by J. R. Ward
“Hold up. Don’t forget this.”
As she glanced at Moose in confusion, he moved the IV pole forward. “Oh,” she mumbled. “Right, thanks—”
He didn’t release it from his hold. “I need you to know that I tried to— I mean, we all wanted to get to him sooner. We worked as hard as we could to free him. But . . . oh, shit, Anne, he was under these beams that were so fucking heavy they’d crush a car and . . .”
She hugged the man when he couldn’t continue, and it was a sad relief to be with someone who also felt guilt. “No one could have done a better job rescuing him.”
“This is my fault, I should have—”
Anne pushed him back. “Stop it. How could you have gotten to him any earlier? And you didn’t put him there. I did. You and the boys are heroes.”
“What if he doesn’t make it?” Moose eased back and dragged a hand through his hair. “I can’t breathe every time I think about it. He’s my best friend.”
As she stared into his tortured eyes, she knew they were all crazy. Every one of them who got into turnouts, and took their bodies and their minds into open flames for little money and lots of risk, for strangers, for animals they didn’t own, for houses they didn’t own, for people they weren’t related to . . . they were all insane. Because this was the other side of the adrenaline rush, the savior complex, the fight.
Tragedy was but a moment. Responsibility for it was forever.
And eventually, the latter turned you dark on the inside, molding over your emotions, making you toxic and uncleanable even as you looked the same on the outside. For every firefighter she knew who’d been hurt or died on the job, she knew even more who were corpses in their own skin.
They didn’t tell you about it when you were in the academy.
Good thing, too.
“Don’t blame yourself,” she said roughly. “You didn’t let him down, and you’re going to be there for him as he heals. And he will. He’s Danny Maguire, for godsakes. He’s unkillable.”
“You haven’t seen him yet, Anne. You need to prepare yourself.”
She looked into the room. So many machines and wires and tubes—a reminder that the human body was an incredible miracle, its countless autonomic functions a gift when they were operating as intended, and a cumbersome nightmare to have to approximate when they were not.
Taking her IV pole, she entered the sterile space and the sound of the whrrrring and the beeping got her truly frightened. And then she actually looked at Danny’s face.
Anne gasped. “Dear . . . God.”
There were stitches all down one side, as if part of his cheek and half of his forehead had been stripped off. Everything was swollen and purple and red, the features distorted to the point where if she hadn’t known it was him, she wouldn’t have recognized him.
And then there were his legs. Both in casts, one elevated like the third side of a trigonometry problem. Also, his arm and shoulder were wrapped . . . and he’d been intubated at some point, a bandage at the soft juncture in the front of his throat between his collar bones.
She went over and sat on the edge of the bed because the floor was suddenly going whitecap storm surge on her. She tried to breathe. Failed.
Now she cried again, and fuck it. Danny wasn’t going to know.
Taking his battered hand, she dropped her head and let the tears fall from her eyes to wherever they landed.
She had done this to him.
The loss of her hand she could live with as payment for her impulsive decision and rash behavior on scene. But this? This . . . catastrophic . . . injury to him? Even if he came through, she was never going to forgive herself and he was never going to be the same.
She thought of him saying that they were going to be back at the stationhouse, playing pong, before ten.
How wrong. How terribly . . . terribly wrong.
“Why didn’t you just leave me?”
As soon as she said it, she regretted the words as they seemed to put the burden on him, and this really was all her fault—
There was a clicking sound.
Looking up, she recoiled. His eyes were open, the white around the left one blood red, the pupils unmatched and glowing as he stared at her and tried to speak.
“Shh,” she said as he struggled. “No, please . . . don’t talk . . .”
Things started to beep faster, and then alarms went off, and she shook her head. “Don’t . . . it’s okay—”
He could barely speak, but she heard the haunting words loud and clear: “Couldn’t. Leave. You.”
Medical personnel flooded into the room, and they didn’t hesitate to get her out of there, passing her shuffling, trembling body off to Moose, who held her up off the floor in the hall.
On the far side of the glass door they shut, she rose up on her tiptoes to see around the crowd to Danny. His face was turned toward her, and through the chaos of the staff, he still stared at her, his puffy eyelids and all the bruises making it a miracle he could focus even a little.
And then the doctors and nurses blocked her view of him.
Deep in her soul, she knew that was the last time she would see him. That it was the last memory she was going to have . . .
. . . of the only man she had ever loved.
Ten Months Later
chapter
9
Harbor Street and Twenty-Second Avenue
Old Downtown, New Brunswick
As Anne turned onto Harbor Street, the tires of her municipal sedan crackled over the broken pavement and she winced at the blinding September morning sun. Putting the visor down didn’t help, but there wasn’t much to worry about hitting. There was no traffic, no pedestrians, and the commercial buildings in the neighborhood had been abandoned years ago.
Two hundred yards later, she hit the brakes and stopped across from the singed ruins of what had been a warehouse.
At least up until the two-alarm fire the night before.
