Maureen's glare nailed David to the wall.
He felt like a frog that she planned to dissect, pinned to the wax bottom of the tray and spread out belly-up waiting for the scalpel. Alive.
Jo groaned and stirred, blood trickling from her lip, and David knew he should go to her, defend her, comfort her, help her up. The air smelled bitter with electricity. He couldn't move.
Insane.
Maureen was insane. It had just been a word, before. Here in the blood-spattered kitchen with a man's body slumped against the cabinets and a gun lying on the table, the words grew substance.
Psychotic. Demented. Deranged. Homicidal maniac.
Stone-ass crazy.
She had murdered that man. She was going to murder Jo.
And then the corpse moved. The corpse shoved itself up to sit against the wall and cradled its arm in its lap and groaned. The corpse wore undershorts and undershirt, not what a corpse should be wearing if it had forced its way into an apartment and gotten shot. Other clothing lay in a sodden heap in one corner, leaking a thin trail of red.
David's eyes finally passed details on to his brain. A long slash gouged across the man's left arm. Black thread ran up it in a ragged line of stitches. A bowl of red water sat on the floor. Little white boxes with red crosses on them lay scattered around. Gauze rolls and gauze pads and flesh-colored tape mixed among bottles, peroxide and iodine.
The static died and he smelled a doctor's office, antiseptic and blood and freshly opened bandages. She hadn't killed him. She was patching him up. The poor bastard had gotten himself into a hell of a mess.
Maureen grabbed a lump of white and threw it at David. His fingers told him it was a roll of paper towels.
"Don't just stand there like a fucking idiot! Take some water and clean up that crap out in the stairwell."
Whatever pinned him against the wall vanished. David stumbled over to the sink, rattled a saucepan under the faucet, and splashed water in it. He still couldn't go to Jo. Maureen's aura forbade it.
He felt like he'd walked into a coven of witches. First Jo damn near pulped his wrist with her tiny hands, then Maureen knocked Jo clear across the kitchen with one off-balance punch. Neither woman weighed more than a hundred, in winter clothes and sopping wet. What the hell was with these Pierce women?
Maureen told him to clean up, he went to clean up. No choice. Maybe Jo would wake up enough to battle her sister for his soul.
Blood and water and sodden red paper towels--it seemed like he wiped up enough blood for a minor war. A puddle of blood affects the eyes differently than a puddle of water, connects to different nerves, works deep on the brain stem. And the damned stuff spreads around like thick paint. One drop will smear to cover a whole floor-tile.
It still was what Maureen or Jo would call a fucking mess, no doubt about it. Sometimes you could tell they were sisters from a typed transcript. Fucking this, goddamn that, assorted obscenities and blasphemies as add-on adjectives and adverbs at a rate of two per sentence.
His mother had always said that the casual use of profanity indicated a poverty of intellect. Someone with half a brain could come up with sharper and more compelling words that wouldn't blush a Baptist preacher. And besides, the way they used foul language, it lost all effect. It faded into background noise after the first ten minutes.
Speaking of brains . . . where was his? He stared down at the saucepan full of thin spaghetti sauce and the wad of crimson paper towels. He was mopping up blood on the stairs while Maureen played EMT.
What the hell was she doing? That man needed an emergency room. Knife wound in the arm, livid bruises on face and shoulder and leg, the spaced-out pupils of a concussion victim--the guy was seriously hurt.
He grabbed everything and legged up the stairway two steps at a time, into what felt like psychic molasses. The closer he got to Maureen, the less absurd everything seemed. He wrestled with his sense of outrage, holding on to an image of punching 9-1-1 on Jo's phone.
The voice of reason yammered on in the back of his head. Get professional help! Get some cops, some EMTs, anybody who can wade through this muck and bring some sanity to it!
David swam against the current, into the kitchen. Maureen wanted the door closed. He closed it. Maureen wanted the bloody water dumped, both pans. He dumped them. What Maureen wanted, Maureen got.
Maureen crouched, tense, like a leopard strung out on speed, swabbing a scrape on Brian's forehead. Jo sat on the corner of the kitchen table, holding a soaked towel to her lip and glaring at her sister. David felt a crackling energy between them, like two storm fronts full of thunderclouds pushing against each other.
Just a quiet evening at home.
