Chapter 1 #2
A face appeared at my window. She was young, dark hair pulled back, bright yellow jacket against the December dark.
She pressed her palm flat against the cracked glass before she spoke, steady and deliberate.
Her eyes found mine and held them, warm and focused and calm.
I could smell her even through everything, the copper and the chemical smell and the cold air.
Something clean and sharp underneath all of it. Alpha. I knew it immediately.
She leaned closer to the window and I watched something shift in her expression, her eyes widening slightly, something softening around her mouth.
She'd caught my scent now too, warm honey even under all the blood and cold, and something in her responded to it without her deciding to.
Her voice, when she spoke, was gentler than it might have been.
"Hey." Low and careful, the kind of voice that just comes out that way. "Can you hear me, sweetheart? What's your name?"
"Elias." I spoke in a hoarse voice, hardly recognizing it. "My grandparents. They're in the front. I couldn't reach them."
"I know." She pressed her palm flatter against the glass, her voice staying steady. "We have people with them right now. Right now I need you to look at me, just at me, and tell me where you're hurt."
I looked down at my lower abdomen, at the piece of twisted steel still in it, dark against my shirt, my left hand pressed around it. "There's metal in my abdomen," I told her, my voice flat and even. "A piece of the car. I didn't pull it out."
Something sharpened in her eyes. She was on her radio immediately, left hand against the window frame, voice dropping fast and low, eyes staying on mine the entire time.
When the radio went quiet she leaned closer.
"You did exactly right," she said, soft but clear.
"Leaving it in. That was exactly right. Keep your hand where it is and keep looking at me, okay? "
I kept looking at her. Her brown eyes, the small silver earring in her left ear catching the light.
I held my breath steady and I held onto her face.
When the door finally gave with a long grinding sound of forced metal, two more responders reached in for me.
Their hands were careful in a way that felt different from ordinary careful.
They handled me gently. An injured Omega… .something they think breakable.
"Easy." The paramedic was right there, one warm hand on my shoulder, her eyes on mine.
Something in her steadied me. "Easy. We've got you.
Don't move your abdomen, just let us do it.
We've got you." One of the others moved behind me as they lifted me, putting himself between me and the cold and the noise outside.
The paramedic stayed at my front, talking me through each movement in a low steady voice. They were slow about it. Nobody rushed.
As they lifted me clear I turned my head and looked back one last time.
Pop's hands on the wheel. Nana's profile.
The red clip in her hair, still perfectly placed, still catching what light there was.
That was the last thing I saw of them. They carried me out into the December dark and the cold closed around me and the radio was finally too far behind me to hear.
I woke up in a hospital bed with bandages on my hands and a tube in my arm.
The ceiling had a water stain near the center, shaped like something with its wings half-open.
I stared at it. For one half-second there was nothing wrong, just grey light through a curtain, clean sheets, the distant sounds of a corridor.
Then everything came back. All of it, all at once. The sound that came out of me wasn't a word. I pressed my bandaged hands over my mouth and stared at the ceiling and breathed as a high-pitched whine escaped me even as I tried to hold it in.
The nurse who came in had soft footsteps and warm brown eyes.
Her badge said Claire. She settled into the chair beside the bed, let a moment pass, and then spoke.
"Good morning, Elias," she said, her voice low and even, careful in the way people are careful around Omegas who are hurting.
"You're at Maren General. You've had surgery, you're stable and you're safe.
Your aunt has been contacted. She's on her way. "
"Okay," I managed. My voice came out thin, like it belonged to someone else.
She told me the rest in short sentences, watching my face between each one: the surgery, what they'd repaired, what the next few days would look like.
When she stood to leave she paused at the door and looked back at me.
"Is there anything I can get you?" she asked quietly.
"No. Thank you, Claire." The use of her name made her pause, something warm crossing her face. Then she nodded and pulled the door closed behind her. I turned my face toward the wall and cried for a long time. There was no one there to see it. That was the only mercy I had.
Vera arrived three hours later in the coat she'd thrown over her pajamas, the plaid flannel showing at the hem.
Her hair was pressed flat on one side, her mascara had run, and she had her phone and her keys and nothing else.
She hadn't stopped for anything. She pushed through the door and stopped when she saw me, her hand going to her mouth.
Then she crossed the room and sat down and took my bandaged hands in both of hers, warm and tight.
"Elias." Her voice broke on the second syllable. She bowed her head over our joined hands, her shoulders shaking once. "I'm so sorry," she whispered. "I'm so, so sorry."
"I'm okay," I told her. It wasn't true, but it was what I had, and saying it was the only small thing I could do for her. She lifted her head and looked at me, eyes red, jaw tight. She nodded once and her fingers tightened around mine. "I know. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."
She was good at the sitting, at being present without filling the silence with things that wouldn't help. She wasn't built for the harder parts, but she had come immediately, in her pajamas, without stopping. In the weeks that followed I held onto smaller things than that.
The surgeon came the next morning, quiet and precise, with reading glasses he looked over rather than through.
He sat across from me and went through my injuries one at a time, his hands folded in his lap.
The laceration from the piece of door frame they'd removed.
My spleen. The kind of damage that healed, he said.
I was going to be all right. "You were very fortunate," he said, meeting my eyes.
"Given the point of impact. Given where you were sitting. "
Fortunate.
I held the word in my mouth and looked at the window.
The grey morning light lay flat across the floor.
Fortunate. I supposed it was accurate. I thanked him.
He nodded, stood, and left. I looked back at the ceiling tile, the water stain shaped like something with its wings half-open, still not decided.
Thomas Duvall. Frances Duvall. Pop and Nana.
The kitchen table he built from salvaged barn wood, worn smooth from thirty years of use.
Her recipe journals on the shelf, pages soft from handling, margins full of her careful notes.
The pressed flowers along the hallway, each one labeled with where she'd found it and what year.
The way she talked to herself in the kitchen even when no one was there, because she believed naming things was how you kept them real.
The way Pop smiled when something had to do with her.
That small private smile, the one that came before he decided it should.
The way he said her name. Frances, never Fran.
She'd told me once, on the back porch in summer, that she'd never much liked the sound of her own name until someone said it like it was the whole point of the sentence.
Both hands on the wheel. Joseph on the corner, facing the wrong direction. The thing I opened my mouth to say and didn't. The red clip, small and red and worn because it was pretty and because she had always believed small beautiful things were worth stopping for.
Gone.
All of it rearranged into the past tense, into the weight that settled into me and didn't lift again, not all the way, not ever entirely.
It became something I would learn to carry differently.
I didn't know that yet. I knew only the grey light and the ceiling tile and the bandages stiff on my hands.
I was seventeen years old.
The radio was not playing.
There was no smell of pine perfume or the warmth of the three of us in a car on a winter night. There was only the water stain shaped like a bird that hadn't decided yet whether to fly.
This is where everything begins.