Infamous (13 page)

A.J. was right. She must’ve slipped and fallen, and I rocketed out of the house to tell him so.

I didn’t get more than a few words out before he ripped off his T-shirt, wrapped it around his hand, and punched his way with a shattering crash through the lowest of the big glass panels in the front door.

Alison awoke to the sound of breaking glass.

She sat up, disoriented, her heart in her throat, but it wasn’t the shower stall glass that had broken. It was still intact—acting as both her protective shield and her prison.

The biggest snake she’d ever seen in her life was no longer out in the middle of the bathroom floor. She panicked for one brief moment, scooting back against the wall, shifting to make sure it hadn’t somehow gotten past the glass. But she was safe. She was alone in there.

Until the bathroom door opened with such force that it crashed against the wall.

Alison screamed in surprise, and then screamed again because she was naked, and that was definitely A.J. Gallagher, shirtless, as he stormed his way into her bathroom.

He grabbed the towel from the rack and, as he opened the shower door, he used it to cover her, which was nice. But he kneeled down beside her as he asked her, “Are you all right? Did you hit your head when you fell?” which wasn’t so nice.

And this time she didn’t so much scream as shout, “Snake!” as she grabbed him by his arm and his shoulder and tried to pull him into the tiny space with her, as she heard the snake’s rattle before she saw it. And there it was—between the toilet and the sink, already in a coil, ready to strike.

But A.J. was kneeling half inside the shower, half out, and there was no way he could get both of his long legs inside the stall and shut the door behind him in the fraction of a second before the snake attacked.

“Kick it!” Alison shouted as she saw he was wearing his thick leather cowboy boots. “Kick the shit out of it!”

And he shifted to do just that, except it was going to be a disaster, because that snake was huge. It could leap three feet, easily, and if it hit A.J. up past the tops of his boots, those sharp teeth—the ones that Alison had spent well over
an hour staring at as the ugly thing hissed at her through the shower door—would slice right through his jeans.

But the snake didn’t strike. Instead it flinched and almost seemed to spasm as it uncoiled, as if it had been hit with an electric current and was temporarily stunned. A.J.’s kick pushed it over to the bathroom door where it quickly regained its senses and sprang back into a coil.

“Do
what?”
A.J. shouted, but she hadn’t done more than squeak in alarm. “How?” he asked—was he talking to her?—as the snake once again went from coiled and dangerous to flopping about.
“Really?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Alison said, as A.J. scrambled to his feet and pushed the shower door shut with himself on the snake side of it. “Why is it doing that? What did you do to it?”

A.J. didn’t answer, not at first, his full attention on the snake, which meanwhile had scrambled itself back into its attack position. Whatever A.J. had done to it with that kick, the serpent was good and mad now.

But then A.J. said, “I am,” and “Do it!
Do
it,
now!”

“Do what?” Alison asked, adding, “Oh, my
God!”
as the snake again spasmed, only this time, when it did, A.J. charged toward it. He pinned it beneath his left boot as he raised his right foot.

“Don’t look,” he shouted as he brought his boot down hard. “Agh!” His shout obscured the sound of the snake’s demise.

Alison didn’t not look—she was too concerned for A.J.’s safety and well-being. But there wasn’t much to see besides the snake’s tail, still twitching, its rattle still making that ominous sound.

“Jesus,” he breathed, or at least it sounded as if that was what he’d said. “Are you real?”

“A.J.” she asked. “Is it …?”

“Dead. It is.” He turned just slightly, not enough to see her, in case she didn’t have that towel secured around her yet—which she didn’t. He was breathing hard, and he exhaled forcefully a few times as if he was trying to regain his equilibrium. “Are you okay?”

“I am,” she said, tucking the end of the towel beneath her arm and pushing open the shower door. “Are you?”

“Yeah,” he said.

But then she realized that there were streaks of blood on the towel he’d handed her. “Are you bleeding?” she asked.

