Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 (2 page)

See? Panicker. This was a panicky move.

Taryn doesn’t know what she’s doing, just that she needs to do something and biting Kanelos’s tongue in an alley is the closest available option. Her credit card is maxed out. She’s twenty-four years old and still living at home, a falling-apart prison where the heat is perpetually being cut off and the water runs yellow for a full minute after you turn it on. Her car is so old, standard-issue snow tires don’t even fit properly. Three days ago none of that mattered because she was finally getting out, finally moving in with Pete, but now—fuck.

She thought she loved Pete. It’s embarrassing to discover she just loved how normal he made her feel.

She catches Nick off guard at first, this soft
oof
when she comes at him with her full weight and no warning. If he’d reacted a half a second later they probably would have wound up cracking heads and that just, like, would have been that.

That’s not how it happens.

Instead he kisses her back like he was waiting, one big hand curling around her rib cage and the other one cupping her skull. Taryn makes a sound at the back of her throat. And all right, yes, she’s been single for thirty-six hours at this point, probably she should slow her roll, but God—she just wants to forget for a while. Her cold hands slip up inside his jacket, underneath the soft waffle of his shirt.

Nick growls. “Falvey,” he says, and it sounds like a warning, but she kisses him again and he nudges her back into the shadow of the building instead, her spine thudding off the brick. She’s freezing everywhere except the places he can touch. He’s a good kisser. Jesus, she forgot that after the fire—made herself forget it—his capable mouth and the scrape of teeth along her bottom lip. He tastes like the beer he was drinking inside. “What are you doing?”

Taryn shrugs. She doesn’t want to talk about it, thank you. She doesn’t want to talk, period, so she kisses him again to shut him up and goes to work at the buttons on his jeans, right here in the alley beside Old Court where anyone could see them. Nick groans against her mouth.

“Hey.” His voice is low and ragged. Taryn ignores him, working a hand inside his boxers and feeling him jerk against her palm. “Hey.” Nick grabs her wrists, not hard but hard enough to stop her, his jeans slipping low on his hips. “Easy, tiger.”

“Nick.” There’s an edge in her voice she’s not crazy about but God, she wants this, and she’s pretty sure she can get it from him. “Come on.”

She should have known that was the wrong way to play it. Right away Nick gets that expression he gets sometimes when a vic is too far gone for them to do anything but push morphine, no hope at all. “Jesus, Falvey,” he hisses. Taryn notices with a mean kind of satisfaction that his voice is wrecked. “Can you talk to me for a second?”

Taryn scowls. All of a sudden she’s hugely embarrassed, a stupid ginger flush creeping all the way up her body. He’s still holding on to her wrists. “What are you, a romantic now?” she asks, aiming to sound as bitchy as possible.

Nick raises his eyebrows. “That’s it, Falvey.” He blows out a noisy breath, rubs at the back of his neck like there’s an ache there. His body is so, so warm. “I was hoping you’d bring me flowers.”

She’s about to say something else when Doc’s voice rings out around the corner like a siren, sounding borderline hysterical. “Taryn!” Doc hates Old Court, to the point where Taryn can barely leave her alone to pee. “Where’d you go? You forgot your coat!”

Taryn tips her head back against the brick, hard enough to hurt. “I forgot my coat,” she tells Nick uselessly. She is not going to cry.

“Yeah, I noticed. Taryn.” Nick reaches up and smooths her hair back off her face, gentle. She leans into his touch without entirely meaning to do it. “What the hell?”

Taryn shrugs. His eyes are dark in the orange cast of the streetlight. “Gotta go,” she says softly, and skirts back around the corner to let Doc know she’s safe.

Chapter Two

Nick gets up at four thirty and lets the dog out—he wasn’t sleeping worth a damn anyway—leaving the radio news on a low hum while he fumbles through coffee and a shower. By the time he gets back downstairs, Atlas is whining at the door to come in.

“Sorry, buddy,” Nick mumbles as the mutt curls up by the floor vent, huffing. It’s still full dark out, the back porch light casting pools of white onto the new snow outside. Atlas tracked wet paw prints across the tile. “Cold, huh?”

