Authors: Yvonne Navarro
Concrete Savior (17 page)
“Probably,” Brynna agreed.
“Looks like they’re going their separate ways,” Eran said. “Wait . . . well, would you look at that.” He and Brynna watched in silence as the young woman suddenly leaned forward and kissed Casey Anlon full on the mouth.
“Tell you what,” Brynna said after the woman had walked away and left Casey staring after her, “you stay with him and I’ll see where she goes. I’ve got my cell phone.”
Eran thought about it, but only for a second. Brynna could take care of herself, at least against anything that humans could throw at her. As far as being overprotective of her, he was out of the woods in that respect—more or less—and he had to admit that of the things
in
human she might have to deal with, he probably wasn’t going to be that much help. “All right.” Still, he couldn’t help adding, “But stay in touch, let me know you’re all right.”
Brynna just smiled.
ixteen
J
ack Gaynor had never
hurt so much in his life.
He couldn’t believe the fucking hospital had sent him home like this. “I’ve seen a lot worse,” the doctor at Cook County Hospital had told him. “You’re a big guy with a strong constitution. You’ll get over it.”
Get over it?
What kind of a bedside manner was that? The man had a patient who was burned enough so that he looked like a piece of blackened toast, for God’s sake, but he’d
get over it
?
He was a big guy all right, and that was exactly what was working against him here. The weenie pain meds they’d prescribed weren’t doing shit, but Jack only had so many left and the doctor—the same sympathy-challenged motherfucker who’d sent him home—had made it one hundred percent clear that there would be no refills—
“Make these last, Mr. Gaynor. I don’t do refills on narcotics. No exceptions, so don’t bother to call and ask.”
If that little shit had to lie in Jack’s overcooked skin for a couple of hours, he’d change his mind pretty fast. In the meantime, Jack had to ration; he wasn’t stupid enough to think the meds he was taking weren’t working at all—they were, just not to the level he needed. But if he took too many now and ran out later, then he’d
really
be in an ocean of hurt.
He stared up at the ceiling, tracing the cracks and ting not to move. It was bad, but if he stayed perfectly still, the hurt didn’t escalate . . . for a while. But he had to shift after a few minutes—he couldn’t help it. If he didn’t, the pressure would build and something would start to sting, or itch, or ache. It was a no-win situation.
If only he could sleep for . . . what? A week? Two? However long it took for his skin to heal and the pain to go away. It had been only three days but it seemed like years. He had first- and second-degree burns on his face, scalp—so much for his hair—neck, arms and hands. But he’d live, oh yeah. He’d look like a damned freak, but he’d live.
Freak.
Wow, that was fucking ironic, wasn’t it? He could still remember what and who he’d been thinking about just before the stupid car had gone up in flames. Rita, that’s who, and Ken—or Kendall, as Rita insisted on calling her son. Those two and the never-ending problems they caused him, and how the
boy
looked liked exactly that—a
freak
.
Even now, here he was laid up and hurting, and neither one of them was doing a damned thing to help him. After all he’d done for them—roof over their heads, food on the table, a good, secure family life—they weren’t doing shit in return. Punk-ass kid couldn’t even be considerate enough to keep his music at a dull roar so Jack could get some sleep. Weren’t teenagers supposed to sleep late? The bastard had fired up his CD player at fucking eight o’clock this morning, and it hadn’t let up since. He could almost feel every bass note on the surface of his skin.
“Jack?”
He jerked at the sound of Rita’s voice, then hissed at the searing sensation that ran up his neck and scalp where it was touching the pillow. He had bandages all over him and the staff at the hospital had told him to keep the burns covered, but they sure didn’t seem to be helping right now.
“What?” he ground out.
“I have to get to work,” Rita told him.
“It’s Saturday.”
“I know, but it’s my turn to cover the reception desk. First Saturday of every month, remember?”
“If I’d remembered, I wouldn’t be asking, would I?”
“Oh.” She didn’t say anything for a long moment. She was just out of eyesight range, hovering like an annoying moth. “Do you need anything before I go? Some water, or a soda? I only have to work until two, but I could make you a sandwich so you don’t have to wait until I get home to eat lunch.”
Jack opened his mouth to tell her to shut the fuck up, then a thought blossomed in his head. It was so good it was worth the pain of struggling to sit up so he could look at her. “What you could do,” he rasped, “is get me some more pain medicine.”
Rita frowned. The expression made her eyes tilt toward each other in her round face at the same time her mouth drew into a straight, thin line. God, how had he ever found her attractive? Then again, he wasn’t much of a prize himself anymore. Now there was something that had been pushing unpleasantly at his brain ever since he woke up in the hospital, eating at him along with the never-ending misery of his burns.
“The doctor said no refills,” Rita said.
“Don’t you think I fucking know that?” he snapped.
“Jack, I know you’re in pain but—”
“Get me something from where you work,” he interrupted. “It’s a dentist’s office, for Christ’s sake. There has to be something you can pick up.”
Rita stared at him. “Are you kidding me?”
“Do I
look
like I’m kidding?” He swung his legs over the side of bed, fighting the sheets as his feet found the floor and his toes sank into the not-very-clean carpeting. Rita had been sleeping on the couch to make sure she didn’t bump him in the middle of the night, and the bed looked like a disaster zone. The cheap linens were crumpled and stained with burn medicine, rank with the smell of someone confined to bed.