David forced himself to pick up the phone, sweating with the effort. Maureen didn't want him doing this.
"No calls." Her voice cut his resolve like a whip.
"Got to get an ambulance." His hand trembled. The phone went back into its cradle.
"No," Brian muttered. "Can't go to the hospital, can't see a doctor. My visa's expired. They'll deport me."
"Man, you need blood, you need X-rays, you could have internal injuries or a cracked skull or anything! Maureen's just sewed up your arm with a darning needle and a length of binder twine. Tetanus shots, antibiotics--you name it, you need it. You got a death wish?"
"Be okay. Was a medic in the army. Told her what to do. Needle's clean, wound’s bled enough to wash any crap out of it."
David surrendered to the pressure. It was the easiest way out.
"What happened to you, man?"
"Car. Hit and run."
"Bullshit. That's a knife wound."
Maureen's stare froze his tongue. "Shut up," it said. "Obey." That glare had nothing but imperatives in its vocabulary.
Charisma. Beaucoup charisma, mon ami, the commanding aura of the truly insane. Like maybe Hitler. David found himself wondering if Jo could do that. The idea ran icicles down his spine. It was something to think about. Something to seriously think about.
This family was weird.
* * *
Maureen jerked her attention back to Jo. "Stay away from us," she warned. "Keep your hands where I can see them. Both of you stay where I can see you.
"Don't even think of trying to get to the bedroom phones," she added, half to herself.
The knuckles of her right hand still ached from the punch. Served her sister right, attacking an injured man. First she stole David, then she waltzed in and tried to kill Brian. Who was the crazy one here?
She dabbed iodine on Brian's forehead and then the slash on his arm, still keeping half an eye on Jo and David. Brian winced at the antiseptic bite around the stitch-holes. That was good. It proved he was still all there.
It was going to get a little involved here, wrapping gauze around that arm. She'd need both hands and some attention. She picked up the gun and set it on the floor, close to her knee, farther from Jo and David. No unnecessary risks.
Jo called her paranoid. Paranoid delusions didn't carve five-inch slices out of arms, didn't break ribs, didn't carry the rusty lengths of iron pipe she'd unstrapped from Brian's leg and tossed in the corner. God above, Maureen knew what paranoia looked like.
Her own fears had nearly pulled the trigger. He'd stood there filling the doorway, made some growling noise deep in his throat, and reached out for her. She'd cocked the .38 and was about an ounce shy of blasting five hollow-points into his chest when she'd realized he was already falling. When she'd seen the blood.
The next instant, she'd been dragging that Neandertal carcass into the kitchen and swearing a blue streak at the damage she found. It didn't make sense. Or maybe it did. She stopped and stared at his blood, sticky on her hands.
There's no way you ever could have met him half way. You had to have control. You had to feel safe.
But there'd still been that gap, when her instincts took control and overruled the terror. Dissociation: temporary but drastic modification of one's personality. Recognizing a symptom and naming didn't make it a bit less strange.
It still felt odd, touching a man, wiping his skin, moving his arms and legs around like lumps of putty wrapped around a frame of sticks. The smell of blood, the smell of man, they ought to scare her. They didn't. She glanced at his crotch, at the lump in his underpants. That thing ought to scare her. It didn't.
Brian grunted as she moved his arm. Must hurt. She ran her hands down the muscles to each side of the cut, flowing cool energy from her skin into his. Weird sensation.
"Maureen, I'd help if you let me."
Jo winced back as if Maureen's eyes were daggers. Good. Stay away from this man, she thought. You touch him, I'll kill you.
Her mental critic pounced. Sounds like the same thing you told him, two hours ago. A little paradox, girl? That glamour thing Fiona talked about? You call a man a rapist and then threaten to kill your sister to protect him? Why aren't you afraid of him?
He'd come to her for help. He was hurt, in danger, alone, and he came to her for help. Nobody had ever come to her for help before.
He was too weak to threaten her. Besides, if he tried to touch her emotions, fuck with her head, she'd know it. Certainty.
Voices again? Voices in your head, Maureen? No trees in here to tell you things. No trees to guard you. You're walking in the world of men.
She didn't need trees. She could feel it in her hands. Brian wasn't dangerous.
