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Angel Dean’s vision blurred, as she stumbled like a drunk down the filthy alley. All she had was an address, burned into her brain as a guide to the twisting downtown streets, the rain pelting her, bouncing off her brittle bones and bruising the thin skin. He had to help her. He had to. A pothole, filled with rainwater, caught her foot and she went sprawling to the dirty pavement, carving chunks of skin from her palms as she tried to brace her fall. She didn’t waste time on tears but scrambled clumsily to her feet, forcing her vision to clear. Where the hell was she?
A long time ago — a lifetime ago — Pyro had come into her life all bad-ass and bigger-than-life but then things had gone wrong. So wrong. And it was all his fault. She’d make him help her.
Angel pushed wet chunks of hair from her eyes and swallowed against the pain radiating through her entire body. The dingy apartment — a tenement for lost souls and those who’d generally given up on caring two shits about their life — loomed and she struck out with renewed strength. He would help her. The fucker owed her, right? A hysterical sob, born of suppressed grief and anger, fear and addiction, broke from her numb lips and she slammed against the front door, pushing it open and taking the stairs at a clip that should’ve been impossible for someone in her condition but desperation did funny things to a person.
“Hey baby, slow it down,” a voice crooned with lecherous intent and she swiveled her gaze to a man lounging against the wall, picking at his cuticle, obviously either waiting for his girls or doing a drop. He pushed himself from the wall and started to come toward her, his gaze sliding the length of her body, taking stock of her assets. “You look like you could use a shoulder to lean on, baby. C’mere, let Ratchet take care of you, boo.”
“Stay the fuck away from me,” she snarled, wiping at her bleary eyes. “I can tell you’re a fucking pimp and I’m not a whore.”
His gaze hardened and his easy smile froze. Quick as a snake strike, his hands were wrapped in her wet hair and a blaze of pain seared across her scalp as he yanked her close. “Look at you, all sassy and shit. You know I have clients who like girls that put up a fight. They like it rough. Do you like it rough, sweetheart?” He shook her like a rag doll and she bit back a scream but sent him a dirty glare. He laughed and pulled her close. “Yeah, you’re a sassy one. I like it. The problem is, girls like you…you break too easily.” His breath, a rancid mix of stale cigarette smoke and bad oral hygiene made her gag but as he brought her in to smash his lips against hers, she drove her knee into his nuts as hard as her abused and exhausted body could manage. His grip sprang open and he doubled over as his face turned florid, his hands now cradling his balls, trying to catch his breath. This was her only chance. Run, damn it. Run! She scrambled away from him while he writhed in pain, his screams, “You fucking bitch! I’m gonna fucking kill you!” echoing in the dim light and she knew that if she didn’t find Pyro soon, Ratchet would make good on his threat.
Her fingernails ripped on the railing as she used it pull herself forward until she broke the second landing and ran headlong toward his apartment door. Ratchet bellowed from below and she heard him stumble with uneven steps as he climbed the stairwell, nursing his damaged testicles.
Angel found the apartment number, 218, and banged on the door, shaking from the cold and the fact that she was strung out as fuck and needed a fix so bad she couldn’t see straight but also from fear because Ratchet would make the second floor any minute. “Pyro,” she cried, banging her fist against the metal door, her voice hoarse. “Pyro, open the door, please!”
Dangerously dehydrated and malnourished as fuck, she couldn’t keep up the energy to continue banging and slid to the floor in a heap, her eyes crossing from the effort to stay conscious. Pyro….
***
What the hell? James “Pyro” DeMarco pried one eye open, fighting against the bone-deep lethargy stealing his body’s ability to react to his will and dragged himself upright from the bed. Something had banged his front door. No one fucking messed with him. His neighbors knew to leave him alone and he gave precious few people his address, so who the fuck was banging on his front door? Shaking off the cobwebs in his brain, he reached under his pillow and pulled his gun. Someone wanna play? All right, we’ll play. He went to the front door and waited, listening. His ears pricked at a whimper and he scowled in confusion. A female whimper. Leave her be. Not your problem. Females in this place were always getting beat up or some shit because they didn’t have the good sense to leave the fuckers that were using their women as punching bags.
