Forcing his arm up slowly, Felipe tried to blindly aim the gun. The cartilage of his throat creaked as he squeezed the trigger. The blast singed the side of his face as gun powder and the saw dusty smell of burnt bone filled his nose. His left ear screamed like a tea kettle, but the corpse finally collapsed. Felipe’s knees nearly buckled under its sudden dead weight as he shrugged the man off like a sodden coat. Where was Oliver? He winced at the throbbing pain in his ear. He wasn’t used to his eardrum not immediately healing, and the shrill keening made it hard to think. As he turned, he caught Oliver yelling something, but it was garbled in his ears.
Too late he felt the searing heat of a bullet punch into his arm.Three. The dagger dropped as his left hand hung uselessly at his side.Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.Oliver rushed to him, reaching for the bloodied arm, but Felipe shoved him back toward the house. You didn’t put precious things in harm’s way. One of his knives whizzed past and lodged in the taller man’s eye. Felipe paused, hoping it was over, but the dead mandidn’t slow. He raised the gun again, and Felipe threw himself on top of Oliver. The wood of the old stable shattered above their heads in a hail of splinters.Two. He could barely hear himself as he ordered Oliver back to the house, but Oliver didn’t move.
His grey eyes widened, and he said something Felipe didn’t catch before pulling him flat to his chest. Another knife sailed through the air and lodged in the corpse’s wrist. The dead investigator paused and stared at its hand as if trying to get its fingers to work, but the heavy gun tipped forward, dragging its useless hand with it. Scrambling away from Oliver, Felipe kicked and sent the gun flying into the grass. Felipe staggered back as a wave of dizziness sent the yard off kilter, but he pushed it back and pulled on the secondhand adrenaline rolling off Oliver. Soon, he could collapse in a heap and replay every mistake. He just needed to stay on his feet long enough to kill this monster.
The creature stared at its empty hand, but as Felipe tried to swing his revolver into position, the dead man yanked the knife from its socket and charged. Time slowed to a crawl as Oliver dove between Felipe and the dead man and yelled something up at Gwen. The taller investigator reared back like a startled horse, but Felipe was already shoving Oliver out of the way. The keening in his ears died to a muffled pressure as the knife sank into his flesh. White hot pain bloomed in his side as the dead man ripped out the blade and raised his arm for a second strike. Something grabbed Felipe by the shoulders and hauled him out of the way before he could convince his body to move. Cupping his hands over the wound, Felipe bit down a cry at the sudden surge of pain. Blood leaked through his pajamas, but something horribly soft and familiar protruded through the wound. Not now. He couldn’t— He still needed to—
Two shots blasted through the man’s left thigh in an explosion of shattered flesh and bone. The dead man’s eyes widened as the uncanny light left them, and it slumped in a heap atop its splintered leg. Leaning back against Oliver, Felipe traced the bullets’ path to the upper window where Mr. Allen still stared down the smoking barrel of the Henry repeater. A relieved laugh slipped from Felipe’s lips, but when helooked up at Oliver, his eyes were filled with tears.
Fuck.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mortal Wounds
Oliver was trapped in a nightmare. That was the only explanation for what was happening. Any moment now he would wake up in bed beside Felipe, and there would be no blood or wounds or mangled corpses in the yard. Scalding his hands with half boiled water, Oliver scrubbed them with soap and watched Gwen and Mr. Allen through the kitchen window as they covered the bodies of the dead investigators from the New Jersey Paranormal Society with old horse blankets. Oliver sighed. He would have to deal with the dead too. Someone needed to see if there was an obvious cause of death and catalogue all the damage they did while trying to stop them. The paperwork was going to be horrendous. Tears burned the backs of Oliver’s eyes, but he stuffed them down. Once again, he had inadvertently involved Gwen in something she didn’t sign-up for. After Felipe was stitched up and the dead inspected, he could go to bed and have a long, guilt-ridden cry. Doublechecking that he had all the instruments he needed boiling on the stove, Oliver steeled himself andreturned to Felipe’s side.
He tried not to let his feelings show even as the color drained from his face. For a fleeting moment as Felipe lay across the kitchen table with his eyes closed and blood leaking from his wounds, Oliver saw him on the autopsy table in the lab. It could have been their reality so many times before. His heart lurched, and Felipe’s warm brown eyes met his as if he could read his thoughts.My light in the darkness. He couldn’t let it go out.
Oliver gave him a smile that didn’t reach his eyes and pushed back the dark thoughts. Felipe looked horrible, and no amount of positive thinking could change that. The blood loss from the wound on his arm had made his skin so ashen that his dark circles looked more like two black eyes. Oliver spent nearly every hour of the day with Felipe. He knew the color of his skin, the cadence of his heartbeat, the rush of air from his lungs, and now, nothing was right.
The bleeding had slowed once Oliver had put pressure on the bullet wound and Felipe stopped moving long enough for it to clot. As he lay on the table waiting for Oliver’s tools to be sterilized, Felipe had insisted on putting pressure on the stab wound himself with his good hand. The blood on him, on their pajamas, on the table, that was all upsetting, but what bothered Oliver most was how calm Felipe was. While Oliver had only briefly seen the wounds, he knew they were bad. Someone else would have been writhing in pain or going in and out of consciousness, yet Felipe merely looked exhausted and resigned as he lay watching him from the tabletop. Catching Oliver staring, Felipe waved at him with his injured arm.
“Don’t move your arm,” Oliver said loudly enough while facing Felipe that he could hopefully hear him or at least read his lips.
