FREAKS

by Hart, Callie

  I looked around, found a seat to park myself on, and I let my head rock back against chair, staring at the ceiling as I listened to their conversation. God, this prick was such a fucking do-gooder. Probably participated in human rights marches. Probably totted his handmade signs baring slogans like, ‘Meat Is Murder’ outside steak houses, feeling pretty damn pleased with himself. I made a note to stop by Rosaria's on the way over to the apartment later on. I was going to eat a fucking steak the size of a goddamn dinner plate. Extra bloody. I was going to make sure I fucking enjoyed it, too.

  Sloane drank the rest of her coffee, crumpling the takeaway cup and tossing it into the trash can beside her. “Alright. I got three more patients I have to see before I can go and get some food. I'll meet you when I'm done,” she said.

  “Sure thing.” Oliver flashed his pearly whites as he held up his hand, waiting for Sloane to give him a high five. Who the fuck gave high fives anymore? This wasn't nineteen eighty-five, for fuck’s sake. Sloane slapped her palm to his, giving him a rye look out of the corner of her eye, as if she were mirroring my own thoughts, and then she turned and walked away.

  Once Massey had gone, I got to my feet and followed after her, maintaining a safe distance. I knew how to do this. Knew how it worked. I'd tailed her successfully many times before while she was on shift, and it'd been all too fucking easy. As we approached the ground floor elevators, I crossed my fingers in my pocket.

  Don't go upstairs. Don't go upstairs. Don't go upstairs.

  I had a rule. One that couldn't be broken. I could follow her. I could watch her. But the moment she stepped foot on an elevator, it was game over.

  Elevators were strange places. People would stand in line in the canteen. They'd sit next to one another in the waiting rooms. They'd stand side by side in the pharmacy, but the moment you put them in an elevator everyone turned into a chatty fucking Cathy. The closed, confined space made people sufficiently awkward that they ended up shooting tight-lipped smiles at one another, eyebrows raised, as they rocked back and forth on the balls of their feet, ready to make polite conversation about the fucking weather.

  The one and only encounter Sloane and I had shared had taken place in the dark. She hadn't seen my face, didn't know what I looked like, but she’d certainly heard my voice. She could have forgotten what I sounded like, or she could have blotted the timbre and the rolling pitch of my deep tenor from her mind on purpose. But it was far more likely that she remembered it with a crystal clarity that would get me into serious fucking trouble the moment I opened my mouth.

  Thankfully Sloane sailed right past the elevators, bypassing them and taking a right hand turn back towards the triage bays.

  “Dr. Romera. Just in time. I have a present for you.”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Gracie, the nurse who had checked me into the waiting room nearly two hours ago, had stopped right in front of Sloane, wielding a clipboard. If Gracie noticed me, she'd know I wasn't meant to be here. She was good at her job. A hard ass. She'd have no qualms about approaching me and forcing me back out into the waiting room.

  I casually slowed my pace and came to a stop in front of a notice board that was plastered with leaflets and flyers. Women’s health leaflets and flyers. I glared at a very detailed diagram instructing women how to perform thorough breast exams, tilted my chin down to my chest, angled my face away, and hoped Gracie wouldn't see me.

  “Woman in four's got a stab wound,” Gracie told Sloane. “Deep but hasn’t hit anything major. Could be some glass in there, though. They already removed most of it and she’s had an ultrasound.”

  “Got it.” Sloane took the clipboard from Gracie and scanned the details. “Wow. This chick got lucky. All right. I’ll take care of this and come back out front when I’m done.”

  “Thanks. Oh, and…be warned.” She motioned toward the exam room. “Patient’s boyfriend’s a little uptight. Just a head’s up.” Gracie winked—way cooler than trying to instigate an awkward high five—and spun on her heel, heading back toward the nurse’s station. Sloane entered exam room four, pulling back the curtain and disappearing inside.

