20. Threx Gregorian Chant #2
They scrambled to their feet, tattered and barely clothed, holding onto one another.
“Are you brother and sister?” I asked, moving them toward the window, keeping my back to the door in case Nathem came looking for me. I’d already been in here too long, and there was protocol when it involved unmarked kids.
If my authorities found them, they would take the boy underground and transform him into a runner, a weapon, or just dead. And the girl, she’d have it worse. She would be sent to one of Marianne’s brothels until she was old enough to take part or die from an overdose.
“No,” the boy snapped, staring straight into my soul. “But we don’t leave each other.”
He growled it like a threat, and it made me smile. Damn right, you never leave each other. I mean, unless your name is Daphne and you are in fucking Maine.
“Good.” I shoved all the cash in my pocket into his hands and curled his fingers around it.
The way his eyes bugged made the twisted shit near my heart pang.
“When the police come, say you’re family.
You’ll have a better chance of staying together that way,” I instructed.
“Foster care is shit, but all you have to do is survive until you find a way out.”
I smashed the window with my elbow and cleared the shards with my gun. “Find people. Eat something. Tell them nothing about me. Got it?”
They nodded.
Bang.
I pointed to the exit, but they didn’t move.
“Listen to me, Asher. If they catch you in here, they’ll take you from her,” I snarled, stepping closer. “Is that what you want?”
The poor guy was on the brink of pissing his pants when the girl reached for his hand, smiling that soft, brave smile I knew too well.
Suddenly, I couldn’t fucking breathe.
“Run,” I ordered when the sound of footsteps thundered from behind, and the room shook. Or maybe that was me.
“For fuck’s sake,” I growled. “GO!”
They tumbled out the window on top of each other, their bare feet slapping the pavement in a scurried sprint. I didn’t know if they’d made it, but I spun and fired two shots into the air, then barreled for the door.
“Clear?” Nathem asked when I nearly tore it off the hinges. He was standing so close we could have kissed, one foot already in the room.
“Yeah,” I swallowed, pushing past him and taking his shoulder with me. His eyes did not need to linger, and I could tell he was assessing me.
“What the hell?” Nathem’s accent cut through when we clocked Jessie kneeling over Blade, who was lying on the floor near the front of the house.
“Get Wolfe,” I ordered, and Nathem bolted into the kitchen.
“Blade was hit,” Jessie cried out, his black gloves covered in dark red. “In the leg. I think he’ll be okay, but…”
“I’m fine,” Blade gurgled. “Just… hurts like hell.”
Don’t get me wrong, Blade was family, but my brain couldn’t process what it was seeing. The room at the end of the hall burned behind my eyes like a neon wound, turning everything bright and dark at the same time.
“Shit,” Wolfe blinked, dropping to his knees in calculated shock. “What the hell happened?”
“We had a crawler,” Jessie laughed, easing the tension. If I had a dollar for every time the men in the house played Call of Duty, I’d be a king.
“Fuck yeah, we did,” Blade joked, already fading behind the mask suffocating him from the inside out. “It is kind of cold in here…” There was a break in his throat. “Don’t you think?”
“I tied his leg to stop the bleeding,” Jessie explained, hauling Blade up as Nathem grabbed his feet. “But we need to get him to the doc.”
Wolfe eyed me the way he always did right before I was about to lose my shit. How that man came to know me so well only burned me deeper. Or usually did. Everything was numb.
“Threx!” Wolfe snapped, and I blinked, realizing I was staring at the back of the house before I turned to meet him, moving in slow motion out the door.
“Are you okay?” he barked again, but I did not answer.
His words were lazy writing at best. “Fine. Just get in the car,” Wolfe ordered, shoving Blade into the backseat by his boots.
“Nathem, call cleanup and tell them to come down here and scrub Blade’s blood off the floor. No traces! Fucking hell.”
Wolfe hated messes, especially ones that pointed to him.
“In the car,” he said again, stepping toward me in a rush of blood and panic.
“No,” I tugged my mask off and flung it at him. “I need to walk.”
Lies. What I needed was to make sure those kids got away.
“Goddammit, Threx,” he snapped. “Blade’s bleeding out in the backseat, and I don’t have time to babysit your shit. Walk when we get home.”
