Inside Out. Amy Lee Burgess

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СКАЧАТЬ I clap a hand to my mouth not sure if I am going to puke, laugh or scream. If not for the gurney, I would collapse to the ground.

      I told you not to kill him. Inside my head my voice is mournful. Wolf-on-human violence could have been excused in this situation, but there is no defense for deliberate murder. My wolf hadn’t even hesitated. I remember everything with a vivid suddenness that makes me cry out, my voice muffled by my hand.

      He deserved it. He fucking deserved it. My voice is loud in my ears even though I don’t speak aloud. Loud as if to drown out the very treachery of the thought itself. He. Deserved. It.

       “Stuh—Stanzie?” Bethany sounds very young and scared, but also hopeful. If she can see Nate’s ravaged body, it doesn’t freak her out the way it does me. “You shifted back. Can you get me free? Please?”

       For the first time I can see her. When I do, I start to cry. Her body is a mass of bruises and burn marks. The wrist and ankle restraints have chafed so badly she’s bled and her wounds are infected. I can both smell that and see the swollen red streaks that ooze a puslike liquid. Her hair might have been blond, but now it is a matted, greasy mop of indeterminate brown. Blue, feverish eyes lock to mine pleadingly.

       “Hang on,” I force myself to say past tears that clog my throat. There is no time for crying. I have to look for the keys in Nate’s pockets. That means I have to go near him and face what I’ve done to him up close.

      * * * *

      Someone made a sound like an injured animal and a split second after I heard it, I realized it had been me.

      Murphy leaned his forehead against the back of my skull. The spot where I’d hit it when Nate had knocked me into the woodpile in the shed was still sore. Every morning for a week, I’d woken with the sick residue of a headache. Murphy avoided the sore spot with his forehead, but his lips were a millimeter from it. I wondered if he knew it was there. If he remembered it was there. He’d found it the night I’d gotten it, but he’d been gone for the next three days so maybe he’d forgotten.

      “How?” I didn’t even recognize my own voice, twisted as it was with anguish and bewildered anger. We’d gotten her out of that root cellar alive. How could she be dead now?

      “Infection,” Paddy watched me closely. “She had a miscarriage while she was...in the root cellar and although they did a D-and-C, it was too late. Infection had already set in.”

      “From the beer bottle. From being raped by a beer bottle,” I snarled. Paddy winced, his face pale. I sucked in my breath as the whole world narrowed to a small pinhole while black spots performed a macabre dance across the tiny expanse that was left.

      I wasn’t even aware I’d gotten up until I was halfway across the room. I had nowhere to go and no idea what to do, so I stopped, my shoulders hunched.

      “He won,” I whispered. “That bastard won.”

      “No!” Paddy’s eyes blazed as he turned to stare at me. “He did not win.”

      “She’s dead, Paddy.”

      “She died in the company of her family, her pack,” he argued. “I’m not telling you she wasn’t in pain or scared, but she wasn’t in that fucking root cellar with a madman’s laughter the last thing she heard. You did that for her and nobody else.”

      “But she’s still dead.” I wasn’t comforted at all. Every time I closed my eyes I could see her bruised and battered face, and the pain and terror stamped across it.

      “I want my mom,” she’d told me and Vaughn when it was all over as we tried to get the damn wrist and ankle shackles off of her. “I want my mom.”

      My own mother’s face flashed before my eyes and I saw her walk behind my father across the conference room floor after he’d renounced me as their daughter in front of the tribunal. She hadn’t looked back.

      I burst into tears.

      Both Murphy and Paddy moved toward me, but it was Paddy I went to. He’d been there in the conference room when I’d had to recount the hellish hours I’d spent chained up with Bethany in Grandmother Emma’s root cellar. He’d been there when my parents had ripped me to shreds in front of the New England Regional Council and three members of the Great Council.

      He enfolded me in his arms and rocked me while he crooned something comforting in my ear. He smoothed my hair, careful to avoid the sore spot. He remembered it was there.

      * * * *

      Paddy rummaged in the mini fridge while I sat on the peach-colored chair and blew my nose into a tissue he’d pressed into my hand as he’d settled me gently. Beyond in the bathroom, the sound of running water as Murphy showered, provided a strange counterpoint to the soft jingle of small glass bottles.

      “Gin, vodka or tequila?” Paddy held three nipper bottles in front of me and I shuddered.

      “Is there orange juice? If there is, I’ll take the vodka. Isn’t there any wine?”

      “Not strong enough.” He returned to the fridge and rummaged around for a can of juice.

      I cast the used tissue toward the wastepaper basket near the desk and missed spectacularly. My nose still ran, so I snatched another tissue from the box on the end table and blew.

      Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the vertical blinds drawn across the window and fell in stripes across the bed. I could see the indentation of Murphy’s head in the pillow. His socks were on the floor beside his jeans and one of his Timberland boots. The other one was probably under the bed with his shirt and underwear.

      The crack the orange juice can made as Paddy opened it competed with the sound of the shower for a moment. Even from half a room away I could smell the vodka.

      “Is there ice?” I wondered and Paddy swore good-naturedly before he grabbed the ice bucket on the dresser and headed for the door.

      “Be right back,” he promised and was gone.

      The water shut off and the shower curtain rings chattered together as Murphy drew the curtain back. A moment later, the buzz of his electric razor filled the air. I blew my nose for the third time and leaned back against the chair, overwhelmed by a sudden dispirited lassitude that sucked all the vitality out of my bones and left me bereft and powerless.

      I was crying again when Murphy walked into the room with a towel wrapped around his waist. His hair was wet but combed and the zig-zag pucker of the bullet scar on his right forearm was a vivid reminder Murphy’d come by that wound while protecting me. He’d covered me and exposed himself, and now he’d always have the scar to prove it.

      He saw my tears right away but didn’t say anything. Instead he found a clean pair of briefs from his leather overnight case then pulled on his jeans.

      The muscles of his back and neck were so tense they vibrated. He pulled a fresh tissue from the box and handed it to me. When I took it, our fingers brushed.

      “I’m sorry, honey.” His voice was a low rasp. He sounded exhausted still, and his eyes were bloodshot.

      “Gin or tequila?” I asked him and he blinked СКАЧАТЬ