Blood and Vows.

Chapter 20 — Old Town, New Ghosts

Old Town wore night like an old coat—frayed at the cuffs, smelling faintly of rain and frying oil, useful because it had so many pockets. Alex kept her head down and moved with the tired momentum of a person who’d been sent for aspirin at the end of a long shift. The streets here curled instead of ran straight. Lamps leaned over cobbles the way gossipers lean over fences. She chose the routes with broken cameras and older locks, places where a face could be just another shadow and a stain could be just another spill. In her mind, the barn was a red pin on a private map. Samantha lay there under dusty rafters on a borrowed table, blood leaking through a makeshift compress, breath counting down the seconds Alex could spend away. Every turn of her feet had to balance the two clocks: how long it took to get what she needed; how long it took to die without it. She didn’t run. Running pulled eyes. She let the city’s small dramas become her cover—an argument at a doorway, a kid chasing a bottle downhill, a bus sighing as if it were tired of being a bus. The first pharmacy she passed had too much glass and too much light. The second was better: a narrow place with a bell that rang tiredly and shelves that looked hand-dusted. She went in like someone who knew exactly where the painkillers were. Bandages first: two rolls of sterile gauze and a stack of large pads. Adhesive tape. Antiseptic—clear, unbranded, cheap because cheap draws no comments. Disposable gloves. A packet of butterfly closures. A small pair of blunt-nosed scissors in a blister pack. She added a lighter and a plain cotton scarf from a peg near the counter; the scarf could hide blood or be torn into strips. Last, a single-use syringe and a suture kit that looked like it had been sitting in the back since the last century. She didn’t like the quality, but this wasn’t about like. “Receipt?” the clerk asked without looking up from his TV. “No.” She paid cash, coins and notes she’d broken across three different pockets so that none of them looked like much alone. No questions, no small talk, no name. The bell rang the same tired ring as she left, and the street took her back like it had only paused to breathe. She wrapped the scarf loosely around her neck to disguise the dark stiff smear on her jacket. Her hands knew what they were carrying; her face didn’t. A normal face buys normal things, walks a normal pace, looks at a poster when it passes and doesn’t count rooftops. She forced herself to look at the poster. Three blocks from the pharmacy the city’s rhythm shifted. It was small, like a skipped beat and then a correction, but it was real. Headlights at the end of the street came into sight and did not brighten the way they should have if a driver had been impatient to get home. The car’s nose appeared, paused, nosed on again. Black paint, expensive patience. Alex eased herself into the alcove of a shuttered shop and became a pair of shoes. The car rolled past at a crawl, quiet enough that she could hear the static breath of the air conditioning. The driver stared forward, hands at ten and two with a zealot’s steadiness. The passenger leaned toward his window as if angling for a better view of a thing he already expected to see. He went by her like a photograph sliding past a lightbox—flat, undeniable, wrong. Jacob. Nothing changed in her body on the surface, because surfaces tell stories to bystanders. Everything changed underneath. The world tilted the way it does when an elevator starts and your bones don’t get the memo. The morgue’s fluorescent hum came back to her. The numbers. The way the tech had said them, as if math were a kind of prayer. The way she had believed because if you don’t believe some things, your mind spends the rest of its days running at a wall. He didn’t see her. The car went on and his profile passed like a knife passes a vein without breaking it—near enough to feel the cold, far enough to leave no mark anyone else could see. The mouth was a fraction thinner. The posture was a fraction harder. The tilt of the head was exactly the same, that angled curiosity she’d once wanted to wake up next to. He held a phone loosely at his thigh. He had always liked to hold tools like that, not because he feared losing them, but because he trusted his hands to know where the edges were. Another pair of cars slid into their pattern two streets away. A triangle. A jaw. The edges of a net. Alex didn’t turn her head to follow. She counted to three, and on three a bus roared past and made the lamps blink, and she stepped out of the alcove under its noise and became a person again. The bag thumped lightly against her ribs. Her heart thumped much harder. She told it to be quiet and it ignored her because hearts do. On the way back she changed streets twice, not because she thought she was tailed—she hadn’t felt a hook set—but because habit is a second skin you don’t take off on nights like this. The old neighborhoods were good that way; they offered choices. Every corner gave you a lie to tell a camera and a story to tell your own feet. When she reached the block with the disused grain elevator, she didn’t look up. She had