The Saved

by Cole McCade

  Silence. Then, slowly, warm arms slid around him, coaxed him—and he let himself lean against Walford, let the man hold him, cradle him, stroke his fingers through his hair with soft and soothing sounds.

  “What happened to you and your compatriots is not your fault,” Walford whispered. “Those are not lives you failed to save. Those are lives someone else took. You cannot carry the weight of their crimes.” He nudged Vin to rest his head to his shoulder, those long hands stroking over his back. “Have you ever grieved for them, Vincent?”

  Vin slid his arms around Walford’s waist, clutching to him, ignoring the dull pain in his side when the ache in his chest was so much harder to bear. “I…I am not even certain I know how.”

  “Try,” Walford said, and held Vin while he trembled, while he struggled not to sob.

  He didn’t know if he could call those long minutes grieving. Probably not even a step toward acceptance. But they were comfort, at least. A moment of quiet at the eye of a storm, a moment of serenity, of peace blooming like a single flower in the midst of a burned and barren field. Walford couldn’t fix Vin. He didn’t even know Vin; he knew only the wounded stranger he’d taken in off the street.

  But his acceptance and understanding were, nonetheless, exactly what Vin needed right now.

  He didn’t know how long he stayed that way, wrapped in Walford’s arms while his breaths evened out and the tension bled from him. But after some time, Wally threaded his fingers into his hair, pulling back to look down at him.

  “Why don’t we change your bandage,” he said, “and then see if you’re feeling up to standing for a few minutes. Get you out of this bed and at least into the living room for supper. The television there even has color.”

  Vin managed a hoarse chuckle and disentangled himself, sinking back against the pillows. “Color television and food. I am beginning to think you are an angel.”

  “Am I? I feel quite the sinner, these past few days.” And with a small, almost secretive smile, Walford pulled away, slipping off the bed. “I’ll be right back with the gauze.”

  Vin watched him go, then closed his eyes to wait—and kept them closed, letting himself relax under Walford’s deft touch as the man stripped his old bandages and cleaned the wound. It didn’t sting nearly so much now, that fever heat in his flesh no longer throbbing so hard, and the pressure as Wally applied the cool, oily salve no longer made Vin want to bare his teeth and lash back. But as Walford wrapped fresh gauze around his waist, the touch of those slim fingers lingered, brushing over Vin’s stomach, tracing the sensitive dips and rises of muscle across his abdomen. Vin sucked in a breath as his skin tightened, a brush of prickling sensation washing through him, curling deep and reminding of just how long it had been since he had felt the touch of a woman or a man, curious and exploring his body with such delicate, feinting caresses. He bit his lip, struggling to ignore it, but when Walford’s touch brushed lower as he wrapped the next round of gauze, dipping onto his pelvis only to skitter away, Vin’s cock throbbed, stirring almost painfully when it had been so long since he’d even thought about giving in to the pleasures of the flesh.

  Walford’s touch stilled, then pulled away.

  “Oh,” he said a bit faintly. “Oh dear. Oh my.”

  Vin opened one eye. Wally sat motionless, eyes wide, red flushed across his skin as he stared at the rise in the blankets with a sort of flustered consternation, almost guilt. Vin arched a brow, shifting to sit up carefully.

  “Apparently the blood loss was not that severe,” he said dryly.

  Walford made a choked sound, then fluttered his hands. “I wasn’t trying to—!”

  Vin couldn’t help himself. He laughed, shaking his head. “I am injured. Not dead.”

  Walford’s blush deepened, and he mock-glowered at Vin before sliding off the bed to gather the medical supplies. His movements were quick, bustling, too busy, his eyes lowered as he said crisply, “I suppose I should be flattered. An old man like me.”

  “You are not particularly old.”

  He scoffed. “Forty-two is no longer a spring chicken.”

  “You wear it well.” Vin reached out and caught Walford’s wrist, stilling his furtive movements. “You are lovely, Walford. It is not hard to see how someone could be attracted to you.”

