He hung up, and I pocketed the cell. “What can I do?”
“Bring all the towels you’ve got. A pillow and a quilt aren’t bad ideas.” He brought Miller’s wrist to his mouth and bit down until fresh blood painted his lips. “That will ease his pain.” He palmed one of Miller’s curved shoulders and pushed it straight. “Can you help me turn him onto the opposite side?”
“Sure.” I hooked my fingers through Miller’s belt loops, and together we flipped him onto his back. “Just one more,” I told him, though he was past hearing. “Here goes nothing.”
Thom and I wrestled him so that his injury faced the ceiling, and then we got busy peeling back the fabric. The material was frayed and caked with blood. I sacrificed a pair of poultry shears from a nearby cabinet to cut the shirt free of him. The gaping bite mark wept, the ribbons of skin tattered.
“Don’t get sick over him.” Thom nudged me away. “Get back if you can’t stomach this.”
Forcing my lids closed, I drew in gulps of oxygen through my mouth, its metallic taste registering on my tongue with cold familiarity as I spiraled inward. The arctic well of rationality deep in my core roused, its frigid calm spreading ice over my emotions in a sheet that trapped them from surfacing.
“Towels, pillow, quilt,” I said smoothly, the bite of frost in my mouth. “I’ll be right back.”
Thom whipped his head toward me, and his administrations faltered. “Luce?”
“I won’t be but a minute.” Knees that had failed to support me when I first spotted Miller had no trouble locking now. “Call out if you think of anything else.”
Thom’s hesitation lasted until I reached the sheeting, and he asked, “What about your gun?”
“I don’t need it.” I heard myself talking, but I was divorced from the words coming out of my mouth. I was still caged in human flesh and had no charun powers, so I had no idea what the cold place expected me to do if whoever had taken down Miller came back for seconds, but the beauty of embracing this headspace was its efficiency, the ability to function without panic over seeing a friend bleeding out on the kitchen floor. I reached the front door as it flung open under Cole’s hand. “Thom’s in the kitchen.”
His charge halted midway, his feet and brain pulling him in two different directions as he stared at me.
“Miller’s bleeding out,” I told him, and I might as well have been reporting on the weather. “Santiago’s on his way with supplies.”
With visible effort, Cole wrenched himself away from me and stormed off in their direction.
I gathered the supplies Thom had requested, adding a few extras, and then I hit the stairs. I met up with Santiago, who carried a black duffle large enough to double as a body bag on his shoulder, and held the plastic aside so he could get to Thom. Following him in, I circled around Miller then knelt on Thom’s left side across from Cole, who sat with his back to the cabinets.
Miller’s head was deadweight when I lifted it and slid the pillow in to support his neck. I worked in tandem with Thom, blotting the wound clean as he stitched it closed. Shock blasted through me when he sniffed the wound before licking the length of it clean, but there was too much insulation between me and what was happening for the disorientation to last.
When the time came for him to pierce Cole’s thick vein, I was running on autopilot again. Needles, which usually made me squirm, didn’t bother me all that much at the moment, even when Thom started the IV on Miller. A bag of saline came next, and Cole hooked that onto a cabinet drawer pull. While Thom checked the line for patency then moved on to tweaking the clamps and hooking up tubes, I existed in the white noise of my own head.
The process lasted two hours during which no one spoke or moved except for Thom, who vacillated between his two patients.
“I can make a bowl of soapy water,” I offered into the quiet. “Miller needs to be cleaned before he rests.”
Otherwise he might wake glued to the floor.
“No.” Cole removed the needle from his arm with practiced ease. “I’ll bathe him. Can you turn on the shower?”
“Sure.” Out of clean towels, I pulled another quilt from the shelves in the laundry room and left it folded on the sink while I turned on the water and adjusted the temperature. Cole was standing in the doorway when I finished, his gaze empty when it fell on me. “It’s ready.”
“Go wait with the others,” he ordered, shuffling through the doorway with Miller lolling in his arms.
Numb to my toes, I did as I was told. Santiago and Thom both stopped what they were doing to look at me, but I shook off their stares and mixed soapy water in a mop bucket. I sopped up the mess staining the floor, dumped the pinkish water down the sink, then washed my hands.
I was fine until I noticed the blood staining my nailbeds, until I really thought about how it had gotten there. Shakes spread from where my hands gripped the edge of the sink through my arms until chills brushed across my shoulders and spread up my nape. The cold place melted as if it had never been, the horror of what I had seen rushed back, and I heaved into the basin I had just scrubbed clean.
“Thank God,” Santiago muttered.
Thom appeared at my elbow, a silent comfort, and I smiled weakly at him. “What’s with the face?”
“You went away.” He leaned across the space and rested his forehead against mine, his need for reassurance that I was me again too great for me to deny him. “Don’t do that again.”
“I’m sorry” was the best I could manage when some days that numbing cold was all that got me through. “I’m better now.”
Santiago shouldered Thom out of the way. “Did you leave by choice?”
“Yes.” I slumped forward, too tired to argue. “I made the call, but it’s instinctive for me to reach for that part of myself when I need to shut down fear or panic. I’ve done it all my life.”
“You can’t give her an inch,” he snarled, so close his spittle hit my cheek, “or she’ll take a mile.”
“I’ll work on it,” I promised, because seeing Santiago rattled shook me too. “Hey, I almost forgot. I got you a present.” I patted down my pants until I located the small device I had stolen from Wu. “Merry Christmas.”
“You’re early,” he said, peering at my palm with avarice, “but I’ll take it.”
“It’s a signal disrupter of some kind. Wu slapped it on a house we broke into tonight.”
Santiago cocked his head like he hadn’t heard me right. “You did what?” He wheeled on Thom. “What the hell were you thinking not telling us Wu threw a B&E party and only invited her?”
Thom held his ground. “I wonder where she got the address.”
“Wu already had the address,” I chimed in. “His plan was to trick me into calling Miller, so he could get a bead on his location, but Miller hasn’t been in contact with me for days.”
A vicious edge serrated Santiago’s voice. “What did he want with Miller?”
“He wanted to know if he had to clean up after Miller when he got done with Ivashov. I told him no.” I rubbed my chapped fingers together, the faint stickiness from using too much soap reminding me of other tacky fluids I had been wrist-deep in tonight. “That was before I found Miller collapsed in my kitchen. I’m not sure how he got here, but it’s not like I’ve had time to go explore the yard for clues. I doubt anyone followed him. The blood in the foyer was congealing. He’d been here for a while. They could have attacked him before we arrived to finish the job.”
“Unless they used him as bait.”
I whirled toward Cole’s voice and found him drenched, dripping water onto the newly cleaned floor. I yanked open a drawer and tossed him a ratty dish towel. It was that or paper towels, and neither was going to do him much good considering his surface area. Miller was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t stop me from craning to see past Cole’s shoulder into the living room.