“It’s okay. He sucked anyway. You’ll find someone so much better.”
He chuckled. “Who am I going to find better than him? He looks like an angel, Edy.”
“Anybody would be better than that slime ball. Gives me the heebies.”
His sniffles died out. “You were right, D…You’re always right.”
I didn’t reply. I took no joy in being right.
Peeling his face away from the crook of my neck, he blinked up at me. “You’re not going to school?”
I studied him in return. Beneath the red rings, purple bags had formed under his eyes. The outline of his face seemed thinner, although that had to be a figment of my imagination. No one could look so different in twenty-four hours.
In a word, he looked tired. Very, very tired.
“Did you sleep last night?”
“As much as I could, but…” he shifted under the discomfort. “It was hard. I dreamed of him.”
I winced. Dreams of Gregory must’ve been contagious.
“Does it show?”
I shook my head and I lied. “No, not at all. Just wondering.”
“You feeling okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s only a headache.”
He smiled a bit and landed a kiss on my forehead. “Feeling good enough for school? I could really use a distraction right now.”
“S…sure. We’ll have to rush.”
While I hastened to brush my teeth, Zach walked between my bed and my closet, tossing t-shirts back and forth until he found one worthy enough to his tastes. At the slightest lapse in motion, he swayed on his feet.
As usual, my parents waved their goodbyes on my way out the door, with Dad looking the slightest bit more apprehensive at the sight of the ghoul beside me. “Drive slow,” he bid instead of farewell.
“Of course,” I forced myself to smile. Come to think of it, I felt pretty ghoulish, too. Reaching up to hug him goodbye met me with resistance not unlike swimming through tree sap. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
Zach took my hand, pulling me toward the parking lot. His fingers shook. After the door separated us from my parents, he stood stock still. “You got your permit, right?”
“Well…yeah? Why?”
“I think I might catch a nap on the way. Do you think you could drive?”
“Sure, of course.” My voice betrayed my reluctance. “I can drive.”
I didn’t recognize the feeling of the driver’s seat beneath me. It had been quite a few months since I’d last driven anything and, when I’d practiced, it had been behind the wheel of my dad’s pickup truck. This little car snarled like a hunting beast at the slightest touch, throwing us into the road at ten over the speed limit. Beside me, Zach fell instantly to sleep.
My own eyes hung at half-mast. In the silence, they grew heavier, reminding me of the bliss that came with dreamless sleep. The whole of my body pleaded for it, skin prickling as though under the business end of a thousand needles.
The blare of a horn startled my eyes open. I hadn’t even felt them close.
Seized by panic, I chewed on my tongue until I tasted blood. If I’d thought it would wake me up, the metallic taste made me woozy and I found myself wanting to retreat into unconsciousness all the more.
Relief came.
An unholy shriek resounded through my ears, forcing me awake again. The car shifted unceremoniously sideways. Metal crunched against metal. The thought struck me from a million miles away:
We’re flying…
Far below, a red pickup truck jerked to a halt, bumper folded, hood spewing grey smoke. It was a truck I recognized. A truck my clouded mind began to assemble had hit us.
Time moved slowly.
Zach’s window shattered in long, spidery cracks, and the world turned overhead. I held tight to my seatbelt, waiting for the inevitable crash of steel on pavement.
The crash came first. Then the pain.
The windshield split on impact but remained, surprisingly, intact. We tipped precariously from one side to the other before the weight became too much on my end, throwing my head into the glass and gravel and trapping my door against the road.
Blackness danced across the edges of reality like a dark wave threatening to pull me under. I fought to stay afloat, to take inventory of my injuries, but only one coherent thought came through:
Zach.
“Zach?” My seatbelt pinned me to the window, contorting around a break in my arm. I couldn’t reach him. “Zach!”
He didn’t reply.
Jerking against the constriction, I shrieked at a protest in my leg. The middle console split into teeth-like protrusions around my thigh. Blood flowed freely through my torn denim. Stuck.