  Walford’s mouth worked, his eyes widening again. “Oh. I. Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Well. Even if it is as you say, I’m no coy young thing anymore to be dallying about with flirtations with handsome, wounded rogues.” Then his smile returned, almost shy, and again Vin could see him as he had been years ago: his flamboyance hiding a certain sweetness, a soft and enticing way about him. Gently, Walford tugged his wrist from Vin’s grip and tucked the basket of gauze and ointments under his arm. “Supper. You can flatter me more after you’ve eaten.”

  Vin watched Walford swirl away, a bundle of energy and grace, before sinking back against the pillows with a smile.

  “Come desidera,” he said, as Walford disappeared from the room.

  As you wish.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IT WAS SIMPLE THING, KNOWING when to leave.

  It was harder telling himself it was for the best.

  For another week, Vin had allowed himself the luxury of Walford’s hospitality. His warmth. His company. Those shy, wondering glances, even if he’d never again leaned in close with that anticipation trembling between them and Vin never again woke with Walford tucked in the bed at his side, though when he managed to move slowly—his sides stitching up in darts and dashes of pain—between the bedroom and living room, the rumples of the blankets laid over the paisley-patterned sofa said Walford’s sleep was quick and restless.

  The days were spent quiet: watching old black-and-white films on TCM, reading Walford’s collections of worn, well-loved, leatherbound books from all over the world. Some he couldn’t even decipher, left scanning words in languages he couldn’t comprehend and studying the sketches in collections of ancient Indian texts detailing strange machines and methods of agriculture; he even found an original Italian edition of Foucault’s Pendulum, and entertained Walford for hours reading it to him until the man’s eyes lidded with pleasure and he slouched in his chair, liquid and boneless.

  “Your voice, dear boy,” he sighed, “in your native language…it is a joy and a sin, music and madness. Kings would pay a ransom that you might whisper them to sleep.”

  “Idiota,” Vin said softly, and Wally laughed while Vin continued to read. He only lasted for a few more chapters before his voice grew tired and his eyes heavy; his stamina improved day by day until he could stand up straight when he took his slow careful steps through the house, and the first day he was able to shower unaided was the day he thought he might yet again begin to believe in God…but sometimes he was still so tired, and hated his body for its weakness and human limitations.

  As he was able to explore, prowling about with Wally’s thin shoulders under his arm, he realized he was in an apartment built above a storefront—and the shop below was a sea of lace and taffeta and chenille, a wedding cake of dresses exploded everywhere. When he wasn’t tending to Vin, Wally was downstairs, managing the shop, tidying the racks and doing inventory and tallying expenses. He sold one dress, in the week that Vincent hovered and rattled around upstairs. One.

  “If that dress made that little girl happy,” he said as he kneaded dough for pecan rolls while Vin sat at the kitchen table and shucked pecans, “then I consider it a success.”

  “You cannot sustain a business selling one dress a week.”

  “Who says I want to sustain a business?” Wally laughed. “Nothing I’ve ever done has been about money.”

  “Then what is it about?” Vin asked.

  “Being happy, dear boy,” Wally sighed. “It is ever and always about being happy.”

  And Walford never seemed happier than on the two days—first Tuesday, then Thursday—when the shop door banged open and a girl’s voice called up from below.

&nb
sp; “Uncle Wally?” she said, before her steps rattled on the stairs. Vincent and Walford exchanged glances, before Vin rose as swiftly as he could and disappeared into the bedroom, hissing when his side protested standing too quickly by nipping him with a sharp bite of pain, like an animal protesting being moved. Walford had remained content to allow Vin to avoid certain details with oblique references, but neither of them needed details to know that there could be no witnesses to Vin’s presence here.

  If the girl sees you, he asked himself, will you kill her too?

