Strength & Courage (The Night Horde SoCal Book 1)

by Fanetti, Susan

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

  Shedding his jeans, he grabbed a condom from the drawer and slid into bed. Leaning over her, he brushed his nose across her cheek. “We could plan one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  He waved the packet. “I’d love to get rid of these. I want to fuck you bare. I want to feel your slick pussy right on me. I want to feel your heat. I want to fuck you in the shower and the tub and any damn place. Goddamn, I think about that.” He flexed, and his erect cock pushed hard into her side.

  Sid hooked a leg over his hip and drew him close. “Jesus, the things you say.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Will you get tested?”

  “Our girls are clean. They get tested.”

  She didn’t like to think about what any of that meant, and she didn’t trust it in any event. “Muse. Will you?”

  He hesitated, but finally nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I’ll call my doctor Monday morning.”

  He grinned and put his hand between her legs. “That’s my girl.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Muse shoved open the glass doors and nearly collided with a young woman pushing a stroller. He sidestepped and didn’t bother to take the time to acknowledge the near miss. As he passed the reception desk, he threw out a question to the nurse behind it, whom he recognized, but he couldn’t recall her name. “Where’s Rachel? She called.”

  “I’ll page her.”

  Muse nodded and headed down the hall. Just as he arrived at Carrie’s closed door, he heard Rachel behind him.

  “Mr. Musinski!”

  He turned. “What happened?”

  “Pneumonia. It came on fast. She had just a little bit of an elevated temp when I left last night, and then about three hours ago it went into the stratosphere. The doctor checked on her about half an hour ago. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  Muse nodded and went into Carrie’s room. There were machines connected to her for the first time in years, different beeping rhythms in dissonance. Her skin was flushed, almost shiny with heat. Her chest was rising erratically, her breathing fast and shallow. And she was making a noise with her breath that lashed Muse’s heart each time, a wheezing moan that sounded like pain.

  They had her propped up much higher than normal, and her head lolled to the side. Someone had shoved a rolled towel between her shoulder and her cheek. She was drooling. Her eyes were open, staring emptily into the room.

  One of the machines looked like it was monitoring her temperature. If he was right, and if he was reading it right, she had a fever of 105.2.

  He dropped the bedrail and sat on the side of the bed, as close to her as he could get. When he picked up her frail, curled hand, he hissed. Fuck, she was cooking. Oh, fuck.

  In the first year after the wreck, she’d almost died several times. Since then, she’d had infections and illnesses a few times, but nothing major. She’d rested quietly since. Muse expected her to live her full life in this rest. He expected to be able to sit with her three times a week and talk to her and read to her and be with her. He expected to keep a little flame of hope alive that one day her eyes would focus and she’d call him Trog again. That the last words she’d ever say to him wouldn’t be ‘fuck off.’

  “Don’t you fucking do it, Spud. Don’t you go.” He lifted that blazing hot hand to his cheek and held it there.

  “Mr. Musinski.”

  Without letting go of his sister, Muse looked over his shoulder at Dr. Chen, who’d been her doctor for the past two years. “What are you doing to help her?”

  Chen stepped to the side of Carrie’s bed, just behind Muse. “We’ve introduced chilled fluids into her IV and we’re medicating for fever reduction. But...” he paused and checked her Foley bag. Muse watched and saw the dark brown, thick-looking fluid inside it. “She’s not responding, and her organs are starting to shut down. There are a couple of things we could still try, but they’re extreme and we’d need to get her to the hospital. And it might well be too late anyway. Or…”

  Muse set his sister’s hand on the bed and stood so he could turn around and face the doctor full-on. He had several inches on him, and he pulled himself up tall to make the most of it. “Or what?”

  The doctor didn’t seem intimidated. He stared right up at Muse, his glasses making his eyes look oddly large. “Or we could make her comfortable and let nature take its course.”

  “Kill her, you mean.” Muse curled his fists tightly.

  “No. I mean let her go to her natural end.” He pointed to the bag hanging from the side of the bed. “I know you know what this means.”

  He did. Her kidneys were failing.

  “I’m sorry. You have to make a decision, and you need to make it now. I can’t make it for you, but if you want us to do more, we need to move.”

  He turned to his sister. They had to save her. She was still young, only thirty-three. She’d had such a fucked-up road, and she’d tried to make the best of it, but she hadn’t had a chance yet to do any of the things she’d wanted to do. She wanted to travel, but she’d never yet left California. She wanted a family, but she’d never even gotten close yet. She wanted a ranch with horses, but she’d only lived in apartments. She wanted, and she’d never gotten any of it.

  And she never would.

  He knew that. Every brain scan was more degraded than the last. There was little left of his baby sister. She would never have the life she’d wanted, that she’d deserved. Because he’d let her down. He hadn’t kept her safe.

