Summer Sons(113)

“Andrew,” Sam wheezed—scared and hurting.

Driven by the recollection of Eddie’s pain and the fresh insult of Sam’s, Andrew bit through that remaining psychic tendon and swallowed the force that had been Troth whole. After a hanging second spent casting around for further threat and finding none, their stacked power drained into the earth again, sated.

Andrew wrestled into control of himself once more. His skin stretched around the haunt, though it curled inside him with cautious stillness. Scattered memories cluttered his brain, his own and Eddie’s, twinned: giving himself the tattoo with broader hands and a frantically pumping heart, while at the same time holding his breath and riding the stinging pain out for the sake of the marker. The vulnerable beat of his pulse and the bumps of his vertebra, held within the cup of Eddie’s palm, silken skin under a sweeping thumb; his own soothed lull at the grounding weight, the squeeze, the welcome reminder of his belonging. Their alternate perspectives notched like puzzle pieces, building a whole. Eddie, bound to this chair, flinging their gift to Andrew in hopes that he’d latch on and tearing himself asunder in the process.

Movement caught his attention. Sam crawled from the pile of bodies, grabbed the knife, and sawed through the rope around his ankles. His cuffed wrists bled sluggishly. His breath came in sobs. With a shock, Andrew realized that the mask of blood on his face covered his eye, stuck shut with gore. Sam cut the ropes around Andrew’s wrists first. He tried to lift his arms, experiencing a lag as the possession that controlled his flesh caught up to his impulse and assisted in the movement. It was now the work of two minds to move his body. The high whine of terror that slipped out of his throat was all his own.

Sam finished working him loose and dragged him off the chair, spilling his unresisting form out on the ground. He huddled around him to touch his wounded forearms, his bruised face. The slashes had closed themselves a little—perhaps enough to keep him living for another night. The phone that appeared in Sam’s hand was incongruous in its mundanity. He watched Sam dial 911.

“Help,” he rasped into the receiver.

The ghost and Andrew made a fist in Sam’s shirt at his solar plexus. Sam’s lips shook as he gasped disjointed chunks of information into the phone. His teeth were tinted red. He tossed the phone aside while the operator continued speaking. Sweat dappled his sallow brow. The splayed gash ran from the middle of his left cheek to his hairline; Andrew forced himself to acknowledge that Troth’s knife had crossed deep over the eyelid. His gorge rose. Sam had suffered that for him.

“Your eye,” he whispered.

“It hurts,” Sam said, voice so small that it made goose bumps rise on Andrew’s arms.

“Fuck,” he sobbed. The revenant reduced itself to a passenger as he wrested control of his limbs and eased Sam onto his side. He ran bloodied fingers over his wrists to the cuffs that were cinched tight to his skin. “Fuck, I’m so sorry.”

The tip of his nail slipped under the edge of the metal cuff. Sam’s furnace heat, indisputably alive, intoxicated him as he held it within his palms. Sam stiffened. The faintest pop of connection sparked as their blood mingled, prickling at Andrew and the cavernous shadow of the haunt riding shotgun.

“Don’t,” Sam said. “Don’t make me like you.”

“I wouldn’t, I didn’t mean—”

“You killed her with that.”

Andrew withdrew an inch from Sam to put distance between their skin, more than he could bear but the least he needed to prevent the transmission his instincts clamored for. Sam let him go, lying flat on his back, cuffed hands clasped on his chest as if offering benediction.

Troth’s self, her lineage, the collected histories and magics and inheritances not dissimilar from his own, weighed like a stone in Andrew’s belly. He’d eaten her, whole and struggling—and it had gifted him a stolen vitality, knitted his flesh, and settled his haunt-half. None of the books had mentioned this. What else could he do, as a whole monster, if he went to the old manor from his dreams and kept digging?

“It’s no different than what you did,” he said quietly.

Sam said, “Stop.”

Andrew stopped. Neither man had to shift an inch for the gap between their skin to widen into a fissure. The sound of their shallow, labored breathing filled the silence as they waited for rescue.





30


“Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Blur,” the plainclothes detective said. She locked the screen of her tablet and tucked it into her almost-subtle tactical bag. “We’ll release the effects recovered from the scene to you once the case has wrapped.”

“Okay,” he croaked.

The scratch in his throat had come with the passenger occupying his flesh, making him perpetually hoarse. He lifted his hand in dismissal as she stepped out of his hospital room. His doctor, a Hispanic woman in her late fifties, entered a moment later. She had strong hands and a brusque but pleasant manner that reminded him of his late grandmother.

“I’d prefer not to release you yet,” she said. “The drugs are out of your system, but I’m concerned with the test results for your heart and kidneys. I’d also appreciate it if you’d speak with the psychiatrist instead of ignoring him.”

Andrew shrugged as grandly as he could with an IV taped to his arm, tucked into his raised bed as if he were a child. “No thanks.”