It had been a man—large, broad through the shoulders, though they sat unevenly now, like the frame beneath them had snapped. His clothes hung in shredded, stiff layers, saturated with dried blood that had stiffened the fabric in places, cracking at the folds when he moved. The sweet, cloying scent of it reached me even at fifteen feet.
His skin had the color and texture of old wax—gray and pulled tight across the bones in some places, split open along the cheekbones. The edges of the splits were dark and crusted, not bleeding; whatever circulated through him now moved too slowly to bother. One side of his face had been torn, the cheek hanging loose in a flap that exposed the teeth beneath in a permanent, lipless grimace. Its teeth were stained the dark brown of old blood, the exposed gum line shrunken back to the roots.
One eye socket sat empty, not closed, but simply hollow—a dark, wet cavity crusted at the edges with dried matter, its orbit collapsed slightly inward. The remaining eye moved in short, disconnected jerks, tracking nothing, responding to nothing visible, swiveling in its socket with the mechanical randomness of something that had lost its signal.
His hands hung at his sides, fingers curled inward toward his palms.
Then my eyes moved to his abdomen, and I fought to hold down the bile rising in my throat.
A section of his midsection had been torn open, the edges ragged and peeled back, the cavity beneath exposed to the air. Whatever had been inside was no longer entirely accounted for. The remaining organs had gone the color and consistency of rot. I couldn’t tell if something had gotten in or out, and knew I didn’t want the answer.
I stood completely motionless.
Don’t move. Don’t breathe.
It shifted.
One dragging step forward, the foot pulling free of the ground with an almost adhesive resistance, as if it had been standing there long enough to start bonding with the soil. Then another, the other foot scraping along the gravel in a slow, grinding arc that set every nerve on edge. It moved parallel to the building, tracking along the wall with no apparent destination, the trajectory carrying it closer to the door and closer to me simultaneously.
I could hear the sound in its throat with terrible clarity now—a low, continuous labor, something between a gurgle and choking.
My fingers tightened incrementally around the bag straps, taking up any slack that might allow movement or sound. My breath caught in my lungs, held tight from the moment I’d frozen.
Its head tilted.
The single working eye stopped its random movement and held a direction—not quite my direction, not quite anywhere, but close enough that a cold dread prickled at the base of my neck. Its jaw worked slowly in that grinding, purposeless motion, teeth coming together and separating with a sound I could hear from where I stood.
Each second arrived and departed, heavy with something I had to swallow.
Then it simply turned away.
A foot dragged forward, then the other, shuffling along the side of the building. Its uneven, listing gait was barely discernible at the edge of my perception. It moved past the door, and the sound slowly separated from the ambient quiet of the evening until I couldn’t be certain where it was anymore.
I didn’t move, counting to ten. I forced myself through each number deliberately, not rushing, not cutting it short, even though my body had already decided we were leaving and was just waiting for my brain to catch up.
Ten.
I crossed the distance fast and quietly, the gravel somehow cooperating. I eased the door open the minimum necessary width and pulled it shut behind me with a click that seemed to hang in the air of the hallway a half-second too long.
I stood there and shook, just for a moment, just long enough to confirm I was inside and the door between me and it was locked.
“Libby?” Fiona’s voice came from down the hall, low and controlled.
“I’m okay,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect.
I wasn’t. It was the furthest thing from the truth.
But Finn lay on a table with a bullet in his shoulder and significant blood loss. And the cat appeared silently from somewhere in the dark hallway and pressed itself against my leg with calm, uncomplicated insistence. I looked down at it for exactly one second.
Then I picked up the bags.
I pushed away from the door and made myself move, one step and then the next, down the hallway toward the light coming from the exam room.
The clinic had somehow contracted around us—the shadows thicker than they had any right to be, the walls closer, the silence between sounds carrying more weight than silence usually did. The cat, already at my heels, padded alongside my feet without invitation; its quiet presence the only thing in the building that seemed entirely unbothered by the situation.
When I stepped into the exam room, Finn was the first thing I saw. Still on the table, too pale, the gray quality of his skin deepened by the candlelight rather than softened by it. His chest rose and fell in a rhythm so shallow I had to concentrate to see it.
Then Fiona. Bent over his shoulder, her hands steady and her focus absolute, wearing an expression I hadn’t seen from her in all the time I’d known her—not my tenant, not his sister, not the woman who’d sat in my kitchen and drunk my coffee and talked me through things that needed talking through. She was someone else entirely—a stranger, focused and absolute.