And Zach was unconscious.
His body slumped over the dashboard as the airbag deployed, thrusting him into the headrest with a bone-like crunch.
Please be his nose. Please, God, don’t let his neck be broken.
A similar bag struck my face. I shrieked profanity through my broken teeth. The thick feel of blood made my stomach heave.
“Help me!” I mumbled into the nylon, struggling backward before it could suffocate me. “Help!”
It deflated slowly, hissing until I could finally see over the wheel and into the cloud of grey hanging in the air. It eased through the seam of the hood. Crawled through the vents. I gagged on it.
“H…help.”
Sweat slicked my upper lip. That wasn’t right; it was February. The cold had leeched through my blanket so easily this morning. Why did my face feel hot?
The taste of smoke clung to my mouth. I choked around it, unable to scream again.
From across the shattered border between here and freedom, something struck the pavement. Alongside it came the dragging of rubber. The wet slap of liquid striking the ground in excess.
Flames sprouted from the hood.
“Oh my god!” I thrashed uselessly against the seatbelt. “Somebody, help me! Please!”
My head spun. My lungs cried out for unsullied air.
“Help me.”
The need for sleep gradually outweighed the need for survival. Eyelids growing heavy, fatigue weighing on my chest, my pleas died on my tongue. I can sleep for a minute. School’s not for another hour…
The dragging persisted. As my eyes finally shut, I imagined it was the wind. Imagined I was home, watching it blow through the trees and shake the fronds of bushes lining the parking lot.
A sudden snarl almost brought me back to the surface. “Eden.” Despite the unfamiliar rage that made it sharp, I thought I recognized that voice… “Do not die, Eden. Breathe. Breathe for me.”
My eyes flickered open. Nearly blinded by the smoke, I could barely make out the silhouette of a man. He placed one unflinching hand on the flaming car to steady himself. The other fist came down over the windshield.
Glass erupted in a million raindrops. He eased into the car, reaching for the front of my jacket with his bare hand. Bits of it lodged in his arms, only to fall away, skin stitching up of its own accord.
Phil.
He yanked me up by my clothes, pulling at the leg stuck in the console. I shrieked, “Stop!”
His brow drew together. He turned the full force of those eyes on me and they were like nothing I’d ever seen before. Rather than crystal clear violet, they were red. So blood red that they glowed and burned my skin.
Or maybe that was the fire.
“Eden?”
I never would’ve imagined he would say my name like that. Reverently. Like a prayer. “My…my leg,” I croaked. “I’m stuck.”
He followed my gesture, ripping the seatbelt out of the car frame in one hard yank. Leaning further inward, escaping smoke that threw back his white-blonde hair, he pried the plastic points apart from my thigh. The blood helped it slide through.
“I have you,” he swore, forcing his hands under me. The warmth of his chest met my face and I trusted his word. When at last my back met the concrete, I clung to
him with my uninjured arm, the slightest bite of betrayal stinging me as he pried my hand away.
You said you had me.
A breeze of warm skin brushed over my maimed thigh, sending white hot anguish through me anew. My sight flickered black, at the precipice of unconsciousness. “Ah, don’t touch it!”
His eyes shifted from the wound to my face and melted. That crimson gaze bored into me as if memorizing every line and crease in my flesh. “I will make it go away,” his soothing voice murmured. “I will make the pain go away.”
I fell into his stare, plummeting and spinning with no end in sight. His hands met my leg again. I hissed, rearing back from the pain, but he held tight. “What’re you—?”
“Shh,” he pleaded. I thrashed against him, lowering my eyes from that hypnotic stare. “For once, be still.”
My floundering slowed as the pain lessened, becoming a dull ache, then a mere twinge. I looked down at the ribbons that had once been my leg to find it stitching up with supernatural ease. Pleasant warmth crawled over me, into the shredded remnant of my forearm and, from there, my head.