There wasn’t much left of the structure, the mostly collapsed shell of the place painted black and gray from the blaze’s soot and smoke. Wafting over on the autumn breeze, the complex, crappy bouquet of extinguished fire was so familiar, she actually took a deep breath and felt the sting of nostalgia—
The sneeze came out of nowhere, kicking her head forward—and as she righted things and sniffed, it was like her nose was out of shape. Waiting to see if there was another coming, she wondered exactly when her nasal passages had degraded into special snowflakes. Had it been in those brutal first couple of weeks of recovery . . . or later, during PT? Had it been as she’d raced to get into class to get certified as a fire inspector? Or how about when she’d been interviewing around for her new job?
Was it two weeks ago, when she’d been hired by the City of New Brunswick to fill a low-man-on-the-ladder vacancy in its Arson Investigation and Fire Inspection Division?
How about now, on her first official day?
She looked down at the lapels of her cheap office suit. The laminated ID card hanging off a silver clip had her picture on it, and she tilted the thing up so she could see her own face.
Her hair was the same. Sort of. Longer now and loose on her shoulders—and those blond highlights from summer a year before were at the very ends. One more trim, and they were another thing gone forever from her life. Her face? Well, that was the same—actually, no, not at all. Her eyes were grim, and if she didn’t know better, she’d say that they were all black pupil, no blue around any rim. Skin was as white and flat as wall paint. Hollows under the cheekbones were testament to the weight she had yet to put back on.
That pink lip gloss she’d thrown on out of some kind of duty looked ridiculous on the thin, straight line of her mouth.
Dropping the image, she wiped away the slick layer she’d put on before she’d left her house. She hated the way the stuff tasted, and
come on, like it was fooling anyone? She wasn’t a lipstick-and-perfume kind of girl, even if she was now a desk jockey.
Reaching for the door handle, her prosthesis thunked against the panel and she closed her eyes. Deep breath.
From out of nowhere, she remembered the morning after the fire, when she’d woken up in that hospital bed and tried to convince herself that she could go back to the stationhouse and resume her life as it was, a triumphant para-firefighter, just like those Paralympic athletes.
Yeah . . . no. Tom had been right. Her career was over.
But she had triumphed over lots of things in the last ten months, including a staph infection that had nearly killed her. Physically, that had been the worst, especially when they’d had to put her in a medically induced coma because her organs had been shutting down. The rest of the road forward had been mostly mental, with blocking and tackling solutions for her lost hand being sought at every turn.
As much as she could do now with her various prostheses, though, that did not include dragging a charged line into a fire and spraying down flames.
You can do this, Anne, she told herself.
When she was out on the pavement, she faced off at the building that was her first assigned case and tried to ignore the fact that she was in a suit, not turnouts. That she was after-the-fact, not during. That there was nothing here to do, really.
“Origin and cause,” she said as she started to walk across the road.
She was halfway to her goal when she realized she’d left her clipboard, her pen, and her voice recorder in the car.
Anne stopped. And could no farther.
This whole length of Harbor Street was your typical used-to-be-necessary, nothing but a strip of asphalt accessorized on both sides by ragged scarves of abandoned, block-sized buildings that had, in their earlier, more optimistic and purposeful incarnations, housed manufacturing plants, warehouses, and shipbuilders. The facilities had been built of brick in the twenties, joist’d, rafter’d, and floored by wood planks and beams, and capped by tin.
Used until another pattern of profit motive had rendered them anachronistic.
As she blinked in that bright, blade-sharp sunlight, she found that memories took over and Back to the Future’d her to a different, but the same, structure—only this time it was night, and she was pulling up in the pumper with Danny, about to head into that one-alarm that had changed her life.
“You must do this, Anne,” she declared.
Digging down deep for more of the will that had kept her going, she was exhausted with propelling herself forward. Tired of punching through wall after wall of I-can’t, I-don’t-want-to, I’m-about-to-break. Life had become one trial after another, only the degree of difficulty and amount of failure what spiced things up.
“Origin and cause,” she repeated.
Movement caught her eye and drew her attention to the right. A gray dog with a partially pit bull face, an ear blown up to twice its size, and a scar on its shoulder regarded her from around the burned building like it was sizing her up as a threat.
The two of them stared at each other—and for some reason, she thought of Danny Maguire. Probably because of the injuries the dog had.
She hadn’t seen Maguire since that ICU visit. There had been a couple of times when she’d been in the rehab hospital that she’d been tempted to reach out to him, but between her recovery and his, they’d both had plenty going on. And then she’d heard that he’d gone back to work at the 499.
Which had hurt her for no logical reason. What, like her bad break had to be shared by him? Like she expected him to fall on the sword of resignation in her honor?
Come on.
There had been that one voicemail he’d left on her phone—God, three months ago. It had been in the middle of the night and he’d obviously been drunk, his words slurred and incomprehensible. And then a female voice had said his name with enough innuendo and invitation to melt paint off a car door.
So, no, there had been no contact.
“Are you hungry?” she asked when the dog didn’t run away.