  He listened from the bedroom, restless, feeling caged, while she and Walford spoke to each other in laughing, warm tones, the sounds of them in the kitchen reminding Vin of Venice, of his grandmother and his brother and the warmth of Italian family, the scents of food and the familiarity of cooking together; he thought, if he tried to fit into that scene again, he would be full of wrong edges that could only shred the portrait apart.

  He only caught snatches of conversation, murmurs about her father and some unspoken illness, her fears about leaving him, Wally’s soothing, soft tones. It was nearly dark before the sound of her voice receded, her footsteps trailing down the stairs, the door into the shop banging followed by the distant jingle of the bell over the door. Wally slipped into the bedroom moments later, smiling wryly as he wiped his hands on a kitchen towel, his pale face nearly glowing as if the girl had replenished the fuel that lit his endless warmth from within.

  “My deepest apologies, my boy,” he said. “You’d missed her visits before, but I dare say you’d prefer not to be spotted, eh?”

  Vin lowered the book he was paging through—The Red and the Black in the original French, forcing him to brush the dust off a language he hadn’t practiced in years—and lifted his head. “Who was she?”

  “My niece.” Wally nearly bounced to the bed and dropped down next to Vin. Fishing out his phone, he leaned in and swiped the screen until he pulled up a photograph from the gallery. “Willow.”

  In the picture, Wally leaned together with a girl, the phone held at arm’s length for a selfie while they both grinned. She was barely eighteen if she was a day, fresh-faced with wide, intelligent pale green eyes and a smile both sweet and spiced with a hint of cynicism. Her hair was a red so vivid it was almost crimson, falling around her face in soft layers and turning her pale skin translucent, her freckles dotting her cheeks like nutmeg sprinkles, and he wondered where he’d seen her before—only to lift his head and frown at one of the posters on the wall, a faded print of a woman on a trapeze, her red hair flying.

  “Her mother,” Wally said, following his line of sight. “My sister. Miriam. She loved to fly so much she flew away, but my little bird Willow is still here, picking at the edges of her nest.”

  Vin looked down at the phone again. “You love her.”

  “More than anything.” Walford’s voice was soft, fervent. “Enough to make terrible, hurtful mistakes on her behalf.”

  His smile faded, his eyes distant as he looked at the phone screen; the lines across his brow were written in the language of an old hurt, and Vin held his tongue when it wasn’t his place to ask—and yet Wally must have seen something in his eyes, for he shook himself with a self-deprecating smile.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, and then, when Vin arched a brow, “It’s nothing. I swear. Just an old man’s melancholy.” He tapped his phone screen, closing the photo app, then tucked the phone into his pocket and beamed at Vin. “I was going to go shopping for her today, actually. We have this thing, you know. I give her bits of colored glass. Every one used to be something else; every one has a story of its own, though we’ll never know it. I like to imagine that if you look through the glass at the color it paints the world, you’ll see a hint of that story.”

  “Do you ever?”

  “No.” Wally shook his head. “But I also like to think she looks through those colors and sees me, when I can’t be there. I like to think she knows that I love her, and that love is in those little pieces to take with her wherever she goes. She’s leaving for college, you know. The first time she’s ever been outside of Crow City.” He rose, smoothing his waistcoat. “I’d wanted to get her something special to take with her. Would you like to come along?”

  And it was then that Vin knew:

  He needed to leave.

  He needed to leave before this growing restlessness inside him turned rough and raw about the edges; he needed to leave before he ruined this, this sweetness and warmth of family that Wally still clung to even when the years should have made him cynical and cold. Vin had been ignoring his unfinished business, ignoring the dull ache inside him, as if he could pretend this warmth, this simple life, was for him when he didn’t belong here and couldn’t fit himself in as just another of the curios on Wally’s shelf. In the warmth and amberglow of the lamplight, it was easy to pretend the world wasn’t gray and cold and empty, that he wasn’t winter inside while Wally was all autumn colors and crackling fire.

