Under the Bones

by Kory M. Shrum

  “The priest must’ve called 911,” she muttered, throwing back the cover and placing her feet on the cool wooden floor.

  His face at last revealed emotion. His right eyebrow hiking itself up onto his forehead. “You were with a priest?”

  “I must’ve slipped back after the surgery,” she added. She clearly wore enough gauze to suggest medical intervention. And she doubted she slipped away while on an operating table. All the bright lights shining down on her would have made it impossible. But the moment they took her back to her room to rest? Turned down the lights and adjusted the IVs? No doubt.

  And at least they hadn’t known who she was. Jane Doe was printed in place of where a name should be on the bracelet.

  She stood, and a wave of dizziness seized her. She swayed on her feet.

  And then he was there. His arms under hers.

  “Where are you trying to go?” he asked. The heat from his breath was on her face.

  “I need my vest,” she said. She hoped the priest had had the good sense to remove most of the armor before the paramedics arrived. He would’ve had to if he’d tried to staunch the wound until help arrived.

  “It will have to wait.”

  “My father’s vest—”

  “You won’t ever wear it again if you’re dead,” he said.

  She froze against him. Her limbs were like sacks of wet sand. Absolutely useless. It was the relentless gravity of the room that wouldn’t let go of her.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said softly into her hair. She realized how rigid his body was against hers. And the breath between his lips was thin and strained.

  He smelled like her soap.

  She pulled away from him under the pretense of inspecting her arm. She stood there in the center of the apartment, her back to him. She lifted the scrub sleeve to inspect the wound, but found only gauze soaked through with bright red blood. “This is why I can’t wear white.”

  He laughed. A short chuckle in his throat. “I can’t imagine it’s your color.”

  She frowned. “I love white t-shirts.”

  She wanted to say more. About how clean a white t-shirt felt. More than that. It had also been her father’s favorite. He seemed to have only two outfits in her memory. The black t-shirt beneath his adjustable vest. Black cargo pants and boots. Or a white t-shirt and jeans, which he wore on the weekends when he helped her mother around the house. Cutting the lawn. Pulling weeds. Repairing a fence.

  She squeezed her eyes shut against the memory of him.

  Since the truth had come out in June, and the story of Brasso’s betrayal splashed every paper and magazine for a week at least, it had been easier to think of him. A cold stone settled in the pit of her stomach the night he died, and it hadn’t loosened for the fourteen years that followed. Until the world knew again what she’d always known. Jack Thorne was a good man who didn’t deserve what happened to him. The truth brought her peace.

  But sometimes, when she wasn’t expecting it—like this very moment—a memory would emerge, bright and beautiful and it would suck all the air from her body.

  Those moments were hard and she suspected that as long as she lived, she would have them.

  She preferred this to the alternative—to forgetting the face of her father.

  She often stared at the photo of her father, now safely hidden beneath the kitchen utensil tray, and retraced the lines of his face. His strong jaw with the scar in the chin that Lucy said came from a motorbike accident when he was fifteen.

  He hit a stump and went clear over the handlebars!

  Those bushy brows and scruffy cheeks. She’d gladly give up an hour to this practice of remembering, if it meant he wouldn’t become a shadowy figure in her mind.

  Lou pushed back thoughts of her father and turned her attention again to the gauze on her skin. It was easy to remove once she worked her nail beneath. It was too soaked through to adhere to her skin properly. No matter. She’d use her own kit to replace it. She’d obviously popped a stitch or something.

  She turned toward the window to get a better look at the wound in the light.

  Konstantine whistled.

  She understood why.

  Her arm was black and blue and swollen from shoulder to elbow.

  The bullet hadn’t nicked the artery as she’d feared but had split the flesh in her upper arm completely, no doubt giving the look of a hotdog that had been sliced down the center, exposing the vulnerable inner meat within. They would’ve had to use a few internal sutures to close the gaping wound. Those would dissolve out of sight without her ever seeing them. But the tight sutures snaking across the surface of her bicep were seeping blood.

  Crimson bubbled up between the black nylon and she could see that one stitch in the middle had popped and frayed. Its snapped end sticking up from the puckered flesh. What had she done to snap it, she had no idea. Lay on it maybe, add too much pressure to the arm. It would have had to be a significant force.

  She understood why she’d bled so much now. This was a nasty flesh wound that would scar horribly.

  “You need to rest your arm,” Konstantine said, interrupting her assessment. “Do you have a sling?”

  She leveled a cold stare at his face.

  He held his hands up in surrender. “I’m not a doctor.”

  “If you want to play doctor, get my kit,” she said. It wasn’t until these words were out of her mouth that she realized their implication. If Konstantine had taken them perversely, she didn’t know because he’d already walked out of the room, his back to her as he walked down the hall.

  He appeared carrying her large box of medical supplies.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, elbows resting on her knees as he placed the kit beside her right leg.

  He popped off the lid, revealing the topmost tray of silver tools, packets of medicinal cream and bandages.

  She pointed at what she needed. “Those pliers, the peroxide and the gauze.”

  He fished each item out with deft fingers. She noted the bruises on the back of his hands had faded from the purple to yellow.