“Pyro…”
He startled. She knew his name. Whoever was on the other side knew him. Well, shit. Grimacin
g, he tucked his gun in his waistband and cautiously opened the door, only to have a woman fall back on his toes. Long, brown hair, plastered to her skull from the rain, gave little clue as to who she was, nor did he immediately recognize her otherwise. He stuck his head out through the doorway, looking for anyone who might have left her there and saw that cowardly fuck, Ratchet suddenly stop and stare, plainly caught between wanting the woman and keeping his face the way it was.
He glanced down at the unconscious woman and then looked back at Ratchet, waiting for the man to make his move. Finally, Ratchet backed down with a shrug and a glower. “Fuck it,” he muttered and then headed back down the stairwell with a decided limp.
Well, now what? He stared down at the woman with an annoyed scowl. He couldn’t leave her in the doorway that was for sure. Sighing, he dragged the woman into his apartment and shut the door. He nudged her with his foot, irritated by the mystery and the inconvenience of the situation. It wasn’t everyday that people came calling — and with good reason. He wasn’t exactly the neighborly type. “Hey,” he said, nudging her harder when she didn’t respond. “Hey, girl. Who the fuck are you and how do you know my name? Are you one of Ratchet’s girls?”
A moan escaped her blueish, parched lips and her eyes opened, revealing green eyes that immediately stirred a memory that he wanted to forget. He stared harder at the sodden woman at his feet, crouching to get a better look. He pushed the wet hair from her face none too gently and couldn’t believe who he was staring at. She looked different from the last time he’d seen her — a lot different — but then she’d been a chubby teen the last time he’d seen her. “Angel?” he tested, not sure he was right but hoping he was dead wrong. “Angel, is that you?”
“Pyro…please help me,” she whispered, tears leaking from her eyes as she shook. “Water…I need water.”
The hoarse croak of her voice horrified him. Had she been beaten? Why was she out in his shitty, dangerous-as-fuck neighborhood alone? Well, don’t just leave her on the floor, you fucking idiot. Get her to the couch at least. He gathered Angel in his arms, alarmed at how thin she was, and laid her gently on the ratty couch. “Did someone do this to you? What happened?” he asked, going to find something for her to drink. He opened the fridge and swore. A few beers and a moldy box of left-over Chinese stared back at him. Fuck. Well, it wasn’t as if he were prepared to entertain human beings. Or hell, anything that lived and breathed. He filled a cup with tap water that looked grey in the glass and even though he wasn’t sure anyone should drink that shit, at least it was wet. He brought it to Angel with a muttered apology. “Sorry, this ain’t the best but I wasn’t planning on company, you know?” He held it to her lips and she drank a little before sputtering, waving it away, to puke what little she’d had in her gut. He jumped out of the way before it splashed on his feet. He grimaced as she moaned piteously. “What the hell happened to you, Angel?” he asked under his breath as he went to grab a towel to mop up the mess. But when he returned, she was passed out cold. Hell, she looked fucking dead. So much so that he felt the need to check for a pulse. When he found the softly bumping heartbeat beneath his fingertips, he sighed with short-lived relief. Great, she was alive…but what the hell was he supposed to do with her?
***
Angel’s body was on fire. Licks of pain scored her nerve endings. If she’d been remotely religious she would’ve sworn she’d been dumped in the fiery pits of hell but she knew hell wasn’t some far off, mythic place — hell was her zip code and had been for a long time.
The surface of her skin itched like mad and the urge to scratch until she bled was more than she could stand. Her stomach twisted and roiled, as if trying to digest itself and she wondered how much permanent damage she’d done to herself. She’d tried to get clean, she really had but when someone doesn’t want you clean, and they keep you high for their own purposes, it’s near to impossible to get away. Excuses and justifications rattled around in her frantic brain as she fought the detox, hating herself, hating everything about her life, wanting to weep and wanting to scream, but most of all, wanting to know the way to fix everything that’d gone so terribly wrong without her realizing. It was as if she’d been on a canoe in placid waters and without her noticing, the current had taken her into the open sea, dumping her into a shark frenzy and she’d only just realized that her fucking boat was no protection from the danger that was going to eat her alive.
Bugs! There were motherfucking bugs crawling all over her! She shrieked and pushed at the scores of black beetles scuttling across her skin but they kept coming, appearing one after the other, marching with tiny scratchy legs, pinching with evil mandibles, ripping open her flesh until she bled in scarlet rivulets that stained the floor and smeared across her body. Get ‘em off! Get ‘em off! She couldn’t move fast enough to stop the tide. She was going to drown in a sea of black bugs. Oh, someone fucking help me!
