Page 2 of Deacon

“…pressure’s dropping…”

“…stay with us…”

Cold slips into him. The lake returns dimmer, as though somebody rebuilt it from pieces and only came close to the truth. Lila sits beside him in the grass, but he can’t feel the warmth of her shoulder against his arm, and that wrongness frightens him more than the dark.

She stares across the water, fingers combing through the grass. “You’re going to leave.”

Jackson turns to her. “What?”

“You are.” She keeps her eyes on the lake. “I can feel it. You’re already halfway gone.”

His mouth goes dry. This wasn’t part of that night, and she couldn’t have known. The thought drags itself through the fog while he studies her profile and loses track of what he is seeing. Eighteen-year-old Lila sits beside him with moonlight on her skin, then an older woman takes her place, time and hurt sharpened into her face. Nurse’s scrubs blur into bare knees in the grass. Green eyes hold everything he never stayed long enough to hear.

“No,” he says, though his voice sounds far away.

She turns toward him, her face shifting from young to older and back again. “You don’t stay.”

The lake disappears. Darkness folds over him to the mechanical rhythm of machines, a monitor beeping nearby while air hisses through a body he does not want to crawl back into. Something tugs from far away, insisting he return to blood and pain.

Then warmth returns in the shape of a small hand wrapped around his.

“You stubborn idiot.” Her voice is older now, rough and tired around the edges. Jackson strains toward it as her fingers tighten around his. “You always thought you knew what was best, like you could make choices for everybody and call it love.”

The words tear through the fog. He tries to open his eyes, but his body won’t answer.

“You left.”

That cuts cleanest. For a long time, there is only the sound of the machines and the crushing weight of every year between then and now. When she speaks again, her voice has softened. “I hated you for that. And somehow…” Her breath shakes. “Somehow I didn’t.”

He hears everything she leaves inside the silence, the anger braided through grief and the ache that never had anywhere decent to go. “I missed you anyway,” she whispers, and something in him breaks open.

He wants to tell her he knows. That he missed her every damn day and carried her into every place he never should have survived. He wants to say her name, but nothing moves beneath the slow drag of her thumb over his hand.

“And I still…”

The words stop. Maybe she says the rest and he can’t hear it, or maybe she leaves it suspended between the monitor’s beeps and the ragged pull of borrowed air. He hears it anyway.

Somewhere beneath the wreckage of pain and memory, Jackson Hayes, the man the world will one day call Deacon, claws his way back toward her.

1

Lila

The ambulance bay doors burst open hard enough to slam against the stopper, and then everything moved at once. The paramedics were already talking before the gurney cleared the threshold, their voices overlapping in clipped bursts beneath the monitor’s shrill complaint and the rattle of wheels over tile. Blue fell into step on one side. I took the other without thinking, my gloved hand closing over cold metal as we turned and drove the bed toward trauma.

It was all motion, noise, and blood. Blood on the sheet. Blood drying dark along one side of his neck and soaking through the leather covering his body.

Then I looked at his face.

My hand nearly slipped off the rail, and for one sick second, I forgot how to breathe. It had been seventeen years. Seventeen years of silence, anger, and forcing old memories into smaller corners of myself until they became manageable enough to live around. Seventeen years spent building a life sturdy enough to stand without him in it.

And there he was anyway, rolling through the ambulance bay half-dead, older and harder and still unmistakable beneath the blood and gray shock.

“Jackson.” The name left me before I could stop it.

At the same moment, Blue said, “Deacon.”

I looked up so fast the room tilted. She was staring at me, confusion flashing across her face as she repeated, “Jackson?”