She nods, but when she extends her arm to me, it’s shaking.
I fill the syringe. “Make a fist for me.”
She obeys, hand nestled in my lap. The fist flops open as the barrel empties, her shoulders softening, cuts fluttering like flower petals as they begin to knit back together.
For a second, reality softens too. Maybe I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of the rain on Veer’s windshield and this is a nightmare I’ll jolt awake from, sweaty and thankful.
The door slams open hard enough to bounce off the wall.
“Ambulance is here,” Veer barks. “Want help with her?”
She’s silhouetted in the doorway, red spattering her sports bra. My mom cowers at the sight of her.
“I’ll drive her later,” I lie. Hospitals aren’t good for creatures like us. “She’s still calming down.”
“’Kay.” Veer frowns, begins to backtrack. Her eyes catch on the needle still in my hand.
I go to hide it automatically, then think better of it. “It’s not—”
“What it looks like. Yeah.” For a second, her face spasms like she’s on the verge of tears. “Is it ever?”
I start to stand, but my mom’s hand grabs me and squeezes. I can’t. She needs me.
By the time I turn back to the doorway, it’s empty, the door still swinging restless on its hinges.
I push it closed, my stomach knotted, and squeeze my mom’s hand in reply. Her eyes drift closed. I watch as tears bloom from beneath her eyelids and race each other down her cheeks.
“Me and you, Mom,” I whisper to her. “It’s just me and you.”
When the medics’ voices fade and the front door slams for the last time, I still wait ten minutes before venturing back into the kitchen. Boots and bodies have smeared crimson tracks across the floor. The scent of it nudges my curse awake, a hungry purr deep in its throat. When I run the faucet, the water that comes out in demanding spurts stinks like formaldehyde.
Veer is gone. I knew she would be, packed in the ambulance with the medics—her people, safe people—but I still feel bereft, pacing the room without her. I stack the vials from the cooler in the freezer, safe and secure this time. It takes three rags to mop up all the blood on the floor. Once I’ve changed into clean clothes and scrubbed any residual spatter off my arms, I toss the rags in a plastic grocery bag and take them out to the dumpster.
Horror, I remind myself as I try to brand the image of Joanne’s collapsed body into my brain. I should be feeling horror. She was good to us. Well, as good as could be expected. Did she recoil when my mom went for her throat, or did it happen so fast that she didn’t even know to react?
The dumpster slams shut, almost catching my fingers. Horror. But it’s just a word, not a real feeling. Here is what I actually feel: relief. It could have been so much worse. It’s too easy to imagine—Veer opening the door, cooler in hand, met with hunger moving too fast for me to stop. Or if we’d lingered at the gas station a few minutes longer and come back to find my mom already lost to me, no way to put her down but death. No, it was only Joanne.
What a thing to think. I’m the one with poison in my blood, not Veer.
Veer, with her bruised knees and her smell like citrus soap and longing. What, exactly, did she see? Joanne’s sprawled frame and ruined neck, sure, but how much else?
I don’t want to know. Any of it, all of it, is too much.
On my way back to the apartment, I pass another neighbor in the stairwell. A young mother and her preteen daughter, her hair in two long braids tied with gold ribbons.
“Was that the police here just now?” the mother asks. She grips a vase of fresh lilies. Her other hand is holding her daughter’s.
“I think it was an ambulance.”
She looks concerned. “Ambulance? Did someone have an accident?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh.” The daughter winces. I imagine her mother’s grip tightening, a handcuff she can’t unlock. “I hope everything’s okay.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
As they continue down the stairs, the daughter glances back at me, like she knows.
