A ghost, standing above the rocks, silhouetted by the evening sun. A man with a gun in his hand.
The name leaves my lips. “Clay.”
Langston freezes over me, turns his head to follow my gaze. He squints, unsure, and the ghost raises his gun—
Pulling the trigger.
Blood drips onto my face, my throat, my chest. Warm and awful.
Langston gulps, gurgles, splutters from his terrible lips. His eyes swing upward—toward the sky—wide and white and stunned. Before slumping down over me. Heavy and lifeless.
My mouth trembles, hands pushing against his weight, managing to roll him off me onto the bottom of the boat with a thud.
My fingers grab, reach, trying to find the edge of the boat.
I pull myself up, coughing, spitting blood from my mouth into the water.
The ghost wades out into the sea, swimming until he reaches me. He folds his hands around me, touching my face, muttering something, then pulls me into the water with him.
He breathes, and he seems real.
Impossibly real. He’s pulling me back to shore. But there is so much blood in the water, swirling around us. Not mine. Not Langston’s. But the ghost’s—he’s bleeding, because he’s not dead.
Clay is alive, bleeding out, dragging me up onto the rocky shore, where he collapses beside me.
I suck in a breath, then another, turning on my side to run my fingers across his chest. The bullet went into his stomach, just below his ribs. I press my palm to the wound, and my lips to his mouth. Because he’s alive. But for how long? I could cry. I could scream.
My eyes turn back to the sea, where the boat drifts farther from the shore, carried on an unseen tide, a corpse resting inside.
“We have to get inside,” I say, biting down on the panic.
“Aye,” Clay manages, but I can see his skin is turning a terrible shade of white.
I help him up, and together we stagger toward the house. A line of blood runs through the grass—marking the path he took from the back door down to the shore.
Up the steps, into the house, we leave more blood in our wake. Through the kitchen, we pass two bodies lying on the floor. Lifeless. The cigarette still smolders, leaving a black, charred mark in the table.
“Bowfin,” he mumbles, and I catch his meaning. It’s an awful sight, enough to make my stomach turn.
We stumble into the living room, and Clay grunts as I ease him down to the couch, a hand to his wound. I run up the stairs, two at a time, banging into the bathroom, where I grab fresh towels and the glass bottle of white alcohol that’s sat unused since I mended his cut hand.
Clay lets out a moan as I douse the bright red hole in his stomach with alcohol. I do it quickly, panicked, then tear away his shirt to expose his whole torso. I feel around to his back, searching for an exit hole, but don’t find one. The bullet is still inside him. But I have no idea if I should go into his flesh and try to pull it out, or if I’ll do more damage. I slosh more alcohol onto the wound. It turns the blood watery, spills it onto the couch, staining everything.
“I have to stitch it up,” I say.
He nods, our eyes boring into each other. Neither of us expectedthis—a bloody end to those men striding up our shoreline. But there are more things to fear than Clay bleeding out. I think of the small boat set adrift. Of the gunshots ringing out across the sea. How long before others from the hijacked ship decide they need to come ashore, see what’s happened to their admiral—who is now lying face down on our kitchen floor, soaked in his own blood?
I grab the small sewing kit from the side table—where I use it most evenings, stitching and mending, keeping the fabric of our life held together.
I kneel down in front of Clay, taking a deep breath. This isn’t like sewing up his hand. This is bloodier, deeper—this wound could kill him. I break off a length of gray thread, then hold the needle up. But my hands are shaking so bad I can’t thread it through. Tears smear my vision, and Clay reaches out, touching my hand with his. “Ye can do this.”
I swallow, refocus my eyes, then slip the thread through the needle on my first try. I squint down at the bullet hole. “Okay,” I say, more to myself than to him.
But when I look to Clay, his jaw clenched, he mutters, “Whiskey.”
I nod, then rush into the kitchen—eyes flicking at the two dead men—before throwing open the cupboard and grabbing the half-empty bottle of whiskey.
Clay sloshes back nearly all of it, his hands around the neck of the bottle, then tilts his head back against the couch, nodding at me.