  Well, well. There weren’t many guys wondering around the hospital in a five-thousand-dollar tux, I was willing to bet, but somehow I’d managed to go unseen. My lucky fucking day. Strolling slowly down the hall, I came to a stop outside exam four, positioning myself opposite the drawn privacy curtain, slipping my hands inside my pockets. Should have brought my cell after all. Michael’s incessant calling had been driving me to the point of insanity but having it on me now would have been useful. A prop I could have used to make myself look busy as I hovered in the bustling corridor.

  Instead, I picked up a pamphlet from a rack fixed to the wall and pretended to read it as I listened carefully to what was taking place in the cubicle ahead. The stab wound Gracie had described didn’t sound particularly dangerous, or even that fucking interesting, but that didn’t matter. I just wanted to hear the sound of Sloane’s voice; the woman could read from an encyclopedia and I’d still have found myself enthralled.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  I was fucking crazy.

  I’d lost my goddamn mind.

  Sloane was the epitome of professionalism when she spoke: cool, calm, and collected. “Looks like you’ve had quite an evening. How on earth did you end up with a shard of glass stuck in your abdomen, Ms. Lafferty?”

  My hand made a fist, crushing the pamphlet inside it. What? What did she just say?

  Lafferty?

  The world was not that small.

  The world was not that fucking unbelievable.

  It couldn’t be her.

  “It’s a long story,” a tired female voice said. Sera’s voice.

  No fucking way.

  I’d shown Charlie the staged picture of the woman, laying in a jumbled, bloody mess at the foot of those stairs as I’d promised I would. I’d gotten into the Camaro and driven at breakneck speeds back to Seattle, and I hadn’t given the priest and his girlfriend another fucking thought. Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. I had thought about her. I’d figured she’d wind up dead sooner rather than later, even if I wasn’t the one to complete the task. These things were inevitable in the end. And now, here she was at St. Peter’s, being treated for a stab wound by Sloane fucking Romera.

  Of all the hospitals in all the world…

  Of all the doctors…

  I didn’t believe in fate, kismet or karma. They were made up concepts designed to control people or give them false hope, but even I had to admit that this was seriously fucking strange. Gracie said the patient’s boyfriend was up-tight, which meant that, not only was Sera here, but so was Fix.

  I had better things to do than tangle with the likes of him tonight. Be better if I just left. Went to the party and forgot about Sloane for the night. Better yet, it would be fortuitous for all concerned if I forgot about Sloane once and for all. Banished her from my mind for good. I needed to go to the apartment and pick out a girl. The prettiest, sexiest, wildest girl, wearing the least amount of clothes. If I fucked the living daylights out of that kind of woman, I’d be able to finally let this thing go. The lie jarred me down to the sockets of my teeth. It was an outright lie that I’d told to myself—the stupidest kind of lie there was. I wasn’t going to be able to let this thing go. Never in a million years.

  I dropped the screwed-up pamphlet onto the ground, my blood hot and irritated in my veins. There would still be plenty of booze left by the time I reached the party, and I was going to fucking need it. I would drown myself in whiskey, glass after glass of the burning liquid, until I couldn’t remember my own name anymore, and it would be a fucking relief.

  Sera sighed heavily and began to explain how she’d come to find herself in the emergency room: her friend had lost her temper and attacked her in her home. She’d smashed the shower screen in her bathroom and had stabbed her with one of the pieces.

  Sometimes, the explanations people gave to do
ctors were the unfortunate truth, but ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, they were falsehoods, made up to protect the person who’d hurt them. Didn’t sound like Sera was making shit up right now, though.

  I set my jaw as I slowly turned away. I’d taken one step when the curtain snapped back, and suddenly Sloane was standing in front of me, scribbling something down on Sera’s chart, the tip of her pen flying over the paper, leaving a string of indecipherable black scrawl in its wake.

  “Oh. You must be Sera’s boyfriend,” she said stiffly. She didn’t look up at me. “You can go in and wait with her, but she’s on a lot of pain meds. She might be a little out of it. I’m just going to find some instruments so I can investigate the wound. Be back in a moment.” She rushed off, head down, concentrating on her clipboard. I hadn’t even needed to speak to her.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Sera was propped up on the bed, wearing a surgical gown. Her face was pale and spattered with blood, hair all over the place. Her lips were a little blue, but other than that she seemed fine. Aside from the gaping hole in her stomach, that was. “What the fuck,” she hissed. “I knew Fix shouldn’t have trusted you.”

