Page 27 of First Blood
I flipped him off. He was one to talk. He barely hit five-five even in his platform boots, dyed his hair purple, and wore a lot of houndstooth suits, including to dispose of bodies, apparently. He strolled over to the cabin, still smiling. The other three laughed, shook their heads, and got to work, one opening up the silver SUV and starting to rummage through the wallets, another loping around the back of the cabin, presumably to check out the perimeter, and the third popping the back of the SUV to take a look at the bodies.
“Esther says hi,” Angelo said. “And here.” He handed me a paper bag. “She said you had a human.”
I caught a whiff of bacon and eggs and uncrumpled the top of the bag. Yep, breakfast sandwich and a bottle of water. Bless Esther. “I’m going to feed him and get him ready to go. He had a rough night.” Angelo raised an eyebrow, and I gave him the abbreviated story of the night before.
“Sounds like he earned the sandwich,” Angelo said. “I’ll have Jason drive you back in one of the cars. The rest of us can finish up here.”
That suited me fine. I headed back in to find Laurie and get him fed, and get us the hell out of there.
***
By the time Jason parked the SUV in my driveway, the atmosphere in the car had gotten a little tense.
Halfway back to Lancaster, I’d officially started to worry about Laurie. He’d hardly spoken a word while we got ready to go, though he’d wolfed down the sandwich in about three bites and guzzled the bottle of water, plus two more when I refilled it from the tap.
But he’d barely looked at me, and it was like the night before — the part of it that hadn’t been fucking awful, anyway — had never happened.
Or maybe to him the whole night fell into the category of ‘fucking awful.’ And I couldn’t even try to talk to him, because he’d told me in a few brief words that he wanted to sleep and that I should sit up front with Jason, and then crawled into the back seat and curled up alone. I cranked the heater up to the maximum, giving Jason a look of death when he started to protest, and then had to content myself with sneaking peeks at Laurie in the rearview mirror. With his hands folded under his cheek and the too-big clothes on, he looked like a little kid who’d fallen asleep on the way home from an unusually rowdy birthday party. I could hear him breathing, and his scent was driving me wild in the enclosed space. Jason didn’t seem to notice, which was a little troubling. Laurie smelled so fucking good. How did Jason not even twitch?
As we passed the ‘Lancaster: 5 miles’ sign, Jason commented, “So Esther wants to see you sooner rather than later. She was worried about you. Y’know. For Esther.”
I grunted at that. Esther began her human life somewhere in Eastern Europe and sometime in the sixteenth century — and it showed. She was a strong proponent of the sink or swim school of management. “She’ll have to wait until Laurie sees a doctor and gets settled in at home.”
“No doctor,” Laurie said. I turned around and found his eyes open, although he still wouldn’t look at me. The back of my seat was apparently really fucking interesting. “I just want to go home.”
“You could be bleeding internally.”
“I’m not.” I frowned at him and got ready to argue, but he added, “If I was losing that much blood, you’d know, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t I smell off to you?”
My mouth snapped shut. He would, and he’d been paying close attention to how my senses worked for him to know that. It would’ve been a lot easier to win an argument for once if he wasn’t smarter than I was.
“For what it’s worth, I graduated from med school once,” Jason put in. “In, like, 1932. I ended up founding a commune in Montana instead of practicing. But I think he’s fine.”
“There you go,” Laurie said. “I’ve seen a doctor. Now I want to go home.”
“Fine,” I growled. I’d inspected the bruise on his abdomen; his hip had taken most of the damage, and he’d be sore but fine in a few days. The cut on his head didn’t need stitches. “But you’re coming home with me, not going to your apartment. No,” I said, louder, as Laurie started to argue. “I’m not even sure your apartment has a door. There’s no heat and no food. My house. Or I’m taking you to a hotel and paying up-front for two weeks, including room service.”
Laurie gaped for a minute, frowned, humphed, and went silent. I knew he would. He didn’t want me spending a bunch of money on him.
And I had a guest room. Sort of. I had a room that was meant to be a second bedroom, which contained some cardboard boxes of junk and enough room on the floor for me to stretch out in. Laurie didn’t need to know he was taking the house’s one bed.
I meant to help Laurie out of the car like a gracious host — and hopefully get my arms around him in the process — but he’d already slipped out the back driver’s side door before I could get near him. He stood in my driveway, his arms wrapped around him — where mine ought to have been, damn it all — and shivering in the cold, his body language screaming to keep the fuck away from him.
My place wasn’t much to look at, with its weathered blue paint and nondescript architecture, and the brown bits of lawn poking through snow didn’t help. At least a few trees clustered around it, giving it some kind of visual…something. Yeah. They didn’t help much. When Jason backed out of the driveway, shaking his head and probably laughing his ass off at me, that left me and Laurie alone, looking at the house.
“Come inside and get warm.” I led the way with Laurie trailing after me. I didn’t know what the fuck to do. I couldn’t let him go back to his place, not least because there probably wasn’t anything left of it. The door I’d shoved back in place had likely been removed by some enterprising scavenger within an hour, and the apartment stripped bare of what little it contained.
But I had no idea what to do with him now that I had him here. I unlocked the door, pushed it open, and hit a light switch. Bare, slightly dusty floorboards. Two chairs on either side of a folding card table. A bookshelf full of random paperbacks.
Hardly home sweet home. Especially since there wasn’t any food here, either.
Fuck.
Laurie stepped past me, and I shut the door behind him. He jumped at the sound.
My heart sank the rest of the way down. I’d tried not to think about having him here, in my dusty, empty sanctum. For one, it wasn’t the kind of place you fantasized about bringing someone you wanted to impress. And for two — for two, the second he left I’d need to sleep at a hotel until I could buy a new house. A faint thread of honeyed oranges was already winding its sinuous way through the living room, into the kitchen, down the hall and up the stairs. Laurie would permeate the house and everything I owned, stamp himself on my mind’s eye everywhere he walked and sat, and then his absence would be more real and permanent than his presence had ever been.
Here he was, so uncomfortable that the sound of a door shutting was enough to startle him. I couldn’t offer him any hospitality. He’d leave as soon as he could, maybe that night if he insisted on it. And my house would be nothing but an empty shell that could’ve held a little warmth and life in it, if I hadn’t fucked up so badly.
