The pain spiked sharp and hot, and blood coated my gloved hand when I touched the multiple punctures through cloth and flesh. I looked up from my hand to Hector. He didn’t see me. One shot. It had taken two to put Boyd down. As Thackery growled and propelled himself up from the floor, blade in hand arcing straight for Hector’s chest, Hector fired the second shot, right into Thackery’s face—Boyd’s face—the same as I had done.
And if there was balance in the world, any at all, that’s where it would’ve stopped, the killing. Hector would go to Meleah’s side and tell his mom that everything was fine. Everything would be all right.
The world laughed at that one.
Whoever had left the shotgun hadn’t only loaded it, they’d also left extra ammunition. Thackery was gone, a faceless corpse lying across my legs in a hallway I used to slide down in socked feet. But I was still alive—in serious, nerve-shredding pain but
alive. That made me another Boyd to take care of. Hector disappeared into the back bedroom and returned to load the shotgun with two more shells by the time I managed to use a handful of Thackery’s lab coat to pull myself up into a sitting position. I ignored the gray haze that blurred my vision. “Hector,” I said hoarsely, but he wasn’t Hector now. “
Jackson,
it’s over. You killed him. You killed Boyd. He’s dead.”
The shotgun stayed trained on me, and Hector’s pale eyes didn’t blink. They were empty. That didn’t mean he hadn’t heard me. If I could’ve seen into my own eyes when I’d put Boyd down, I wouldn’t have seen much of anyone home then, either.
“Jackson,” I emphasized again. The guy at the mill had heard me, or at least I’d pushed the recording into a minor detour. “Jackson, your mom is hurt. She needs you.”
This time, Hector did blink, and his lips peeled back from his teeth. “You stabbed her. You murdering bastard. She’s dying. You’ve killed her. You killed Tess. No more killing. Not by you.”
I saw them simultaneously: his finger tightening on the trigger …
And the shoe.
It was at his feet, halfway between him and Thackery’s shattered skull. It gleamed bright and pink as the day Mom had bought it and as the day I’d found it in the grass. One small pink shoe. Tess’s shoe … although she’d been buried in them both.
Her pride and joy, her favorite possessions. How could she be buried in anything else?
This was dying, I guessed. Not your whole life running like an overly long James Cameron movie. No, just small moments. Small shots of the things that had derailed your life altogether. It made sense. It made you glad to go. You could finally see the whole screwed-up mess put to rest, because there’d never been any real hope of turning it around with one selfless act. That was movie shit, and movie shit was just that. Pure, unadulterated, get-your-hopes-up and pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you-every-time shit.
“Go on then, Jackson,” I said quietly, my eyes still on the impossible shoe. “Boyd has to go, and you know it. Pull the trigger. Hector, if you remember this, it’s not your fault. Some things have to play out. You can’t stop a recording in the middle. It has to play out until the end. Things just work that way.”
I didn’t look up to watch him pull the trigger. If he did remember this, I didn’t want that to be one of his memories. Nightmares cut at you a shade less in the dark of the night if you don’t have to see them looking back at you.
But instead of the shotgun blast that I couldn’t possibly hear until after it tore off my head, I heard something else. Something as impossible as the shoe.
“Boys are so stupid.”
I lifted my gaze—not by too much, I didn’t have
to—and saw her standing behind Hector. She had small fingers hooked into his pocket as she peeked around his hip. The strawberry blond hair was in a bow. Green, to clash completely with the shoe. Tess had always had her own unique style.
“Jack Sprat, I’m awfully busy now.” There was the same overly dramatic sigh I remembered. Her face brightened. “You found my shoe!”
“I did.” My lips were completely numb. I didn’t feel them move. “I wish I could’ve kept it before, but I thought you’d want it more.” Hector hadn’t pulled the trigger, or he had and here was the afterlife I’d always denied. I didn’t like being wrong. I hated worse to admit it. But now, if this was what happened when you died, I didn’t mind being a blind idiot. “Where were you all those years? Why didn’t you come see me?”
