Chapter 16

On my next day off, I didn’t go back to the shack until well after sunset. When I got there, the metal door was slightly ajar.

It’s never open. My pulse pounded in my throat as I pushed the door inward to find Jackson trying to get Harry off the floor—trying, because Harry was wild-eyed and fighting.

The burns—he was going to tear through brittle, paper-thin flesh. Like hell you are, you bastard. “Stop.” The word burst from my lips. “Now.”

The prince of agony went suddenly, eerily still. “Do people always listen to you, not-nurse Hannah?”

Jackson looked like he was considering homicide. He wasn’t the only one. My heart was still jackhammering my rib cage. When I’d seen that open door, my first, subconscious thought had been that my family had found them.

Found him. “I don’t know.” I fixed my gaze on Harry. “I try not to say much.”

“How’s that working out for you?” Why was it that his damn lips seemed to have about a thousand different ways of twisting?

“Just fine,” I said. Until you. “Get in bed.” I crossed the room to help Jackson, and together, we managed to get Harry back on the mattress.

“Far be it from me,” Harry quipped darkly, “to turn down an invitation from a pretty woman, especially when it involves a bed.”

I didn’t know which was worse: the fact that he was acting like I’d invited him to bed or the way he’d said pretty—like he meant it.

“You deal with this,” Jackson growled in my direction. Before I could reply, he stormed out of the shack.

I followed the fisherman as far as the threshold. “What happened?” I called, as Jackson Currie did his best to disappear into the night.

“Stubborn son of a bitch thought he could stand. And walk. He fell.” The outline of Jackson’s body was just barely visible in the moonlight. “And then he lost his damn mind.”

Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that Toby Hawthorne didn’t take failure well.

I stepped onto the porch, knowing I couldn’t go any farther, knowing that I couldn’t leave Toby—Harry, think of him as Harry—alone.

“Jackson, are we doing the right thing?” I hadn’t meant to ask that question, hadn’t meant to whisper those words into the night.

“Sometimes there’s no such thing as the right thing. Sometimes, there’s only Death and whatever you can do to hold her off.”

“Her?” I asked.

“Yeah, well,” Jackson grunted. “Death’s a real bitch.”

I went back in. Harry was lying perfectly still on the mattress, his long limbs marked by lines of tension, muscle after muscle. His eyes were closed. He looked like he’d been carved from stone, like a work of rage-fueled beauty called forth from granite by a master. But when I got closer, I realized that his face was wet. I watched as a new tear—just one—carved its way from the corner of his eye down his cheek, all the way to the base of his jaw.

I wasn’t even sure he knew he was crying. From pain? From failure? From being trapped here? I didn’t say a word as I went about checking the damage he’d done, and neither did he—not until I was finished.

“I guess that’s it, then. I’m your captive for a little longer.”

The word captive was barbed, and I tried for just a moment to put myself in his shoes: no memory, in agony, and at the mercy of strangers.

“Trust me,” I said, “the second you’re well enough for us to move you, I will very happily dump you three hundred miles away and leave you to fend for yourself.”

“Oddly enough, I do trust you. I must be a masochist that way.” There was a long silence and then: “Why three hundred miles?”

Honesty came more easily to me than it should have: “There are people who want you dead, and right now, all of them think you already are.”

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me who those people are or why they want to hasten my tragic and inevitable demise?”

The tears were still coming from his eyes, a single drop at a time. It had to be the pain.

I went for the medication. “Have you met you?” I asked bluntly. I checked the log I’d had Jackson keeping to make sure I’d grabbed the right medication. The risks of an overdose were lower for this one, so I slipped out two extra pills.

One after another, he took them, his lips brushing the very tips of my fingers. I tried to look anywhere but at my hand and his mouth and the place where they met. On the floor beside the mattress, I saw a piece of paper with writing on it. I bent to get a better look.

Two words were written in oversized, uneven chicken-scratch on the page: bourbon and lemons.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Pain was rolling off him in waves, but that didn’t stop him from smirking. “My grocery list.” He lifted his right hand off the bed just enough to make a little waving motion. “Hop to it.”

Clearly, he wanted me to murder him. “I’m not buying you bourbon. Or lemons.”

Why the hell did he want lemons?

“You know what they say,” he murmured, “about making lemonade.” He was hurting, but there was something more than pain in his voice, a deliberate, teasing something dancing lockstep with agony in his tone.

I stayed with him and waited until the pain meds took effect before pulling back to the table, where I tore a piece of paper out of the notebook for myself and started folding. Hours passed. Harry was barely moving and wasn’t talking, but he was conscious.

It was only when we heard Jackson’s footsteps outside that my patient spoke again.

“I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end.” There was something almost musical in Harry’s tone, something dark. “I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.”

Something told me those words weren’t his. “I don’t understand,” I said.

I heard his next breath. “I would wager, my little liar, that you do.”