He got Atlas after Maddie died, almost three years ago now. It was a rescue adoption, the shelter guys swearing up and down Atlas was half Labrador even though all evidence pointed to the contrary, his kooky ears and the wrong body shape entirely. Nick went through with it anyway, mostly to shut his sisters up, both of them a hundred and ten percent against the idea of him living alone. At the time a dog seemed like less work than a fight, and if that hasn’t turned out to be strictly true in the long run—well. Nick doesn’t hate the company.

When he pulls up in the truck Alexandra’s already waiting outside the diner, leaning against the stonework and finishing a cigarette. The smoke disappears in wisps above her dark, curly head. “Thought it was my morning,” Nick says as he hops out of the Tahoe. The sky’s graying up on the eastern side of town, his breath just visible.

“It is.” Alexandra shrugs. The older she gets, the more she looks like their mother, faint creases around her eyes and mouth. “I was awake.” She stubs the cigarette out on the concrete, picking up the butt and tossing it in the ashtray outside the door. “Except not really awake, apparently, because then I got here and I didn’t have my keys.”

Nick mumbles noncommittally, pulling his own keys out of his pocket and nudging her aside to unlock the door. Their grandparents bought this place for twenty grand back in 1962, a family business built on deluxe egg breakfasts and Saturday night prime rib specials, checkerboard floors creaking underfoot. Their father shot the shit with the regulars from his perch behind the register every single day until he died. Nick makes enough as a paramedic to pay his mortgage, and their sister Ioanna’s husband does pretty well at an insurance company in Springfield, but the fact of the matter is the diner wouldn’t float without all three of them working a couple of mornings a week. And none of them have the heart to sell it.

Mornings like this, Nick’s not sure why. “Fuck,” he hisses when two of the overhead lights blow as soon as he flips the switch bank. “Dammit.”

“Hey there, Stormface,” Alexandra says, an old expression of their father’s. She frowns, making a beeline for the coffeemaker. “What’s eating you?”

Nick shrugs. “Sorry.” In theory it’s nothing a cold shower shouldn’t have taken care of, so he can’t figure out why he’s still in a mood that could peel the bark off a tree. “Didn’t sleep so much myself,” he calls over his shoulder, heading down to the basement for extra lightbulbs. The storage space smells like onions and coffee, familiar.

“Ah.” Then, once he’s back and has the ladder set up, “You want to talk about it?”

Nick shakes his head, pulling a new bulb out of the package. “I’m okay,” he tells her. “Thanks.”

Alexandra’s unconvinced. “I’m just saying— Hi, Victor,” she calls as one of the line cooks lets himself in, raising a hand in greeting. “I’m just saying,” she continues, attention back on Nick with a laser focus. “It’s not good not to talk to anybody about how you feel.”

Right. Nick climbs down the ladder more carefully than he really needs to, wanting to avoid his sister’s gaze. She thinks it’s Maddie-related. Alexandra and her husband Bill never had any children of their own, but Nick is a full ten years younger and Maddie was like a daughter to them. Ever since Nick first brought her home when they were teenagers, Alexandra doted on her, taking her shopping at the Eastfield Mall and sending her care packages while she was away at college. She and Maddie had a standing lunch date every other Thursday right up until Maddie was too sick to leave the house anymore, and when that happened Alexandra started bringing food over herself. As slow as Nick’s been to recover from what happened, he thinks it’s probably been just as bad for his sister. The offer to talk might not be for his benefit alone.

“I’m fine,” he promises her anyway, gently as he can muster. “Really.”

Ioanna shows up around eight, hair knotted on top of her head and both her children in tow. It’s a teachers’ conference day so her kids set up in one of the booths by the window, coloring on the backs of place mats with a cupful of stubby crayons. Stevie, who’s seven, spends the morning practicing a card trick he learned from his viola teacher. Nick picks the four of hearts and remembers it, just like his nephew tells him, but when he looks up both his sisters are eyeing him skeptically across the room.

“Niko’s not sleeping,” Alexandra announces, like that might somehow tempt him to share his darkest emotions. Stevie holds up the six of spades.

Kanelos doesn’t text the next morning to see if she needs a ride.

