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“I am worrying about my job, Woods. In case you somehow managed to forget, Trine is my client. It is absolutely under my purview to keep her alive and well.”
“Will you two stop fucking bickering?” Salinas says. He’s sitting in the backseat, rubbing his brow dramatically. “It’s starting to really get on my nerves.”
I crane my neck to look at him. “Starting to…”
He puts his hand up to stop me from talking. “Yes, starting to,” he says. “Look, I understand that you needed time to process what was happening with Trine, particularly after her mother died because we got attacked by literal demons, and the two of you are ready to verbally spar at the drop of a hat since that seems to be your only hobby…”
“It’s not my only hobby,” Woods says, a smile creeping into his voice.
Salinas ignores him. “So I thought I would give you time. I wanted you to be able to wrap your head around everything that had happened before you shared some pivotal information with me.”
“Oh, you were giving us time, Father?” I ask. “Because I seem to recall that there was something extremely important you needed to share about Trine with the good doctor here that you just never did.”
“You’re both smart men,” Salinas replies. “I didn’t expect that the two of us hooking up would stay a secret for long.”
“Is that what you’re calling it?” I ask him. “Hooking up?”
“I don’t need to give you a play-by-play of the sex we’ve had,” Salinas replies. “But if you really want one, I guess I could record it for you.”
“Okay,” Woods says, waving his hands in front of his face. “Clearly, tensions are high between all of us right now.”
“Which part of your education allowed you to discern that one, doctor?” I ask him.
He laughs, which surprises me. “We can’t make decisions for her,” he says. “We can’t follow her again and we absolutely can’t gossip about her behind her back. If this is what she wants, and we’re all okay with it, then we need to talk to her about it.”
“That all makes sense to me,” I reply. I do like that he’s back to his sensible self, but there’s one small thing that he’s overlooking. “What about the upcoming apocalypse? The fish rain? The fucking demons and then the explosion in the house that the news attributed to a gas leak?”
“Or the fact that a demon is with Trine in a church, yeah,” Salinas says. “I mean, we can talk about how this works until we’re blue in the face, but what difference will it make if there’s nothing to talk about? We need to…”
“Stop the apocalypse?” Woods offers flatly. “Yeah, I’ve thought about that too, but unless the two of you have managed to think about how to do that, I’m trying to focus on the things that I can actually control.”
“We can have this conversation once we stop…whatever this is,” Salinas says. “You never actually told me what happened with Tom Souter.”
I look at Woods for a second. The only reason we haven’t told Salinas anything is because we don’t want to talk about Tom around Trine. She’s obviously dealing with plenty after she saw her mom and her mom’s husband die a fiery death in front of her.
I don’t think she needs any more death in her life.
I would like not to make things more difficult for her if it’s not absolutely necessary.
And Tom’s death…that was brutal.
Thankfully, Woods answers for me. “We got to the Souter house earlier than we said we were going to that day,” he starts. “We were supposed to be running errands but we were on that side of town and had an appointment later that day, so Misha called Ms. Souter to make sure she was okay with us popping in. She said that would be fine. She sounded fine, but when we got there, things felt strange.”
“Yeah,” I say, when it’s clear that he’s not going to continue telling this story. “Like the house was quiet and something was wrong with Mrs. Souter. She would hardly look either one of us in the eyes. She looked like she’d been crying. We asked her what was wrong, tried to get her to calm down. She said she was okay, then she just took off. She drove away as fast as we got there.”
“That…doesn’t seem like her,” Salinas says. “She seemed very concerned about him when we first went to see her.”
“She was still very concerned about him,” Woods says. “She was just also shocked by something. It almost felt like she wasinshock. When we got to Tom’s room, it was…shocking.”
The word shock doesn’t make much sense anymore.
“Tom was in bed, sitting up, and there was blood all over his arms and his nail beds were black,” I say, closing my eyes as I remember the horrid, acrid smell when we walked into the young man’s room, mixed with the scent of copper. “He looked even more gaunt than the last time we’d seen him. Woods called an ambulance, but…”
“Yeah, it was too late,” Woods says. “There was nothing they could do. Whatever was inside of him, it had eaten him from the inside out. He was too weak, too sick to survive.”
“Because he was so young and, as far as people knew healthy, there needs to be an inquest,” I say. “And it turns out that the reason Mrs. Souter was so upset was because a social worker had come around after someone had reported her for medical neglect. From what I understand, they were worried about Tom. It was another thing for Ms. Souter to worry about.”
“When he stopped breathing, we tried to intervene,” Woods says. “But even with early intervention, there was nothing to do. Nothing to be done. It was too late. The coroner came, and so did the police. They didn’t interview us, but they’re probably going to call us into the station at some point.”
