A Wild Light (6 page)

He wore clean clothes. So did I. Gloves, turtleneck. Covered from my neck down. I rarely showed my tattoos. Too many questions when they disappeared at night.

I glanced at him, then looked away, quick. Not before he noticed, though. He limped a little faster, and leaned in. “Don’t look at me like that. I tried to warn you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We share an underwear drawer,” he whispered tersely. “
Clean
underwear, thank you very much. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Did I say anything?”

“I think your eyes bled.”

I shot him a look. “Later. We’ll talk when we’re not in public.”

“Will you let me get that close?” Grant leaned in, his expression hard, unflinching. “Will you let me be alone with you again?”

Heat suffused my face. I was a tough woman. Covered in demons. Used to dealing with monsters. Sex with a stranger—and I assumed that we
were
sleeping together—was nothing. Really. Even if I did not remember being with
any
man, ever.

At all. Not even kissed.

“Fuck,” I said, loudly. Heads turned, but when the volunteers saw it was me, their startled expressions faded, and they gave each other resigned looks that were a hairs-breadth from being disparaging. My middle finger twitched at them.

Grant never even blinked an eye, but his mouth softened. “That’s my girl.”

I turned away. Something about his tone, the humor buried in the hardness and anger—
that’s my girl, that’s my girl
—lodged inside the little cracks of my heart. Lodged like a ton of bricks. I wanted to vomit.

The kitchen was exactly as I remembered, which was some comfort. Journey blared, gruff voices rising and falling as crates of oranges were dropped on the floor, shoved sideways around battered cardboard boxes filled with industrial-sized bags of pasta. Sausages sizzled as they were dumped inside metal serving bins, alongside pancakes and scrambled eggs—but those scents were nearly buried beneath the overwhelming sweetness of warm cinnamon buns being pulled fresh from the giant upright ovens. My stomach growled. I needed food—not just for me, but for the boys.

I didn’t feel like eating, though.

Grant’s cane stopped clicking. I told myself not to look, but I twisted around anyway and found him speaking to the men who had been unloading the oranges. Big guys with rough, dented faces, muscles that strained against their rain-spattered jackets, and gloves in their hands that they kept slapping against their thighs—impatient, wanting to get on with business. But they looked at Grant with respect. Listened to him with complete focus.

This was his place, I realized. His homeless shelter, his apartment.

Grant glanced at me. I felt another jolt when our gazes met, and broke eye contact, embarrassed and angry.

Focus,
I told myself, grim.
Focus, or you’re good for nothing.

I scanned the kitchen for the person I had come down here to find. With Jack’s body dead, there were other problems that could arise. Maybe. Perhaps. I wasn’t sure. But it was nothing I wanted to take for granted. The old man was upstairs under a sheet. I didn’t want anyone else to end up the same way.

Over in the corner I saw a girl stacking loaves of day- old wheat bread. A faded purple kerchief covered her braids, and she wore a patchwork apron that had definitely come from home. I didn’t know her name. I told myself it was because I was an asshole and not some pothole amnesiac.

“Hey,” I said, and the girl jumped, gasping. A tentative smile flitted across her mouth when she saw it was me, but there was a trace of nervousness, too. My sparkling reputation. I vaguely remembered seeing her yesterday, on the edge of a crowd that had watched me put a man down for harassing a woman. Broken his nose against the floor, in plain view of a dozen horrified people—which was stupid and smart. Stupid, because it drew attention to myself. Smart, because a little brutality made a good deterrent.

I was a woman of all trades around here, but mostly the muscle kind. If there was a problem with security, folks came to me. If there was a problem with anything else . . .

I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even recall why these people knew me, just that they did. I had lived here for almost two years. Two mysterious years, for some mysterious reason.

I heard that cane clicking on the floor and smelled cinnamon. Told myself that was the oven and not the man who warmed my shoulder without touching me. He felt like a radiator.

The girl looked past me, and her smile widened into something genuine and sweet. I cleared my throat. “Byron is supposed to be here.”

