Chapter 34 #2
I drop my chest to the tank and open the throttle until the engine note shifts from a scream to a low, full-throated roar, and the dark parts ahead of me, and I ride.
The headlight finds her at two hundred yards and my fingers lock so hard the left hand cramps.
A shape on the road, small and dark, moving, one shoulder dropped lower than the other, gait wrong, wrong enough that I can read it from here because I've watched this woman walk across kitchens, rooftops, fundraiser floors.
Her body has never moved like that. Listing. Favoring the right side. Alive.
Alive. She's alive. She's walking.
Her head snaps toward the sound. Her whole body changes, shoulders drawing up, back straightening with a surge that overrides everything she's been protecting, and she runs.
Away from me. Into the dark beyond the headlight's reach, not looking back, because an engine on a dark road in the middle of nowhere means the people who took her and she has no way to know it's me.
"Evie!" The word rips out of me and goes nowhere, swallowed by the Agusta's scream, and she's getting smaller in the beam, moving with a desperate lurching stride that means the ankle is bad and she's running on it anyway. "EVIE!"
She doesn't slow. She doesn't turn.
I kill the engine. The bike is still rolling when I swing my leg over and let it go, and it drops sideways onto the dirt road and I'm already running.
The headlight stays on behind me, throwing my shadow long and thin across the packed earth.
The silence after the engine dies is so complete I can hear my own breathing, the slap of my boots, nothing else.
"Evie!" Louder now, into the quiet. "Evie, it's me, stop, it's me."
She can hear me now but she's still moving, slower, the ankle failing, because Evie is what everyone calls her. Her father calls her that. The men who took her might have called her that.
I slow to a jog at ten yards. My lungs are burning and my voice drops, all the way down, past Saint, past every register I've ever built, into the one that sounds like the kitchen on St. Charles Avenue, Odette's rosary beads, every version of me I tried to bury.
"Evangeline."
She stops.
Her shoulders drop first, then her hands, and she turns, and three seconds pass while I close from ten yards to ten feet.
Not the injuries. Her eyes. Her eyes first, wide and black in the dark, finding me.
I stop at ten feet and hold my hands up, palms toward her, fingers spread. She has to see me. She has to know it's me before I touch her.
Two seconds. Three.
Her face changes. Recognition lands first in her shoulders, then in her mouth.
I close the distance.
My palms find her face, thumbs against her jaw, fingers in her hair, mud and cold skin and the faint warmth underneath that means circulation, that means alive, that means here.
"Tripp." Her voice is small and ruined and certain.
She said my name. She's standing in a field in the dark with blood on her hands and she said my name.
"You're smiling," she whispers. Her fingers touch my mouth, and she frowns like she's solving something. "Tripp, you're smiling."
I didn't know.
The sound that comes out of me isn't a laugh and isn't a sob and isn't anything I've made before.
It breaks in the middle, wet and ugly, unfinished.
My vision blurs. I press my forehead to hers, breathe her in: dirt, ditch water, the faintest trace of my soap underneath.
My shoulders are shaking and I can't stop them.
Her legs buckle. I feel it happen, the shift in her weight, her body finally registering safe and surrendering everything it's been holding.
My arms are already there. I don't catch her.
I lower with her, both knees hitting the dirt road, and we go down together.
I'm still holding her face because I can't make myself let go.
She's shaking against me, I'm shaking against her, and the headlight behind us throws our shadow long and tangled across the empty field.
The medic takes over because the man can't hold.
I let go of her face, though the man's hands don't want to.
I go to work. Penlight from the chest pocket of my jacket, thumb on the switch, two fingers under her chin to tip it up, the beam in her left eye.
The pupil contracts, sluggish, half a beat behind.
Right eye responds faster but not fast enough.
Uneven. Concussion confirmed, moderate to severe, and the differential builds itself behind my eyes while the rest of me kneels in dirt and tries not to break apart.
