by Cole McCade
Vin frowned. Who was this man? How was he able to perform that kind of surgery casually, then speak of it as if it was nothing? The posters on the wall indicated he’d once been part of some traveling troupe. A circus.
What kind of circus performer could extract a bullet, then stanch a wound with expert precision?
“Only a few stitches,” the man continued. “The rib has a hairline fracture and you’re suffering from severe blood loss, but you’ll live. You just need bed rest and proper nourishment.”
“How long have I been out?”
“It’s been nearly twenty-four hours, dear boy.” The look the man gave him was almost pitying, certainly knowing. “Long enough that anyone looking for you has likely moved on from the area.”
It wasn’t himself he was thinking about. The thug who had left him for dead would be more concerned with disposing of his friend’s body and clearing out; he wouldn’t have gone to the police about Vin, not when he’d have had to explain about the bloodied, bruised escort and any lies trying to pin it on Vin would fall apart at the slightest sniff of forensics. But it was the escort he was worried about; she’d been a witness to not one, but two murders, as far as the man who shot Vin knew.
But if Vin’s good Samaritan hadn’t found her body next to his, there was a chance the thug might have bought her silence and chased her off.
Because Vin couldn’t stand the idea that in trying to save an innocent…he might have inadvertently killed her.
He dug his fingers into the sheets. “Was there a girl with me?”
“Who?”
“A girl,” he repeated, struggling not to snarl, to snap. “Red dress. Pale skin. Strawberry blonde.”
“No, lad. There was only you.” After a moment, one long, thin-fingered hand settled lightly over Vin’s. The man’s hands were smooth and hot and strangely slick, as if he had no fingerprints. “Was she someone important to you?” he asked gently.
“No,” Vin admitted.
But is not every lamb important to a shepherd, even those not of his flock?
He closed his eyes.
I am no shepherd.
I am only a wolf, who has tried for so long to pretend to watch over the sheep.
Yet he needed to find that girl. If he felt nothing else in his lifetime, he would live forever with the guilt of his crime, the blood of the innocent. She never needed to know. It couldn’t be hard to track down an escort in Crow City; she had looked as if she came from the more discreet, high-priced establishments with certain standards, and it would only take a few questions in the right places, whispered and low, to find out any hearsay about one of their girls turning up dead—or coming back marked up and the customer blackballed from ever working with them again.
Please, Dio, let it be the latter.
“I should go.” He tried again to find his strength—tried to reach inside where he had once found the last dregs of life when he’d thought he was too broken to go on, and pulled out that last spark and made it blaze until he burned himself to nothing but ash. Maybe that was why he could find nothing now; where ash was laid, nothing would grow, and no new fire could take root in nothing but the dust and char of the old.
And when he struggled up a few inches, there was only a moment of pain before his vision went black and swirling, and then smooth hands were on him again, pressing to his shoulders and gently pushing him back down. Pride was a snarling thing, fighting and furious—but weakness was the bars keeping that animal caged, and it could only rail helplessly against its bonds as Vin found himself pushed back down to the pillows without the wherewithal to resist.
“You should settle down, is what you should do,” the man said firmly, but with some gentleness. “Is there anyone I can call for you? Someone to take you home?”
“No,” Vin rasped, the answer coming without thinking; he struggled to breathe when the pain seared up into his lungs like a hot poker, pinning them in place until they fluttered and writhed but could barely move. But even if his lungs, his body were not so disobedient, the answer still would have been no. He had no one. Vaughn was too far away, and Gabriel was tangled in his own spider’s web; Vin would not and could not snare his blood brother in this mess he had made for himself.
You have to find him, you know, needled in the back of his mind. The one who shot you. Find him. Kill him.
Because if he finds out you survived, he will come for you.
Men like that belong in the gutter anyway. Show him what it means to feel fear. Until his eyes look like that girl’s, and he knows what he did to her.
He grit his teeth and shoved the thoughts away. The pale man, his good Samaritan, was still waiting, and Vin made himself meet his eyes.