“No.”
“THREX!” Wolfe lunged, grabbing me by the shoulder, but I spun, pressing my gun flat against his chest.
“Get Blade help,” I snarled, pressing it harder. “I’m taking a fucking walk.”
He stared at me, jaw tight, reading my eyes to see if I’d actually do it.
“Fine, asshole,” he ground out, turning away. “Enjoy your fucking walk.”
When the sound of tires dissolved, I moved in the only direction a wildling would go: toward food, taking the squares on the sidewalk three at a time.
I was only half-real. The sounds of engines were just exposition while I searched for tiny bodies shoving food into their mouths.
I must have handed that kid like five hundred bucks.
I checked the bakery, Moe’s Chicken, and the roasted duck place at the end of the row.
No kids. But they wouldn’t eat inside. Daphne and I never did.
We hid because it never felt safe to eat it.
After being so hungry, it always felt wrong.
Like a sensation you had to defend, or a secret that someone would take from you.
Daphne was the only one who knew what it was like to be starving enough to lick the pavement or consider eating rocks.
Even the impenetrable Wolfe learned to be a monster with steak in his mouth.
I pushed farther, not caring that the rain had become a weapon as I searched every dark alley, every absent corner, but found nothing. They were gone.
Fuck.
Gone was good, though, Threx. Gone meant safe.
But was I? Safe? Never.
I turned up the slope, feeling the slosh as I trudged up the pathway that led to Capitol Hill.
It was the only direction my body knew to go, and suddenly I was sprinting.
There was no rhyme or reason to the landmarks, only the way everything bled together as I tore past them, leaning into the sound of my breath, my heart, the burn in my knees as I took the incline.
It was all I could do not to die in the goddamn street before I screeched to a halt, taking the air in my lungs with it.
Of course, my body would lead me to her.
Daphne’s light was off, the window of our two worlds closed and forgotten… Boarded up like the room I just escaped from, but never left.
Something inside me ticked, and I lunged, grabbing the fire escape and hauling myself onto the busted scaffolding that reeked of tetanus. I scoffed, madness tipping me over the ledge.
Just get in there, I told myself, burying the scream in the sick of my throat.
I needed her. The sound of her heart. The feel of her body. The edge of her breath. But more than that, I wanted her, here, selfishly, fucked up and all mine.
Shit. Damn. Fuck.
My drenched hoodie whipped in the wind, slamming me back against the red brick beneath her window. There was poetic justice in the fact that I might die trying to get into a room that didn’t even lead to her, but I didn’t care.
Dying would be a present.
Dying would mean done.
I made a face when her window slid open, because of course, she wouldn’t lock it. That shit pissed me off. You try so hard to keep someone safe, and they just leave their goddamn window open, as if to say, fuck you, Threx. Fuck you.
My head was still reeling when I tumbled into the smell of her, toppling over some shit of the life she’d built without me.
In an absent sweep, I took in the pictures pasted on the walls and the dirty laundry she left folded…
well, not folded; she was messy as shit…
crumpled into balls beside her nightstand.
I didn’t think twice when I reached for her dresser, yanking the first drawer clean out and dumping it onto the bed. I paused, reaching for the second and the third until there was enough of her to drown in.
Then…
Then…
I fell.
Into her scent.
Into the memory of things that had once touched her skin.
I shaped myself around it, dragging my knees to my chest, trying to do what only Daphne’s body knew how to. Make the pain stop. Make me fucking work. Turn the monster off for one goddamn minute!
But it didn’t go away.
The smell of her lingered in the absence, and all of me chose to shatter instead.
“Fuck!”
My hands twisted into the fabric in a desperate moment, gripping until they smothered me completely. Shit. I crumpled, my stomach knotting as the hurt climbed into my chest, where everything beat on the edge of a blade.
This wasn’t working.
I wasn’t working.
Daphne, her name bleated in the dead light, spilling from my lips like clotted blood.
No, I mouthed, breathless and aching, clawing my fingers down the center of her bed when the scream in the back of my throat finally tore loose, shredding through me like the loaded gun pressing into my gut.
I wanted her.
I needed her.
I loved her.
And she fucking left me.