by Cole McCade
“Why are you being so kind to me?” he asked through grit teeth.
If there was one thing he’d learned in the confessional chamber, it was that in their heart of hearts, people were small and selfish and petty, and only admitted it in the secret dark where they thought no one would know them, and no one would care.
“‘I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers,’” Wally fluttered in a falsetto, trembling accent, his lashes batting, only to sigh at Vin’s blank look. “No? Not a fan of Streetcar, then.” With a sigh, he left the pad with its ointment to sit on Vin’s chest, and picked up a towel to dip it in the bowl of steaming water. “You were hurt. Would you rather I had not, or had ferried you off to some hospital with their endless barrage of questions and police reports?”
“No hospitals,” Vin said firmly. “No police.”
“I gathered that. And so you must endure me, where my questions are driven only by curiosity—not suspicion, with the intent to incarcerate.” Wally leaned over him again, and began gently swiping the towel over Vin’s chest, starting just below the bandage at the base of his neck and slowly sweeping down. “Why are you so suspicious of kindness?”
Vin said nothing, at first—caught by the way Walford touched him, by how the towel molded over his flesh in damp warmth, as if defining the lines of his body in soft terrycloth and the trickles of hot water. As mortifying as it was to be bathed like an infant or an octogenarian, there was something almost hypnotic about it, about the slow and careful rhythm of each stroke, soothing in its cadence, comforting in its touch. There was none of the clinical briskness he was accustomed to from field medics and military doctors, none of the urgency of wound care in combat and the taste of ash and gunpowder in his mouth, not even the brusqueness of a man who, without even being aware of it, of his own conditioning, felt the need to create a certain gruff distance from the simple act of touching another man.
No…Wally touched him as if he cared about him, stranger that he was.
Vin studied Wally, searching, looking for anything that would give a hint to his thoughts, but his eyes were dark wells of thoughtful introspection, following the path of the towel.
“No one does anything for free,” Vin said. “One way or another, people act out of their own self-interest. For their own personal gain.”
“What a cold, cruel, cynical view of the world.” Wally lifted the bowl of warm water out of a second bowl it had been nested in, and wrung the towel over the empty bowl. The water ran like pink lemonade, trickling against the glass. “What do you think I could possibly gain from this?”
“I do not know. Blackmail. Extortion.”
“For what, exactly?” Wally’s soft, brief laugh was almost sweet. “I know nothing but your name, and you may well have lied with that.” Shaking his head, he wet the towel again and resumed caressing the warm terrycloth over Vin’s chest. “If you truly need some ulterior motive, look at it as a lonely old man with a desperate need to nurture something. I was once father to an entire circus; now I have a niece who visits me as sporadically as her furious father will allow, and a sister who never grew up and only occasionally bothers to remind me she’s alive.” He shrugged almost too glibly. “I need something to fuss over, and apparently you are it.”
Yet it was too easy an answer, and Vin wondered what Walford wasn’t saying. “You do not have children of your own?”
A wry, self-deprecating smile tightened Wally’s mouth. “Certain types of relationships do not produce fertile unions. Let’s leave it at that.” He caught his tongue between his teeth as he skirted the towel carefully around the inflamed area over Vin’s ribs. “I could have adopted, I suppose, but the wandering life I led never felt right for raising a child, even if many of my troupe managed quite well with their own families.” Abruptly his gaze snapped upward, pinning Vin with a sharp look. “And you are deflecting away from yourself.”
“Force of habit.”
“Mmhm. Let’s break that habit for just a moment.” Wally set the towel aside, then gently lifted the oil-soaked pad from Vin’s skin; seeping blood had turned the white gauze to rust, mingling in splotches with the oil. “You can start by telling me how, specifically, that happened.”
“I tried to play the hero,” Vin said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “I got shot for it.”
“And that’s the entire story, is it?” Wally sighed, leaning back on one hand. “Perhaps I was a touch too apt in that analogy about the wounded lion. You are one mistrustful beast.”