Meanwhile, her fingers played ER nurse without her command. Gauze pads covered the wounds. Gauze strips bound them in place--wrapped two handed, gently, only enough pressure to hold the bandage in place. It seemed her hands knew what to do. Her hands told her not to squeeze the wounds; it would be dangerous to slow down circulation.
"David, get away from that fucking phone!"
He jerked back as if he had touched a live wire.
The voices switched to strategy. She needed to ease up a little. Was she going to move this hunk of muscle into a bed all by herself? Going to cut the phone wires and hold them at gunpoint all night long?
She needed to try a bit of cunning here, soothe her bitch sister and that faithless fake-Irish guitar player. Maureen wasn't mad at them. Maureen was just protecting this poor man who came to her for help.
"Jo, why'd you attack him?"
Glare met glare. "Thought he'd killed you, dammit! You had that fight at The Cave. Then we came in and saw all the blood . . . ."
"David, get her some ice to hold on that lip. Wrap it in a dish towel."
Jo glanced over to the gun and back to Maureen's face. Suddenly, she was five again, and Jo had found her playing with Dad's pocketknife. Such a pretty thing, and it cut so clean into the soft yellow wood of the scrap of lumber, such smooth pine-smelling curls. Trouble was, she didn't know to cut away from her body, away from her other hand.
She rubbed the thin white scar running from the knuckle of her left thumb all the way across to the center of her wrist. Memories. Maureen dropped her gaze.
"Sorry I hit you. Had to stop you, fast."
Take a chance, she thought. Can't watch them all night, going to fall asleep sometime. Relax, people, it’s just your little helpless hopeless wallflower sister.
Maureen stood up, scooped up the gun, and tucked it back into her jacket pocket. Then she moved away.
"Brian's sleeping in my bed tonight. I'll sleep out on the couch."
She looked around, finally pulling her focus away from crisis. The kitchen was a fucking mess: bloody towels, Brian's bloody clothes, melted slush, tag ends of bandages. The place looked like a M*A*S*H scene. It was time to pick up, mop up, get rid of the evidence. Besides, some physical activity might serve to calm things down. Nothing like mopping the kitchen floor to bring you back to reality.
She hauled clothes into the bathroom, running water in the tub to soak out blood before the stains set. She emptied his pockets first, and stared at a roll of bills about as big around as her fist. The outer one bore Ben Franklin's smiling face. Her hands shook at the thought of holding a whole year's wages in one lump.
Maybe it was reaction, but she felt like shit. The tendons in her right arm had turned to red-hot wires. She must have strained something with that punch. A headache centered about two inches behind her right eye and an inch below the scalp.
She moved back to the kitchen--mopping up bloodstains, David helping. Jo held that cold towel to her lip, gathering trash. Brian suggested using the black trash bags--opaque, he didn't want anybody seeing all that blood and asking questions. He didn't have enough answers.
Just one big, happy family. Just two women with their boyfriends on Friday night.
"Stay away from Brian, Jo. Not just cleaning up, I mean stay away from him permanently."
Jo's eyes widened. Such a look of innocence, you'd think she was an actress. Maureen thought she'd better get some clothes on Brian. Then maybe Jo'd quit running her eyes up and down his legs, across his chest, measuring his biceps.
Jo shook her head. "I don't need your new boyfriend, Mo. David's going to be staying here. He's gonna move his stuff in tomorrow. You don't like it, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out."
Maureen felt her skin prickle like she was charging up for a lightning bolt.
* * *
The lights flickered. Brian wondered if he was the only one who noticed. Both of them were doing it. Neither of them knew what she was doing.
He hoped they got this settled before they burned the apartment down around their ears or blacked out half of Maine. It was the most dangerous thing in the world, power in the hands of the ignorant. Like giving that pistol to a child just strong enough to pull the trigger.
Rage. Fear. Sexual attraction. Powerful emotions caused powerful responses. Whether they knew it or not, those were two powerful women. If they weren't balanced, one would have torn the other to shreds.
He was too groggy to handle it now. He tried to remember that pain was optional. He could use his left arm now, just stunned nerves. If he could get this background noise calmed down, maybe he could get some serious healing meditation going.
He was going to need to move again in the next day or so, fight again in the next day or so. Fiona never gave up on anything in her life.
