I took a few steps down the embankment so I was out of sight.
I took the gun from my pocket and checked the magazine. Full.
I pulled back on the action and checked the chamber. Loaded.
I headed back down to the wrecked car.
Chapter Eleven
Evan
Lincoln slid into the seat next to me.
“Go back to the city.” He gave the cabbie his home address. I stared at the back of the pleather seat, following the white stitching along the seam. It was frayed, coming apart and allowing stuffing to poke through. Too many rough visitors pushing against it with their shoes or knees or who knows what. Some things weren’t meant to be handled so roughly. Some things couldn’t take the abuse.
“—Evan!” Lincoln said, as if he’d been calling my name for a while.
I felt his arms around me, pulling me into him. I sat on his lap, my legs stretched out in the seat where I’d been lying. There was fire in the distance. It retreated through the back windshield. A small explosion sent a burst of fire into the air before my view was obscured by trees. I looked down at my legs. They were dirty, and my shoes were gone. Odd.
He looked me over, a full inspection as his hands roved here and there. It wasn’t sexual, more clinical than anything else.
“What hurts?” he asked.
I didn’t know. I reached up to touch the cut along the bridge of his nose. I didn’t put it there with my own hands. But something whispered around in my mind that I might as well have.
“Angel, please, tell me what hurts.”
I tried to concentrate. There was a ringing in my ears that prevented me from focusing. The incessant hum was maddening.
“I . . . I . . . my head here.” I touched my forehead.
“You have a cut there. Anywhere else?”
I could barely hear him through the single note playing in my ears.
“Evan, stay with me here. What else?” He was so calm. The worry in his voice was thick and the fear in his eyes consuming, but he was still so calm. A thought flitted by, reminding he should be mad at me, that he hated me.
“Do you hate me?”
He shook his head. “Concentrate, Evan, please. Does anything else hurt?”
“Nothing, I don’t think. Nothing. Just my ears, they hum.”
“I think you have a concussion.”
“Don’t let her go to sleep,” someone said. Must have been the cabbie.
“I know. Evan, I’m going to need you to stay awake and talk to me. Can you do that for me, angel?”
I didn’t know if I could. I was tired, and I was having trouble remembering things. I had been in a car accident, I knew that. My clothes were damp in places, wet in others. Other things were fuzzy now.
I leaned into his chest and rested my head on his shoulder. He felt good. His clean scent enveloped me. It was the best thing I’d ever felt. I was light. I was safe. I closed my eyes.
He pushed me away, jarring me back awake. “Can’t do that, angel.” He winced when he looked at me—was there something ugly on my face? Then he schooled his features, getting his poker face back in place. He even smiled a little, casually, as if he were just chatting me up over drinks. “Tell me more about you. Did you have a pet when you were little?”
Random. “A pet?”
I wanted to lean into him again, just lie on his chest and sleep. He wouldn’t let me. He held me still and away from him, even as the cab jostled over the roads.
“Yeah, are you a dog person or a cat person?”
It was one of those questions that was meant to test who you were; at least that’s what I used to think they were for. When I was a kid, your answer to a question like that could divine your whole future. Chocolate or vanilla? Left-handed or right-handed? NSYNC or Backstreet? The earth’s axis seemed to spin on the answers to those questions.
“I had a cat.”
“Good.” He stroked my hair, pulling the strands out of my face. He was loving, intimate.
I wondered if the cabbie was watching us, but I didn’t care enough to turn around and look. He’d seen much, much worse in the back of his cab, no doubt.
“What was its name?” Lincoln asked.
“Tybalt.”
He smiled. I wanted to kiss him.
“How did you come up with that?” he asked.
“Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet. Tybalt was Juliet’s cousin. He was called the prince of cats in the play.”
“That’s an interesting name.”
“My college professor said “prince of cats” meant Tybalt got a lot of pussy. He didn’t say it quite like that, though. But when I was in junior high, I didn’t realize the name was a pun. I thought it was cute, kitty cat royalty. So that’s what I named my little furry prince.”