“I do not have a home,” he clarified. And after last night, the security cameras…the hotel room was off limits.
“Well we can’t have that, now can we?” The man did that thing with his tongue again—clucking it against the roof of his mouth like a mother hen, and there was something almost motherly about him, the way he hovered and fussed. “As if I’d put a lost lamb out on the street.”
“I am hardly a lamb.”
And they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb…
“But you’re not the lion, either, are you?” The man’s gaze drifted down Vin’s chest and fell on his rosary, and he reached out to touch the cross, lightly fingering it with a gentle, almost reverent touch, as if he were touching flesh—and Vin shivered, for the cross was as personal to him as his flesh and his blood and his bone, and the man might well have stroked his hands over his vulnerable and naked body. “I do wonder what strange creature you are. But perhaps we could start with names.”
There had been a time when his name was the only answer he would give. His name, his rank, and a number assigned to mark him as one of many, no matter the pain he suffered, no matter what questions he was asked. But now he hesitated; now, he realized, he had to think like a criminal. The only difference between a soldier and a criminal was the nationality of the people he killed, the cause they spoke for, and yet even now if he were dragged up before a judge there would be people calling him a hero for eliminating one of the people who skulked the streets of Crow City and did their dark dealings in the back alleys. The label hero wouldn’t save him from sentencing, from prison. He would not survive prison. He had little to fear from the inmates, but the cage of four walls would destroy him, drive him mad until he tore himself to pieces trying to get out.
If you had any honor left, you would turn yourself in. Accept your fate.
He would, one day. When it was time. Something told him not yet, not yet…and he trusted that gut-deep instinct, and listened. One day he would stand before judge and jury and confess his crimes, and take his penance and his punishment.
Just not yet.
Then what would it matter if he told this man his name? No matter what happened after this, Vin would have to disappear. His blood was at the crime scene, and he doubted the man who had shot him had done more than dispose of the bodies. Forensics would be all over Vin’s DNA; he would likely be declared dead from the amount of blood at the scene and the absence of a body, and that was for the best. If he was dead, he could become a ghost, vanishing beyond the radar of law enforcement.
And if a ghost spoke his name, who would remember?
“Manion,” he said. “Vincent. Most call me Priest.”
The man chuckled. “I’m not partial to nicknames. Vincent has a lovely old-world feel to it, and if I’m not mistaken, that accent is quite particularly Venetian.”
“You have a good ear.”
“World travelers always do, my dear, world travelers always do.” The man stood, sliding off the bed with lissome movements that belied his age, and swept a grand bow. As his arms flung out and arced in graceful gestures, twenty years fell away, and he glowed with the same bright radiance as he had in the posters, his voice ringing forward as if projecting for a crowd. “I, by the way, am
the esteemed Walford Gallifrey, Esquire, former ringmaster of Gallifrey’s Glories, Caravan of the Macabre.” He straightened—and a lock of his hair came loose, tumbling over his brow boyishly and ruining the illusion. He grinned. “Wally works just as well.”
Vin arched a brow. What was his life, that in the space of twenty-four hours he’d been shot, only to be taken in by a retired circus ringmaster? “You are very strange.”
“I’ve been told that more times than I can count. Now.” Wally settled on the bed again, and dragged the tray from the nightstand into his lap. “Hungry? I’ve made pumpkin and cinnamon rye bread, and it would be a shame to eat it alone.”
CHAPTER SIX
THERE WERE FEW EXPERIENCES MORE mortifying and emasculating than a sponge bath.
Vin had expected Walford to chatter at him as they ate, but Wally had stretched his lean frame into a high-backed chair covered in colorful quilts—and settled into a silence more comfortable than it should have been, the only sounds the faint clink of their plates and the knife against the pan as Walford cut one or both of them another slice of pumpkin bread. But then few understood the companionship in silence, and Vin was grateful to be left to eat quietly with Wally speaking only to ask if he wanted more, or to offer him a cup of steaming tea that he surreptitiously held steady for Vin’s shaking hands.
