Page 89 of Bourbon & Blood

“I’m on my way,” La Croix said, and the line went dead. He didn’t sound happy from the word go when he’d answered the phone.

I wondered why.

“I think you best call in to work now,” Hex said, and I blinked.

“Why? I mean, what if it’s not her?” I stared at him and his hand tightened on the wheel, making a creaking sound where his hand rubbed against the material of it.

“I think it’s best you call in anyway, Cher. Her or not, this ain’t gon’ be an easy thing.”

I swallowed hard and did what he said, or tried to. Clyde, my manager, was giving me an absolute ration of shit over it. Finally, he relented, but not before cursing me out. I lowered my phone to my lap, red-faced and sniffed.

“He always talk to you like that?” Hex asked.

I simply pursed my lips and shook my head.

Hex grunted, an annoyed but at the same time skeptical sound, and I hunkered down in my seat, turning to stare out my window.

Please don’t be her, please don’t be her, please don’t be her,I chanted in my mind the whole way there. I swear the rest of that drive went by in a blur.

I walked down the hallway with Hex at my side but I wanted La Croix. I wanted my frightening, stolid, sentinel of a lover at my side to hold my sweating hand and to lean on.

I was in a fog, terrified, and everything on my insides rebelling and trying to spill on the outside of me as I went back with the doctor. There would be a window between me and the body. As I stopped in front of the window, Hex at my back, I tried very hard not to look like I was going to hyperventilate.

“Are you ready?” the doctor beside me asked, and she sounded like she was down a long hall with an echo. I didn’t trust myself to speak, and simply nodded instead.

I steeled myself, took a deep breath, held it, and made eye contact with the person on the other side of the glass. They nodded at me in their surgical gown and their scrubs, the mask over their face. All I could think was that their eyes were kind, empathetic and so sad for what I would go through, which just served to ratchet up my level of dread even further.

Hex gripped my shoulder to steady me as the person behind the glass pulled back the sheet…

CHAPTERTHIRTY-TWO

Alina…

The sheet peeled back and anything I’d held in my heart resembling hope shattered into parts so fine it might as well have returned to the sand that the glass of it had been made of.

I crumpled, and screamed, at the bloated mess on the cold and sterile table. Her face so distorted, the only way I’d truly recognized the thing in front of me as my best friend was by the filigree black-and-gray tattoo along her collarbone and shoulder on the one side.

Hex caught me before I hit the floor and the curtains on the other side of the glass whisked closed at the touch of a button by the medical examiner out here with us. She’d been quick on the draw, the curtains whisking along their track before the morgue attendant could even pull the sheet back up to cover my friend.

I didn’t hold anything back, screaming my pain at the linoleum floor as Hex tried to hold me up and then, out of nowhere, he let me go and the arms I really wanted were around me. La Croix was suddenly there, as though appearing by magic. I looked up into his darkly inked eyes and his face was as stone – impassive, even as security and another doctor in a white coat loomed behind him.

I didn’t care. I was grateful. I wrapped my arms around him and practically crawled into his lap right there on the hallway floor.

I felt like I’d just been rent from the hollow of my throat to the top of my pubic bone, my heart, my guts, all my hopes and prayers to the goddess I believed in, spilling out onto the shiny linoleum floor. All the best parts of me, all the worst parts of me, seeping out across it to touch their shoes. All while my friend’s bloated rotting shell sat on that unforgiving table on the other side of the glass, covered only in a sheet, hidden only by a curtain.

Empty, like I was emptying out right here; except she didn’t have anybody to put it all back in. She didn’t have the ability to smile or laugh or tickle me or throw popcorn at me, or cry with me during the sappiest part of the romance movie, or positively drool over the male lead, or hug me, or slap some goddamn sense into me when I started one of my pity parties, or… anything! Anything anymore! Because she was gone… gone forever, and I felt like I was the only person out here looking for her, and I didn’t understand that!

I didn’t, because out of the two of us? Maya was better. Maya was stronger, and braver, and the baddest bitch I had ever met in my life, and I didn’twantto miss her like this. I didn’twantthere to be a world without Maya Bashaw in it.

“I got you, cher.” La Croix’s deep soothing voice broke through my frantic thoughts, broke through the shock and the pain, and I took it from him. I took from him the offered strength, the offered stillness, the numbness chasing the panic and the heartache away, if even just momentarily. I wept, and I knew there would be some more weeping to come, but for now, the initial storm was passing and it was thanks to La Croix’s steady presence, his arms wrapped around me and rocking me gently.

I sniffed, and the pressure he had on the back of my head, pressing it to his chest beneath his chin eased up. I drew back and looked up at him. He looked down at me and smoothed a thumb through the moisture slicking my blotchy face from my deeply ugly cry.

“There you go,” he murmured encouragingly. “That’s it.”

I dove into the shelter of his big arms and he held me tight for as long as I needed to finish getting it together.

There was paperwork, because of course there was, and then the devastating news that when they were done with my best friend’s body, that I wouldn’t be able to take her home or have anything to do with anything, really… that was up to her father. Her father who wasn’t interested in her at all so long as she did anything that was perceived as untoward.

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