  She handed him the old bloody gauze and took the peroxide. “There are old towels under the second tray.”

  He handed her a faded green scrap of cloth, which she pressed against her arm, just under the wound. It was hard to clean up this particular part of her arm. It wasn’t on her dominant side, which helped. But it seemed impossible to hold the cloth under the wound and pour the peroxide at the same time.

  “I’ll do it,” he said and he already had the white cap off the brown bottle and was kneeling over her.

  Cold liquid hit the wound and burned like hell. The fizz and pop of the solution pricked her ears. But she’d felt worse. The burn was little more than irritating and she knew to save her real annoyance for what was to come.

  “There’s a lighter in the second tray. Top left.”

  He hesitated, but only until she gave him another cold stare. Then he was handing over the orange lighter.

  “I want you to pinch the two snapped lines together long enough for me to light them.”

  He didn’t move.

  “If you pinch the nylon together so that some of it sits above the pliers, I can melt it back together. This will prevent it from pulling at the wound. Grab the pliers too.”

  She watched him rummage through the trays. The light from the window fell across his neck and jaw. She realized she was staring and turned away.

  The wound was ugly.

  “Here, pinch them together.”

  He hesitated.

  “You’ll have to come closer than that,” she said, calmly. Her voice was utterly emotionless. And it remained so even as he had to scoot forward, placing himself between her legs.

  She swallowed. “I’ll squeeze the wound together and you clamp the wires.”

  “Okay,” he said, licking his lips.

  She added the slightest pressure to either side of the wound where the nylon had snapped, and the wound gaped ope
n.

  When the wires were overlapping, he clamped them together. His eyes were very green in the light and fixed in concentration on her arm. She caught herself staring at his full mouth, the scruff around his lips. She wanted to rake her fingernails over it. Maybe bite his lower lip hard enough to make it bleed.

  Instead she said, “Hold it. Twist the ends together if you can.”

  He did as she struck the metal on the lighter with her thumb until the orange-yellow frame sprung up.

  She lit the ends and watched them evaporate in a puff of smoke.

  When he removed the pliers, the black nylon lay fused over her skin once more. But when she bent to pick up the towel from the floor beside her left foot, she heard the slight pop and saw a fresh trickle of blood spring down her left forearm, rolling along the crease in her arm. The wound looked like a bloody mouth, opening to speak.

  “Or not,” she said. Damn. She had no choice but to restitch it.

  She sighed and motioned for the box. He leaned over her right leg, his abdomen pressing into her thigh. It sent a deep clenching thrill up the inside of her leg, centering below her navel.

  “Skaggs black?” he asked. And he turned toward her, making her glaringly aware of how close their faces were. And she knew he knew it too. Despite his calm mask and uninterested expression, she could see the pulse jumping in his throat.

  “That will do,” she said, hoping her own throat wasn’t betraying her. And if it was, so what of it?

  I could fuck him, she thought. She wanted to. But here, in her own apartment in her own bed, with someone who knew her name and her history…

  It was a sobering effect, the light that removed all shadows. The desire died away almost instantly. Her back straightened as she accepted the little paper packet.

  She tore open the white packet and tapped its contents out onto the back of her scrubs, using the top of her right thigh as a sort of table. A curved needle was already attached to the black nylon. And the string was coated in antimicrobial agents, or so said the packaging. So no need to worry about using the peroxide again.

  “Do you need anesthesia or—” he began.

  She inserted the needle through her skin before he could finish. It was Konstantine, not herself, that hissed, rocking back onto his heels.

  “Cazzo,” he said.

  Lou didn’t know much Italian, but knew this was a swear of one kind or another.

  “You can look away if you’re squeamish,” she told him.

  He didn’t. Instead he said, “What the hell happened?”

  “I was shot.”

  “How?”

  “A bullet ejected from a gun and I happened to be in its way.”

  Whatever he wanted to say next, he dropped it.

  She glanced past him at the green digital clock on her stove. It was nearly one in the morning. “After I’m done you can go to bed.”

  He laughed but understood a dismissal when he heard it. He repacked her kit and carried it out of the room, leaving only the bit of gauze and tape she needed to redress the wound. With his exit, he took that wall of heat and her hyperawareness of his body in relation to hers. It was as if someone had opened the window and let the night breeze wash in over her.

  When he returned he said, “How do you get those supplies? Some of them are for doctors only.”

  “I take them from medical supply stores or pharmacies.” How many times had she slipped into some dark supply storeroom at night, stuffing her bag with gauze, tape, needles and bottles of disinfectant.

  “You’re a thief?” he asked. He smiled as if amused.

  “I leave cash on the counter.” Usually.

  Unless she knew that pharmacy was owned by a mob, which sometimes she targeted, or if the pharmaceutical company was Satan incarnate. Then she took without care.

  She stood and crossed to the kitchen. Tossing the suture needle into the trash underneath, she washed her hands in the sink and added the gauze Konstantine had left aside for her.

  “Go to sleep,” she told him. “You’re healing.”

  She motioned to her bed.

  He shook his head. “You’re more wounded than I am now. You take the bed.”

