Blood and Fire (McClouds & Friends #8)(4)

No. Grow up. Get a spine transplant. Get the f*ck over it.

He muscled himself into the shower and slumped against the tiles for support. Let the water beat down against his closed eyelids.

Move your pansy ass, Ranieri. They ain’t payin’ you by the hour. He almost laughed. Tony, again. Made him nostalgic to channel the old guy’s brusque rudeness. Aw, hell with sleep. Kev would be back soon, for the wedding that Edie’s terrifying aunt was planning for Kev and Edie in a few weeks. He could talk to Kev between tux fittings, wedding rehearsals, dinners, showers and all that standard nuptial fluff.

In the meantime, he’d face his monsters like a man.

Brave words, dude. Brave words, an inner voice commented.

So? he shot back. Shut the f*ck up, or say something useful.

He listened in the silence for more as he got ready, but surprise, surprise . . . the little voice said nothing further.





2


Lily Parr stared into her laptop. The taxi’s swerving on the bends in the highway was making her queasy, but she powered on. Nausea was nasty, but if she shut the laptop and closed her eyes, she’d have to think about what she was about to do. And the way it made her feel.

She’d rather cram psych texts into her brain until there was no room for so much as a fleeting thought. After all, she had six years worth of studying to do in four short days for the grad thesis she was writing. A steep learning curve, but the guy who’d hired her to write it for him had forked over the 50 percent in cash she asked for up front this very morning, thank God, soed was committed. With that, plus the other fees she’d scraped together, letting utility bills slide and paying the minimum on her maxed-out credit cards, she’d covered the monthly fee for Aingle Cliff House, Howard’s private clinic. Assuming she didn’t need to buy anything frivolous, like subway fare or groceries, until some fresh fees trickled in. But once they did, she’d already be budgeting for next month’s check. She wasn’t sure what was left in the dark corners of the pantry, but she was going to get friendly with it this week. And who needed subway fare? She lived in Manhattan. She could walk. Her thighs could use the workout.

She muscled her mind back to the screen. The trick was to keep her mind constantly applied, like a pen that did not dare leave the paper. If only she could forget she had a body. Just be a vaporous cloud. Things would be simpler. Talk about saving on the grocery bill. Her inconvenient body was the medium through which feelings made themselves known. She hadn’t been able to afford feelings since she was ten, but they never figured out that they weren’t welcome. Clueless.

Ironic, to be writing a thesis in psychology. A crash course in the inner workings of the human brain, yay. That stuff belonged to the category of things that she could not afford to personally worry about. Like, for instance, the fact that a guy who’d paid another person to study for him, take his exams for him, and write his papers and his graduate thesis for him was about to graduate with a PhD, probably cum laude, thanks to Lily, and then go out to find work in the field of psychology, perhaps diagnosing or even treating people.

Yep. She, Lily Parr, had made that scenario possible.

Too bad. She pushed it away. She hadn’t chosen to do this. It just happened, and then it snowballed, and now she had no way out, not with Howard to take care of. The world was a shitty place, and she was sorry, but an ethical dilemma was another luxury she could not afford.

It was better than robbing banks, or dealing drugs. It really was.

The last paper she’d been paid to write had been on ethics. Hah. But at least a false ethicist wasn’t likely to hurt anybody once he was unleashed upon the world. There had been some small comfort in that.

Every month, she pulled together the eleven thousand bucks, plus her own cruelly pared-down living expenses on top of it, and forked the dough over to the professionals who’d promised to watch her father like a hawk twenty-four hours a day to make sure he didn’t kill himself.

She’d put Howard in less expensive facilities before Aingle Cliff, and every time he’d managed to get his hands on some pills and swallow them. God knew how. But he’d been at Aingle Cliff for four years now. They’d kept him under control. So far, so good.

Not that one could really describe the situation as “good.” Good in the sense of “not dead.” Everything was relative.

So here she was for the monthly torture. Checkbook at the ready. Stomach in knots. Locking Howard up was all she could do. She couldn’t help him any other way. She’d almost killed herself trying when she was young and dumb. She knew about addiction, codependency, blah, blah, blah. She’d written papers about it, taken online exams. On behalf of others, of course. She knew the material. She got it already.

Her presence was not a comfort to Howard. He never asked her to come. In fact, he begged her to stay away. Real egopumper, that one. Her own father, pleading for her not to visit him.

So why did she feel compelled to visit every month?

Her best friend, Nina, aocial worker who worked in a battered women’s shelter and knew self-destructive behaviors up and down, told her it was guilt that spurred her, but Lily didn’t buy it. Who had time for guilt? She was a floating cloud, a disembodied entity. Detached and cold, except when it came to Nina and a select handful of other friends, but Nina was the main one. Nina kept her marginally human. Not that she had time for a social life. No more than she had time for feelings.