If you say a word, the dark thing inside him whispered, you will have to kill him.
He saw it now: that broad, bright smile widening, splitting, cracking like his face was made of dried clay and the blood inside seeping out as the corners of Wally’s lips stretched up to either ear. Those dark eyes going dull, their merriment and mysteries lost. And Vin’s hands on his flesh, rending him limb from limb, a twisted monster turned feral and biting the hand that sought to soothe and stroke and ease his pain.
He lowered his eyes. “A secret shared is no longer a secret,” he murmured, “but a mutual truth.”
“I’ll give you that.” With a resigned sound, Wally dropped the towel in the bowl of water, then taped a fresh gauze pad over the bullet wound. The pad vanished, then, beneath rolling strips of gauze; Wally’s fingers feathered over Vin’s body, moving him with a gentle deftness that made it seem like nothing at all until his ribs were bound again and the source of his pain was muffled in layers and layers of white. Wally tied the bandage off, then dusted his hands together. “There. You should be good for another few hours. Do you trust me enough to give you painkillers? I’ve a few prescription things lying about that should let you rest, if you’d like.”
Vin weighed his options. Walford would have no reason to drag him inside, tend to his wounds, then drug him for some nefarious purpose. Then again, the man was a puzzle of questions, of strange circumstance and happenstance wrapped up in cotton candy smiles and long licorice-whip legs.
“Answer me this,” he said. “How does a circus ringmaster know how to surgically extract bullets?”
Wally blinked—then laughed, as if Vin had asked him the most entertaining question in the world. “Darling boy,” he said, eyes bright, “the carnie world is one dark and deep and full of secrets. When the world overlooks you as invisible until you put on your show, you overlook the world right back. The world, and its rules. We have no home, no jurisdiction, and we live by our own law and extract our own justice.”
He spoke with a dreaming quiet, with a voice that breathed the air of long stretching roads, and looked with eyes that saw somewhere else, somewhere gone, somewhere that was just a memory given life and weight and depth by love and longing and a deep, sighing loss. Yet when Walford’s eyes focused again, there was a spark of wickedness as he looked at Vin and smiled.
“Would you be surprised to know that I am just as adept at putting the bullets in as I am at taking them out?”
“No,” Vin said, and saw Wally as he once had been: that dapper and dangerous young man on the posters, a derringer on his hip and a cocky sway in his stride. “No, I do not think I would be. An interesting way of life, you had.”
“The only way of life, for the longest time. We were a world unto ourselves, and to others we were magic: there with the sunset and gone with the sunrise, sometimes spiriting people away like change-children.”
“You miss it,” Vin said.
“Sometimes,” Wally answered, with a rueful smile.
“Why did you leave?”
“I didn’t.” Dark eyes shuttered, then lowered. “It left me, fled away somewhere I’m not ready to follow just yet.”
Walford had lost someone, Vin realized. Or something that meant so much to him it was as deep as losing a living human being. It was in the slope of his shoulders, in the bow of his head, in the way his hands shifted in his lap as if trying not to curl, to clench.
“I will take your pills,” Vin said.
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Wally lifted his head, brightening. “And here I expected you to be a mule about it.”
“I thought I was a lion.”
“You can be many things, as long as you aren’t a complete and utter jackass.” Wally dragged his basket over to rummage inside. “Will Vicodin suffice?”
Vin’s lips twisted bitterly. “It will do.”
Walford found an orange prescription bottle; a glimpse of the label said Miriam Gallifrey, and Vin wondered if Miriam was the sister Wally had mentioned, or the niece. Wally shook two pills out into his hand, eyed Vin, then added two more.
“You’re a big chap,” he said, “and these pills are old. Four should be just enough.” He gently folded the pills into Vin’s palm, then offered him his mug of tea. “Down the hatch.”
Vin looked down at the pills in his palm, plain white ovals with the letters stamped deep.
It’s been a while, he thought, and tossed the pills back dry. Missing Gabriel?