“My eardrum is mostly healed now, Oliver. You don’t have to yell. All I need is half a dozen pieces of jerky and a few hours of rest for everything else to catch up. I’ll be fine.”
As Felipe gave him his most disarming smile, Oliver realized he was testing his bleeding arm in order to try and sit up again. Before he could put weight on it, Oliver laid a hand on his chest and gently forcedhim back down.
Felipe stared up at him with his brows knit in confusion. “Oliver, I’m fine.”
“You arenotfine! This is anything but fine. This is my worst nightmare come true, Felipe. Seeing you like this: bleeding and with injuries that could—” Oliver nearly put his clean hands over his face but caught himself. To Felipe, this was normal, but Oliver knew a hundred ways these sorts of injuries could kill someone. He needed to fix this. “Let me see your stomach.”
Felipe shook his head. “Check the arm first. It’ll be quicker. My stomach isn’t bleeding that bad.”
Oliver wanted to argue with him that the blood was probably poolinginsidehis abdominal cavity because he was lying down, but Felipe didn’t appear to be getting worse. Sighing, he took the scissors from his bag and cut Felipe’s sleeve from his wrist to his sternum. As he peeled back the fabric, Oliver did a doubletake at the giant bruise blooming across his clavicle. In all the chaos, he must have missed that injury. When he lightly pushed on it, Felipe’s jaw tightened. Fractured, at least. Felipe wouldn’t like it, but he was getting a sling for that arm. Carefully peeling the gauze and fabric away from the bullet hole, Oliver was relieved to find the bleeding between both wounds had slowed to a trickle. If a major blood vessel had been damaged, it seemed to have healed or clotted shut.
“It hit the muscle, not the bone,” Felipe said tightly as Oliver probed the wound with a careful finger. “I felt the bullet pass through, and it doesn’t hurt like there are any pieces left behind, bones or bullets. I’ve had that happen before. I know what it feels like.”
It took a second for his mind to catch up with what Felipe said, and while he was correct, he didn’t like what he heard. Grabbing the supplies from his bag, Oliver carefully cleaned and disinfected the wound. How many times had Felipe been shot that he could tell if a wound had bullet fragments in it by feel alone? After forty years of injuries, Felipe didn’t have a single scar, yet the damage done to Felipe’s body was evident now that Oliver knew where to look. This kind ofcalm was what doctors only saw in the chronically ill. They could brush off things that would have felled healthy people because they had grown accustomed to the pain and dysfunction within their bodies. Instead of being chronically ill, Felipe had been chronically injured. Oliver didn’t want to think about all the times Felipe must have dug a bullet out himself or set his own bones. How many injuries did it take for it to become the norm? Oliver’s stomach clenched at the thought as he pulled the needle, forceps, and tweezers from the pot of hot water. Felipe shouldn’t have gotten used to this. It didn’t need to be this way.
“Oliver, you don’t have to do that,” Felipe said as he threaded the needle, “they’ll heal on their own.”
“Most wounds will heal on their own. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you bleed all over yourself until it does. As it is, we’ll need to buy Mr. Allen a new table.” Sighing, he dragged the oil lamp closer and sat beside the table. “I’m sorry, but this is going to hurt. If I had any morphine or chloroform with me, I would let you sleep through the worst of it. Can you hold still for me?”
Felipe nodded and stuck his arm out with a wince. Oliver tried not to upset his collarbone as he adjusted his upper arm, so he could get a better view of the bullet hole. The stitches should have been painful. Another man would have had to be held down, but as the needle slipped through his skin, Felipe merely stared at the ceiling without making a sound. Letting his mind trail to the tether, Oliver found everything on Felipe’s end was oddly muted. In the past, Felipe had gotten upset with him for withholding his feelings from him, but Oliver didn’t think he was doing it on purpose. When he watched Oliver work from the corner of his eye, there were still pulses of concern and what felt like guilt. Oliver doubted the detachment was due to blood loss since he still seemed sharp, and the implications of that brought the anger he had felt when he found him sleepwalking surging back to the surface. Releasing a tight breath, Oliver secured the bandage and stepped away to wash his hands and bathe his tools in carbolic acid.
“Don’t feel bad about not bringing any anesthetic. They don’treally work on me anyway.”
Oliver’s hands froze mid-rinse. “What do you mean?”
Shifting his hips, Felipe suppressed a hiss and pressed harder on the wad of gauze under his hand. “Ether, chloroform, morphine. They’re like alcohol. They just,” he waved his injured hand dismissively, “blow through me. You would have to give me enough to knock out a horse for it to do much, though they might work better now since I can get hungover. Even so, I don’t know how long it would last.”
“So you have had to endure every injury without any pain relief?”
Felipe started to shrug but caught himself. “It isn’t that bad. Most injuries heal so quickly that I don’t need it. Those that don’t… Well, you get used to it, and it goes away soon enough.”
You shouldn’t have to get used to it, Oliver wanted to scream. All the times Felipe had been shot or stabbed or whatever other horrors Oliver didn’t want to imagine had he just carried on like nothing happened as long as the wound healed? When Oliver had been recovering from the stab wound and subsequent surgery, Felipe had been adamant that he needed rest and had even told off the head inspector when he wanted him back in the lab before he was healed enough to work. Felipe knew pain. He knew what it felt like to look outwardly healed and be exhausted and hurting because the inside was still a mess, and he had done everything in his power to keep Oliver from suffering. Why had he never done that for himself?