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s the snake,” he started, but then said, “What? Oh, wow. Yeah, I guess … I guess I am. It’s not bad. Don’t come too close,” he warned her. “I don’t know much about snakes and whether or not …”

He paused, then said, “Actually I
do
know about rattlesnakes. I just, um, remembered. My great-grandfather is, um,
was
familiar with, um …” He cleared his throat. “The venom
is
still potent—great. We need to be careful how we clean this up. Plus, you probably shouldn’t go into your kitchen with bare feet. See, you were missing, and we didn’t know where you were, so Hugh went to try to find a spare key, but then he didn’t come back, so … I kind of broke the window in the door, which is how this happened.”

He held up his left hand, which had a nasty-looking gash on the edge of his palm, beneath his pinkie finger. “I broke the glass with my right hand—wrapped in my shirt, which is why I’m, um …” He gestured self-consciously to his bare chest. “Anyway, after that, I reached in to unlock the bolt with my left hand and … I wasn’t careful enough. If you could just get me a rag or something so I don’t bleed all over your house … I don’t want to tromp around in these boots, until I get ’em cleaned up and …”

Alison reached into the bathroom closet, and yeah, okay, she didn’t just reach right in, the way she would’ve done just a few hours ago. First she checked for snakes. But seeing and hearing none, she grabbed a towel and gave it a quick shake before holding it out to A.J.

“Oh,” he said, “no, I don’t want to ruin another of your towels.”

“Please,” she said. “Take it.” She didn’t wait for him to argue, she just wrapped it around his bleeding hand.

“Careful of the boots,” he said, and she took a step back.
“Why don’t you get, you know, some, uh, clothes on, while I go and hose off my boots outside?”

Ah, yes. That was right. A.J. had seen her naked. Way to establish a good professional working relationship with the man.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said softly, as if he were somehow able to read her mind. “I didn’t see much.”

He was a lousy liar—although his approach certainly was one way to play it. Pretend it hadn’t happened.

“Watch where you step,” he added, “and don’t forget that there’s glass on the floor in the kitchen.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Alison said, as she turned to head into her bedroom to find the clothes that she’d rather desperately wanted to put on for the past two hours, while she’d been trapped in the snake’s human zoo. But then she turned back, because it needed saying. “Thank you.”

A.J. nodded. “I’m just glad you’re all right.”

“Me, too,” she said. “I mean, that
you’re
all right.” She stopped herself. “Okay, you know what? This is just too awkward and weird. A) I know you saw me naked and it’s just not that big of a deal. I mean, I’m relatively fit, right? A little under endowed on top maybe, and certainly no Winter Baxter or Eleanor Marcus, but—” She cut herself off as she held up her hand to keep him from speaking, too. “Don’t say anything, because now it’s going to be even more awkward, like I’m fishing for a compliment, so you have to say something nice or positive, which, even if you mean it sincerely, I’m going to assume is a load of crap. So just, rewind everything I just said and let’s go back to the you-pretending-you-didn’t-see-anything strategy. That way we can focus on B), which is I have never seen
anything
as bizarre as that in my entire life, and I still don’t have a clue what just happened here.”

A.J. stood there, just watching her, and she realized he was waiting for her to clear him to speak.

“Please,” she said. “Explain. What just happened here?”

He glanced down at the remains of the snake before looking
back at her. “I’m not really sure myself,” he said. “It happened so fast. What, um, did
you
see?”

“The world’s biggest rattlesnake,” she said, “about to strike, but then having some kind of weird seizure? Can snakes even
get
seizures?”

“You saw that, too,” he said. “Huh. I mean, yeah, that
was
pretty weird. I wonder if they can. Get seizures, or I don’t know, maybe … it had … rabies?”

Rabies? Was he kidding? “Snakes don’t get rabies,” Alison said. “It’s a mammal thing.”

“Then, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe when I, um, kicked it, I crushed some kind of nerve. I kicked it pretty hard.”

“Except didn’t it do its first weird twitchy thing
before
you kicked it?”

“Did it?” he asked. “It’s all kind of a blur.”

It
did
happen fast. Still, Alison shook her head. “It did its weird thing first. I was sure it was going to bite you, but then it didn’t, and
that
was when you kicked it.” She felt her eyes fill with tears. Oh, good.
Now
she was going to fall apart. She turned away because there was no need for him to see her emotionally naked, too. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll just …” And she escaped into her bedroom.

