Chapter 22 Diem
Diem
The first thing my brain registered was shock.
The second was blood. Not a lot, but enough that my stomach cramped.
The door crashed against the wall, rebounding and knocking into the kid as he fell.
Darcy, who must have been leaning heavily against it, collapsed first to his knees before tipping forward and resting his forehead against the floor.
With a groan, he rolled to his side and curled in a fetal position, cradling his arm.
His already tattered jeans were shredded worse than before and spotted with rusty red stains.
His jacket was missing. He hugged an arm against his chest, his hand streaked with more blood.
It seeped from dozens of cuts and scrapes.
His cheek bore a gruesome patch of road rash, angry and weeping pink fluid. Blood mixed with his tears.
Echo barked and barked, bounding in circles around the fallen kid as though we didn’t see him or register the emergency.
Tallus raced from behind the desk, shouting something I couldn’t process, as I landed on my knees, gently touching Darcy’s shoulder to get his attention. He whimpered and cried pitifully, no longer the brash boy with the attitude who had run from me on the street.
“Hey. Hey. What the fuck happened?”
“How bad is he hurt?” Tallus crouched on Darcy’s other side.
“I don’t know. Darcy… Darcy, look at me.”
“Go away,” he blubbered. “Don’t look at me.” He covered his face as more tears fell.
“I want to help.”
“You promised.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You’re a liar.” The tears turned instantly caustic, and he shot me a dirty look. “Why the fuck did you move offices?”
I didn’t understand what he was asking, but I tried to keep my cool as I took inventory of his visible injuries. The arm he cradled to his chest seemed to be what ailed him most.
“What’s wrong with your arm?”
“It’s fucking broken.”
“How did you break it? Did that motherfucker do it? Did he beat you up?”
Darcy growled, pinching his eyes closed as he shook his head.
“No. I jumped out of the car. It looks way easier on TV. Why’d you give me a junk card?
Fucking asshole. I’ve been walking all over the goddamn city trying to find your fucking bullshit office.
” He whimpered and buried his face against the floor as another round of sobs escaped.
“He needs a hospital, D. Do you want me to call an ambulance?”
“No. We’ll take him. Keys are in my coat. Pull the Jeep around. I’ll carry him down.”
“Don’t touch me. I can fucking walk. I walked here, didn’t I? My legs aren’t fucking broken.”
Tallus glowered as he got to his feet. “Calm down, kid. He’s trying to help.”
“I don’t need help.”
“Then why are you here?” Tallus asked.
Darcy sobbed.
Tallus rolled his eyes and found the Jeep keys.
I examined Darcy’s bloody, shredded pants. He claimed his legs weren’t broken, but I suspected he would be sporting some decent bruises or cuts underneath.
Jumped from a car? Christ.
Tallus raced out the door and headed for the elevator.
“Hold it for us,” I shouted. “We’re coming behind you.”
I examined Darcy, trying to figure out the best way to get him off the ground without hurting him further. “Come on, kid. On your feet or I’m carrying you against your will. You decide.”
Taking the majority of his weight, I helped him stagger upright. He whimpered and cursed. When he jarred his left arm, he yelped in pain. I’d broken more than my share of bones, so I knew exactly how he felt.
As I assisted him to the elevator, he leaned heavily against my side, animosity seemingly forgotten. I hated people in my personal space, but something inside me calmed knowing Darcy was away from that Lukyan asshole.
“You got a health card, brat?”
“In my wallet with your bullshit junk fucking piece of shit card.” Another sob, but he bit it back and growled instead, like he feared I might judge him for being weak.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You gave me your business card when I worked for Janika at the supplement store.”
“You kept it?”
“Yeah. I don’t know why. A lot of good it did me. The phone number goes right to a messaging system, and the address was some fucking run-down building six blocks from here. Some rando opened the door and told me to fuck off.”
Shit. I’d given Darcy that card before Tallus and I had relocated the business, and since it was technically after office hours, our landline kicked over to automated answering, so clients could leave messages.
Tallus had insisted we didn’t have the system reroute the calls to our personal cells because we were entitled to nights off.
I hadn’t given Darcy my cell.
“It’s an old address.”
“Obviously.”
“That’s not my fault.” But his being taken was, so when he confirmed I was still an asshole, I didn’t get angry. I was still an asshole. Nothing would change that.
I had a million questions about everything that had happened between the café kidnapping and Darcy’s Evil Knievel escape from a moving vehicle, but not before he saw a doctor, and his pain was managed enough that he could have a conversation without spitting curses and crying.