With slow movements, she went back to the car, got her bag, and brought it with her across the street to the broken sidewalk. Grabbing a Fiber One bar and her bottle of Poland Spring, she got down on her haunches and made what she hoped were encouraging noises.
The dog was slow on the limping approach, its head low, that swollen ear as flat back as it could get, one front paw obviously injured. The animal’s ribs were so stark under its thin coat and skin that she couldn’t bear to focus on them.
“Here,” she said, breaking off some of the breakfast bar.
She tossed the piece right in front of the dog, and it eyed her with suspicion as it dropped its nose and sniffed. The first piece was taken slowly. The second went down a little faster. The third?
Gobbled.
She fed the dog the bar, bringing him or her ever nearer by pitching the pieces closer and closer. When she turned to get the Poland Spring opened, she lost ground, the animal flinching back and costing her a couple of feet.
Pouring a stream of fresh, clean water in her palm, she waited.
When the dog finally gave in to its thirst and she felt the first tentative brush of a rasping tongue, tears came to her eyes.
It had been months and months since she had cried. Not since that horrible stretch when the infection had really gotten its grip on her, the Grim Reaper’s deadly handshake trying to pull her into her grave. She had had to choose. Did she live or did she languish? Did she fight and claw her way back . . . or did she give up?
“How about I help you?” she whispered as she sniffed hard. “I won’t hurt you. I promise . . . I won’t hurt you.”
New Brunswick Firehouse No. 499
Hurst and Benedict Avenues
Goddamn, he hurt all over, Danny thought as he parked his truck behind the stationhouse and contemplated getting out and signing in for his shift.
Seemed like it was about three hundred and seventy-five miles to the back door. In reality? Probably only thirty feet. But when your head was thumping, your back had turned into a solid during your seven-minute commute, and the healed breaks in both your thigh bones and that fucking left calf of yours were aching because rain was coming, anything more than an inch and a half felt like a marathon.
As he opened the driver’s-side door, his shoulder let out a holler and he thought fondly of his new girlfriend. It had been a mere six hours since he’d seen her last—or maybe less than that? And he was starved for more of their connection.
On that note, he shoved his hand into the duffel bag on his passenger seat and fished around. When his palm hit what he was looking for, he smiled and pulled out a bottle of Motrin the size of his head. Across the front of the label, in black Sharpie, was written “BETTY FUCKING MAGUIRE.”
Yup, he was dating a bottle of ibuprofen.
Popping the lid off, he thought once again that this was, in fact, the healthiest relationship he had ever been in. Betty never let him down, was always available, and improved his life immeasurably. Still, he was jealous over her, and unwilling to share her with anybody—not that she ever complained that he was a smothering sonofabitch.
Shaking out six capsules, he took them on a oner, washing them down with some still-hot Dunkin’.
Looking at the back door to the stationhouse again, he breathed in. Someone was cooking bacon and eggs. He hoped it wasn’t Duff. The bastard always under-did the former and hard-tack’d the latter—and for a guy who liked super-crispy and sunny-side up that was more tragedy than Danny could handle on a Monday morning.
To kill some time, he took out his Marlboros and lit one. Soon as he’d gotten out of rehab last spring, he’d taken the habit up again with a vengeance—but yet again, Betty didn’t mind the secondhand smoke, and now that he essentially had no roommates, there was nobody aro
und to complain about the ashtrays.
Perfect.
Sitting back, he closed his eyes. Firefighters in New Brunswick worked an unpredictable schedule, which was always tighter than the national standard of two days on, three days R&R—but with the city in a bad way financially, they had to cover the shifts. At least they were finally getting some newbs, although they were all going to the 617.
Chief Ashburn, who was now pulling double time as an IC due to budget cuts, always worked it so that he got the best of everything: the new stationhouse, the new apparatus, the extra help.
Must be nice.
Danny’s lids cracked of their own volition, and his eyes shifted to his hands. There were blisters all over the insides of both, the result of him having worked with a chain saw for five hours on Saturday and seven yesterday. He must have been crazy to buy that old farm. The uninhabited house was crowded by trees and overgrowth, and the various outbuildings on the fifty acres were likewise choked with vines thick as tree trunks. Shit might have gone easier if he’d used an axe, but he didn’t pick them up anymore. Swing them. Cut things with them.
Anyway, at least the farm gave him something to focus on. If he didn’t have that shitty property to go to between shifts, he would be clinically insane.
And hey, at least it kept him from dialing Anne Ashburn’s number again. Jesus, he shuddered every time he thought about that drunken voicemail he’d left her.
From the moment he’d gotten out of rehab, he’d worked on reasons to call her, go over to her house, email her. You know, reasonable justifications that didn’t involve him breaking down and getting all emotional over how he’d failed her in that fire.
The words hadn’t come, even as the yearning had gotten stronger. So add too many beers and the fact that he’d memorized her number from the instant she’d given it to him three or four years ago—and you had a drunk dial that should never have happened.
She hadn’t called him back. Why would she? And now hitting her up felt impossible.