Page 83 of Ghost’s Awakening

I'd nearly put the Church table into itself for a second time.

He kept playing with me. The name through the horns, the raid, the floor full of his own men, none of it had touched him. He'd paid off the rest of my brother's bill and called it a tip for a good show.

For a month I hadn't been able to put it down. Liam in room 217, the tube out of his throat for two weeks now, the sedation coming down a notch at a time, slow, because a man kept under that long doesn't get yanked awake. Soon, they kept telling me. They wouldn't say when, and every time the nurse used the word, something in my gut came up to meet it and I had to push it back down.

Enough. Fuck Gravedigger. If he wanted to pay, let him pay. If he wanted to leave me and Liam alone, let him. He wasn't getting one more minute of my head. I'd counted everything my whole life, and I was done counting him.

I lay there in the gray and did the other thing instead. In through the nose. Four. Hold. Out through the mouth, four. The count had come back sometime in the second week, on its own, and I checked on it most mornings the way I'd check a lock. It held. The thing that stood up in me on that mat had sat back down.

And I had a club to feed.

I slid out from under his arm an inch at a time. He made a sound about it, low, and pulled the pillow into the warm spot and kept it. Short shower. Jeans, and the black hoodie hanging off the back of the door, his, the collar of it smelling of him when I pulled it over my head. The hallway hit me cold. The desert had turned over in the last three weeks, the sun still warm on the yard by afternoon and the nights gone hard, and the concrete floor handed the cold back through my boots.

The kitchen door swung open under my hand, and the room wasn't empty.

The urns were on, ticking as they heated, and the whole long room smelled of last night's bleach and this morning's coffee. Irish sat at the end of the long table nearest the counter with Nolan and Declan on either side of him, the three of them on one bench with their backs to me. Nolan's hair stood up on one side and his glasses sat crooked, and he'd noticed neither. Declan drank black coffee in slow pulls with his face doing nothing. Irish heard the door before the other two did, because Irish heard everything.

"Half past five." He announced it to the coffee urns without turning around. "The kitchen opens at five. At some point the treasurer has to ask what the whole club is asking, which is how long Ghost thinks he can keep the usurper in bed before breakfast turns into brunch."

"He was asleep." I came down the length of the table. "I wasn't."

"He was asleep." Irish twisted around on the bench, and the grin was already up, wide and red-cheeked in the cold. Then it dropped a notch, and his hand came flat onto the wood. "Listen. Since you're late anyway. The winter one. The sneaky one with the chili in it. Teach it to me. I'm not asking for myself, I'm asking for the club."

"He wants it for himself." Declan didn't lift his eyes from the mug.

"I want it for everyone." Both of Irish's palms came up off the table.

"He's been talking about it for a week." Nolan pushed his glasses straight with one finger, and they went crooked the other way. "In his sleep, once."

I stood at the end of the table and looked at the three of them. A month ago I'd have called them Ghost's people. Somewhere in the last few weeks the word had turned into family, and I felt it land in my chest, warm.

"After service." My face did something I didn't order. "You wash the potatoes."

"I'll wash the potatoes." Irish hit Declan in the arm. "Did you hear? I'm on potatoes."

I went around the counter and put my hand flat on the griddle to feel it come up.

By seven the room was full.

Fifty-odd bodies came through those doors inside an hour, and the potato frittata went up onto the pass faster than I could fill the trays. Bacon spat on the griddle. The room was loud and warm now, forks on plates and thirty conversations at once, the windows fogged along the bottom, and the heat off the line kept the front of my head busy and I let it.

Ghost worked the pass, two plates a hand, sliding through the crowd sideways so that people felt him go by and never saw it. Every third trip his eyes came over the trays and found me, and every third trip I lost my count on the trays. I took two plates off the pass myself and carried them out.

Trenza had the end of the second table. The cut along her cheekbone had healed to a thin pale line, and the eye above it, the one I'd watched swell shut on a mat, was open and on me before I'd cleared the counter.

"You're late, cook." She took the plate out of my hand before I could set it down. "Ese chico te tiene mal."

"That boy has you bad."

"He has me fine." I set the second plate down in front of Mateo, and Mateo looked at it and then at me.

His left arm hung in a sling, the cast under it gone gray with a month of the compound. The cut over his eyebrow had closed into a mark he'd have for the rest of his life. He looked at me for a while with his fork in his good hand, and I stood there and let him.

"I decided." He told it to the frittata.

"Decided what?" I kept my hand on the back of Trenza's chair.

"Whether I like you." He cut a piece off the corner and ate it. He chewed for a long time. "You're all right."