“They can’t stop talking about how well you healed.” Deb set a lunch tray beside Alex’s bed, balancing it on two stacked, packed boxes neatly labeled in her hand: Knick-knacks. Donation.
She’d been clearing out what she’d made of her life here. “Would have been faster on my own from the start,” Alex said, eyeing the sandwich. He was hungry. Always hungry, since he’d come home from the hospital and the blade had begun the healing in earnest, able to work unfettered without raising questions.
There were plenty of those questions already left unanswered. A random drive-by shooting with two abandoned vehicles parked nearby, the owners of which weren’t to be found... the cops weren’t quite buying it. But with no evidence besides the disgruntled word of an elderly man who’d never done more than shout out the door at an unseen ruckus, they’d finally left it alone.
“Grand Canyon for me,” she said, spreading a napkin in his lap—so very familiar with his body, so very much at home as she sat on the bed beside him. “And then Albuquerque for you. But still no particular reason for heading that way?”
“Second thoughts?” he asked, suddenly not hungry at all.
Not that he’d blame her. It was the blade, nudging him toward the southwest... tugging him. More than just the usual. But she’d been ready to leave Ohio behind—ready to run toward something now that she no longer had anything to run from.
Ready to start something new... in Albuquerque.
“Mmm,” she said, and shook her head. “Not in the least.” Her own bruises were long healed, her hair clipped back at the sides and swinging free, her expression relaxed. “I seem to recall seeing one or two could be, should be’s that we haven’t actually experienced yet. That knife of yours might not make the future, but it’s damned good at nudging it around.”
“Blade,” he murmured, a glance at the bedside table where it lay, unprepossessing and silent. “Demon blade.”
She frowned, a slight gathering between her brows. “You should have thrown that blade at the dealer, not at Gary.”
He wasn’t surprised at her words. He suspected it lay behind many of the small and thoughtful frowns he’d intercepted since the ambulance had deposited him in E.R. and the doctors had begun to speculate why he wasn’t already dead. “Then Gary would have had you, and I couldn’t have stopped him.”
“But you could have died! Should have died!”
Memories mixed with the lingering touch of the blade in his mind. On the motorcycle, Deb wrapped around him, the quiet rural street unfolding before him, the blade’s sudden warning...
Could have been. Deb, her neck broken, hanging limp from Gary’s grip. Alex, simply broken. Would have been. Death clutching them, the dealer with a newly acquired blade in his hand...
He rested a hand on her thigh, trying not to close it too tightly. “There are worse things than could have died. Being in this world without you... that’s one of them.”
“And being in this world with you is no longer a could.” She wrapped herself around him. “That’s an is, now. And I think the blade knew it all along.”
~o0o~