Page 54 of Shadow Man

I screamed when the bullet hit home. I cried as the stag circled and folded, as graceful in death as he had been in life— proud and defiant, and fighting the inevitable even as his heart stopped beating. I wanted so badly for him to get up and run. To fight back, even though I knew deep down in my five-year-old brain that some things couldn’t be brought back to life, no matter how badly you wanted it.

The memory isn’t a comfort. It lurks in the corners of my mind during the worst possible times—superseding love, all the Christmases, the trips to Disneyland California. Years later, when I was locked in a basement and forced to fuck five or six men a night, it mocked me like a sick perversion of karma.

Those men deserved to die, but they lived.

The stag deserved to live, and now he’s dying again in my arms.

The memory is all around me. It’s on the back seat of a car in an unfamiliar town, in an unfamiliar country; it’s cradling the head of a man in my lap, and pressing a fist to a wound that won’t stop pumping blood. It’s the surety that nothing is working, and that another is going to die, whether I beg or scream to a God we once both mocked each other for ignoring.

“Faster!” I scream at Vi.

“I’m trying!” she cries, guilt driving her foot to the floor, driving like a maniac.

The car gives another brutal jolt forward, and I hear him groan out. We’re doing sixty on dirt tracks where a slow crawl is a white-knuckled fairground ride. We’re still ten minutes out from her aunt’s place. There’s nowhere else to go. If I take Joseph to the local hospital, I’ll be condemning him to a different kind of death.

“Is there another route?” I say desperately. “A highway or something?”

“This is the fucking Amazon, Anna! It’s not the sunshine coast!” She’s crying as well. My pain is her pain—that’s how much our lives have merged in the last day. Grudges lose their power when their consequences are bleeding out in front of you. “Anna, I’m so sorry. I heard the gun go off in the store. I saw him dragging you into the restroom…”

I don’t blame her. I blame myself. I should have been honest…I shouldn't have been so intimidated by her hate.She wouldn’t have shot him if her process of deduction had been given a little more direction from me.

“This isn’t your fault, Vi.” I cradle his head in my arms, leaning over to check he’s still breathing. My tears rain down onto his bloody skin, their tracks leaving smears across his face. “Please don’t die,” I whisper, pouring what’s left of me into my plea. “I can't live without a shadow. It’s like asking me to live without a soul. Without you, there’s nothing to protect me from the darkness.”

His eyelids flicker. I feel his heavy hand on the back of my head, and then he’s crashing our lips together. He doesn’t taste of whiskey anymore. He tastes of pain, and something similar to that strange emotion I felt in the gas station store.

He breaks away and tries to speak. “Push harder,” he grits out, bringing his hand down on mine, the one that’s trying to stanch the bleeding. My motel towel is his tourniquet now. It’s more red than yellow; our spilled blood is as fused together as the rest of us.

We hit another pothole in the road and he groans in agony again, reeling off words that I don’t understand.

“I heard you, Cash,” he mutters. “I fucking ran like you told me to.”

I cradle him closer, hating how cold his skin feels. “I don’t understand, Joseph. Who’s Cash?”

Is this a relative? An old friend? It seems strange to think he had a life before crime.

His head falls sideways, and I know I’m losing him. I recall another story my mom used to tell me, about how a person’s memory bank is raided in their final moments.

Is that what’s happening here? Are these the names of the people he loved the most in his life? Are these the events that defined him?

I watch his lips part again.

“Caleb…”

Caleb?

“Díaz.”

Shit.

I watch his fingers tug at the silver chain around his neck. I’ve never noticed it before, but it has all of my attention when I see his bloody fist close around two gold wedding rings.

Joseph was married?

My self-control slips, and I let out a piercing, primal scream. I refuse to be this fucking useless to him. I refuse to let him die.

“Stop, Anna!” Vi slams her foot down on the brake and the car skids across the loose stones.

“Don't you fucking die on me, Joseph Grayson!” I scream again, pressing down on his wound so hard he’ll have no option but to feel me at the bottom of the dark well he’s fallen into. “You’re a sinner, but you saved me… You hear that, asshole? You fucking saved me. And I’m not talking about a cage in Amsterdam or a dark alleyway in Miami or a convenience store in Colombia. I’m talking about the fact that you gave a damn enough to be there in the first place. You never gave up on me. Hear that, shadow man? You were the only one, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to do the same to you now. Breathe. Just fucking breathe!” I collapse sobbing into the crook of his neck, willing him to climb back out of the well. At the same time, I feel his hand on the back of my head again before it’s sliding off, helpless.

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