Definitely dreaming…
Phil pried his hands away from my leg, reaching back to pull a very familiar pair of gloves from his pocket. Only after he’d donned them did he take my face between his leather-clad palms.
“Relax, Eden,” he breathed, cascading beautiful vanilla and roses over my nostrils. “Just relax. I will keep you safe.”
My body wrapped around his, clinging to him like life itself.
“Eden?” he demanded. My lip quivered and warped my words. Slowly, hesitantly, he enveloped me in his arms and held tight. “Eden? Are you alright?”
Was I alright? Here he was, an angel, who had just plucked me from imminent death with his bare hands. And I didn’t have a scratch or burn to show for it. I’d never been more or less alright than I was in that moment.
I nodded. It was safer than trying to work out actual words.
Across the street, the car erupted and my world ground to a screeching, jarring halt.
Zach.
I threw myself to my feet as fast as my dizzied brain would allow and tried to make out his shape amid the flames sprouted from the hood. Nothing. Phil grabbed me before I could get any closer.
“Save him,” I begged. I didn’t know what he was or how he did it or if he could do it again, but I clutched his hands in mine, perfectly willing to beg. “Please, save him.”
Phil looked between me and our joined hands with something like horror. He gently pried himself free, taking up a grip around my waist, instead. “I can’t.”
“I’ll do anything. Please, save him!”
He ignored me. “We have to leave.” Eyes shifting listlessly from East to West, he implored, “People will come to look. We can’t let them see that you were involved.”
“You…you can’t be serious.”
“We have to leave. We risk exposure standing here.”
“Exposure! You’d weigh that against his life?” I shrieked.
He pulled me closer, shielding my soot-covered face in his chest with an iron grip.
Traffic stilled around us. People of every shape and size trickled out of their cars to get a better look. A group of men convened near the windshield, peering through the smoke that hid Zach.
Phil lifted me into his arms and started away from the wreck. “What are you doing?”
“It will look suspicious if they see you got out unscathed,” he said, steps picking up into a jog.
“No! No, I’m staying for Zach!”
He looked over the gathering pedestrians with unease. “They are the only ones able to help Zach now.”
I thrashed in his arms. “Put me down. Put me down! If you’re not going to save him, I will!”
He flinched at my scathing tone. Then, he scowled. “You are my concern, Eden. I need no permission from you to remove you from this danger.”
“Then I’ll scream. Put. Me. Down.”
“I will drag you away if I have to.”
A stranger leaned into the car, very narrowly dodging the flames licking up the frame. It took three of them to get him out, carrying him through the windshield like Phil had easily done with me. I could barely make out the marks of charred skin between the saviors huddled around him.
I flailed away from Phil’s grasp, landing on hands and knees. Before I could take my first step toward the wreck, he’d already yanked me flush against him. “Don’t fight me.”
“Please, Phil!”
Sirens shrieked around us. With their growing volume, Phil became more frantic, shrinking into himself like a wounded animal, backed into a corner. A growl rumbled in his chest. Still, he held tight to me.
And hesitated. “I will go with you.”
“What about exposure?”
“I will have to worry about that later,” he snapped, relinquishing his hold on me enough to grasp my hand. He squeezed my fingers, assuring me that I wouldn’t slip away and I didn’t try. Alone or laden with Phil’s weight, I didn’t care. What mattered was getting on that ambulance.
They stretched Zach’s limp form over a gurney, loading him into the back of the transport. Readying to leave without me.
“Wait!”
The doors stopped short.
“I’m family. I have to come!”
I didn’t wait for an answer before I threw myself in after them. A uniformed man tried to hold Phil back, but the latter sent his shoulder into the stranger’s hand. He tried to hide it but I clearly made out that he flexed his fingers to shake off the pain. “And you? Can’t have you if you’re not family.”
The look Phil shot the EMT sent primal fear down my spine. “I’m with her.”
He didn’t press.
