“Well acquainted with prescription drugs, Eddison?” asks Mum.
He shifts a little, uncomfortable but trying to hide it. “You get shot a few times, you learn some tricks.”
Mum pauses the game so she can look over her shoulder at him. Whatever she gets from his expression, she doesn’t comment on it. Just turns back to her game.
I take my pills. Drink my milk.
Thunder rumbles overhead, soft and rolling. There’s snow falling outside, clean white flurries skittering in whorls and flips in the wind. It’s the kind of night to stay safely inside, warm and curled up with those you love. I reach for Eddison’s hand so I can pull him to the middle seat.
So I can lean against him.
He puts his arm around my shoulders and leans into me, too, and we sit in silence and watch Mum play. There are questions he should probably be asking.
Probably will ask once he figures out how to phrase them. The thing is, Eddison knows me.
He knows I’m only so many kinds of stupid.
So I think—I’m reasonably sure—he’s waiting to ask until we know whether or not Joshua is going to survive. It changes the shape of things, doesn’t it?
Probably not.
Legally not, in any case.
“What did you do to your hands?” I mumble into his shirt.
“It’s a long story. Please don’t ask Ramirez for her version of it.”
As tired as I am, I can’t help but snicker.
Eventually, the day catches up to us all. Technically, Eddison is here on guard duty just like Sterling was, but it doesn’t feel right to put family on the couch, so we set him up in Mum’s room. It’s slightly less creepy than the idea of him sleeping in mine, and I suspect he feels the same way. Mum helps me get ready for bed, and for a moment, I can close my eyes and think it’s Chavi bumping hips with me in the narrow bathroom, brushing her teeth next to me.
We curl together in my bed, the flickering illumination of the electric tea light casting shadows across Chavi’s picture frame and the wall beyond. The teddy bear Mercedes gave me the first time we met usually lives on my dresser, but now he’s cushioning my aching jaw. Mercedes has a seemingly endless supply of soft bears to give victims and siblings when she goes to a scene or home. It was a comfort then, and a comfort now.
It’s also the bear I threw at Eddison’s head when I first met him, so there’s that.
“That did not go quite as planned,” Mum says eventually, her voice little more than a whisper, and I can’t help but giggle. And then I can’t stop, and it sets her off, and we’re lying there laughing our heads off, because fucking hell, is that ever an understatement. My ribs flare with pain even after we finally get our breath back.
“I knew Archer would leave,” I tell her more seriously. “It honestly never occurred to me that he’d go farther than it took to hide. I thought he’d be out of sight but in range, especially of a scream. I was . . .” I let out a breath, hold the next, let it out. “I was terrified.”
“I’d be very worried if you weren’t.” She stirs, shifts, settles so her cheek rests against mine and her chin digs into my shoulder. “Work was hell. I had to convince myself over and over not to drive down after you. I can’t do that again.”
“I have no more monsters to kill,” I murmur.
“One and done?”
“Thank God.”
“What would you think . . .” She falls silent, which is so unlike her I’d turn to look at her if my ribs wouldn’t protest. Instead, I find her hand and tangle my fingers through hers, resting them on my belly. “For a long time, it’s been me and you against the world,” she continues after a while, “but we have our agents, and you have Inara, and your veterans . . . maybe it’s time we open ourselves up a bit.”
“I’m going to try to make friends in Paris. Not just grudgingly allow it, like with Aimée, but actively try.”
“Good. And what would you think . . .”
Whatever the rest of that thought is, it seems to be impossible.
“Some of your cousins are at universities on the continent, or work there. A handful are even in Paris. Maybe we can start connecting with the outliers, work our way down to the older generations.”
“Work our way up?”
“I said what I meant.” Brushing a kiss against my ear, she matches her breathing to mine. “You could have died today, my love, and it occurred to me: I don’t want to be all alone. I could do it, certainly, but I don’t want to. And I realized, if anything happens to me . . . I know you’d be taken care of. Vic would adopt you in a heartbeat. I just thought . . . Save me, Priya-love, you know I hate leaking emotions.”
Laughing softly, I give Mum’s fingers a squeeze. “Cousins sound like an excellent place to start.”
She’s silent for a long time, her fingertips rubbing little circles against my shirt. “Was he scared?” she asks finally.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Even with the adrenaline crash and the medications and the warm, comforting weight of Mum wrapped around me, I’m a little surprised at how easy it is to drift off, not quite sleeping but definitely not awake.
Then my phone beeps.
Mum props herself up to grab it from the nightstand. The number is Inara’s, but the text is addressed to both me and Eddison. It’s just a picture, no caption, but I can’t make it out from the thumbnail on the lock screen. She hands the phone to me and I thumb it open, pulling up the picture.
Inara stands with another girl, about our age and significantly shorter, with Times Square screaming neon all around them. Both have half-size poster board signs and dangerous smiles. The shorter girl is on the left, her sign yelling FUCK OFF in gold glitter; Inara’s says BAD GUYS in silver.
Across the hall, a muffled thump and curse is followed by a “Christ and goddamn, Bliss!”
Mum and I look at the picture a while longer, then Mum snorts softly. “I’m impressed,” she admits. “Wandering around Times Square with a sign that says fuck off. Lovely.”
“Fuck off, bad guys,” I tell her, aiming for prim but landing somewhere next to a laugh.
“You did your best to drag ours straight to the gates of hell; we’ll see if it sticks.”
I turn the phone to silent and set it back on the table, but as I drift off again, I can hear the buzzing vibrations against the wood that says Eddison and Inara are back-and-forthing. It’s a strangely welcoming sound.
Jameson Carmichael—also known as Joshua Gabriel—dies Thursday, May fifth, at eight forty-seven in the morning, mountain time.
He never woke up.
Eddison can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not. A confession, or even a chance to question him, would have helped immensely, but there’s a part of him that’s glad they never had to hear him try to further justify what he did. There’s more analysis to be done before anyone will sign off on informing the other families, but there’s a sense of completion there.
Vic and Finney go down to Texas to talk to Mrs. Eudora Carmichael, and Vic comes back looking a kind of haunted that makes Eddison’s skin crawl. Vic’s daughters take one look at their father and practically nail him to the couch, sitting around him with snacks and a nearly endless stream of animated movies at the ready. It’s what he’s always done for their bad days; his girls are too bright not to realize that it works both ways.
Once the girls are asleep, Vic squirms out from under them, adjusting the blankets so they’re covered, their limbs so they’re not about to fall off the couch, and motions his partners outside. They follow him, but not until Eddison snaps a picture to send to Priya.
After all, she’s been part of that puppy pile in the past.