looked up earlier when the light had been different and the sky had decided to be on her side. The barn crouched behind a sagging fence like something that wanted to sleep and kept being asked to remember. Alex slipped through the gap where the boards had given up, shouldered the door until the latch that didn’t work pretended to work, and let the cool, dusty dark of the inside fold around her. The smell was hay gone old, motor oil old enough to be sweet, and the faint irony of rust. Samantha lay where Alex had left her: on a worktable padded with a coat and a drop cloth, the compress dark and sodden against her shoulder. Her face had the waxy sheen of a person whose body was trying to ration itself. But her eyes opened when the door’s hinge voiced its opinion. She focused with effort and found Alex’s outline. The relief there was not dramatic. It was practical, like a hand finding the rail in the dark and letting the knees ease. “You came back,” she said, voice a thin scrape. “I said I would.” Alex set the bag down and all but dropped into movement. Gloves on. Scarf off. Tape, gauze, antiseptic laid out in a ritual line that made the barn look briefly like a field clinic instead of a place where nothing new had happened in years. “I’m going to make this better and I’m going to make it hurt.” Samantha nodded like a person signing a contract without reading the small print because the big print is obvious. Alex peeled the soaked compress away. Blood had glued it to skin; the separation made both of them wince. The wound under it was what she’d hoped and what she’d feared: a ricochet’s starburst, dirty from stone, not a tunnel, not a crater. No exit. No obvious projectile. Good for not bleeding out on the floor. Bad for sleep later. Bad for fever, if you believed in fever as a kind of animal. “Look at me,” Alex said, because focus is anesthesia’s poor cousin. “Count to ten and don’t be brave. Be loud if you need to.” Samantha smiled at that, or tried. “I don’t… think brave is the problem.” “Good.” Alex twisted the cap off the antiseptic and poured. The fluid hit the exposed flesh and the barn became a cathedral to one long, contained scream. Samantha’s back arched. Her hand found the table edge and gripped so hard the tendons stood. Alex kept pouring until the run-off ran clean and the grit she could see was grit she could flush from edges, not from inside. She dabbed, quickly, gently, then more firmly when the edges told her they would stay. Next: heat. She snapped the lighter, flame small and defiantly ordinary, and held the blade of the folding knife in it until it changed color a shade. She let it cool a breath on the cold side of her glove and touched it to a bead of blood that wouldn’t stop. The smell made the old wood shift in memory. Samantha’s breathing turned into old-fashioned locomotive sounds—shuddering, relentless, fueled by a will that had decided not to be embarrassed by noises. “Good,” Alex said, because praise at the right volume can be a bridge. “Good.” She used butterfly closures to pull the most stubborn edges together; tape to secure the world that would move. She folded a stack of gauze pads over and under and around, building a white fortress that would need attention in an hour and then in three and then in the morning. She wound the roll around Samantha’s torso, under the opposite arm to keep the dressing hugged to rib and shoulder. The work had rhythm. The rhythm was faster than comfort and slower than panic. “How bad is it?” Samantha asked between breaths. “Bad enough that you don’t get to pick up anything heavier than a glass for a while,” Alex said. “Not bad enough to die from if we’re careful and the air likes us.” “That’s… specific.” “I’m a specific person.” She slid the scarf under Samantha’s wrist and tied it behind her neck to make a sling. The cotton took the weight, and with the weight off, the shock stepped back a half-inch and let color creep into Samantha’s face. “Drink.” Alex unscrewed a bottle of water and put it to her lips. “Small sips. I don’t want it coming back up because you tried to impress anyone.” Samantha obeyed. The first mouthful went down like gravel. The second went down like water. After the third, she let her head fall back against the support Alex had wedged behind it. The barn roof was a pattern of dark and darker. Small insects busied themselves around a bulb that wasn’t plugged in. The night outside had quieted into the kind of quiet that meant the city was changing shifts. “Your hands don’t shake,” Samantha said after a while. “They can shake later.” Alex checked the dressing again, fingers light, eyes all business. The hemostasis held. For now. The brown paper under Samantha’s shoulder had printed a red map and then stopped expanding. “Tell me if the world tilts or turns into snow.” “It’s already both.” “Then say so again.” Samantha turned her head to look at her, as if she had a right. “You’re not afraid of me.” “I don’t have time to be afraid of you.” Alex set the empty wrappers aside with the same care she’d use setting a charge. Trash can give you away. So can the lack of it. “Close your eyes for sixty seconds. Not sleep. Just… let your brain set the table for the