Blood Howl (26 page)

Jed struck, a blood-soaked silver knife flashing in the low light as it buried itself in Fil’s throat. Fil’s hands flew up to try and dislodge it, but Jed just forced it deeper. A full-body shudder ran through Fil’s limbs, hands twitching, before he slowly fell still, lifeless eyes still open in the surprise of the last moments.

They both watched, hoping that this time Fil would stay down. He didn’t move again, didn’t even twitch—his blood merely continued to spread outwards from his body.

“Red. Darlin’? You’re a wolf,” Jed commented, still kneeling awkwardly next to Fil’s body. He tentatively reached out a hand, eyebrows rising in surprise when Redford pushed his nose into his palm. “You’re not going to go all crazy and attack?”

Redford shook his head for a
no
, hoping that he could change back. Like last time, the thought seemed to do it—unfortunately, it was also just as painful as last time, and by the time he was human again Redford was pretty sure he looked almost as bad as Jed.

“You’re not dead,” he repeated dumbly, watching as Jed tried to yank the knife out of Fil’s neck, his movements uncharacteristically clumsy from pain and blood loss. Redford shook himself, moving over to Jed urgently. “Can you stand? I think you need to go to a hospital.”

Jed just smiled at him, one of his hands wrapping around Redford’s. “I can’t feel my legs,” he said calmly, and promptly passed right out.

Chapter Fourteen

Jed

R
EALLY
, he wasn’t a stupid man. Jed knew that to most people, he wasn’t exactly walking the edge of sanity, but by and large his actions made sense. They were logical. Thought out. If one knew his line of thinking, if they could understand what was going on in his brain, such as it was, he really wasn’t all that suicidal or impulsive.

This, though, had been pretty damn stupid. Jed knew the laws of blood loss, of a bullet ripping through a good portion of muscle and flesh. Unless moving was the only way to keep that hole from getting a bunch of friends, you stayed still. You bound up the wound, you treated the injury, because running around like a maniac with an actual, honest to God see-through part of your shoulder was not the way to keep living. But when he’d woken up on the floor, gritty and dazed and in so much pain he’d puked a few times, just to keep the fun times rolling, the
smart thing to do
had been the furthest from his mind.

Redford had been taken. Again. And this time Jed kind of thought there wasn’t going to be a welcome home party for him. Fil was pissed, and God only knew what that would mean. If he didn’t get to Red immediately, he couldn’t be sure there would be anything left to find.

No, that was too logical. His thought process hadn’t even been that complex. Everything in him had boiled down to one thought.

Must find Red
.

The time between the first gunshot and that final death rattle, blood under his fingers and a knife buried to the hilt, passed in flashes and blurs. Jed kept losing consciousness, waking up on his table, in an alley, outside the building where Fil kept his pack. Pain slurred into agony, constant and numbing, and Jed found it increasingly hard to stay upright, much less be any real threat.

He’d had the presence of mind to get his emergency sack out of the apartment. A few explosives, a fucking huge gun, a knife for close quarters work, and a needle filled with adrenaline—an entire fucking bag of
stupid
. No longer concerned with innocents, with anyone else in the entire world, all Jed knew was that the wall was in his way, was between him and Red.

Which meant the wall had to go.

At one point he’d been sagged against a doorway, head spinning, choking up blood while he tried to force his feet to move. Dazed, he was only vaguely aware of footsteps, of people running, of bodies lying strewn around him like discarded popcorn. Then he heard it. Goddamn music to his ears.

The whistle.

“That’s my boy.” Smiling faintly to himself, eyes closed, Jed had gathered every last tendril of strength. Fire was burning somewhere in the background. Someone tried to rush him, to grab the gun, but Jed had fired twice, stumbling over the body and managing to drag himself down the hallway.

He wasn’t stupid. Not most of the time, anyway. But right then, in some crazed desperation to find Redford again, Jed honestly didn’t care if everyone else burned. Fil was an annoyance, was merely another obstacle. When he passed out for the last time, it was holding onto Redford, time sliding into darkness and then nothing at all.

