Bones by the Wood (39 page)

Please God, let Josh be okay.

There was a bang in the corridor.  Another bang.  More bangs.  Gunshots?  Scuffling.  What the fuck was happening now?

Were there more of them?  Two would be bad enough.  Two would be too many.

Please God, let my son be okay.

The door burst open.

Brotherhood. 

Trust in that. 

Always brothers.

Forever.

And they hadn’t let him down.

They’d
found them.

He could barely see. His face was swollen. His eyes wouldn’t work.  His mind was clogged with pain, pure pain that was white hot.  Sharp knives and wicked spikes lined every nerve.

But he saw enough. 

He saw a man’s head explode in a burst of red like a macabre firework. 

He saw a hail of bullets turn another man’s chest to ground beef.

He saw Thea.

And she was alive.  Mercifully, she was alive.

Brotherhood. 

Always brothers.

Ride together.  Fight together.

Live.

Trust in that.

He saw his brothers.

And then the darkness fell.

~o0o~

When Dizzy woke up, or more accurately came around, for one ball-shrinking moment he was blind.  And then he felt the weight of something over his face, something cold, very cold.  Oh fuck, what were they doing to him now?  He tried to lift his hand to move whatever it was that was covering his eyes.  Not tied, that was new.  He grunted as the pain of all of his injuries coalesced into one throbbing, agonizing mass.  He grunted.  He would not scream.  Would not.

“Here, let me.”

He knew that voice, that gentle, female voice.

The weight lifted off his eyes.  He tried to open them.  One was still very definitely swollen shut.  He wouldn’t be opening that bastard for a while.  His balls tightened again as he considered the possibility that it might not work all that well once he could open the lid, and he wouldn’t know until then.

He managed to crack the other eye open.  The ice pack had helped some, but Jesus fuck, it hurt, but he wanted to see, badly wanted to see where he was.

Everything was blurred, and he knew terror until, after several blinks, his vision began to clear.  A shape. A woman.  A blonde woman.  The person and the room came slowly into focus.  Ashleigh.

“Tink?”  His throat was sore, raw and dry.  The splits in his lips pulled and cracked when he tried to speak.

But none of it mattered. None of the pain mattered, because if he was looking at Ashleigh, then he was safe.

“Hey Dizz.  I’d ask how you’re doin’, but it’d be a dumb question.  You hangin’ in there?”

He grunted.  He didn’t have enough words, or enough energy, to comment on the raging ache that was his body.  And talking about it would make it hurt more.  He knew that much.

“Josh?  Thea!”  Despite the pain, because of the pain, he struggled to push himself up.  He needed to see them.  He needed to know that they were alive.

“Shhh, lie back down.”  He felt Ashleigh’s cool hand on his shoulder.  The pain had weakened him.  He wasn’t strong enough to resist her when she gently forced him to lie back.  “They’re okay.  They’re here, too. You’re at the clubhouse.  Lie back down.  Doc Anderson said you need to rest.  You keep movin’ around like that and you’re gonna pull all your stitches.”

“Are they alright?  Where are they?”  The words rasped more hurt in his throat.

“In the room next door.”

“Are they alright?  Are they hurt?”  Ashleigh hadn’t answered that.  He remembered Thea bleeding.  He remembered that very clearly.

“They’re okay.  Mostly.” 

There was a world of detail that Ashleigh was leaving out.  He tried to sit up again, tried to get his legs to move off the bed.  It felt like nearly every rib he owned was broken and they all screamed at once.  He didn’t give a shit.  He needed to see them for himself.

“Okay, okay!  Lie down you stubborn bastard.  It took the doc ages to stitch you up. He’ll be pissed as anythin’ if he has to do it again.  I’ll go get them.  Your boys are all here, by the way.”

He knew that.  The last hours, day, however long, were a muzzy, agony-soaked fog, but he knew his brothers were okay. He’d known that since they flooded into that room, since they had shot the kidnappers, since they’d dragged him out into the sunlight.  He knew they were okay.  Only he, Thea and Josh had been taken.  Ashleigh wasn’t moving quickly enough.  He tried to get up again.

“I said lie the fuck down!  I’m goin’.”

He was embarrassingly weak, but he only complied when she left the room.

He tried to take deep breaths to combat the rolling waves of hurt, but his ribs were singing a fucking symphony.  If he’d been given any pain relief, it had worn the fuck off, and he wanted more.  But he needed to check on his family first.  He needed to see that they were okay.

The door opened.  He turned his head, unable to do much more for the moment.  Thea walked in.

The left side of her face was bruised in deep shades of black, red and purple.  He remembered that fucker hitting her.  Her cheekbone had to be cracked with bruising like that.  Her face was a little swollen, but not misshapen.  Hopefully just bruised, probably cracked, not likely broken.  But it was still too much.

“You’re okay?  Did they...?”  Jesus, just the thought of them laying hands on her, let alone anything else, brought an immediate and murderous rage flooding through his body, the first thing so far that had outweighed the pain.