Catering to my pride, then? he thought with a touch of amusement, but he was grateful for Wally’s stabilizing hold when his fingers trembled so deeply the tea threatened to slosh over the rim.
Yet still he was more grateful for his silence, and the fact that he said nothing to force Vin to confront his own weakness, or the unsteady future facing him once he recovered and stepped back out into the world.
You’re thinking of doing it again, aren’t you.
He couldn’t. One murder was a moment of passion, of impulse, an irrational and thoughtless crime. The secret thoughts spooling out in the back of his mind, as he ate slowly of Wally’s surprisingly good pumpkin bread, were a matter of premeditation. Calculated, cold-blooded murder with a purpose—and that made the difference between a flawed but pious man, and a willing sinner who had lost his soul.
But if you don’t kill him, he’ll kill you.
And he was surprised to find that he wasn’t quite ready to die.
Just one more time. One more time to feel something again, emotion and sensation caught up in a haze of crimson, everything such a lovely red that brought the life back to the world again.
One more time.
This time he would be smarter about it. Plan. Research. Control the kill site, and leave no evidence. He was reckless last time, impulsive, acting without thinking, and he could only hope the traces he’d left at the crime scene would feed into the fiction that he was dead, a victim of a criminal transaction gone wrong or whatever other conclusions forensics teams would draw. This time he would clean up after himself. A ghost could leave no trace.
Then he would disappear, change his name. Vincent Alessandro Manion would be dead, and he would start over as someone else.
And maybe if he started over, he might figure out how to start living again.
“You have the look of a man judging the weight of mountains,” Walford said.
Vin lifted his head, his gaze focusing, the blur of the empty plate in his lap coming clear only for him to realize he’d been unconsciously arranging the crumbs in patterns while he turned over his thoughts. He studied Wally, but the man was a bastion of neutral pleasantry, giving away nothing but a sort of merry curiosity.
“I am simply trying to ascertain what happens next,” Vin answered.
“Ah.” Wally stood and gathered Vin’s plate, stacking it on the tray with the empty pan and Walford’s own plate. “And I imagine there are extenuating circumstances I’m not privy to, and that you aren’t comfortable confiding in me.”
“It is not necessary.” Nor did Vin know what to make of his acquaintance of mere minutes, good Samaritan though he might be. “Nor is it necessary for you to sacrifice space in your home for me.”
“And you’re going to get up and walk out of here, is that it?” Wally laughed, low and soft, and set the tray aside on a shelf next to the door before settling back into his chair and crossing his legs, hands folding neatly in his lap. “It’s at least two weeks before I’d trust you to even stand and walk to the bathroom on your own, lad. Another month before you should even think about returning—with care—to a normal lifestyle.” He gestured airily. “Whatever passes as normal for you.”
“Are you, in your own oblique way, trying to ask who I am?”
“Yes.” Wally folded his hands in his lap. “Bloody transparent, am I?”
But if Walford was transparent, so was Vin—for the man fixed him with a shrewd look, his eyes narrowing, before he sighed and tilted his head back with patient exasperation.
“Stop fussing,” Wally said. “You aren’t putting me out. And if you were honest, that there’s no one for you and nowhere to go…that’s the end of the matter.”
Vin pressed his lips together. Part of him wanted to throw the blankets layered atop him aside, climb out of bed, fight the pain and weakness that reminded him far too much of those long ago days, and stand. But there was no sallow pockmarked man here; no crooked tooth; no rust-edged blades and the stink of suppurating flesh.
And he wasn’t so stubborn and stupid as to let his pride lead him to a fall.
He looked away, glancing around the room. Around the warm, lived-in feel of it, the way everything was worn in a way that spoke of handling and use and a familiar hand that knew each and every object by touch alone. “Is this your bedroom?”
“Yes.” Wally arched a brow. “And my bones are not so old that I can’t endure the couch, before you begin that line of protest.”
With a groan, Vin thunked his head back against the pillows. “Guilty as charged.”
“You are also guilty of smelling like dried blood.” Walford stood once more, brushing his hands off briskly. “Can you stand allowing me to tend to you while you’re awake, or will that end in tears and bared teeth?”