Until that damned beeping woke him up.

Cracking one eye open, Jed rasped in an agonized breath, feeling like his mouth was stuffed with cotton. Holding himself completely still, he tried to put two and two together. Okay, scratchy sheets, incessant beeping, the stink of antiseptic—must be a hospital. Just fucking ducky. Wincing, he rolled onto his side, hand clumsily flailing out to try and find his IV. There was always an IV. He’d rip it out, find some pants, and get his ass home.

“Jed?”

The voice stopped him cold as the rest of reality rushed back to him. The gunshot. Redford. Fil. Blood. Explosion.
Redford
. Swallowing back the sour tang on his tongue, Jed forced both eyelids open, looking around the room.

Redford was sitting in a chair next to the bed, ramrod straight, hands folded tightly on his lap. He looked like he was barely holding it together, like that death grip he had on his fingers was the only thing keeping him from coming unglued. Both of Redford’s eyes were bruised, a cut standing out against one cheek. Jed’s brow furrowed, and he reached out, limbs feeling heavy and disconnected, to brush his fingers across Redford’s face.

“You’re hurt,” he rasped, surprised when Redford choked out a laugh, a sob, reaching up to tangle his fingers in with Jed’s.

“Shut up.” Then Redford was kissing him, slow and gentle, tears getting lost between their lips. Shocked, Jed lay silently for a moment, unresponsive. After everything, all the blood and the pain and the uncertainty, Redford was still there. He still wanted to be close, still wanted
Jed
, and that was something a lot bigger than he’d been prepared to deal with.

After a ragged breath, Jed tilted his head up to catch Redford in another kiss, featherlight and achingly sweet. “Don’t tell me to shut up,” he rumbled, nipping Red’s lower lip with a tired, confused little smile. “Jerk.”

Redford was hanging onto his hand like it’d kill him to let go, and Jed really couldn’t find it in himself to complain. He sighed quietly when Redford’s fingers brushed across his forehead, concentrating on that rather than the dully leeching pain or the fact he really wasn’t sure what had happened. There were bits and pieces that surfaced, murky against the morphine haze, but Jed couldn’t nail any of them down.

“You were dead.” Redford was staring at him, eyes wide and solemn. There were still tears drying on his cheeks, still that agonized red circling stormy grey that showed all of the hurt Jed hadn’t been able to stop. Hesitating a moment, Redford looked around them before nudging Jed over, jaw set determinedly. He crawled into bed next to him, wrapping his arms around Jed, burying his face in the curve of his neck.

Yeah. He’d been dead. For a long fucking time he’d been chasing every kind of high he could get, any kind of connection to make himself feel
real
. Jed had been dead and buried ages before Redford had showed up. He just hadn’t realized it. Until everything else had faded away and that one need, that one urge, had drowned out all the other bullshit.

“What happened?” he asked lowly, deciding that the time for deep, emotional soul searching was not while drugs were dripping into his system. “With Fil? I remember….” A faint smile, then, tipping up his lips, and Jed reached out to brush his fingertips along the chain that disappeared beneath Redford’s shirt. “The whistle.”

Redford just shook his head. “The rest isn’t important right now,” he mumbled, resting his cheek on Jed’s uninjured shoulder. “You should sleep. The doctors said you need lots of sleep.”

Frowning up at the ceiling, Jed let his mind shift back, trying to pick up the pieces. “Were you a wolf?” he said after a little while of silence, looking down at Redford next to him. “Jesus, I think I was loopier than I thought. I swear you turned into a fucking huge wolf just because you felt like it.” A pause, and he rubbed his forehead with his free hand, wincing as the movement pulled at stitches. “Just tell me we killed the bad guy, Red.”

There was a laugh buried against his shoulder, a relieved smile turning up the edges of Redford’s lips. “You killed him,” he confirmed, and added, “and I was a wolf,” a little bit more quietly. He took a quick look around to make sure there were no doctors or nurses hovering, and pulled up his sleeve, baring three puncture marks on the inside of his elbow. “Fil gave me his blood. He said it was his gift to his pack.”