As Zach moaned through their medical ministrations, I turned my eyes down to the cot. His face had come out nearly unrecognizable under a cover of purple bruises. A string of cuts and burns marred his entire right side, courtesy of the impact with the other car. His leg bent in all the wrong ways.
“Edy?” his voice, unfamiliar with the thickness of sleep, rasped. “Where’s Edy?”
“Here!” I shoved myself between two EMT’s, ignoring the low snarl of protest behind me.
His eyes barely opened. “What’s the noise?”
The EMT clicked a penlight from his pocket, shining it in Zach’s eyes. “Can you follow the light?”
Those lids drooped shut. “What light? Can’t see a light?”
My heart lurched. “What does that mean?”
“Kid, can you open your eyes?”
He didn’t oblige. The rise of his chest slowed as he returned to sleep. For as long as we drove, he didn’t wake.
A pair of arms looped around my waist, yanking me back into Phil’s lap. I tried to get back up but a deep, animal growl shook his chest: a warning. I looked up to question him but he didn’t meet my gaze. His eyes flickered around the tight space; more specifically, at the medics working over Zach.
He looked like a different person. I’d pulled a smile from him on the odd occasion. Maybe some nerves. I thought in these last few moments I’d even seen anger. But this…this new expression held something harsher. Something colder.
Fear.
All of this had scared him—was still scaring him. As if in response to my thoughts, his embrace tightened.
The moment the ambulance stopped, Zach vanished, wheeled through the front doors and into the ER where I could not follow. Phil held me back, assuring me as his thumb burned soothing circles into my side, “The best chance he has is with them.”
I could still see his purple face long after the ER doors shut. My lip quivered. He’d been so small, so fragile, on that gurney. The slightest touch would’ve broken his skin.
Was I ever going to see him again?
I hoped so. I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again if the last image I had of Zach was…this.
The warmth of Phil, permeating my clothes, snapped me back to the present
, where I’d sunken into him like a seedling drawn to sunlight. It soothed my frayed nerves and the skin I didn’t realize had chilled with the cold outside.
Throwing my arms around his back, I followed the line of his wrist upward until I met his face and cast my fears of those crimson eyes aside. Under the ultra-harsh fluorescent lighting of the lobby, he looked even more inhuman. Even more angelic. Even more impossibly beautiful.
For right now, I didn’t need to ask. I knew exactly what he was. He was a guardian angel, sent down from heaven itself to save me. The world around me may have been shadowy, full of danger and the promise of pain, but, from the circle of Phil’s arms, I hardly noticed.
I felt safe.
And that was enough. No words. No explanations. No promises.
Just warmth.
Eyes focusing on the threads of his shirt, I waited for tears to come, but they wouldn’t. “Please don’t leave me alone.”
His breath hitched. The words rumbled in his chest even after they were gone. “I promise.”
6. Guilty
Phil didn’t speak so long as we sat in the waiting room. He just watched, perched on the edge of his chair to more efficiently flee. If not for the bruising grip on my hand, I would’ve wondered whether he was still breathing.
Zach still hadn’t come through the ER doors, smiling and laughing and bemoaning his car’s tragic end, which meant his burns must’ve been as bad as they looked. My body shifted between sleep against my companion’s side and vibrating with anticipation. I clung desperately to his gloved hand all the while; without it, I’d take flight.
Still, the hours bled on without a word. I’d already called Zach’s parents, on the hospital phone since my cell had been unfortunately melted in the accident, and arranged a ride home with my own. I only hoped the traffic caused by my poor driving would postpone them long enough to hear some news.
Mrs. Ferguson sat across the waiting room. She worked upstairs in obstetrics so she’d been loitering across the way almost as long as we had. Though it had been some years since I’d last seen her, I picked her easily out of the many. She looked like Zach, right down to the shape of her blue eyes. Although, where his hair waved bright red, hers hung like wheat.
The Amaryllis Page 6