Those slick white demons slid down his throat, and he took the mug and washed them down, then laid back, closed his eyes, and waited for the haze to come. The haze, and the cold, when the Vicodin took over his central nervous system and tried to give his body instructions it was too tired to understand. It came on fast: first in the tips of his fingers, then climbing up his arms like spears of ice, until pain relief came not in numbness but in frozen flesh with blood moving too slow and sluggish to circulate an ounce of feeling. The only thing he could feel was the needles of ice biting into his flesh; he remembered this from the VA hospital, from those long, slow days of recovery from dehydration and starvation and torture, the scents of death and cleanser and medicine in his nose just as terrible and nauseating as the rot and dankness of his prison. Back then he’d wondered if those icy needles were the teeth of the Grim Reaper, finally coming to claim him with the touch of that frigid and bony hand.
Now he knew it wasn’t death, but a whispered glimpse of the future: a cold and yawning void, an empty forever, and all that was waiting for him when he died.
“You’re shivering,” Wally said softly.
Vin clenched his teeth. His tongue felt thick, a slow-moving thing disconnected from his mouth and rolling around against his lips. “I…I-I believe blood loss is affecting my body temperature.”
“Unfortunately the upstairs conversion didn’t come with central heating, and it takes a while for the furnace to warm up.” Wally’s hand rested to his arm, hot as a branding iron…and then a shift brought his strange lurid body heat closer, the soft smooth brush of the fabric of his slacks, and then his arm was sliding under Vin’s shoulders. “Here. I promise I don’t bite.”
Vin didn’t have the strength to protest, as Wally settled against the pillows with Vin half-cradled against his body, enveloped in his body heat—heat further trapped by blankets drawn up close. He wanted to open his eyes, but if he opened his eyes he would have to look up at Walford, acknowledge this, pull away out of sheer pride. And he didn’t want to…not right now. Not when he was tired, so tired.
And it had been a long, long time since he had felt a comforting hand; longer still since he had let himself accept it.
So Walford was only a warmth in the dark, a faint sweet scent like beeswax and old paper, and a skimming touch across his brow, brushing his hair back. “Is this too awkward for you?” Walford whispered.
“No.” Vin sighed, turning his head, letting himself go lax with his head resting against Walford’s chest. “No, I…I find it strangely comforting.”
“Well then.” Walford’s smile was only a lilt in his voice, a gentleness in his words. “Lay your weary head and sleep, Vincent. I have the strangest feeling your soul needs it far more than your body ever could.”
And I have the strangest feeling, Vin thought as the dark came down on him in a sweeping like folding black wings, that you understand that far more than I could ever imagine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THIS, VIN KNEW: THIS TIMELESSNESS, hours and days fading in and out of a haze of pain and drugs and deep, restorative sleep. His body became a cage, his weakness its bars—and even while a rebellious and restless part of him screamed against the stillness and the dark, the rational part of his mind knew he needed this, needed these hours and days when he knew nothing but the faint sensory impressions of the room around him, its warm comforting glow and the amber lamplight that made it seem as though it was always a quiet autumn evening no matter the time of day, with the crisp dark locked outside and that hearthlight glow inside.
Now and then he woke enough to eat, and take more Vicodin; sometimes he was vaguely aware of Walford tending to his wounds or the other needs of his body, and once he thought he felt soft fingers playing over his back, following the lines of his tattoo—but for the most part such things were just long stretches of black in which he woke with his bandages changed, the tight feeling of sick sweat on his skin washed away, and once his phone resting on the pillow, its screen lit up, the letters blurry and yet close enough to read.
Where are you? Tell me you’re safe. Send up the call sign, Priest.
Gabriel’s number. Gabriel’s words, reaching through the dark, but Vin couldn’t find the strength or the desire to answer when it would only give Gabriel another weight to carry on his already bent and bowed shoulders.