“Calm the fuck down!” A voice she dimly recognized from the past pulled her out of the nightmare, out of the hallucination and she realized it was more detox delight, the after-effect of her brain dealing with the chemical withdrawal of her addiction and she uttered a sad, near hysterical laugh even as she continued to scratch at her skin because even if there weren’t bugs traipsing up and down her body, the insane itch continued. “You’re scratching your damn skin off,” he yelled, holding her arms down forcibly. “If you don’t fucking stop, I’ll tie your hands together. Jesus, what the hell have you gotten yourself into, Angel? What happened to you?”
The last part, muttered with dark annoyance, struck her as ironic. What’d happened to her? She wanted to scream, “You! You happened to me!” but her mouth wasn’t working properly. Drool dribbled from her slack mouth and Pyro wiped her face roughly with a foul smelling dishrag. If she’d been halfway coherent, she would’ve puked again but she didn’t have anything to chuck. Her last meal had been three days ago. All she had left was bile. And even that, might’ve been iffy. He forced more water down her throat and she nearly choked on it but she managed to get it down. He did this several more times before he let her rest and she fell into an exhausted sleep that was nothing but blackness and despair — the sleep of the damned.
***
Pyro stared down at the woman he could barely reconcile as the teen he’d once known and he didn’t know what to do with her. She was a fucking addict and from what he could tell, coming down from some serious shit. He checked her arms and between her toes for track marks but couldn’t find anything so that told him it was probably meth. Or crack cocaine. Either one was bad. He was no saint and no stranger to drugs. Hell, he’d once stayed up a week straight back in the day when he’d been all piss and vinegar and out to prove to the world that he was a bad ass. What a fucking joke. If he could tell his younger self one thing, it would be, “Stop acting like a fucking jackass” but then nobody gets second chances in this life, right? He leaned back in the chair by the couch, his mind heavy with the realization that likely the kid — wait, she wasn’t a kid anymore. She’d been sixteen when he’d last saw her so that meant she was close to twenty-two now — well, at any rate…she’d probably come to him because she’d had nowhere else to go.
And that was his fucking fault.
Guilt, crushing and visceral, returned like an anvil falling from the sky to land on his shoulders. Yeah, it was his fault. Maybe if he’d never started hanging around Angel and her sister, Ashley, Ashley would still be alive. Maybe if he’d been a better man, Ashley wouldn’t have been caught alone that night. Maybe she would’ve walked away.
Whole lot of maybes, which always added up to a whole lot of nothing. Ashley was dead because of him. He hadn’t stuck around to see what’d become of Angel. His gaze found her, wincing as her body told the story of addiction, and he knew whatever she’d gotten herself into was his fault.
He’d clean her up and then try to find her the help she needed, he told himself. Maybe that would help appease the roaring monster of guilt eating h
im from the inside out, chasing away any chance of rest, and forcing him to drive his body to complete exhaustion just to catch a little shut-eye. Guilt and shame had been his constant companion since that night. Penance wasn’t supposed to be a cake walk. Yeah, that was a good plan, he told himself, rising to grab his keys. The girl, excuse me, woman, needed food and maybe some Gatorade or something to keep up her electrolytes, which meant, he had to make a food run. He slipped out of the apartment and headed down the stairs only to run into Ratchet again. He started to walk past him but then thought better of it, returning to the punk to make sure there were no misunderstandings. “If you have any ideas about my friend…lose them,” he advised Ratchet with a hard look. “Unless you have a death wish.”
“I’m not afraid of you, cabrón,” he sneered, though the way his gaze darted told a different story.
Pyro stepped into Ratchet’s personal space with the slow, steady push of an icy smile as he said, “You should be. I eat little piss ants like you for breakfast. Don’t mess with what’s mine. You hear me?”
Ratchet swallowed and tried to hold his ground but really, it was an unmatched fight. Pyro outweighed him in height and muscle three times over and if Ratchet were smart — which admittedly, he wasn’t — he’d back the fuck down with his tail between his legs.
“Make a move,” Pyro dared him in a low tone. “I could use a stress reliever and I believe your face would work just fine, you know what I mean?” Yeah, I believe you do. Ratchet swallowed audibly and finally jerked a nod to show he understood. Pyro stepped away, his gaze never leaving Ratchet’s. “Good talk,” he said. “Remember what I said.”
Pyro knew Ratchet wouldn’t go near Angel, not if he valued his face. And that little fucker, loved his face.
