from the compound—I assumed he’d run this whole way. Or maybe crawled. I pushed him so he was on his back, and tried to look him over. There was a welt on his arm. I unspooled a roll of gauze, lassoed it around his armpit, and tied it tight. Until I could figure out where he was bleeding, I was going to cut off blood flow to all his extremities on principle.
His shirt was full of holes. The crosses hadn’t protected him from anyone but Luz—and even that was iffy. I started when I thought I’d found a gun—but it was just the outline of a gun, tattooed on his stomach, roughly done. This kid wasn’t much older than Olympio was. Jesus.
“Hey!” I shouted at him, shaking him. He groaned. I could feel a pulse at his neck. “Help is coming, okay? Just hang on.”
I went through his limbs more systematically now, looking for holes in the fabric in addition to blood, and undid one arm and a leg. Then I planted the rest of the gummed-up gauze over a wound on his thigh. I hoped it wasn’t his femoral—I didn’t think I was strong enough to haul him into Hector’s car.
There was another burst of gunfire. “Edie!” Catrina shouted at me.
“Hang on. I’m almost done, okay?” I wasn’t sure whom I was addressing, him or her.
“Edie—Edie?” Catrina made a question of my name, and I turned around. “I think I got shot.”
She was still crouched behind the seats, but she was holding her side. “Oh, God—can you lie down on the backseat? Lie down right now.” I tied down the dressing on the gangbanger’s leg, and took my soggy bag of gauze back into the car. “Shit shit shit—where?”
“Here.” It was the side of her stomach—could be a flesh wound, could be halfway to peritonitis.
“Okay. I want you to lie still.” I opened up as much gauze as I could. “Is there an exit wound?” I slid my hand under her back to feel for any other, potentially worse, openings. Finding none, I shoved all the gauze into the bleeding spot on her stomach. “Shit. Catrina—hold this here, okay?” I fished my phone out of my pocket with bloody hands. Not that now was a great time to text Asher, but he had the fucking car keys and I didn’t know what else to do. Emergency vehicles should already be on their way.