  But the problem with pretending was that it was all a lie, and he was lying to himself if he thought he could set aside that dark voice inside him that said:

  Find him.

  Find what happened to the girl.

  And then take back every drop of blood he shed. Every drop he took from you, from her.

  He’s the man with the crooked tooth. He just put on another name, another face. You ended him once.

  You can end him again.

  Vin looked down, licking his lips, and folded the book closed. “If I am feeling well enough to go shopping, I am feeling well enough to leave.”

  Wally’s stillness was a third presence in the room, watchful and dark. He said nothing for long moments, only to sink down on the bed as if he had just wilted, the brightness and life taken right out of him, and now Vin knew more than ever that he needed to go. He was a shadow, and he could only darken Walford’s life.

  “It’s strange how much it hurts,” Wally said, with a soft, choked little laugh, then rubbed at his chest. “I’ve known you two weeks, and you spent most of that time asleep.” He lifted his head, looking at Vin with gleaming eyes. “Why do I want to ask you to change your mind?”

  “Because it is human, to form attachments. To look at others and see wants and needs, potential and promise.”

  “But that isn’t what you see, is it?”

  “I…” Vin hesitated, and wondered if his answer meant that he wasn’t human at all. “…no.”

  “What do you see, then?”

  “Blood,” Vin answered, and Wally closed his eyes and pressed his face into his palms.

  Vin tried to feel something, as he watched Wally struggle with himself. But the numbness was back, the spell of strange magic cast by Walford’s brightness lifting with the encroachment of reality—and all he could feel was a vague sort of regret, that he had ever come into Wally’s life to hurt him this way in the first place. He caught one of those long, pale hands, tugging it down from Wally’s face to enfold it in his own, then drew Walford closer until he could pull him into his arms.

  “I am sorry,” Vin said, and Wally curled into him with his breaths hitching and his fingers clutching at Vin’s shoulders.

  “Everyone leaves me,” Wally whispered. “Everyone.”

  “I am sorry,” he repeated. “But I was never meant to stay.”

  Wally said nothing; his fingers only dug harder into Vin’s shoulders. Vin told himself to let go, but his arms didn’t want to move. Walford was a familiar, safe warmth in his arms, and for just a desperate moment he told himself that he could make this real, make this right. That there could be a place for him here, if he held still long enough to try; if he waited out the cold and the numb, bitter dark long enough for the light to come through. But he thought of the girl—the red of her hair, the brightness of her smile, and the cynicism that said beneath her sweetness she had aged in ways she kept quiet and secret to herself. If he stayed, he would take Walford away from that girl, because this restlessness inside
him would not be calmed until the red in his thoughts was the red of blood spilled across the pavement and flowing in S-curve ripples into the streets.

  He began to pull back. Walford lifted his head, looking up at him with his eyes dark with a quiet wanting. Vin stilled, and that sharp tug in the pit of his stomach seemed tied to a string that moved with the parting of Walford’s lips. Wally’s hand drifted inward, curled against his throat, a hot thing against Vin’s pulse, his blood turning erratic and slow. And he could taste the longing on the air, as Walford leaned closer. As pink lips parted, and breath curled against Vin’s mouth, a promise of sweetness in those dark and yearning depths. He inhaled shakily, leaned closer.

  And pressed his fingers to Walford’s lips, touching their soft, yielding curves and stopping him with a shake of his head.

  “Don’t.”

  Crimson bloomed in Walford’s cheeks; utter mortification flashed in his eyes for a brief glimpse before he jerked back. “I’m sorry. I thought—I—I was mistaken, I apologize—”

  “Walford. Stop.” Vin settled his arms around Wally’s waist, keeping him close, halting him where he sat. “You are kind, and good, and soft, and warm. I am none of those things. I would hurt you. I would break you.” He brushed his fingertips beneath one black eye, already brimming with that ache that would only grow deeper, if he stayed. “I do not know how to do anything else.”