She tore her gaze from Grant, and frowned. “Oh. I haven’t seen him.” She turned, studying the kitchen, and her frown deepened. “That’s strange, isn’t it? He’s never late.”

I walked away without another word and headed for the doors. The moment I was in the hall, I started running. Grant called my name, but hearing him only made me run faster.

The homeless shelter had been built from a collection of linked warehouses, part of a former furniture factory just south of Seattle’s downtown. There were beds for men, women, families, along with a small day care, and a job-training center. The Coop also had a second wing filled with short-term apartments, reserved for special cases.

Byron was a special case.

His room was at the end of the hall. I rapped on the door. Heard nothing on the other side and pulled a set of keys from my pocket. Listened to the muffled click of a cane on the stairs and felt ridiculous for trying to outrun a man with a bad leg—and for trying to escape him at all.

You live with him,
I told myself, unlocking the door in front of me.
He knows your secrets. You wouldn’t have made that decision lightly.

“Fuck,” I said again, and opened the door.

It was dark inside. Some fresh air would have been nice. The room had been designed like a standard hotel space: bed, dresser, one window, a bathroom by the door. Movie posters covered the walls:
Hellboy
,
Blade Runner
, a few others that Byron and I had picked up over the last few months. Books had been stacked in islands along his desk, surrounding stacks of paper. No computer. He preferred longhand, and I didn’t care if he mastered the Internet, or knew how to type. I just wanted him to learn. I had been homeschooled, and had somehow found myself doing the same for him. He was good with history and math. I dared any so-called college kid to match his brains and maturity.

The teen was still in bed. I didn’t need to turn on the lights to see him. He was asleep, but restlessly so, half the covers kicked off, one sock hanging from his toes. He still wore his white T-shirt with its Shakespeare logo.

Grant appeared in the doorway. “Is he okay?”

I held up my hand and knelt by the bed. The boy’s cheeks, usually bone-pale, were mottled red. I stripped off my glove and touched his brow. I felt heat through my tattoos. Too much heat.

I rubbed his shoulder, watching his eyelids twitch. “He has a fever.”

A faucet turned on in the bathroom. Water ran. Grant reappeared, a wet rag dangling from his bandaged fingers. I placed it on the boy’s brow, soothing back his dark hair, suffering a peculiarly breathless anxiety that, not for the first time, made me wonder if this was what it felt like to be a mother.

“How did you know?” Grant asked, quietly.

“I didn’t. But he and Jack . . .” I stopped, still unable to get around the fact that this man, for all intents and purposes, was a stranger. I wasn’t a kid anymore, but never talking to strangers still sounded like good advice. Safer. Fewer headaches. Required no effort.

Grant leveled a long look at me. “Jack experimented on the boy. Made him immortal, a chronic amnesiac. Neither of us have been able to determine why he did that—or when—but we know, based on what Zee has said, that it was before Pompeii went up in flames and ash.” He pointed at the wall. “That enough for you? You can start banging your head now.”

“Smart-ass.”

“If our positions were reversed—”

“Stop—”

“—and I didn’t know you—”

“I wouldn’t care.”

Grant leaned down, holding my gaze. “I would be cautious, too, Maxine. But not . . . willfully blind.”

For some reason, that cut. “Don’t lecture me.”

“Don’t push me away. Not yet.”

I looked down at my hands, then the boy. I wanted to tell him that
not yet
was
now
, and that he could go to hell. But those words lodged in my throat, and all I could force out was, “I should have asked Jack more questions about what he did to Byron.”

“Jack doesn’t answer uncomfortable questions.” Grant sat carefully on the bed’s edge and laid his cane on the floor. He stared at Byron with that same unsettling intensity, long enough that I wondered if I should be concerned.

“You were right to worry,” he said, suddenly. “It’s not a virus that’s causing his fever. Goes deeper than that, but I can’t quite determine—”

Byron’s eyes opened. Just a little, revealing narrow slits of dark feverish eyes. I held my breath when he looked at me, hit with memories, lightning flashes of images: seeing him for the first time inside a wet cardboard box; later, a zombie holding a gun to his head, his dark eyes wide with fear.