She cocked her head and smiled, happy as she’d ever been … always been. Every minute of every day. “I came all the time. Except not so much since, um, December? Other than that, I visited you tons and tons. But you couldn’t see me or hear me. You never pay attention.” She stomped her socked foot playfully, and suddenly, the pink shoe was back on her foot as she stepped out to stand beside a frozen Hector. He was breathing, I could see that, and maybe that meant I wasn’t dead after all. Why would I stick around to watch the man breathe?
“I
knew
you’d need help. And if you wouldn’t listen, then I’d have to smack you one and make you
listen.” I felt good and solidly smacked, that was true. She reached up and pinched Hector’s side. “Wake up, Hector. Put the bad gun down and wake up.”
Hector jumped, as if he’d received a small electric shock. “What …?” He looked at the shotgun in his hand and hurriedly eased back on the trigger before placing the weapon on the floor. “Jackson.” He was pale under his darker skin. “I shot you. God, I
shot
you.” Thackery he paid no attention to. After all, in his mind, Thackery had been a done deal, anyway.
Tess shook her head, hair swinging and fierce with exasperation. “Boys. Boys can’t do anything right.”
Hector’s head jerked around and then angled down. I was certain my file had pictures. He knew who he was seeing, what he was seeing, even if I was having trouble wrapping a mind suddenly made of mush around it all. “Tess?”
“You hurt Jackie, but I guess it’s not your fault. I thought doctors were supposed to be smart and have suckers. Grape suckers are the best.” She turned an expectant gaze on him, only to sigh again, this time in disappointment, when his mouth opened without sound and no suckers came out of his pocket. “I think you need to go back to doctor school, but I have a present for you, anyway.”
She held her hand up imperiously for such a small thing, a small thing who hadn’t even been made of flesh and blood for a long time. I could see
that now. A stray beam of sun had struggled through the bedroom window to find its way to and then through her. She wasn’t transparent. She was luminous and delicate, made of the wings of butterflies.
“Charlie.” She wriggled her fingers impatiently. “Chaaaarlie, I have to go. I’m late. It’s my birthday party. Hurry up.”
Her hand disappeared in a ripple of air and returned holding on to a much larger one. The rest of the body stepped through a larger ripple, and I saw the messy hair and big nose I hadn’t forgotten. They were as homely as ever, and Charlie’s smile was as wide and pleased. “You found me.”
“Everything that’s lost is found sooner or later,” she said solemnly. I saw her hand tighten around his to squeeze reassuringly. “It’s time to go home, Charlie. You’ll love it. It’s everything and everything and everything.”
He nodded. “I can’t wait to see.” He was so close to Hector that their shoulders rested against each other’s, and Charlie bumped his harder, judging by the sudden tilt to Hector’s stance. An older brother’s affection. Pale blue eyes to pale blue eyes, he added warmly, “You did good, little brother.”
“Charlie.” Hector said it with the purest of belief and relief.
“You found the one guy who could help you save me. I owe you big.” Then Charlie turned his gaze to me. “I knew you’d answer my call. Just like you promised at Cane Lake.”
“One helluva long-distance charge,” I managed, my tongue as numb as my face and lips. I wasn’t Hector. I had nothing this trusting or this deserving in me. No faith. This couldn’t be real. As much as I wanted it to be, it was the denial of what I’d believed for almost my entire life. How could I believe it? All of it?
A kiss brushed across my cheek, and I turned with what had to be half-crazed eyes to look into those of my sister, still five years old, still beautiful.
“You won’t forget this, Jackie. You’ll try, because you’re a boy, and boys are stubborn. But I won’t let you. No way you’ll be able to ignore me now.” She smiled again, a little sadder, the kind of sad that broke me with her next words. “It wasn’t your fault you didn’t save me. We all take turns. It wasn’t yours. But it’s my turn to save you now. And I will.”
They were gone, the two of them, as if they hadn’t been there to begin with. Couldn’t have been there, and my thoughts clamped onto that firmly, because that made sense. Impossible shoes, impossible sisters, they don’t happen. Hallucinations from blood loss, that happened. Some damned ether disruption went screwy and messed with your mind, that happened, too. But the long lost? They don’t come back, and they don’t speak to you. They don’t absolve you of things that can’t be absolved.
