Chapter 25 #2
She’s a black shape flying, arms out, wide, wider than a person should be able to make themselves, and she is between me and it before my mouth can finish her name.
The gun goes off and she falls to the ground to my right.
With immediacy, the world comes into focus like somebody dropped a lens over it.
Every ache is gone. The bell in my skull is gone. My ribs, my eye, my hands, the whole ruined weight of the last eight days is not in my body anymore. I just watched Sylvie take a bullet in the chest and go down on my floor.
She’s not moving.
I can’t get to her. The math of it takes me a quarter of a second, because if I go to her, and he puts one more in her, hope will be lost.
So I don’t go to her.
I go at him.
I come up off that floor like something rising from the ground. Adrenaline has taken over my body making me more monster than man.
He’s fast. Especially for his size. He brings the gun back up, but I’m already angling myself for an attack from the side. I don’t go for the weapon. You never go for the weapon. I get his wrist in my left hand and I break his elbow with my right forearm.
He doesn’t scream. He grunts, like a man lifting furniture.
The gun goes off again and another round implants into my wall.
I get two fists in his shirt, and I put my forehead through his nose. It breaks with a wet crunch, and while he’s distracted by the surge of pain, I snatch the gun from his hand but he tugs back, and we both lose hold of it. It skitters a couple feet to the right.
He’s still swinging. This animal is still swinging with a broken arm and I take one across the jaw that turns the room sideways, and then his boot comes up.
The blade’s out.
It comes for my thigh but I catch his knee on the way. I turn it the wrong way then slam my body into the twisted ankle with everything I have. There’s a satisfying snap, like a dry rotted branch.
Then he screams.
I throw him into the wall, adrenaline still steering the ship, because this man is larger than me. I shouldn’t be able to toss him like a child, but something monstrous has come out of me.
I peel him off the drywall and throw him right back into it Again, and again. I have his hair in my fist, and I use it as a handle, smashing his face into nothing recognizable.
He’s clawing at my forearm with his good hand. He’s breaking the skin, causing me to bleed, but I don’t feel it.
I don’t feel any of it. There is a version of me that would be tired by now, that would be counting my own injuries, that would be thinking about the neighbors and the law. That version is not in this hallway.
The man in this hallway is twenty-seven years old and he is standing in a burning field screaming five names into the dark, craving revenge. And I’m about to take it.
“Sylvie!” I bellow.
But she lies still on the floor behind me, still not moving.
The brief distraction allows him to get a thumb in my eye. He’s too feeble to do anything noteworthy with it. It’s time to end this.
The gun’s four feet away.
I don’t run for it. I don’t dive. I take three steps. I pick it up, and I turn around, and the man is on his knees in the ruin of my hallway with his broken arm hanging and his face mangled, covered in blood.
He looks up at me, but I bet he can’t see much.
He starts to say something. His mouth opens and he gets one syllable out. I don’t let him have the rest.
I fire with steady hands, like I’m clearing the range, all my military training like muscle memory. Two rounds. Right above the bridge of his nose, an inch apart.
He goes over backward and he is done.
I don’t check him. I don’t look at him. I turn my back on that thing and I am on the floor beside her before he’s finished falling.
“Sylvie.” I get my arms under her and she comes up off my floor with nothing in her, no weight, no resistance, her head going back over my arm, her hair falling and her mouth open.
“Sylvie. Sylvie.”
Nothing.
“No.” I’ve got her against my chest. “No. No, no, no—”
A sound comes out of me that I have never made. It goes up and it breaks and it doesn’t stop. There’s a hole in the front of her shirt. It’s black and getting bigger and I have both arms around her and I am rocking, on my knees, in a hallway.
“Please.” I can’t see her. “Please. Please, please, please.”
Not this one.
You’ve had five. You took five and I let you. I laid them out in a box on a shelf and I never once asked you for anything, not one thing, not in ten years.
I have been so quiet.
Take the apartment. Take the job. Take my hearing, take my hands, take the rest of it, I don’t want any of it—
But don’t take her. Anything but her.
I’ll do anything.
I don’t know who I’m praying to, it doesn’t matter. Just that I’m begging someone with powers greater than me to not take her away like this. Because of me.
I kiss her forehead.
Hard, both hands on her face. Her skin feels rough with grit, too hot, like a fever’s taking over.
I lay her down, determined. I am not going to sit on a floor and grieve…yet. My field medic training floods my brain, while my hands are already going through protocol.
I tear the shirt open down the middle.
Right side. High. Two inches under the collarbone, and it’s ugly, and it’s welling, and it is not the middle of her chest.
I get my hand under her. There’s an exit. Ragged. Bigger. It went through.
It went through. High and right. I have seen more gunshot wounds than most surgeons and I am telling myself the truth right now. This is survivable. Hear that, Sylvie, don’t you dare try to go. You can survive this.
I pull the strap of her bra down off her shoulder to see the whole of it.
That’s when Sylvie inhales like she’s coming up from deep water.
It is a terrible sound—a wet, dragging, enormous gasp. It’s the most beautiful noise I have heard in my life.
“Sylvie.”
Her eyelids flutter.
“Baby. Hey. Hey.” I’ve got my hand pressed down over the hole and I am leaning into it. “Stay with me. Stay right here, we’re getting help, you just stay—”
She coughs.
She drags in another breath. Then another.
Her eyes crack open, about a millimeter. She glances down at her own bare chest, and then at my hand on it.
“Perv,” she rasps.
I laugh except it comes out as a sob, and I can’t tell which one it’s more of.
“Copping a feel…when I can’t do a thing about it.” Her voice is a coarse thread.
I smile as wide as my lips will allow. “That fucking mouth.”
I kiss her. Once, twice, three times, hard little presses to her mouth. There’s blood on her teeth—hers, mine, I don’t know and I don’t care.
“I love this mouth,” I tell her. “God help me. I love this mouth.”
Thank you. Whoever is listening.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
“I’ve got you, Sylvie. I’ll take care of you. We’re going to put this all behind us.”
She blinks at me slowly. “You said you’d never forgive me.” Her eyes are unfocused. “You’re a man of your word.”
“Then we’re both liars now.”
I get my free hand under her head, cradling it carefully.
I’m looking straight down into her face. “I’m never letting you out of my sight again. Do you hear me? Never. I love you.” My throat closes.
“You love me?”
“Of course I do… I don’t know how we get from here to there but we’re going to find our way to forgiveness and we are going to find our way to a future. I promise you.”
She tries to speak.
“Shh.”
“I’m sorry, Callen.”
“I know.”
“I love you.” Her hand comes up and lands on my wrist, no strength in it at all. “I mean it. I’d do anything for you.”
“Clearly.” I press down harder on her chest. “You just took a bullet for me like you were a star in an action film. Did you think any of that through?”
She laughs and the wound wells up under my palm and it gushes; more warm blood coats my palm. I stop laughing immediately.
“Shh. Shh, baby. Don’t. I’m here.” I’m gathering her up. “Don’t speak. It can wait.”
“Callen—”
“Shhh.” I put two fingers over her lips and hold her tighter. “I’ve got you. Whatever it is, it can wait.”
“Callen.”
I look down at her. Sylvie’s eyes come all the way open, all the wisdom of the world on the tip of her tongue. Whatever she needs to say, I need to let her say it. I know it’s another apology, and she doesn’t need to offer any more. We’re going to be okay.
“What is it?”
She looks at me like I’m the unhinged one. “I’m bleeding out. What the hell are you waiting for? A hero’s parade? Take me to the fucking hospital.”
Oh, shit. I get her up in my arms and head for the door.
There she is.
There’s my girl.