by Jo Raven
Shrugging, I walk faster.
I don’t want to talk. I’m afraid I’m wrong. Why did I put so much trust in what the old woman said? Why did I jump to conclusions?
Because Ash loves the water. And because I’m running out of ideas. Out of time.
“If he’s in the park, he could be anywhere,” Zane says.
“Unless he’s hurt,” Tessa says. “Then he’s probably just off the street, right here.”
We slow as the faint scent of water and cold, wet earth fills the air. Lake Mendota spreads, dark and endless, lights flickering across the bay. It’s quiet and frigging cold. The wind coming from the lake has dropped but it still has knives in it.
We step off the path, into the dimly lit night, our footsteps crunching on stiff grass and the hard ground.
Is this a mistake? Should we head back to State Street and continue looking there?
Then I stop, almost falling over.
A black shape is barely visible under the bare trees. A slumped human form seated at the roots, a dark head bowed forward.
The air leaves my lungs. Unable to speak, I reach around and grab Tessa’s arm. She halts, and Zane comes to stand beside me.
“Audrey? What is it?”
I pull Tessa with me as I lurch toward the person seated with his back to the tree trunk. “There.”
I suppose it could be just anyone, but somehow I know. The set of the shoulders, the profile—even in the dimness I know it’s him.
Finally I get some breath back into my lungs.
“Ash!” I stumble to my knees by his side. His eyes are closed and his face is ice cold under my hand. “Can you hear me?”
“I’m calling 911,” Tessa says faintly, pulling out her cell and stepping aside.
Zane grabs Ash’s chin. “Ash, wake up. Come on, fucker. Say something.”
“They’re sending the EMTs. They’re asking if he’s awake,” Tessa says, coming to stand over us, and Zane shakes his head. “He’s breathing, right?”
Warm air washes over my fingertips when I place them over his mouth. “Yes.”
“Is he injured?”
I’m about to say I don’t know, when Zane says, “Yeah.”
The word drops like a stone. “What is it?”
Zane lifts his hand, wiggles his fingers. “Blood. He’s bleeding.”
“Can you see the wound?” Tessa’s voice wavers.
Zane fumbles with Ash’s jacket, lifting it. “Looks like a wound in his side. Can’t see much, it’s too dark here. Cut clean through the jacket.”
This is like a nightmare. My nightmare, where Ash is in the car with me, where I watch him die and can’t do a thing to stop it.
“Ash.” I stroke his short hair. “He’s frozen stiff.” My fingers trail down his face and come away wet and sticky. More blood. Jesus.
Zane shrugs off his jacket and drapes it over Ash. “They’ll be here soon.”
I want to draw Ash into my arms, as much to warm him up as to reassure myself he’s there, solid and alive. But I don’t dare. I don’t know how hurt he is.
The police arrive first. They bring flashlights and when they light up Ash’s face, my heart drops. His face is one big bruise, one eye swollen shut. They also ask if Ash is breathing, if he’s hurt. I let Zane and Tessa explain.
Then the ambulance arrives and suddenly we’re surrounded by uniformed paramedics and more flashlights cut glowing trails through the night. They check Ash and talk to him, shout at him until he mutters something.
Awake. He’s awake.
They seem satisfied with his response. As I try to calm my racing pulse, they examine the cut in his side and pack gauze on it. I catch words on the rising wind about internal bleeding and blood loss, frostnip and hypothermia.
I can’t draw enough air into my lungs.
“Will he be all right?” I grab hold of a paramedic’s sleeve and tug. “Please tell me.”
“Are you next of kin?” he asks and I shake my head.
“He doesn’t have any next of kin left,” Zane says bluntly and I wince. “What do you need to know?”
So Zane steps in front of me and answers the barrage of questions flung at him—What happened to Ash? How did he hit his head and ribs? What caused the wound? What did he eat today? Is he diabetic? Does he have a heart condition? What medications and drugs does he take? How old is he? Does he have any allergies?
It goes on and on. Meanwhile, the others bring out a stretcher and load Ash on it. Then they pull a thermal blanket over him and roll him into the ambulance.