“You’re already doing it, aren’t you, you stubborn bastard?” No matter what he said, Hector
sounded unnerved. Amazed, too, but he’d definitely had his world tilted on its axis. “Going straight into denial of a full-blown miracle.”
“You shot me. That means you don’t get any say into what I do or don’t do. And there are no miracles. It’s not like the Vatican is behind funding your project.” I lifted an arm, swallowed bile that scorched my throat at the pain the movement caused, and demanded, “Help me up. We need to check on Meleah.”
He was already as pale as he could get, but I saw the apprehension etch its way into his face.
“She’s going to be all right.” I thought she was, and right now, that was the best to be hoped for. “She was quicker.” I didn’t want to finish the rest of that sentence, and I didn’t. “I think it looks worse than it is.”
I was on my feet, thanks mainly to Hector hoisting me up with one hand while the other held the shotgun. I hadn’t seen him bend over to pick it back up. I knew I hadn’t, but there it was. I could’ve missed it.
I knew I hadn’t. But I could have. It didn’t have to be Tess who put it in his hand. And why would she? Why would he need it now? He wouldn’t. I held tight to the last thought, because denial needed help now and again. Back where I’d left her, Meleah remained sitting on the floor. She managed a smile at our appearance. “Hector. Jackson.” The cloth around her throat and under her hand was only half
scarlet. The bleeding had slowed. I’d been right. She would be all right. Hector, her, me—we were going to walk away from this, unlikely as that would’ve seemed minutes ago.
Which proved once and for all that I was limited to reading objects, places, and people. While bullshit illusions were wide open, the future was closed to me. I’d always been grateful for that.
Until now.
Stepping through the open front doorway, as cheerful and smiling as always in the face of adversity and carefully designed plans gone wrong, Eden glowed with the same inner joy she’d never failed to show. She stopped when she saw the two of us, standing upright.
“This is inconvenient,” she noted, not dressed in nursing scrubs anymore, frowning a little. “All good boys and girls should be dead now. I did expect maybe Thackery would’ve survived, being the obnoxious ass that he is. I was rather looking forward to finishing him off as a loose end.”
Eden. My nurse advocate. On my side against all others who would use me without regard, when really, all along, her own regard had been as predatory as a silent fin slicing through the water. And considerate enough to wear latex gloves always around me, to save me from an unwanted reading. Too bad I hadn’t seen that a reading was more unwanted by her than by me. Eden, who came bearing the gift of an injection of painkiller and sedative in the middle of the night.
“What was in the shot you brought me last night like a good little Florence Nightingale?” I asked, propping myself against the nearest wall, the easier to ride out the waves of pain radiating from the buried shotgun pellets.
She smiled, the dimple flashing beside her mouth like the morning star. “An overdose of Flecainide. A therapeutic dose is just the trick for an arrhythmia. Too much stops the heart altogether. It’s what I gave Dr. Allgood, along with the sedative he normally received in his preexperiment physical. Fifteen minutes later, he’s in the transplanar, and in fifteen more minutes, he’s dead. It’s a good drug for falling through the cracks of a toxicology report.” She flashed the same smile at Hector. “You wondered why you couldn’t find what was wrong with your little toy. That’s because nothing was. Charlie was a dead man before he climbed into it.”
Her gun, the same nine-millimeter Hector carried on base, was trained on him. He was the only one of us armed. And wasn’t that lucky? The shotgun in his hand, the one I hadn’t seen him pick up, the one that if he’d thought about it, he wouldn’t want to pick up again after turning Thackery’s face to hamburger with one barrel and taking me down with the other one.
“But you didn’t want the shot, Jackson, and as you were so certain you were leaving today and no more readings were in the works, I backed down. No one likes a pushy nurse. And I’d had my three
other shots at you. It seemed only fair.” In keeping with her bouncy Eden persona, she was wearing whimsical fairy earrings. I didn’t want to die
period,
but I really didn’t want to die at the hands of someone wearing fairy anything. “It was fine with me if you escaped with your life. I only kill people who are in the way. I get paid for my work. I’m not into extra credit. I don’t even mind all that much about Fujiwara. He was a good partner, but with this job, I have enough to retire, and with his share, I might get two villas instead of one.”