“No tears. Possibly bared teeth.”
“I’ll take that risk. It’s time to change your bandages.”
Vin turned his head, following Walford with his eyes as the slim man breezed from the room, dipping behind a curtain Vin hadn’t noticed before. There came the creak of door hinges, the sound of running water, rustles and small clatters, before Walford appeared again with a basin of water tucked into the curve of his arm and a wicker basket propped against his hip, filled with bottles of smoky colored glass. Humming under his breath in a softly pleasant baritone, Wally arranged the bowl and basket on the nightstand, then settled on the bed at Vin’s hip and leaned over him with a pair of slim shears.
“Now,” he said, delicately slipping the shears underneath the gauze binding Vin’s ribs, “let’s get you cleaned up.”
A few snips, and the gauze wrap fell away; the gauze pad underneath clung to Vin’s chest, and when Wally tugged at it, it stuck and pulled with a stinging rasp of pain that said it was crusted in dried blood and stuck to the wound. Wally clucked his tongue sympathetically and peeled it away slowly; Vin bit back a hiss, but made himself watch as the wound was revealed.
It always amazed him, how small a gunshot wound was. The first time he’d seen one—the first mission where there’d been open fire, after dozens of deployments full of droning silence and nothingness that had lulled the young soldiers they’d been into a false sense of security—it had been in a grunt, a fresh PI from North Carolina who’d just shipped over the week before. Martinson, Vin remembered. Martinson with his sparse scrub of thin, freshly-shaved red hair, a ginger carrot so bright he was practically a target. And that one stray bullet had found him unerringly, punched through him, knocked him back and left him bleeding out, one moment alive, the next dead. And there was nothing but a little round pucker smaller than a dime, the skin peeling in a thick layer all around,
but that little pucker was all it had taken to turn a living man into the gray shell of a corpse.
Small things, Vin thought. Small things change everyone and everything, in ways that cannot be reversed.
The pucker of Vin’s wound had been closed with a neat black line of stitches, the edges snipped clean as neatly as by a surgeon’s hand, but the flesh all around was red underneath the bronze tone of his skin, swollen and puffy, yielding like a blister when Walford pressed gently down on it. Vin sucked in a breath, biting back a sound as that dull heartbeat of pain turned into a crash of thunder, then dulled again when Walford jerked his hand back.
“It’s the inflammation, really,” Wally said, shaking his head and fussing with the bottles in his basket, picking up one after the other and skimming hand-written labels in a scrawling, archaic script before putting them down and moving on to the next. “The hole itself isn’t so terribly bad, but it’s keeping the inflammation and infection down while you heal and recover from the blood loss. I’ll give you an anti-inflammatory painkiller to help, but we’ll have to watch you. If you start to show any sign of fever, we might have a problem.”
He settled on a bottle of pale blue-green glass and popped the cork, before tipping the bottle over a fresh pad of gauze. A thick, slightly milky tan oil oozed out in a creeping dollop, speckled with brown dots and smelling faintly of honey and something woodsy. Wally let a puddle of it collect, then leaned over Vin to press the cool, sticky oil against his wound, rubbing it with a gentle circular motion; Vin swallowed hard and ignored the pain, but he couldn’t watch anymore. Not when every jolt of pain dragged up instincts he couldn’t surrender to; not when every hint of pressure snarled enemy, enemy, kill him, kill him, gut him tear him to pieces bathe him in red red red.
He fixed his gaze across the room. Past the foot of the bed, on the opposite wall, a squat CRT television flung his reflection back on its blank screen. It was the old kind that came built into its own wooden cabinet, with a wicker fronting and little knobs and dials of silver and bronze, their polish worn dull and the numbers eroded by age; if he turned it on, its screen would likely play in shades of black and white, all monochrome with the color entirely in the viewer’s imagination. It fit into this room the same way Wally did, a collection of forgotten things that still had life left in them, left behind and discarded only because those who’d once loved them had moved on to newer, brighter, shinier things.