A.J. hosed off his boots and the bottom of his jeans, wiped up the snake, swept up the glass, walked around the outside of the house to try to figure out how the snake had gotten in in the first place, and found a piece of plywood to temporarily cover the window he’d broken in the door—all before Alison came back out of her room.

“Sorry,” she said. “Henry called.” She was wearing her usual Bermuda shorts, this time with a golden brown T-shirt that matched her eyes and hugged her extremely fit body.

That was the word she’d used to describe herself—
fit
. A.J. would’ve used other words. Like
holy shit
and
sweet baby Jesus
.

A) If it were up to me, Alison, you’d never wear clothes
again. Nor, for that matter, would I
.…

Things not to say.

Particularly when she wanted explanations he couldn’t provide.
Well, see, what happened in your bathroom was that the ghost of my great-grandfather, you know, Jamie Gallagher? The man that you call “Kid” even though that never was his nickname …? See, he threw himself between me and that snake
.

He wasn’t sure if it would do any good, because he has no power over earthly beings or even inanimate objects. He passes right through them. But he’d noticed yesterday, when he bumped into some guy who’d just killed some other guy named Wayne—which is a whole nother story … But he
found out that occupying the same space as another being creates this strange sensation and odd energy
.

Turns out it worked to freak out the rattler, which was a damn good thing, or I could well be dying, right now, on your bathroom floor
.

So. To summarize. Jamie threw himself at that snake, got the reaction he got, so he did it again. And then, he told me how to kill the damn thing—to crush its head. Which I did, right after he stunned it one more time
.

Although my mother would say that I must’ve read some book somewhere that told me how to kill a snake, and that Jamie didn’t really help—I just imagined it
.

And I know that snakes don’t get rabies. I said that because I didn’t know what to say, not just because I’m an idiot, but because I was a little overwhelmed by everything that had just happened—including seeing you naked
.

Yeah, A.J. wasn’t about to say all that. At least not any time soon. If he did, he was sure as hell never seeing her naked again. And his doing so had moved up, quite a bit, on his list of priorities.

“Oh,” Alison said as she looked around. “That was fast.”

She was carrying the shirt she’d borrowed from him earlier, a dustpan, and a brush.

“You should’ve left her something to clean,” Jamie said from his perch on the kitchen counter. “When women are shaken up, they need something to do. And she
was
badly shaken by that, although you won’t get her to admit it. Because I think the thing that shook her up the most was you nearly getting yourself snakebit. I’m pretty sure she’s fond of you, kid.”

A.J. shot him a silent look because he’d already said enough to the ghost in front of Alison. He wasn’t going to give her any other reason to suspect he was crazy. Which he quite possibly wasn’t.

Because she’d seen that snake flail and twitch, too.

He’d like to hear his mother explain
that
.

Of course, maybe he’d moved that snake with the force of his mind—simply by wanting it badly enough.

Although, if he truly had that kind of power, then—just
from the sheer force of his wanting—Alison was going to put down that dustpan and walk over to him and wrap her arms around him.

Which she didn’t do. She did, however, set down the dustpan and hand him his shirt. Which A.J. gratefully pulled on. He’d shaken out his T-shirt a few times, but it still glittered with tiny specks of glass. He was going to need to visit the town Laundromat and wash it. Hopefully there was a town Laundromat.

This other shirt—long-sleeved and pale blue cotton—smelled like Alison, which was nice. He managed to resist the temptation to bring the sleeve up to his nose and breathe in her sweet scent. That could have read as creepy, and his being snake-killer-guy, who broke into her house and burst into her bathroom uninvited, was creepy enough.

“What’s your squeamishness rating?” he asked her instead, as he buttoned it and rolled up the sleeves, careful not to bleed on it with his injured hand.

“I’m good with relatively minor injuries,” Alison said, knowing right away to what he was referring. She motioned to his hand. “You need me to look at that?”

“I think there still might be a piece of glass in there,” he confessed. “But I’m left-handed, so it’s hard for me to—”