“No you’re lookin’ at the worst of it.  I have to get back.”  Her voice was distorted a little.  That she wanted out of the room so badly, so quickly, so callously, set off blaring alarms in his already pounding head.

“Josh?”

“They didn’t hurt him, not physically, but he’s still terrified.  Even here.  I can’t leave him.”

As if to emphasize what she was saying, Josh’s thin, panicked voice rose shrilly from nearby.

“Mama?”

The voice was so scared that it almost didn’t sound like Josh.  Dizzy tried to force his recalcitrant body off the bed.  He needed to see the boy, needed to tell him it was all going to be okay now.  He needed to reassure his boy.

“I have to go.”  Thea was already half way out of the door.

“Wait!”

“No.  I need to be with my son.  He needs me.”

And she was gone.

He understood.  He wanted to say that he needed her too, that he needed them both, but he didn’t.

Ashleigh didn’t come back to his room when Thea left.  Dizzy was just contemplating unconsciousness again when the door opened and Samuel walked in.  His President sat down in the chair by the bed that Ashleigh had occupied.

“S’good to see you’ve come to, brother.  You had us a little concerned.”

No shit.  He was still a little concerned, about the extent of the damage he’d sustained, about Thea’s distance, about Josh.

“What’s the damage?”

“Superficial mostly.  You’ve got cracked ribs, but the doc doesn’t think they’re fully broken.  You’re a mess of cuts and burns, but you know that.”

Yeah, he did.  He remembered each fucking one being inflicted in vivid, Technicolor detail.

“The doc said there shouldn’t be any effects from the Taser.  Apparently most of the injuries and shit you read about are from people hittin’ the ground after they’ve been shot.”

He remembered the Taser vividly, too.  “Yeah, that shit just tickles.”

Samuel chortled, fucking chortled.  “You’re a tough son of a bitch, Dizz.”

“Had to get through it, for them.”  Fuck, did his voice really just crack, yeah, it had.  Fuck it.

“Here.”  Samuel lifted a glass of water that Dizzy hadn’t noticed was on the nightstand.  He hadn’t seen it through his fear for Thea and Josh and the sabotage his own body was wreaking on him.  Samuel put a hand behind Dizzy’s head and lifted him to help him drink.  Samuel was likely the only person in the world, certainly the only man, that Dizzy would have allowed to help in such a way, that he would have admitted such weakness to.  The water helped.  It wasn’t a decent pain pill, but it tasted like liquid life.  If anything, he nearly knocked Samuel out for taking it away too soon.

“Easy, brother.  Too much too soon will make you sick, and you don’t want that in your condition.  You’ll pull your stitches.”

“Yeah, Tink nagged me about that.”

“Well,” Samuel sighed, “The doc did put more’n three hundred in.  Took him a while.”

“What day is it? How’d you find us?”  Dizzy was beginning to feel more like himself, a hurting knot of himself, but still.

“It’s Sunday, afternoon, not sure of the time specifically.  Fitz heard somethin’, an engine, but it was them drivin’ away with you.  He tried to follow, but they lost him. He got everyone movin’ quick.  To start out, we didn’t have the first clue where to look for y’all.  We figured to concentrate on thinkin’ that it had to be the Perdidos, what was left of ‘em.  We pinned our thinkin’ on there not bein’ a lot of them, otherwise they’d have killed everyone else, and maybe you, outright.  They took who was most important, and who was most vulnerable.  Y’all were there in the one room.”

“Where the fuck else would I have been, Samuel?”  Dizzy didn’t appreciate the comment, the insinuation that he’d fucked up.  He’d been with his family, exactly where he was supposed to be.

“Easy, brother, easy.  Not sayin’ you did wrong, just sayin’ how it was.”

Dizzy relaxed marginally.

“We didn’t think they’d have the resources to take you far.  Maison D’Oublié was the logical place.”

Yes it was.  Dizzy had been at least half conscious when they’d dragged him into the building.  He’d recognized it from the cell. It was an old, long-abandoned jail.  It was a place that the Priests had used on occasion for just such unsavory work, until they’d decided that the cabin in the bayou was safer, less conspicuous.

“Thea, Josh, are they really alright?”

Dizzy did not like the way that Samuel’s eyes slid away from him.

“Physically, yes.  You’ve seen her?”

Dizzy gave a small nod.  Making big movements with his head was beginning to hurt, more than it had.

“She’s bruised some, but that’s it.  I don’t think the boy was touched, but...”

“Fuck, just spit it the fuck out!”

Samuel leveled narrowed eyes on him.  “The kid is terrified.  Still terrified.  I’m worried somethin’ happened to him that he won’t say about.  But he wouldn’t let the doc anywhere near him.  Anyone other than his mama touches him, he starts screamin’ holy hell.  And she’s not feelin’ too friendly to anyone at the moment.”

Dizzy had never known cold fury, the like of which engulfed him now.

“They better all be dead, Samuel.  I promise my family they’re safe, then they better be fuckin’ safe.  I will rain fire and blood to make it so.”