rest of you.” Samantha obeyed that, too. Sixty seconds became ninety. Ninety became a slow exhale that learned how to be longer. Alex sat back on her heels and let the wave of adrenaline recess like a tide. That was always the dangerous part: the first relief. It told lies. It said things like safe and finished and stay. She let it talk and didn’t listen. She peeled the gloves off, wiped her own hands, rewound her brain. Outside, a car drove past the mouth of the lane too slowly and then corrected to a normal speed as if it had remembered something. The barn’s wall held the sound at the right distance. Alex stood and eased the door an inch open, just enough to make sure the world was the world. Old fence. Dirt road. No fresh shoe prints except her own and the ones from when she’d carried Samantha here, a stagger and a line. The stars were indifferent. She liked them for that. When she closed the door again, Samantha was watching her. Some of the shock had drained; some had decided to stay and be a roommate. The woman’s eyes had that too-wide look of someone who understood what could have happened in an abstract way and then accepted the non-abstract weight of still being here. “Who were they?” Samantha asked quietly. “Back there.” “Men who get paid to stand in doorways,” Alex said. She kept her tone even. Names weren’t useful in this room. “Men who do what they’re told.” “And the one who wasn’t a man doing what he was told?” Alex’s jaw worked once. “We don’t have to talk about him.” Samantha accepted that, perhaps because acceptance had become a habit in the last hour. She swallowed another mouthful of water, made a face, and said, “I’m going to be sick.” Alex turned her gently and waited with a hand steady on her back while the body decided to protest the antiseptic and the pain and the fact of existing. It wasn’t much. It was enough to prevent worse later. When it was over, she cleaned the corner of Samantha’s mouth with a swipe of gauze and handed her the bottle again. “Sorry,” Samantha whispered. “Don’t apologize for being a mammal.” It drew a sound that might, in other weather, have turned into a laugh. Minutes stretched. The barn’s dust made its own weather beams in the thin light. Alex rearranged the supplies into a pile that said planned, not panicked. She wedged a plank under one leg of the table to remove the tilt. She made a note of how long the lighter would last if she had to sterilize twice more. She made another note of how long she could keep this up without sleep. Longer than most, not as long as she liked to claim. Samantha broke the quiet first. “We can’t stay here.” “No.” “They’ll look for me.” Her gaze slid toward the door like the door could hear its name. “They’ll look for you now.” “They already were.” The admission cost less to say than to lock away. “We’ll move before dawn.” Samantha took that in. The breath she let go after carried something heavier than air. “There’s only one call to make.” “No.” It came out faster and harder than Alex intended. She hadn’t had time to decide what to do with the word no, and the word no hadn’t had time to learn manners. “Absolutely not.” Samantha looked at her—not defiant, not pleading. Just looking, the way accountants look at a ledger and find the line that decides a year. Her voice was thin, but it was steady. “He’s the only one who can pull us out of this alive. You know it.” “I know a lot of things,” Alex said. Her mouth felt dry again. “Most of them say he’s the last person—” “Then ignore most of them.” Samantha’s hand lifted a fraction and fell, the effort too expensive. “You dragged me out of a death sentence. You did the impossible part. Let him do the ugly part. Call him.” Alex turned from the table as if the door could offer her a better argument than the one that was happening. The night outside didn’t change. Somewhere far away, a siren announced that it intended to be someone else’s problem. The pressure under her breastbone had started when the black car went by and had settled there like a squatter. She closed her eyes and saw Jacob’s profile again, crisp as a coin. The tilt of the head. The life in it. The void it cut. Samantha’s voice reached her back. “Please.” He’s the only one who can pull us out of this alive. The words were ugly because they were true. Her body understood triage. Her mind understood maps. Her heart understood things she would not let into the room. Alex opened her eyes. She set her jaw the way you set a dislocated shoulder. When she spoke, it sounded like she’d had to use a tool on herself to do it. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll call Sebastian.” Samantha nodded, closed her eyes, and let out a breath that might have been relief, might have been pain trying to say thank you without losing dignity. Alex moved to the corner, picked up the burner she’d cached in a tin under a stack of oily rags, and checked the battery with a touch that knew how to make machines keep secrets. In the dark of the barn, with the old wood holding its breath and the city briefly forgetting their names, she understood that the line she’d crossed tonight didn’t end at this call. It ended somewhere she couldn’t see yet. She dialed anyway.