I start after them, then see Zane do the same and stop.
“You go,” I say.
Zane puts a hand on my arm. “They’ll only take one of us.”
“You’re his best friend. You should—”
“He’d want you to go. He’s been in love with you since forever.”
Strangely, after everything, this is what makes me cry. I wipe at my eyes angrily. I can’t fall apart now. “Well, me, too.”
Zane gives a faint smile. “Well, I’ll be damned. He’d better wake up soon to hear this.”
I mock-punch him. “Shut up.”
“Go. We’ll follow you in Tessa’s car. The emergency room is just around the corner from here. He’ll be fine.”
I nod and hurry after the paramedics.
***
I beg the paramedics to let me ride in the ambulance with Ash, and they cave in because it’s such a short distance to the emergency room. So I hunch over where I sit on the bench, feeling vaguely claustrophobic and uneasy, watching them take Ash’s pressure and start a drip.
They talk among themselves, using terms I’m not familiar with. They might as well be speaking Chinese. They check Ash’s pupils, ask him simple questions like his name and the date.
Leaning forward, I listen for his replies. His voice is just a hoarse rasp but it wraps around me like a warm embrace. I reach over and put my hand on his arm, over the thermal blanket. I want him to know I’m here, but I’m not sure he sees me.
The ambulance halts. We’ve reached the emergency room. The doors open, and quickly and efficiently the paramedics pull the gurney out and push it inside while I hurry after them.
A triage nurse stops them and, after exchanging a few words I don’t catch, she gestures for them to continue. I think she might stop me from following, but she doesn’t.
They wheel him into a room with an examination bed, but don’t make a move to transfer him there. A middle-aged doctor in blue scrubs arrives and joins the paramedics huddled around Ash.
I hang back, trying to piece together what they’re talking about. Hypothermia. Concussion. Internal bleeding.
Oh god. Did we reach Ash too late? I find a chair at the back of the room and sink in it, rubbing my burning eyes. I can’t stop the tears; they keep coming.
At some point Zane and Tessa appear by my side, looking somber. Zane puts a hand on my shoulder.
“I thought,” I whisper, “that my problems were big. Important, you know? My life, my problems. They just seem so small now.” My stomach twists. “I never thought he was in such danger. That he had no place to go. If I’d known...” Screw my mom’s objections, then I’d have invited him to stay over. Then he wouldn’t have been fighting illegally. Wouldn’t have been exposed to the cold. Wouldn’t have been hurt.
“Don’t blame yourself,” Zane says quietly. “I should have seen this coming. I blame me. I knew he had no place to go, but I put off talking to him.” He frowned. “It doesn’t matter now. This...” He gestures at the gathered nurses and doctors around Ash’s gurney. “He was stabbed. That didn’t happen in the fight club. Someone attacked him.”
“Because he was on the street,” I say, biting my lip to keep from whimpering.
“We don’t know why yet.”
Tessa wanders closer to the group of doctors and nurses and comes back to tell us they’re taking Ash away for an ultrasound, to determine whether he’s bleeding inside.
> We wait until they wheel him out, then settle to wait some more in the small cluster of chairs. Time slows, the minutes plodding. After checking the hour on my phone for what has to be the millionth time, I get up to pace.
“What’s taking them so long? Shouldn’t he be back by now?” What if he’s dying and I’m here, away from him? What if they’ve found something seriously wrong and they aren’t telling us? After all, we aren’t next of kin. I’m ready to storm out of the room to go and find him.
But then the double doors open. Ash is wheeled back inside, and I freeze. I want to go to him but I’m not sure I can handle any bad news.
It’s as if I finally found my way to him only to lose him again, and the thought scares me to death.
The nurses lift him onto the narrow bed and fuss with the blankets and pillows.
One of them, a pretty young woman dressed in gray, walks toward us. Her dark eyes move from Tessa to me. “Is one of you Auds? Audrey?”
“I am Audrey.” My stomach turns over. “How is he?”