  He sat back down and picked up her hand. The temperature monitor showed 105.3 now.

  “Mr. Musinski.”

  When he tried to answer, his voice failed him. He swallowed and tried again. “Make her comfortable.”

  Dr. Chen put his hand on Muse’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  Muse shook him off. “She looks uncomfortable the way she is.”

  Chen picked up the bed controls and lowered the head. “We’ll lay her down a bit and get some of these machines off her. I’ll be right back.”

  When the doctor left the room, Muse pulled his personal out with his free hand and dialed.

  Sid answered right away, her voice bright and sweet. “Hey. I’m just getting out of the doctor’s. Guess what I’ve got?”

  Muse closed his eyes against the happiness in his ear. “Sid, I need you.”

  “Muse, what’s wrong? Are you okay?” He could tell from the sound of her voice and the sounds around her that she was outside, probably walking to her car. Keanu had better have been nearby.

  “Can you come?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Yeah. Where are you?”

  “With Carrie. San Gabriel Care Center.”

  “Oh God. Muse, is she—”

  “I just need you, hon.”

  “I know where it is. I’m like twenty minutes away. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  Muse put his phone away. It wasn’t until the nurses had disconnected Carrie from everything but the heart and temperature monitors that Muse realized that he’d just called Sid to come and witness the worst thing that had ever happened in his life.

  He opened the drawer and picked up Carrie’s tattered, decomposing copy of Wuthering Heights. He was five chapters from the end. They’d finish it together one more time.

  Sitting on the side of her bed, he opened her favorite book and read: I have paid a visit to the Heights, but I have not seen her since she left. Joseph held the door in his hand when I called to ask after her, and wouldn’t let me pass.

  ~oOo~

  Sid came in while he was reading, but he didn’t stop, and she didn’t try to interrupt him. His love for her grew beyond measure when she simply came to the side of Carrie’s bed and laid her hand on his back, bending down to kiss his shoulder while he read.

  She stood there, her hand on him, not seeming to move, until he lifted his eyes to his sister’s, open and showing the same b
lue as his, and recited from memory the last lines of the story: I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

  Carrie had seemed no different while he read. She was still struggling, her breathing distressed, and still flushed with heat, but she held on, her heart monitor showing a steady beat. Now that he could study her again, though, he saw that the tone of her skin was turning from feverish red to orange. Jaundice. That meant her liver was going, too.

  And her temperature monitor showed 105.4.

  “Don’t leave me, Spud. Don’t you go.”

  Sid’s hand moved on his shoulder, a light squeeze, and he remembered he wasn’t alone.

  He turned to look up at her for the first time. “Thank you for coming. I’m…sorry.”

  She took her hand from his shoulder and pushed it through his beard. “Shut up. I’m glad you called. I’ll be here as long as you want me to be.”

  He hooked his arm around her waist and leaned his body into hers, to rest there for a second. When she wrapped her arms around his head and laid her head on his, the rock in his chest that was holding his heart in place heaved painfully.

  “I found you here,” she murmured.

  He leaned back, loosening her hold so he could look up into her beautiful, exotic face. “I thought you knew where it was?”

  “No.” She shook her head and waved with one arm around the room. “I found you here.”

  He looked around at Carrie’s room. He didn’t pay much attention to it anymore. It was her room; he’d made it someplace she’d want to be. Now, he tried to see what Sid was seeing. He’d put up a big bulletin board for all the cards she’d gotten. At first, she’d had more visitors than just him. Her friends had come to sit with her, and they’d sent cards and flowers. But then they’d forgotten her, dropping away one by one. Now, those cards were yellowing, and there hadn’t been new ones for long time, but he’d left them up.

  He’d pinned on the wall a few posters for movies she liked. Muse’s next-door neighbors to the north were a family of five, with three kids. The oldest was twenty now. He’d been working at the Foothill Cinema since he was sixteen, and he’d been able to get his hands on lots of movie posters. Muse had made a few special requests, including one for a version of Wuthering Heights she really liked, with that Tanner Whozits guy as Heathcliff, and another for an old movie called Truly, Madly, Deeply, which Carrie had subjected Muse to more than once. In his opinion, it was the soggiest piece of weepy chickgasm he’d ever had the misfortune to experience, but she loved the fuck out of that movie.

  In most ways, Carrie was a tough chick—too tough, even. But in other ways she was a total girl. She had a deep and wide romantic streak. There was a particular kind of love she wanted, the kind that made people crazy for it. Running up the side of her right leg was a line from a poem or something: When love is not madness, it is not love. She really believed that shit.

  Muse had had to rescue her a few times from crazy assholes she’d thought had that kind of love for her, but those bad experiences had not cooled her on the idea that it was the only kind of love worth having.

