Xander shoved him, hard. He hit the wall, then slipped and fell on his ass, his head knocking back into the stucco. He reached back, pushing the strands of his thinning hair aside and feeling the tiny droplets of blood that were rising to the surface of his dandruff-ridden skin. “Xander, huh? I remember you. You’re that kid Dent thought was behind all the murders. Apparently it all came back to you.”
Xander smirked. “Good thing Genblade confessed.”
“Yeah,” he smiled, dragging out each syllable. “Weren’t you even at the crime scene when White arrested him?”
“I was kidnapped by Genblade.”
“That’s what they say,” he whispered, leaning in close. “But maybe... just maybe... we aren’t looking at a copycat after all. Maybe we’re looking at the real deal that just never got caught.”
Xander laughed, trying to hide his nervousness. “Then why would Genblade admit guilt?” His eyes kept darting to the floor, instinctively avoiding Drake’s.
“Because Dent was right. It is a gang, and you’re the leader. Genblade said what he said to protect your ass,” he said it in a way that was half mocking, half serious, and Xander wasn’t sure exactly how he meant it. His was annoying and had a high-pitched voice, and reminded him of Mr. McGee from The Incredible Hulk.
“Okay, that’s enough,” he said, grabbing Drake by the shirt collar again and throwing him out the door. Xander heard him utter a swear as all of the cameras again snapped away.
“Hey Mike,” Xander said, entering through the window, having decided it was the best way to avoid the media vultures outside. As bleak as Cathy’s room had been, Mike’s was worse. There was no color, only a few glow-in-the-dark stars tacked on the ceiling by some previous tenant, and even their arrangement seemed somehow depressing.
Mike stayed tight lipped and looked away.
“I’m sorry. You know I didn’t try it.”
“But,” Mike interrupted. “It had to come from somewhere, didn’t it? You had to have had some hidden desire to hurt me, or Cathy, right?”
“No, it doesn’t work like...”
“How can we be sure?” he interrupted, his voice angry and wet. “Or how can Cathy and I even be sure that if it was true that you’d tell us?”
“Mike, I...”
He tried to continue, but it was like his mind wouldn’t create words. Mike opened his mouth to interject, but no sound came from there either. After a moment, they both sighed in unison.
“Fuck,” Xander said after a few minutes of awkward silence, rubbing the bridge of his nose and willing his tear ducts not to fill.
“Look,” Mike sighed, flapping down his hand as though he were literally laying down the grudge he’d been carrying for almost a month. “I know that you - -”
“Stop,” Xander said in his cold, blunt voice, raising a hand to punctuate his words. “I don’t deserve forgiveness. Not from you.”
Mike frowned, shooting him a look. “Wasn’t going to. It’s just frustrating to know what’s doing this and not be able to do anything about it. It’s like trying to hit a target that vanishes every time your finger touches the trigger.”
“Tell me about it,” he nodded, collapsing into the chair next to him as his mind ventured back to think of his father’s revolver, still laying on his bedroom floor amidst the charred carpet.
There was a long silence.
“So what’s the plan?” Mike asked after a minute or two.
“I’m going to make sure Genblade had nothing to do with this.”
“And if he did?”
Xander paused, looking down at the floor. When he turned back and met his friends’ gaze his eyes were so cold and full of hate that it was no longer hard for him to see the connection between him and the Black Womb. “If he did I’m going to undo the mistake I made back at Engen when I didn’t rip his heart out.”
Thomas Drake gripped the leather steering wheel of his bright red Porsche until the joints of his fingers ached, his trimmed nails leaving eight tiny half-moon indentations in the Suede. This car was the only thing his ex-wife had let him keep when they’d gotten a divorce and the only thing he had wanted to keep. She’d told him that he’d bought the car to make up for his penis and now she didn’t have any use for either, something that rang in his ears every time he slid the key into the ignition, making it harder to enjoy the fall rides with the windows down that he used to crave to-and-from assignments. Right now the memory only served to agitate him further than he already was, his loose cheeks turning a bright, livid red.
He glared at the entrance to the hospital as the other journalists slowly started to trickle out, some alone and some getting into their cars in pairs, breaking his gaze only once to glance at the fuzzy white die that hung from his rearview mirror. Some of them were laughing, the smiles on their faces big enough to see all their teeth as they slapped each other heartily, one howling so hard that he looked like he was having trouble catching his breath.
At our most paranoid and vulnerable moments we think that everyone’s talking about us. From his vantage point at the other side of the parking lot, Drake could not hear what his colleagues were saying, but he could guess. When someone got even a little bit of an edge on the competition in any field, it immediately made you a target for every half-assed remark or jeer people thought of, even if there wasn’t a good reason for them.
Being tossed out of a hospital room by a teenage boy was a good reason.
He could still hear them chuckling as he had gotten to his feet, and the way that