Run the list. Keep running the list. If you stop the list you shake and if you shake you can't help her and if you can't help her you are useless and you have been useless for three hours already so run the goddamn list.
Pulse at the wrist, sixty-two, thready but regular.
Respirations shallow, fourteen per minute, consistent with pain-guarding and early hypothermia.
Her skin is cold and damp under my fingers.
When I press two knuckles to her sternum her response is appropriate, which means she's oriented enough to flinch and push my hand away, and that push is the best thing I've felt in hours.
Her palms. I turn them over and the headlight catches the damage. Lacerations across both, shallow but dirty, gravel embedded in the heel of her left hand.
Forearm scrape, superficial, already clotting.
Blood in her hair on the right side, matted and dark, and I part it carefully and find a two-inch laceration above her ear that's stopped bleeding but needs irrigation and probably closure.
Her feet are bare and raw, the soles torn in three places I can see, and the cold has numbed them enough that she's not reacting when I touch them.
The ankle. Her right ankle, swollen to twice its normal size, the same joint I wrapped on my living room floor while she sat on the couch and her breath caught under my fingers and I told myself it was procedure.
The same ankle I elevated on a pillow and iced while Darcy talked about farmers markets.
Same ankle. Same woman. Different floor.
My thumb traces the swollen joint and her breath catches and I pull back, and I'm shaking now, the list gone, the protocol gone, because the checklist can't hold when the patient is her.
I key the comm while the other hand stays on her knee, because if I stop touching her I'll lose something I won't get back.
"This is Saint. I need medevac at my position.
Vanessa has the coordinates." The operative's voice, clipped and clean, except the vowels are wrong, too warm, too round, Louisiana pouring through the clinical shorthand like water through a cracked dam.
"One casualty, female, twenty-four. Concussion, grade two, pupils unequal and sluggish.
Right ankle, likely fracture, significant edema.
Multiple lacerations, hands and scalp. Hypothermia risk, skin temp below baseline.
She's ambulatory but fadin'. Priority two, request immediate transport to nearest trauma center.
And someone retrieve the Agusta. I'm not leaving her side. "
Fadin'. He heard it. Everyone on the channel heard it.
The comm clicks.
"Copy, Saint. Bird is six minutes out. Bike's covered." Kade, steady as a wall.
Six minutes. I can hold for six minutes.
Evie's eyes haven't left my face. She's watching me like she watches rooms, reading what I'm not saying, except her gaze keeps drifting and her blinks are getting longer.
"Evangeline." I cup the back of her neck and lean close. "Stay with me."
Stay. The word I built into her body without her permission, the trigger I conditioned into her nervous system on fourteen nights she didn't choose, and it sits in the cold air like a confession neither of us has the energy to unpack.
Her fingers find my wrist. Cold, filthy, grip weaker than it should be. She holds on.
"Hi." Her breath fogs between us. Barely a whisper.
The same word she gave me the first time. My chest cracks open the same way.
Her eyes close. Her grip on my wrist goes slack.
She's out.
The sound builds from the north, distant at first, a rhythmic thudding that vibrates in my sternum before my ears fully register it. The helicopter. Running lights appear above the tree line, blinking red and white against stars I forgot were there.
I slide one arm under her knees, the other behind her back, and I stand. Her weight settles against my chest. She weighs nothing and everything. Her head drops against my shoulder. Her hands hang heavy. The shivering hasn't stopped even though she's not awake to feel it.
The Agusta lies on its side behind us, headlight still burning, throwing a long bright rectangle across empty farmland that illuminates nothing but dirt and dark. I turn my back to it and walk toward the sound. Toward the lights. Carrying her.
Everything that comes next is coming. The medfac and the questions and Blanchard and the wreckage of every lie I've told and every truth I've withheld. All of it, bearing down like the rotor wash already pressing against my face.
But right now it's this. Her weight. Her breath against my neck. The road under my boots. The helicopter getting louder.
I walk.