  Other than the cards and posters, and the big birthday greeting the schoolkids had made for her last month, and the nice sheets and comforter on her bed, the only other thing Muse had done was take a bunch of poorly-composed snapshots from their grandma’s photo albums, and some photos that Carrie had had in her apartment, and blow them up for frames. There were maybe twenty framed pictures of them together and of the few times in their childhood when things had been okay.

  Looking around the room now, Muse realized that over the course of her years here, he’d almost filled all her walls. He looked at those photos, which he’d barely noticed in all that time, and saw what he was losing. What he’d already lost. What their father had taken from them both.

  What Muse had let him take.

  “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.” He sagged, and Sid held him close again, her lips on his head.

  “Would it hurt too much to tell me about her?”

  He had no idea, and he had no idea what to say. But he wanted to try. Telling Sid about Carrie felt like a way to let these two important women meet. Setting Sid aside, he reached out and caught the arm of the chair, pulling it up to the bed. “Have a seat.” She sat, but kept her hand on his thigh when he stayed seated on the bed next to his sister.

  “She’s tough, but sweet, too. She likes to think of herself as a badass, but put a furry critter in front of her—especially one that’s hurt or a baby—and she turns into a pile of sugary goo. She loves movies and books that make her cry. She says her very favorite kind of story is ‘love transcending death.’ She usually works as a waitress. She wanted to be a reporter—the kind that gets embedded with soldiers—but there wasn’t money for college, and her grades weren’t good enough for a scholarship or anything. She’s super smart, it was just hard to get to school and focus.”

  He lifted his sister’s hand and kissed it.

  “She’s nine years younger than me, almost ten. Her birthday was the night we…when…when we ran into each other at Ralphs, I was bringing those flowers to her for her birthday.”

  Sid smiled, clearly remembering that moment, and he found a little smile, too, for a second.

  “Our mom skipped out on us when I was twelve and she was still in diapers. We never heard from her again. She could be dead, I don’t know. Don’t care, either. Our father beat the shit outta her probably twice a month, sometimes more, but I don’t feel sorry for her, because she left us behind.

  “After that, we were just alone with the old man, and I pretty much stopped going to school for a few years, until Carrie could go full-time, too. I couldn’t leave her alone with him. Best case, he was a drunk and wouldn’t think to take care of her or watch out for her. Worst case, he was a drunk and would get pissed about some little shit and hurt her. So I bailed on school. Even after she could go to school, by then I was so far behind and had been left back so often, that I was way too old for my grade, and I still bailed. It was pointless.

  “We got taken away a few times by DCFS, when the truancy cops got on it, or when somebody heard something or saw a bruise, but we’d always be back home in a week or two. Once, they came when I had a busted-up face, and they took us for a month, split us up. Put me in a boys’ home, which was like something out of a horror movie, and put her in a pretty good foster home. It was out a little ways in the country, and they had horses. She liked it there.

  “But we’d always end up back with him, and we’d have a spell of quiet, just long enough for the social worker to stop comin’ around, and things would go back to us trying to stay out of the old man’s way and getting fucked up when we didn’t. When Carrie got a little older, she started to goad him, do shit to piss him off, like she was trying to get herself killed. She told me she thought if he hurt her bad enough, they’d put him away. But that was crazy, so I spent those years putting myself between them. She was just a little kid, but that didn’t stop him.”

  Carrie’s breathing changed, the moaning wheeze growing heavier, and the beep of her heart monitor sped up and then slowed. Muse stopped talking and waited, watchful. Fearful. But she settled again into her restless rest.

  “When I was fifteen, he went in for just over a year for fraud. They sent us to our grandma’s in Nebraska. Our mom’s mom. She had no idea where our mom was, either, but she was a nice old lady. She had a little farm, with chickens and a goat, and a few horses, and just every kind of animal, seemed like. That was a good time. We wanted to stay, but when the old man got out, he made a stink to get us back. I was sixteen, I could have probably stayed, but I wasn’t gonna let Carrie go back there alone. So we went back. Our grandma had a stroke and died three months later.

  “After he got out, things were a little better, I gu
ess. He was still a drunk, but he was too broken to cause us much trouble. I officially dropped out of school—I was almost seventeen and only in ninth grade anyway—and started working full time, doing loading at a paper company. Carrie started to get okay grades. We stayed out of his way, and I took care of her. One of the guys I worked with was prospecting an MC, and I started hanging around at the clubhouse. I liked it—it was so much more like a family than anything I knew, I had, whatever, culture shock or something at first. I knew they were into some dark shit, but I wasn’t exactly a saint, and it didn’t bother me. I liked them. I felt like I got them, and they got me. They earned, and I needed money. So when I could, I prospected, too. I got my patch at the first opportunity.