Which, fine—Taryn doesn’t text him to see if he’ll give her a ride either. On top of which she doesn’t actually need one; the weather’s clearer today, a hint of blue sky, and the roads across town won’t be that much of a problem. Everything is under control.

Fuck, she really can’t believe she did that.

Okay, she can believe it. It’s not like she didn’t know he liked her. It makes Taryn feel like a jerk to admit that, even to herself, but she knew. It’s been building, her and Kanelos and their weird, loaded thing, since way back before breaking it off with Pete was even on her radar—Nick bringing her a cup of coffee if he stopped at the Dunkin’, Taryn calling him for rides when she could have asked anybody and being careful not to think about why. Not to mention the night of the fire last summer and how gross and sweaty both of them were, Nick dropping to his knees on his kitchen floor, the way he dragged her jeans down her legs and propped her bare foot on his shoulder and—

Anyway. Last night. She’ll apologize.

She’ll avoid him, or she’ll apologize.

One or the other.

In the meantime, there’s laundry to do and dinner to make and leave in the fridge for later. Her mom’s having a bad spell, so the kids were basically on their own last night, her little brothers and sister. Jesse, who’s the second-oldest Falvey after Taryn, was supposed to come home and watch them and then just blatantly didn’t, which means they were running around like the fucking Indians out of
Peter Pan
until one o’clock in the morning. When Doc dropped Taryn off, she walked in the door and found Connor passed out upside down on the armchair with something in his hair that looked like blood. It turned out just to be ketchup, but it scared the shit out of her anyway. What a nine-year-old is still doing playing with his food is beyond Taryn.

“Just throw this in the micro for like two minutes, okay?” she tells Caitlin now, pushing a tub of margarine and some off-brand orange soda to the back of the fridge and sticking the bowl of beans and cut-up hot dogs in front. “And then stir it, and maybe like another minute and a half after that.” The franks and beans are gross, and not very nutritious, but they’re the sum total of Taryn’s culinary abilities.

Caitlin nods seriously. She’s eleven, small and skinny just like Taryn was. Taryn hates leaving her in charge like this when she’s so young, especially since Connor and Mikey are fucking terrors, but what can you do. It’s not like they’ve got extra money for a sitter.

She fishes her phone out of her jeans pocket, deletes two
I’m really sorry
voicemails from Pete and hits the button for Jesse’s cell. “It’s your sister again,” she says when she gets his voicemail for the fourth time this morning. “Just calling to see if you’re dead in a ditch, or if you possibly might come home to watch the kids later. Ma’s still passed out, so…” She picks at a peeling seam of wallpaper, the pattern faded pictures of herbs with ribbons tied around them. “Plus the gas company called again. Anyway, if you could stop being an asshole for five minutes and help me out, that’d be awesome.” He’s probably at his girlfriend’s, Sheena or Shawna or something. He started disappearing there on the regular after Taryn announced she was moving in with Pete. At the time she let it go, seeing as how she was technically the one abandoning him, but it’s been months now and she really needs the help.

She hangs up and digs a clean thermal out of the dryer, throwing her hair into a haphazard braid. At the last second she runs back upstairs and puts on some mascara, which—ugh, who the hell knows why.

He’s good-looking, all right? Kanelos. He’s got that dip in his bottom lip and everything, a jaw you could use to crack open a beer bottle. Just because Taryn’s a disaster in every single area of her life doesn’t mean she wants him to think she looks dead around the eyes.

“I’m going to work, Ma!” she calls as she passes the bedroom door, then yells at the kids to be good before she goes.

“Easy,” she mutters to herself, saying a prayer just like always as the engine turns over—one deep breath after another, one mile after the next. “You’re okay.”

Nick carries his bad mood all the way in to work, spending the better part of the drive telling himself to chill the hell out. There’s no reason to think he’ll be riding with Falvey—it’s Lyn’s night off but there’s always Ortiz or Jerry, any of the other part-time guys. Nick could stand a break. He makes himself suit up before he even checks the roster, takes his time with his jacket and his boots. But in the end there’s no changing what’s already done, and there it is taped to the cinderblock in the hallway: Falvey/Kanelos, Bus #5722.