  “Calm down. I’m not here for you.” I stepped into the cubicle, rocking my head from side to side, trying to crack my neck in order to rid myself of the inexplicable knot of pain that had developed there during the past twenty seconds.

  Sera’s pupils were blown and dilated so wide, her entire iris was almost obscured by the black. “Carver’s been taken care of,” she informed me. “We dealt with her before she…” She visibly battled with the word ‘her’, struggling to say it without shaking.

  “A woman hired half the hitmen in the country to ex you out?”

  Slowly, Sera nodded her head. Her eyes were laced with a penetrating, deep kind of pain that told a tale of its own. Likely, she’d known this woman all along. Carver had been close to her. Someone she hadn’t suspected.

  “Yes. And there’s no point in hurting me now. You won’t get paid for it,”

  “I already got paid for it, if you’ll remember. And I gave the priest my word,” I snarled. “I wouldn’t break that.”

  Sera huffed out a rattle of disbelieving laughter. “What is it with you guys and the whole, ‘my word is my bond’ thing? You’re hardly upstanding members of the community.”

  “No. We’re criminals. The worst fucking kind. We rob, and we cheat, and we steal people’s lives. But when we promise we will or we won’t do something, you can bet your ass we’ll keep that promise. Every single time. Our word is our only currency in trust.”

  Sera stared, her gaze skipping over me, as if she couldn’t really focus properly; Sloane must have dosed her with the really good stuff. “If you’re not here for me, then why are you here, Zeth Mayfair?”

  I pouted, running my tongue over my teeth. “Is Fix taking care of the body?”

  “What?”

  “Is the priest taking care of Carver’s body right now? Is that why he’s not here?” That would be the only reason good enough for me to leave the woman I loved alone in a hospital bed.

  She blinked, looking down as she tugged at the sheet covering her legs. “He’s…dealing with the situation. But that’s none of your concern. You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “I don’t have to answer your question,” I said sharply. The glare she sent my way could have flayed a man alive. “But since you asked so nicely…I’m here because of a woman.”

  “Have you been paid to kill her, too?”

  “No.” My history with Sloane was far more complicated than that. I didn’t want her dead. Far from it. But I had wronged her. Wronged her in a way that kept me up at night, pacing the warehouse, running my hands through my hair like a fucking guilty teenager.

  Sera let her head fall back against the pillows. She was plainly exhausted. If Charlie hadn’t bought the text I’d sent him, proving that the woman was dead, I would easily have been able to rectify the situation now. Ending her life would have been a moment’s work, with her laid here, half out of her mind on morphine, incapacitated by a serious injury. “Somehow, I can’t imagine a man like you knows what it is to love another human being,” she said.

  “I never said I was in love with her,” I fired back. God, the very fucking idea of something so preposterous. It was laughable. But still…the fact that she’d made such a statement irked me. “That’s interesting, though. You can imagine that Fix is in love with you?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “I know he loves me.”

  “What makes you think he and I are so very different? We’re both in the same line of work. We both have blood on our hands.”

  She stared at me. Stared through me. Her mouth remained firmly closed.

  “He and I share many similar attributes,” I continued. “If you know he’s capable of love, then it stands to reason that I would be, too.”

  “Fix keeps saying the same thing. He keeps saying you’re both so alike, but I see a world of difference. He isn’t shut down. He hasn’t shut the world out. His heart...” She paused. “He has a heart. Maybe you do, too, but you’ll never allow anyone to touch it. To find a home within it.” She squinted, her eyes distant and glazed over as she searched my face.

  My mouth twisted into an unpleasant smile. No one spoke to me the way she was speaking to me. No one fucking dared. She was pretty fucking observant for someone in her position, though. I didn’t want to admit that she was right, but her words struck something inside me that I didn’t want to deal with right now. “I think I should probably be on my way, Sera Lafferty.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But first…why did you say that to me? Back in that stairwell. You told me I was the one who was no good for Fix.”