Even in the darkness, Walford was there: a warm presence in the bed now and then, easing Vin back to sleep when his warmth chased away his biting chills; the scents of warm tea and beeswax; the occasional noise of the television turned down low until the stentorian voice proclaiming Go to your quarters, sir, and be arrested! gave its commands in a dramatic stage whisper. The faint sound of metal rasping, and through his lashes a blurred image he wasn’t quite sure he’d dreamed or not:
Walford sitting in his high-backed chair, his lap full of skeins of yarn and a wooden crochet hook flashing in deft fingers, the lamplight falling over him in spills of honey, his loose white shirt hanging on his slim frame and his hair disarrayed by sleep. There was a loveliness to him in that unguarded moment, a pensiveness left unshielded by bright smiles and knowing eyes, a strangeness that spoke of stories untold.
But then Vin blinked, and the moment was gone, time skipping forward by minutes, hours, he didn’t know, only that Wally was no longer in the chair and the light was different, and Vin had moved into a different position in his sleep. Pain rode him, a cruel jockey with a toothy whip, and he fled back into sleep where it could not follow.
Then came the sense of waiting: as if his consciousness were a thing outside his body, impatient and alert and tapping its feet. Even in his sleep he felt different, and as he rose toward wakefulness his thoughts came clear for the first time in some time, the thick cloudy feeling of the Vicodin gone, the dreamlike unreality that had made every minute an hour and yet every hour a second. The pillow was cool under his cheek, and when he opened his eyes the world sharpened from a Monet painting into high-definition clarity, as if he saw with unshielded eyes for the first time.
Madre de Dio, no wonder Gabriel hated his Vicodin hazes so much.
He didn’t know how long he’d been out, but the pain in his side had dulled, its heartbeat now a murmur, easily ignored. Starker was the warmth pressed against his uninjured side, the weight leaning against him, and he turned his head to come nose to nose with Walford. The man slept tucked against him, his head resting to Vin’s shoulder; the faint beginnings of dawn morning light trickled through the curtains and dripped over the tousled mess of Walford’s hair, pooled in the hollows of his cheekbones, caught fire along the angular line of his jaw. His slow, even breaths washed against Vin’s cheek, his jaw, his lips.
What a strange thing you are, he thought, so very odd to feel at once the newness of this stranger and the familiarity of the impressions Walford had left over the course of unknown hours, until he felt like an ingrained part of Vin’s self, his world.
As if he had heard him, Walford’s lashes fluttered and began to rise. He came
to with a feline yawn and murmur, stretching himself in small motions and the smooth skin of his cheek rubbing to Vin’s shoulder. As dark eyes opened fully, they drifted to Vin’s face, only for a warm, drowsy smile to soften Walford’s lips.
“You’re awake,” he murmured, sleep a husky thing about the edges of his voice. “I’d wondered when you’d come around.”
“Good morning.”
“Hi.” Utterly shameless, Walford remained right where he was, looking up at Vin past the sleep-mussed tumbled of his hair. “How are you feeling?”
“The pain is less.”
“I should hope so.”
But when Vin started to sit up, Wally pushed himself up quickly with that clucking sound he made, and pressed a hot, long-fingered hand to Vin’s chest, easing him back.
“I’d not be trying any cartwheels just yet, though. Bed is still the best place for you.”
Vin wrinkled his nose. He couldn’t sit still a moment longer, and the pain wasn’t that bad. Wally made an exasperated sound and folded his arms over his chest.
“Don’t make faces at me like a petulant little boy. I’m trying to keep you in one piece.”
“I have been in this bed for—” Vin came up short, then scowled. “For—for—”
“Ha!” Walford crowed triumphantly, grinning. “You can’t complain if you don’t even know. For all you know it’s been all of an hour.”
Vin gave him a flat look, and flicked a glance over Walford’s clothing—another of those flowing, ruffled shirts, far too large for him, paired with a pair of pale blue and white pinstriped pajama pants. Not what he’d had on when Vin had taken that first Vicodin and fallen down the rabbit hole. And he doubted he’d dreamed those moments, those flashes, those changes in the light that came with day and then night and then day and night again.