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So that meant … shopping for a couch cover. With my last forty dollars from this paycheck. On Christmas Eve.
Dismayed, I set out for Target.
CHAPTER SEVEN
On my way out the door, I stopped and grabbed Anna’s knife. My brother had a lifelong penchant for going through my things. New couch covers could be explained away, but fancy cutlery could not. I decided to toss it in my locker at work for a few nights. It was three times as secure there as anything in my house would be on Christmas Day. I left the fancy box behind on my dresser, settling the knife into the bottom of my purse, wrapped in a hand towel, and had a few crazy thoughts about how exactly I’d explain it away if I got pulled over on my drive in.
Only no one was out ticketing people on Christmas Eve night. They—and by they, I meant everyone—were at Target, desperately shopping.
Packed to the gills did not begin to describe it. I parked my Cavalier out in a satellite parking location, and then hiked into the store.
Throngs of shoppers milled around, none of them looking any happier than me. I was lucky, I supposed—I wasn’t going to the toy aisle. I wove my way to homewares and stood in front of the couch cover zone, in do-it-yourself home-decorating land.
It would take a lot more than forty dollars to make my entire apartment look nice. But there were only so many extra shifts I could take and still maintain a life, by which I meant feeling like I left the hospital often enough to see the sky.
Out of habit, I diagnosed people around me. Flat affect and slumped shoulders? Seasonal affective disorder. Red eyes and sneezing? The flu. I wondered what disorder people could read on my face, given both knowledge and half a chance.
“Hello, Edith. ”
No one had called me Edith since my grandmother’d died. No one except for—I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as I turned around.
A tall man was standing there—strike that, a vampire, one that I knew. “Dren. ” A Husker, in service to the Rose Throne. The last time I’d seen him was at the end of my trial when he’d tried to kill me. I’d cut off his hand in self-defense.
“What do you want?” I asked him. The other shoppers glanced at me when I spoke, but none of them looked at him. He had his vampire look-away high beams on; no one’s consciousness could get a grasp on the fact that he was there.
He stared at me with his grass-green eyes. “I believe you owe me. ”
“For what?”
“My hand and my Hound. ”
His right hand sat on his sickle holster, his left wrist plunged into a coat pocket that subsequently stayed flat.
If he hadn’t tried to hurt me, he’d have been fine. And I didn’t even kill his lizard-person-Hound-thing—the Shadows did. We were very in the open here. Sure, I had an antique knife hidden inside my purse, but I didn’t think I’d know how to use it, if I even got a chance to pull it out.
“Let me get this straight—say, if I had let you kill me, then would you, technically, owe me?”
“If that had happened, you would not be in a state to ask for reparations,” he said over a short blond woman’s head.
“So my crime is really not that you lost your hand, but that I didn’t finish the job?”
“That’s one way of putting it. ”
All of the passing shoppers veered to the left, nearer me and farther from Dren. None of them could see him, and yet none of them wanted to come near him, either. Me, though, they could see and hear. They might not be able to diagnose me, but they knew that I was wrong. I started getting the stink eye, but it’d take a hell of a crazy show to get people off course on Christmas Eve.
The couch covers I so desperately needed were at my back. I looked up and down the aisle. I couldn’t count on any of these people to help me—they all thought I was talking to myself. And even if I could have … I still couldn’t. I couldn’t put anyone else in danger.
“What do you want, Dren?” I asked, letting my weariness with the world seep into my voice. “I’m a noncombatant. You can’t hurt me. ”
“I’m not supposed to hurt you. That doesn’t mean I cannot. ”
And suddenly all the ways that Dren could hurt me came to mind. I’d be seeing them tomorrow. My horror must have flashed in my face. “So you see,” he said.
I cleared my throat so my voice wouldn’t crack. “How can I make good?”
“My hand is irreplaceable. ”
“I didn’t know—” It was his own fault for attacking me. I hadn’t meant to injure him.
“My Hound,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “requires the use of a gifted victim. ”
“I didn’t kill your Hound, Dren. The Shadows did. ”
“I do not have access to the Shadows. You do. ”
I had no urge to ever visit the Shadows’ home, subterraneanly deep below the hospital, again—much less do anything else that would indebt them me to them further. We had a deal—they kept my brother clean, and I worked for subpar wages on Y4. I didn’t have anything left to trade, other than matching organs. “We don’t really get along. ”