  I thought about leaving this particular question to eat away at her, but then I changed my mind. What would be the point? I smirked, placing my hands on the railing at the end of the gurney, leaning my weight against it. “Women like you are dangerous to men like us. Fix’s heart was probably just as dysfunctional as mine before he laid eyes on you. He was probably just as angry as me. And then you came along and took all of that away from him. You made him weak. You made him mortal again. Now, he’s no longer untouchable.”

  She processed the words—I could see her doing it. She appeared to consider her response carefully before she answered me. “And do you honestly think he would have it any other way? You think he would choose to go back to the way he was before he knew me, if he could?”

  The smile froze on my face. “I know he wouldn’t. And that is precisely why you’re dangerous. Because, once men like us fall into bed with women like you, the world could set alight and burn for the rest of time. Society could crumble and fall into ruin, we wouldn’t care, so long as you were safe.”

  Sera’s expression softened. She closed her eyes, breathing out steadily down her nose. “Then I apologize. I was wrong about you just now, Zeth Mayfair. You do know what love is. I can hear it in your voice. The only difference between you and Felix is that you’re just not ready for it yet.”

  EIGHTEEN

  SERA

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  I was healing up nicely, though I still ached from time to time. My stomach throbbed, reminding me to take it easy if I tried to take on too much, but other than that I felt stronger and stronger every day.

  I hadn’t told Fix about Zeth appearing at the hospital the night of Sadie’s…or rather Julia’s attack. On one hand, I couldn’t be sure that Zeth had actually been there. I’d been drugged up to my eyeballs, and everything had seemed so surreal and strange that I couldn’t have been sure I hadn’t imagined the conversation. Then there was the possibility that Fix might try to go after Zeth. If he knew the guy was aware of our presence here in Seattle, he might see him as a threat to my safety and hunt him down. I’d had enough violence and bloodshed recently to last me a lifetime. I’d tell him one day, when we’d figured out what we were going to do with ourselves
now that Sadie was out of the picture and there were no more contracts out on my life. Until then, I was going to enjoy the comfortable albeit weird existence we had now fallen into.

  Things were never going to be what anyone else might call normal for us.

  The foundations of our relationship had been formed during a time of intense unrest and fear, and now our existence together felt strange, as if we were holding our breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Could things be this calm for us now? Could they ever be simple? I’d be a fool to believe they would be.

  There were going to be bumps in the road. Obstacles we had to overcome in order to move forward. There were probably going to be days when Fix behaved so egregiously that I wanted to murder him for his actions. And there were definitely going to be days when I wanted to be alone, to run away and hide from the world, and I was going to try and push him away. I wasn’t afraid, though. We’d get through it.

  See, easy and simple weren’t concepts I was used to. I’d had to fight for everything in my life, and I didn’t regret that for a moment. The fight had shown me how strong I was. It had shown me the true value of happiness, and it had shown me the lengths I was willing to go to in order to protect it. It would be okay if I had to fight for a life with Fix from time to time. After all, he’d been fighting for me since the moment he set eyes on me, and it didn’t look like he was planning on stopping any time soon.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask. Why did you rent a car for your trip across country when you had this beauty sitting in the garage the entire time?” Fix asked, slapping the steering wheel as he headed north east, up toward Redmond.

  The Chevy Beretta I’d stolen from Sixsmith had gotten us as far as Washington State. I’d walked into a Walmart in some town I couldn’t even remember the name of anymore, with the purpose of buying Amy and I a few items of clothing. At the checkout, the woman in front of me was struggling to wrangle two tiny children while she’d counted out the change to pay for the diapers and baby food that sat on the conveyor belt. She’d looked tired and harassed and had nearly burst into tears when the guy waiting behind me had told her to hurry the fuck up. Outside, once I’d paid for the clothes I’d picked up, the same woman was waiting at a bus stop in the rain, her children quiet and round eyed, and I hadn’t even thought about it. I’d pulled the car over, told Amy to get her bag, and we’d gotten out.