Tallus rode in the back with Echo since Darcy couldn’t contort his body well enough to fit behind a retracted seat. At one point, Darcy’s tears grew obnoxious. My patience thinned, and I yelled for him to chill out because his arm was broken, not fucking amputated, and did he hear himself?
“Shut up,” he sobbed.
“You shut up. Christ. You aren’t dying. Stop acting like you are.”
Tallus kicked my seat, and I scowled in the rearview mirror, snarling, “What?”
Tallus said nothing, but he didn’t have to. His expression was enough to remind me I was supposed to be the grown-up. Did I sound like my father when I yelled? Christ. I took it down a notch and let the kid whine.
In truth, I wasn’t angry at Darcy. I was angry at myself.
At the hospital, it took forty minutes before Darcy was called into an exam room.
A nurse had him change into a gown before shipping him off for X-rays.
I was not invited to join them. When he returned, the same nurse tended to his superficial wounds, including the intense road burn along his left hip and cheek and the scrapes on his palms and knuckles.
He sported a nasty bruise on his elbow and knee.
Thirty minutes later, a doctor arrived with the diagnosis. A distal radius fracture to his left arm. It would require a cast.
Getting the full story out of him was impossible since Darcy’s wounds earned him a lot of attention.
Nurses were in and out constantly. At one point, they gave him a hefty dose of pain meds that knocked him out.
He wouldn’t get to nap long since they had yet to apply the cast, but at least it stopped the blubbering tears.
By ten-thirty, Tallus offered to take Echo home. “This is taking forever, and I’m starving and tired. We aren’t getting any information out of him tonight anyhow.”
I glanced at Darcy, who looked years younger than nineteen under the harsh overhead lighting. His slack face and parted lips gave him an innocence he usually hid behind an attitude.
“Hopefully, we won’t be much longer.”
I tucked Tallus into my arms and hugged him, rocking us side to side and absorbing the solidity of his presence.
“Go easy on him, D. You’ve been…”
“An asshole?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know. Don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s not your fault. He came back. He’s not as mad as he pretends. He trusts you.”
I hoped Tallus was right.
“I caved tonight,” I said, remembering my adventure to the liquor store.
“I know.”
“Not just cigarettes.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to a meeting tomorrow with Aslan.” I glanced at the bed. “Will you watch the kid while I’m gone?”
Tallus groaned. “He’s nineteen. He doesn’t need a babysitter.”
When I didn’t speak, he sighed. “Yeah. I’ll keep an eye on him, but I won’t promise not to shove a dirty sock down his throat if he gets lippy.”
“That’s fair.” I kissed the top of Tallus’s head, and when he tilted his face up, I planted another kiss on his lips. The soft peck turned into something deeper.
“Ugh. So gay,” came a hoarse whisper from the hospital bed. “You’d think you were newlyweds. Fucking gross. Do that somewhere else.”
Tallus rolled his eyes, and I couldn’t help but smile. “I love you.”
“I love you back, D.”
I walked Tallus to the emergency room doors, where I removed Echo’s vest and passed off the leash. “I’ll be home whenever we’re done here.”
“I’ll meet you in bed.”
Before he could walk away, I snagged his hand and drew him in for another kiss, this one, uninterrupted by a weaselly teenager.
Darcy wasn’t discharged until close to midnight. The doctor prescribed painkillers of the less-addictive variety, which the kid bitched about all the way back to the apartment. “He might as well have given me stupid Tylenol.”
“It is Tylenol… with codeine, which is technically a narcotic, so consider yourself lucky. I could have told him you’re an addict, and all he would have given you was baby aspirin.”
“I’m not a fucking addict.”
“No? How much did you participate in the drug orgy back at your apartment? You admitted you snorted coke and smoked pot. Those are drugs.”
“Those aren’t bad drugs. They aren’t even addictive, and I didn’t touch heroin.”
“They are addictive. Ask me how I know. Do you drink?”
“Everyone does.”
“Alcohol’s a drug. You’re an addict.”
“Fuck you. You don’t know me.”
I knew him better than he understood. He was me, and I’d argued those same points at his age, convinced I was right and no one could tell me differently.
At the apartment, I found him a clean pair of Tallus’s pajamas in a basket of laundry that had yet to be put away.
He spent twenty minutes in the bathroom, showering with a plastic bag around his cast because he didn’t want to stink like a hospital.
He rejected my offer to help wrap it, and I swore up and down that I would knock him into next week if he got the cast wet.