Page 72 of Saint of the Shadows

Marisol kicked wave after wave of water in his direction. “He was right there! He needed us!”

“And what were we going to do? Storm the place like we’re invading Poland?”

She sucked in a snippet of air, and whispered, “Useless pig.”

He put a finger behind his ear, “I can’t quite hear you being a crazy bitch.”

Something possessed her to charge at him. She crashed into him. The heels of her hands landed with muted thuds into his thick chest muscles. “Can you hear me now?” She wished the chest she struckwas Vincent’s. “You let everything break and then call yourself a hero when you shoddily glue it back together!” And he took ineffective blows like Vincent took them. She hated him more. Foam must’ve flown from her mouth. “You’re just a swinging dick with a shit clearance rate!”

He stood expressionless and unmoved, a mountain, and she obviously wasn’t a prophet.

She drew back her fist. “A useless..." And swung. “...piece of—”

He stepped back. She slipped on a pile of coagulated dead leaves and muck in front of her and fell onto her knees, smack into Shadowhaven’s toilet—her new home.

He kept his sights on the slaughterhouse. “Get up.”

Marisol hugged her knees to her chest. The water drenched her jeans and reminded her that after that tantrum, rolling around in poop water seemed like her proper place. “No.”

“You’ll get dysentery.”

“So?”

“Frankly, if you diarrhea yourself to death out here, we’d attract a lot of unwanted attention.”

Tears filled her eyes as she tried to bring herself back to reason. “I don’t care.”

“You damn well do, kid! We’re fixers. If you don’t like that we put broken things together, why the hell do you work in an ER?”

Her job meant she had mended things for the better. At sixty percent, what the fuck did he or his homicide cronies ever fix than have a name in black for the quarterly statement? The ER would be shut down at a sixty percent success rate. Maybe if he had the balls to walk a beat, there’d be no Bloodsuckers. Or Cazzes. Or any other chewed up people this city spat out. Maybe try prevention instead. To articulate that would mean she’d have to swallow a drop of sewer water. It would be best to keep that bit to herself.

So, she rooted her wet butt to the ground and stayed silent. Icy water numbed her lower limbs. When she thought about it, her actual pain came from her devastated heart. Her inability to save Vincent as he suffered perpetually felt like a cleaver to the chest. But to make it worse, watching him get pulled apart and slowly regenerate was like having the cleaver pulled out over and over, and not knowing if he’d come back as a man or zombie made it worse when she realized…

She hadn’t returned those words when it mattered.

She hadn’t long to clutch at the phantom pain before Tobias grabbed her by the front of her hoodie and almost lifted her out of the water. “I stopped you from shattering, didn’t I?”

Her vision turned into watercolors, blurring Tobias’s features into splatters. She ran her fingers over his calloused knuckles to pry him off. Once hisgrip tightened, her chin trembled. Was he going to shake her? Hit her? Snap her neck? Kiss her?

His face turned bright red. He breathed in through his nose slowly and out again. Then he let go of her and skulked a few steps away, keeping his back to her. “You’re good, kid, but you’re not that good. To face the remnants of the Mob and the Bloodsucker, we’d need a whole force.” He turned and pointed a finger. “And I’d sooner convince my Commissioner I found a unicorn that could fart rainbows than I could get him to use the police to save our good-as-dead friend.” By the time he said friend, he seemed defeated, and his posture sank, no longer tall. After a sigh, he continued just above a whisper, “I take the successes where I get ‘em. You’re alive. It’s a good day.”

She returned a disgusted snort. Tobias knew nothing. Vincent couldn’t die.

His strength came back. “Do you wanna be like Caz? Destined for a body bag or prison?”

Was he kidding? She had spent the last twenty years of her life ensuring she was the antithesis to Caz. She made it this far, striking no deals and owing no favors. But if she couldn’t get the police to save Vincent…

Marisol stood and wiped the water from her upper lip. “Sorry.”

Without a pause, Tobias shrugged. His eyes turned back to their kaleidoscopic color.

Marisol reached in her pocket and drew out the commlink button. She wished she knew Morsecode. She’d tap it to say, “I will save you,” or “I’m coming back.” Instead, she pushed the button four times.

Each click was for the four words she hadn’t said to Vincent.

“C’mon, kid,” Tobias said.

They trudged up the hill, climbed over the fence, and pulled their coats from the barbs. “I haven’t told you everything,” Marisol said. “Our friend is like the mouse. The DNA that Annie synthesized? That was his. He can’t die. You think he’s good as dead, but he can’t die.”

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