“Audrey, he’s been calling for you. He seems to think you’re in danger. Would you sit with him for a while? We’ve stitched up his side and it’s better if he doesn’t move about much, but we don’t want to use a sedative as there’s still a possibility he has suffered a concussion.”
I force myself to move and make my way across the room to the bed. The nurse pulls a chair for me and I sit, grateful.
Ash looks awful. The fluorescent light from above casts his bruised, swollen cheekbone and jaw in harsh contrast to his too-pale skin. The paramedics have cleaned the blood on his face and applied butterfly bandages to the cut on his forehead.
His eyes move behind his lowered lids, his dark lashes like coal smudges. They’ve removed his clothes and dressed him in a hospital gown. It leaves his strong arms bare, and they’re mottled with more bruises. God, he looks as if he’d been beaten within an inch of his life.
He shifts on the mattress, his body tensing. “Auds,” he rasps and his hands shift restlessly on the blankets they’ve heaped on top of him in an effort to warm him up. A needle goes into his left hand, secured with white tape. Bags with blood and antibiotics hang by his side. “Auds.”
The lump in my throat won’t let me swallow. “I’m right here.” I catch his fingers. They’re ice cold.
“Dangerous.” He rolls his face toward me. His lashes flutter as he tries to open his eyes. “You should leave.”
“I’m not leaving you.” I squeeze his hand. “This is where I want to be.”
“Auds...” he whispers again, his voice broken, and I wonder if he’s heard me at all. If he can feel my fingers wrapped around his.
Zane and Tessa approach the bed, their faces set in worried lines.
“Hey, fucker. Can you hear me?” A muscle jumps in Zane’s jaw. He leans over to touch Ash’s shoulder, then folds his arms across his broad chest and turns to the doctor. “What’s the verdict?”
The doctor strokes his goatee and seems to hesitate. Then he slumps a little. “Bruised kidneys. A slight laceration to the liver with minimal bleeding, which doesn’t seem serious but which we need to monitor at least until tomorrow. The cut in his side,” the doctor gestures at Ash, “is quite deep and he has bled a lot, which is why we are giving him a blood transfusion. If he doesn’t move too much for a few days, the sutures should hold. His body is quite stressed but it should heal fine.”
Liver laceration. My hand creeps up my side, to the scar of the incision where they fixed my bleeding liver and kidney.
Tessa wrings her hands together. “So no surgery is needed?”
“No surgery,” the doctor agrees. “Not if he allows the wound to heal, and if his liver stops bleeding. We also want to monitor the concussion symptoms, make sure we haven’t missed anything.”
It all sounds good. Truth be told, I’ve braced for much worse.
Zane nods. “Are you keeping him in?”
“He’ll be staying here at least until tomorrow. We were afraid of hypothermia, but you found him in the nick of time. He’s warming up nicely and there seems to be no real damage from the cold. He mustn’t have stayed out very long.” The doctor glances at my hand over Ash’s. “He seems calmer now.”
He does. His hands have stopped moving and his face is more relaxed.
“If you’ll excuse me,” the doctor says and gives a warm smile that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle. “I have other patients to see, but I’ll be back later to check on him.”
He leaves, followed by two of the nurses, and as the door swings open, I get a quick glimpse of a vast room, endless rows of chairs taken by the people waiting. The hubbub enters in a wave, then recedes once more as the door closes.
Quiet returns.
The remaining nurse checks the IV drip, takes Ash’s pressure once more and checks his eyes. She turns as if to go.
A wave of noise from the door makes me glance around.
Someone has walked inside, a tall, broad-shouldered young man, his dark hair tousled from the wind, his expression dark with fury and perhaps fear. Something about him forces me look twice. He’s handsome in a rugged sort of way, but the shape of his eyes, the nose, the mouth...
Weird. He looks a lot like Ash.
So I’m not that surprised when he marches toward the nurse and barks, “How’s my brother?”
Chapter Twenty
Asher
Where’s Audrey? I can’t shake the feeling there’s danger—she’s in danger and I have to warn her, help her. She’s calling my name and I’m running down endless streets, trying to find her. Dark fog swirls around me, and knives glint in the shadows. Eyes are watching me.
