AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The streets around it would be a hive of small scenes of criminal activity.
By five AM I’d cruised up and down every unappealing, litter-strewn, dilapidated street in Houston.
I switched off the engine and lights, exited, and leaned on the car. The port was over my left shoulder, past a barbed-wire-topped enclosure. The road went through a gate that was locked then into some business premises. Val was in the car—a perfect man but dead to the world and to me. Maybe his head was full of brain that’d turned to sponge. Maybe you couldn’t fix that. The Nightmare King couldn’t do anything with a man who couldn’t think or walk.
Poetic justice?
Jesus. I’d rather have Val back with his parasite mocking us both than this.
Dawn approached. The horizon glinted. The sky showed a hint of mauve and purple. Pretty, and reinforcing the lonely fact that my misery bothered no one else. What must I do? Give up?
The edge of the road veered close to a channel of water and a high chain mesh fence kept the two apart. On my side a small heap of garbage slumped into the fence—discarded building materials, timber, wire, cans. Bottles and paper floated on the shadow-slick surface. I picked up a rock and tossed it. The water swallowed it like a troll eating breakfast. One gulp and the thick water settled.
What was I going to do?
If I returned him to the ward, I could maybe stick around if I was clever. How fun was that. He might last forever like this...
Giving Val that push to set him on the journey to death might be my fate after what I’d done to those other people—karma with the weight of a backhand that smashed you to a pulp. I’d rather kill myself than do that to him.
So weary. Every part of me sloshed with the stone-weight of a grief that filled me more and more the longer I waited. I was impotent, powerless. Couldn’t fix the only thing I needed fixed. Couldn’t help him. And I’d run out of tears. The middle had been carved from me leaving me hollow.
I was a nothing person...but for a brief moment I’d run with the wolves, been with a man who made me feel alive, important, made me feel as if I were someone...real.
I wanted him back.
Please.
I had. One. Last. Idea. One last desperate hope.
I pulled the passenger door until it creaked fully open, undid his seat belt, reclined the seat a long way back until it was at forty-five degrees, then I climbed in.
Straddling his hips I looked down on him, and sighed. I’d shaken him, slapped him, and screamed at him, all to no avail.
He was like Sleeping Beauty, and so, if this were some kinda fairytale, all I’d need to do was...
I hunched over and gently kissed his lips.
Val’s hand crushed my throat cutting off my gasp.
My air.
My scream.
His eyes snapped open, gray pupils rimmed with red.
He rolled us out of the car. Using the grip on my throat to direct me, he pushed me onto the hood, pinning my hands above my head before I’d managed more than a single thought.
His strength and speed stunned.
One-handed, he tore at the hospital gown, stripped it off his torso, letting it flutter away, taken by a breeze.
Naked.
Tight, taut man-flesh, ribs caging a chest randomly decorated with sticky bandages, like some fantastical modeling rig made real. Tattoos and the C’s stitching were lit in the fire of black-and-white faerie light.
He was brutally beautiful. And he was healed.
My fingers flexed. Though scared, I itched to touch him.
