Page 21 of Crown of Ash

Another burst of gunfire cracked through the phone, three shots, then two more, the sound thin and metallic through the speaker. Jack's voice went tight and low, strained against the noise. "Marcus. If this goes bad-"

"It's not going to go bad." Marcus kept his voice flat, his eyes fixed on the road ahead as he took a corner without slowing. Rain began to speckle the windshield. "Stay on the line."

"I need you to hear it anyway." A breath, rough at the edges like gravel under tires. "You gave me something worth fighting for. Both of you. I need you to know that."

The plastic case of Marcus’s phone groaned under his white-knuckled grip. His foot stayed even on the gas, pressing just hard enough to keep the engine humming at a steady pitch beneath the sound of rain and gunfire.

"I know," he said, his voice low and certain. "Now fight."

Marcus heard the chaos before he saw it.

Glass. Someone's voice cutting off short. The wet slap of tires on cracked asphalt as Trip's truck rolled to a stop thirty feet ahead of him, hazards still blinking. Nate, Seth, and Zain beat them there. Marcus pulled in behind it and killed the engine and sat for exactly one second with both hands on the wheel.

Then he got out.

The lot behind the laundromat was roughly the size of a basketball court, chain-link on three sides, the fourth open where a gate had been at some point and wasn't anymore. There was a chemical smell underneath everything, sulfur and the older rot underneath the sulfur, the particular stink of Delray's water table bleeding up through the gravel. A single sodium lamp on the laundromat's back wall threw orange light across maybe half the space and left the rest in graduated dark.

Trip had gotten the car turned. It was nosed toward the open gate now, the passenger window gone, not cracked but gone, the door frame glittering with the film of shattered glass that couldn't be swept clean, and Seth was crouched at the rear quarter panel with a flashlight tilted at an angle, cataloguing damage Marcus didn't look at yet.

He looked at Jack first.

Jack was upright. That was what mattered. Upright, back against the passenger door, arms crossed over his midsection with a deliberateness that said there was a reason for it. A cut above his left eyebrow had already stopped bleeding on its own, and he had glass in his hair, three or four bright fragments catching the sodium light, and he was watching Marcus come across the lot with an expression Marcus recognized from five years of knowing him. The one that said Jack was deciding whether he was still allowed to be afraid now that the immediate thing was over.

"Jack." Marcus stopped in front of him. Took one pass, jaw to boots. "What's broken?"

"Nothing." Jack's voice came out rough. He cleared his throat. "Graze. Left side. Nate taped it."

"Let me see."

"Marcus-"

"Let me see."

Jack exhaled through his nose and lifted the hem of his shirt on the left side. Nate had done good work with what was available, gauze and tape, tight and clean, but the dressing was already darkening at the center, a quarter-sized bloom that had stopped spreading. Graze, yes. Not nothing, but close enough that Marcus knew he'd be fine, if a little sore.

"Okay," he said. He put his hand briefly on Jack's shoulder, one second, pressure only, and then moved.

Elijah was in the back seat.

Nate had the rear door open and was angled half inside, one knee on the seat, both hands already three steps ahead before Marcus could track it. The dome light was on. Marcus ducked in under the frame and looked.

Elijah was conscious. That registered first, a fist below Marcus's sternum unclenching. Conscious and present, eyes tracking, the left corner of his mouth pulling back in the half-grimace he made when he was irritated, which meant he was clear-headed enough to be irritated. The shoulder was another matter. Nate had packed it, a compression dressing that had already soaked through twice by the gray-pink color of it, and Elijah's right arm was braced hard against his ribs with the immobility of something that would not be moved by will or request.

"Before you ask," Elijah said. His voice was tight, not the tightness of pain suppressed but the tightness of breath that costs every inhale, each word rationed against lungs working harder than they should have been. "I'm here. I'm fine."

"You're not fine."

"Comparatively."

"Elijah."

A muscle in Elijah's jaw moved. "Hit the clavicle. Maybe. Nate thinks so." He paused. Took one careful breath in. "Didn't touch the lung. I can tell the difference."

"He's not wrong," Nate said, not looking up from the dressing. "Lung sounds are clear. But we need a surgeon, Marcus. Tonight. Not a maybe."

Marcus had already pulled his phone out. He dialed with his thumb without looking at the screen, the number memorized since Lakefront's third month of operation. Three rings. Then: "We need the off-books team. Gunshot. Clavicle area, possibly fractured, clean entry, significant blood loss. Yes." He gave the location. "Twenty minutes. Don't come in the front."

He hung up. Put the phone back. Looked at Elijah for one more second, at the lines around his eyes that hadn't been there three years ago, at the set of his shoulders, held so still they had gone rigid, the kind of stillness that is the last available choice when the body has run out of others, and then Marcus stepped back and straightened up.