Wow, okay, and he had officially reached his threshold of weird-ass shit for the year. Staring blankly at further evidence of Fil’s insanity, he just huffed out a long sigh, letting his thumb rub over the holes. “Well, all right then,” he mumbled, nudging his face into Red’s shoulder, deciding that was a good place to hide. “I’m twice as glad I killed him, now.”

According to Redford’s expression, Fil’s death wasn’t nearly as important as some things—say, the fact that Jed was here and not dead in a hallway. “I’m just happy you’re alive,” he said quietly, watching Jed. “I didn’t want to think about what would happen if I got free, but you… weren’t there.”

“You would’a lived,” Jed half shrugged, closing his eyes and letting himself sink into the warmth of Redford’s body. Though he’d be the first to admit that he, too, was pretty damn happy to not be pushing up daisies, he couldn’t imagine his status on the whole living thing would affect Redford
that
much. Sure, yeah, the guy would be sad. That was what happened after death. People were sad for a little while, and then they moved on. Surely it’d be the same for Redford.

Except he remembered what it was like, to wake up alone. To know with utter certainty that Redford was gone. If he hadn’t reached Redford in time, if Fil had been even more of a bastard… there wasn’t pain for a thought like that. Pain was transient, too weak of a word. Pain could be borne, pain could fade, pain could be dealt with or embraced or passed over. If it had been Redford lying bleeding on the floor, Jed wouldn’t just hurt. He knew that, could feel the threatened edges of the abyss just at the corners of his mind. It wouldn’t be merely
pain
. Jed would just come apart. Be swallowed whole by the skin-tight agony of having to breathe in and out in a world where he wasn’t.

“Not very happily ever after,” Redford grumbled, shifting so that he didn’t cause Jed any pain. Jed snorted quietly, nudging his forehead against Red’s temple. For a moment he was silent, oddly so, the words only half forming before he swallowed them down again, afraid of letting them tumble out and become real.

Finally though, he opened his eyes and met those cool, gray depths, and he asked the question. “You want an ever after with me?” There was a slow smile starting at the corners of Redford’s mouth, edging upward, and Jed tried to stop it, cautioning, “I can’t promise a
happily
in there anywhere, and I’m kind of a bastard. I don’t clean, I’ll leave my guns out everywhere, I can’t remember the last time I was sober for a week at a time. Oh, yeah, and I feed my cat better than myself. Seriously, I often grow mold that would make a dump look sanitary. And I don’t know how to be anything other than a slut, swear to God, Red, I’m a mess, and—”

He got cut off by a kiss, fierce and intense, Redford wrapping his arms around him, hitching him in close. “Yes,” Redford whispered, smiling into his mouth,
grinning
, a laugh buried into the meeting of their lips. “Yes, yes,
please
, yes. I want that. I want you.”

There was a difference, Jed was learning, between being
content
and being
happy
. Before, he would have categorized himself as happy. He had a job that didn’t suck. He set his own hours, did his own shit, and no one bothered him. There was an apartment with cold beer in the fridge, all-night marathons of buddy cop movies and porn, and a cat to talk to when he got bored. What more could he have asked for? But then there was Redford, and Jed realized that all that stuff just meant he didn’t hate his life, most days. It didn’t make him happy. It wasn’t what he really
needed
.

This was.

“Well, okay, then,” he murmured, realizing he was grinning, too. Probably looked like an idiot. “You know what this means, don’t you?” Redford shook his head slowly, a faint line appearing between his eyes as he thought it over. Jed just laughed, a low chuckle that shook in his chest, as he leaned up to kiss away the furrowed brow. “We’re going to have to buy another towel.”

Redford let out a surprised snort, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “One seemed to work just fine.”

“Well isn’t this just the cutest thing,” the voice drawled from the doorway, and Jed had to remind himself that he didn’t have a gun under his pillow here. Pity. “Seriously, you two should get matching shirts, or something.”