  She didn’t want to tell him she couldn’t. That the pillows, sheets and all of it smelled like him. That the idea of sleeping in the apartment where he also slept—freely, of her own will—was like agreeing to something.

  But he’d already tucked a cushion under his head and turned away from her, offering the long plane of his back in the light from the window.

  And the fact remained that she did need rest.

  It wasn’t only the pain wracking her body. Now that the danger had passed, her body ached. Every muscle had grown stiff and unforgiving. Dragging three corpses across worlds will do that do you…

  And there was the fact that Lucy was on her radar.

  The compass inside her whirred softly, a tug urging her to go and visit the woman again. It wasn’t the firehouse alarm that had woken her weeks ago. The night Lucy’s health turned a corner, Lou hadn’t been fully awake before she found herself kneeling down and scooping her aunt off the floor.

  A hop-skip-and-jump away and she’d delivered the woman to the hospital she’d never visit for herself.

  The woman. Already her mind was taking steps to distance herself from the inevitable. As if Lucy wasn’t the one who’d wrapped her arms around her the night her parents died. As if reducing her to nothing, to no one, could lessen this blow.

  It was Lucy who had assured her that her parents were gone—irrevocably gone—but that she wasn’t alone.

  I can never replace what you’ve lost, her aunt had said. How strange she had seemed at first. This hippie with bleached hair in a long flowing skirt and arms as defined as any man’s. But I can give you a home and love you and help you in a way they couldn’t.

  She had meant slipping of course. Not only the fact that she was now offering Lou room and board and an alternative to six years in the foster care system.

  But she couldn’t see Lucy now. Not looking the way she did, shot and bleeding. It would only upset her. Make her worry.

  She pulled back the covers and slid between the sheets. She leaned across the mattress and felt the plastic slats of the blinds. With restless fingers, she pried them apart, one by one, welcoming more and more light into the bed.

  It had been a while since she’d tried to sleep in this bed at night. It was easier to sleep from dawn until the late afternoon, when the sunlight was strongest. She could fall into deep slumber then, without any fear that dreams of the men she hunted may deliver her to their bedrooms.

  But it was more than that.

  Her nighttime habits had also taken over, hadn’t they? It was easier to hunt by night. Under the cover of nightfall, stalking her prey was almost too easy. It was when she tried to do it during daylight hours. When they themselves may be more alert, but also the shadows against her. Shadows she could work, true. And it was only the light against dark that projected them. And yet, night was her natural ally. She didn’t need a shadow when she was hunting under the cover of night. The world itself had become a shadow for her.

  She let her back soften into the mattress, welcoming the support against her aching body. But she found a spot she could lay in.

  She didn’t think she could sleep though. Not only because a man lay less than two feet from her, his skin wrapped in the moonlight. The back of his neck a tuft of black hair.

  But she had to try. Fighting sleep would only make healing harder.

  “How did you survive?” Konstantine asked.

  His voice was far too intimate in the darkness. Not full volume, but enough above a whisper to be clear.

  “I slipped into a confessional. I guess the priest took pity on me and called an ambulance.” And I’ll take pity on him if he still has my father’s vest.

  “Not tonight,” Konstantine said, turning over on the sofa. The coils creaked beneath him. His eyes shone like onyx in
the dark. “The night Angelo came to your house, how did you survive?”

  In her mind, Lou heard the quick blat-blat-blat of gunfire. Saw the strobe lights flash in the window and knew her mother was dead. Saw the side gate fly open and a ghostly hand shoving aside a lilac bush. Petals the colors of bruises rained down on the lawn. That glimpse of the phantom illuminated by the motion lights before her father lifted her off the ground and threw her into the water knowing it would save her.

  Her back arched instinctively. Fourteen years separated that moment and this one, but she still felt the cold water knocking the air out of her, before sucking her down, enclosing her limbs like tendrils of seaweed. That unforgettable image of her father turning and running away, his white shirt an ethereal haze, he himself a target drawing the gunfire away from her.

  “We were talking in the backyard when they came,” she said. “He threw me into the pool.”

  “Ah, yes. Like in the bay when you took Ryanson. Your father knew you could exit through the water?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened when you came back?” If he had looked too interested. If he had come up onto his elbow, turned this into some slumber party share time, she would have shut down.

  But he’d closed his eyes.

  Dark lashes spread across his cheeks and serene light shined on his skin.

  She wouldn’t give him all of it.

  Wouldn’t recount for him what it was like rising out of Blood Lake with the full weight of her terror on her shoulders. Wouldn’t tell him how she’d hidden on that strange shore until her terror of the place overtook her and then she tried to go home.

  But it hadn’t been their pool she’d crawled out of. It had been a river. And then a bathtub that had been left to fill while its owner stepped out of the room for a book or glass of wine. Then it had at last been a pool, but not hers. Rather an Olympic pool in a closed gym. She cried herself hoarse on the shallow steps, the eerie glow of the water not frightening her as it always had.

  She had a new fear. And it had eclipsed her world.

  Finally, she made it home to find the house crawling with officers and not one of them was her father. They’d wrapped her in a beach towel and sat her on the front step with a glass of water she never touched.