“Jack, you know I can’t do something like that. I just sit at the front desk and answer the phones. I don’t have access to any of the medications, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to get for you.”
“Vicodin,” he said. “Demerol. Morphine would be even better.”
“I can’t. That’s all locked up and I don’t have the keys—”
“Then
get
them, for fuck’s sake!” he yelled. “Can’t you see I’m in pain here?”
He saw Rita wince when he raised his voice, and Jack thought that was a good thing, a
fair
thing. Let her hurt, just like him. Having to holler had not started a dull headache in his forehead; rather, it had raised his blood pressure to the point where the areas cooked on his body were now throbbing along with his pulse, each beat of his heart sending a big, nasty jolt everywhere on his body that counted.
“No.”
“Wait—what?” He glared at her, feeling both his pulse and temper climb even higher.
Standing there in that stupid new uniform top, something that had fucking
kittens
on it, she drew herself up. “I said no. Even if I could do what you want—and I can’t—I wouldn’t, Jack. Not only would it get me fired, it’s
wrong
. It’s stealing drugs.”
Son of a bitch, he thought. For a second or two, he was actually stunned that she would talk this way to him, that she would
refuse
him. Did this stupid woman actually think he was so sick that he couldn’t still kick her ass all over this house?
He was off the bed and across the room so quickly that she didn’t even have time to inhale before he hit her.
div height="0">He put the full weight of his body behind the punch and he aimed for her face, but his injuries affected his balance and his fist caught her on the shoulder instead. She flew backward and screamed, and he went after her, intent on teaching her the biggest and best lesson of her life about doing what the hell he told her. She tried to get away and that pissed him off even more. He hit her again, she wailed, and it all started over; every blow pulled and split his crisped skull and hurt more than the one before, and that made him even more furious. It all built—her big unexpected refusal, his agony, her shrieks, his fury. He would shut her up, damn it all, and then she would know who was boss—
Something hard and heavy crashed into the broad part of his back and scraped the burns across the back of his now-bald skull. He had a fist bunched around the collar of Rita’s stupid cat top so he could hold her up, but he didn’t let go of his wife when he spun. His other hand came up automatically and caught one leg of the metal kitchen chair before Kendall could slam it down again.
“Get away from my mother!”
the boy screamed.
“Let her go or I’ll kill you, I swear I will!”
Jack wrenched the chair out of the kid’s hands with hardly any effort at all. He was enveloped in pain but past acknowledging it, past thinking about consequences, past all reason. All he was now, all he had left was endorphins, agony, and rage.
He slammed Rita face-first against the wall so hard that her head snapped backward, then dropped forward like a ball hanging from a string. Ken howled and leaped forward, and Jack tossed his wife aside and went to work in earnest on the stepson he so despised.
“GOOD MORNING, MA’AM,” THE
young woman said pleasantly. “How may I help you?”
Brynna made herself smile, hoping as she did so that it looked natural—it was such an integral part of human existence but sometimes that simple expression still felt foreign to her. If a smile felt odd on her face when it came naturally as a result of something good, did a false one ever really look genuine? “I’m not sure,” Brynna answered. “I don’t really know what I’m looking for.” As the words left her mouth, the irony of the utter truthfulness in that statement wasn’t lost on her. Really, she shouldn’t be worrying about that smile thing. She had been all about deception since her fall from Grace; there was no reason she couldn’t turn the tables and use those skills to her advantage now, in this entirely new game.
The young woman looked her up and down but didn’t step any closer. The appraisal was evaluating but not catty or insulting. “You’re very tall,” she said. “I imagine it can be very difficult to find a properly tailored suit. Our clientele is generally male, but we are very pleased to offer our services to women looking for upscale business attire.”
Brynna nodded and took her time scanning the inside of the spacious, well-appointed store into which she had followed the girl after she’d left the nephilim at the coffee shop on Michigan Avenue. The instant she’d stepped into this high-end suit business, a single name had flashed into her head:
Lahash.
This was exactly the sort of place where the demon would come to feed his never-ending desire to play dress-up in the human world. Tasteful, low key, horrendously expensive—in fact, Brynna was certain that right over there was a bolt of tan-colored fabric that exactly matched the suit Lahash had been wearing the last time she’d seen him at Wrigley Field, right after the unfortunate Michael Klesowitch had met his end. And she had no doubt that Lahash was still around. Although she’d screwed up his current plans to eliminate nephilim around the city, he’d come up with something else eventually—he always did. After all, he was like her: if he had to, he could wait forever.
“I was thinking more of getting a gift for someone,” Brynna said. “I came in here because a friend of mine recommended it. Perhaps you know him. He’s tall, like me, handsome with very dark hair and eyes. His name is Lahash.”
Although the young lady never made a sound or a move that anyone normal would have noticed, Brynna felt her change as surely as if she’d had a hand on the girl’s arm. Her heartbeat jumped, her temperature rose, she even inhaled more deeply. It wasn’t fear exactly . . . no, not that strong. More like uneasiness, as if she knew something, a dark and special secret, and needed to make sure that knowledge stayed hidden. That meant she probably wasn’t working directly with Lahash . . . but she had undoubtedly had dealings with him. Had it been only to sell him a suit or three, or had there been something more meaningful between them?