But the memories of him simply sitting with me, eating with me, reading with me, were the strongest—because Byron was like me, wary of people. Unused to having a friend.

He trusted me, though. God help him, but he trusted me.

“Kid,” I said, gently.

Byron looked at me for a long moment, then his gaze ticked upward, sideways, toward Grant. “Why . . . are you both here?”

“Looks like you came down with something since last night.” I flipped the washcloth to the cool side. “Tell me how you feel.”

“Hot,” he mumbled, and closed his eyes again. “Had a bad dream.”

“Tell me.”

“Woman. Or man. Don’t know. Had a . . . collar. And her voice . . .” Byron touched his throat. “Didn’t want to hear her . . .
him
. . . speak.”

I frowned. Grant leaned in. “What did she look like?”

“Sharp,” he whispered, and swallowed hard. “I’m thirsty.”

“I’ll get water,” I said, and went to the bathroom, thinking about women who might be men, and collars, voices. Could be nothing, but the boy was sick, Jack was dead, and I didn’t believe in coincidences.

Grant was speaking into his cell phone when I re-emerged. One hand rested on Byron’s shoulder, but the boy was relaxed, not a trace of distrust or tension in his face. I felt as though I was observing Zee again—or Raw and Aaz, hugging the man’s knees. Had to shake myself.

Grant hung up the phone. “Rex is going to find Mary, and have her sit with Byron.”

I didn’t ask how he knew that I wasn’t going to stay with the boy. Or why he didn’t volunteer. Not that I would trust him to. I wasn’t certain I trusted him at all, but everyone else seemed to be falling down at his feet. I could take a hint. Not be . . . willfully blind . . . to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there was a reason the boys—and this boy—trusted him.

The same reason my underwear was mixed with his.

God. That made me ill.

The boy sighed. “Mary’s crazy.”

“Just a little,” I admitted, which was an understatement bordering on lies, lies, and more damn lies. Mary had been a soldier and bodyguard in another life, on another world, in another
dimension
. Now she was an old woman addicted to marijuana, knitting, and—

Nothing. I couldn’t remember.

I couldn’t remember
him
.

“She likes you,” I told the boy, embarrassed I sounded so hoarse. “If she brings you weed—”

“I know,” he replied, collapsing into the pillows. “I’m not . . . stupid.”

I bit back a smile and ruffled his hair. “Don’t go running any marathons before I get back. Do you want me to bring you anything?”

He shook his head, eyes too dark. “I don’t feel right, Maxine.” His fingers scratched at his throat, then his chest. “I don’t feel right.”

I’m scared,
I imagined him saying.
I’m scared.

I thought of Jack, dead on my floor. Waking up in his blood, seeing his throat cut. My grandfather. My grandfather murdered. I hadn’t stopped it. Couldn’t even remember how it happened.

I knelt and pressed my lips hard against Byron’s brow, tasting his fever. The boy stopped breathing when I touched him, then his arms wrapped around my shoulders, and I stopped breathing, too.

“It’s going to be all right,” I whispered.

His fingers dug hard into my shoulders. “You always say that.”

“Because you’re mine.” I almost couldn’t hear my own voice. I didn’t know why I spoke those words, except that I was afraid of losing the boy, too. First my grandfather, then Grant: a man I was supposed to love. Gone. My life, unraveling.

“You’re mine,” I said again, stubbornly. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“Okay,” whispered Byron, and patted me on the back. “I can’t breathe.”

I let him go and stood. “I’ll be back soon.”

I walked to the door. I didn’t mean to look back, but I did, and felt terrible, filled with dread, when I saw the boy. Byron had already closed his eyes, but for a moment I imagined him dead, cold. Grant stepped between us, and pressed his mouth to my ear.

“You’ll scare the boy if he sees you looking at him like that.”

I ducked my head and backed away. I didn’t stop until I was outside, in the hall. And then I kept walking. Grant caught up with me at the top of the stairs. He stayed silent. So did I.

We left the building. No one stopped us. I walked to my car, sucking down the cold wet air, savoring the rain on my face. The rain always felt real.