And he made a mental note to never even think about touching Maureen's emotions again. Charged up the way she was, it would be like bringing a ten-pound hammer down on TNT. She'd notice, oh yes. She'd fry his eyeballs.
"Can't go back to my hotel. Following me."
Maureen paused and ran a cold towel over his head again. Her touch spread energy and soothing--unsuspected power. That woman needed some training. He'd better take her to St. Theresa's Abbey before Dougal got his hands on her.
"Stay here," she said. "If Jo can move her boyfriend in, so can I."
The lights flickered, and Brian felt the hair rise on his arms. It was a feedback loop, Jo reacting to Maureen reacting to Jo reacting to Maureen. He'd better get those two separated before they reached critical mass.
"Just tonight," he said. "Stay here tonight. Ask you to find me an apartment, tomorrow. Furnished. Buy some things. Find money in my jacket."
"I saw it." Maureen glared at her sister, at David. "If you don't mind, I'll find a place big enough for both of us."
Brian knew his brain was only functioning at half power, but some signs were printed large enough to read. One was, the look between Jo and David. Mixture of shock and relief. Said, "This is Maureen?" Said, "What the hell is going on here?" Said, "Good riddance!"
Undercurrents.
People with Power, people with the Blood, usually didn't fit in. They heard voices others couldn't, saw things no one else could see, touched and smelled and tasted and thought and acted outside the fences. Society pasted labels on them. Jo's face said Maureen wore a label. Jo's face said she was fed up with living with a label.
Jo's face still held worry.
"Maureen, I can't fucking believe you're moving in with a man."
Jo wanted her sister gone. She did not want her sister hurt. Brian must look like a very dubious case, judging by her frown.
"Take the money," he said, "find two apartments. There's enough."
"One apartment, two bedrooms."
The tone said, "Don't get any ideas. I'm your nurse, not your goddamned whore."
Maureen disappeared into the bathroom and returned, dumping his cash and keys on the kitchen table. David stared at the bloodstained roll of bills.
"You're a drug dealer." He edged towards the phone and Maureen's jacket--Maureen's jacket with the gun in the pocket.
The static charge in the room jumped a coulomb or ten. That man was going to get crisped if he didn't watch out.
"No. Swear it. I'm clean."
"The scars you've got, you've been carved up like a Christmas turkey. Street fights. Nobody but a drug-runner carries his bank in his hip-pocket."
Brian wished the debate club straight to hell. His fuddled thoughts weren't up to it.
"Drug-runners and wetbacks. Can't use a bank. No plastic, no checks. That's my room and board for the next year, until I get home again. Think I'm going to leave it in a cheap hotel?"
Jo waved David back from the phone. At least she had the power to sense dangerous territory.
"Little Sister, what do you really know about this man? There's something screwy here. I've got some questions that need answering before I'd trust him behind my back."
The Sergeant-Major was back, offering advice. Don't get into what you really are, me laddie. Some of Jo's questions don't have answers they'd want to hear. Some of them cross the line into Maureen's territory--label territory. Maureen's already over there; she understands. The other two won't. Not unless they have their noses rubbed in it.
Brian groaned. If Jo or David poked at Maureen one more time, that bomb was going to explode. His head hurt too much to deal with it. "Maureen, let David take the gun. Lock me in your room tonight. You've got those old locks that use a key from either side."
He tried getting vertical. The walls turned into sponges under his hands, and the floor tilted to a twenty-degree list. Moving wasn't a good idea. It did get them off the topic, though. Pain spoke across a lot of gaps.
Hands and faces and shoulders and doorways and darkness and the blessed soft warmness of a bed. A bed that smelled of Maureen, the sweet musk of a woman with the Blood, overpowering and seductive. To sleep, perchance to dream--perchance to lust. Or heal. He set his body to concentrate on the bones first. They carried the rest.
The lock rattled and clicked. Taking no chances. They didn't know he could step around into the half-worlds and be gone in two seconds. He'd have done that in the alley if he hadn't been sure Fiona was waiting for him to try, waiting under the Sidhe hill with her webs all woven. Traps within traps within traps. Now he didn't dare move until he had his strength back.
Thought I saw Dougal out on the street: watching, waiting. Nobody else would be carrying a hawk around at midnight. He knows where Maureen lives. It'll be a hell of a problem if he comes here now.
Darkness.