I need to reach the water, find the lake, but first of all I need to find her.
Audrey.
I have to talk to her, tell her. I’m a fuck-up. She must know. It’s dangerous for her, being with me. Being anywhere near me is a mistake. I have to warn her to stay away. Have to tell her everything.
“Ash, it’s okay,” a voice says—her voice, soft and reassuring. “I know it all already. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
She knows? I reach for her. Can’t rest until I see she’s okay. Slender fingers tangle with mine and I feel the press of warm lips on my cheek.
“You should go,” I say. I have a feeling I’ve said it many times already.
“I’m not leaving you,” she whispers. “Not ever.”
My eyes open and I see her face over me, hazy. I reach up, touch her mouth. She smiles.
I’m dreaming. Yeah, that has to be it.
“Love you, Auds,” I say, and my throat hurts as if I’d swallowed broken glass. Because this isn’t what I’m supposed to be saying to her, but in the end it all boils down to this. “I want you safe.”
“Love you too,” she says. “I’m safe. Now rest.”
I’m definitely dreaming. But that’s all right. It’s a good dream. One I don’t want to end, even though pain’s winding its way through the haze to stab various parts of me.
Why am I hurting? Flashes of angry faces and glinting blades crisscross my thoughts. I know something bad has happened. But I can’t fathom what as the darkness pulls me down into blissful oblivion once more.
***
Voices. They seem to float over my head, one louder than the other. Male, rumbling voices that are somehow familiar.
Audrey. She was there with me. Right? I talked to her, and she said...
No, scratch that. She most likely wasn’t there. It was probably a dream.
A spasm goes through my body and pain shoots through every nerve. Oh fuck, what happened to me?
“Ash, hey bud.” A rustle, a screech as a chair is pushed back. “I’ll call the nurse.”
Nurse. Hospital. The smell of antiseptic finally registers, but I’m too busy trying to figure out how to relieve the pain burning through my side to ask why I’m here.
“Hold still,” the other voice says, a voice that holds such authority over me I ins
tantly stop struggling. “You’ll pull out the stitches.”
Stitches.
I try to open my eyes but the light stabs at my retinas and I close them again in a hurry. My mouth’s dry like a desert and my throat aches when I attempt to swallow.
Who does the voice belong to? Something in it tugs at me, makes me feel safe. Makes me feel young and protected.
Footsteps approach the bed and an unfamiliar woman’s voice says, “Feeling better today, Asher?”
I finally manage to open my eyes to slits and get a look at her. Auburn-haired and middle-aged, she looks determined to get an answer out of me as she fusses with plastic bags hanging from a metal stand by my bed.
“Yeah.” My voice’s so rusty I wince at the sound. “What...?” I wave at the bags hanging over my head, and a sting on the back of my hand makes me narrow my eyes at it. A needle is stuck into my flesh, white tape holding it in place.
“Saline, antibiotics, and you also had a liter of blood pumped into you,” she says cheerfully as if discussing the latest episode of her favorite TV show. “Glad to see you more alert. The doctor will be with you in a minute.”
I swallow again and she glares at me until I nod. What, does my opinion matter? Do I get a say in this?
She leans over and pats my hand, the one without a needle. Her brown eyes warm up. “Really good to see you back among the living, young man.”
And she bustles away and out the room, leaving me to stare at her ample backside.
I can’t remember how I got here. It bugs me. I remember the fight club... I remember fighting. The rest is murky.
A sound comes from my right and I twist my head to see, wincing as the pounding in my head redoubles.
Zane. Of course, that’s one of the familiar male voices. He comes to stand by the bed, a grin tugging at his lips.
“Fucker,” he says and his eyes look suspiciously wet. “Scared the living crap out of me, man. The hell happened to you?”
I frown. “It’s all a bit hazy.”
Zane grabs a glass with a straw from a table by the bed and gives me to drink. I sip gratefully at the water. It feels heavenly going down my parched throat.