sounds of it.” Dean pushed himself up to his feet and walked away, cradling his arm.
I almost got out my phone but didn’t know who I would call or where I would go next. I sat on the concrete and tugged at the weeds, tearing them out in showers of dirt, taking my pain out on them. Jake had tried to shoot me, kill me. He’d definitely kill Dean if he saw him again. Everything told me if I wasn’t with Jake, I was against him. He’d come after me. I couldn’t go home, Jake knew where I lived. I’d given him the address. He’d been there, seen my parents, manipulated them.
I had no money left for travel or accommodation and didn’t know the area well enough to get myself moving in any direction. Tears had built up along my bottom eyelashes and the first broke free, splashing on the ground and turning the concrete the color of Dean’s eyes.
“Do you have somewhere to go?”
I looked up, and Dean stood next to me again. I shook my head and another tear spilt.
“Come on then.”
***
Dean and I both moved slowly. I jumped at every sound, expecting a gunshot or an Empath to burst out and attack us. Dean kept a steady pace but wobbled as he walked. He’d lost a fair bit of blood and must have been woozy. I’d be woozy just from the pain with a hole in my arm like that. I offered my shoulder for support, and the second time, he accepted.
We only had to walk two blocks, to where a trailer park spread into the distance from the end of a cul-de-sac. Dean pulled out his keys and let us into a mid-sized trailer, permanently fixed in place like most others around it. The screen door rattled and inside a man lay sprawled across the lounge. I stiffened and looked to Dean. He just shook his head, put a finger to his lips, and led me past a kitchenette piled in beer cans and a tiny bathroom to the room at the end. The man let out a gurgling snore as Dean closed the door behind us.
His room barely passed eight by eight feet in size, with a small bed, beanbag and set of drawers taking up most of the space.
Dean scooped up an old towel from the floor and held it against his bleeding arm.
Boys. I frowned and snatched it off him. “Do you have any kind of first aid kit? Bandages or something? Alcohol? At least something washed ? If you won’t go to a doctor, we better clean that up properly ourselves.”
Dean went back to the kitchen. He returned quickly with a box of band-aids, scissors, a clean cotton dishcloth and a bottle of vodka with just a finger or two left in the bottom.
He handed them to me and shrugged, then sat down on the side of the bed.
“Okay, we can work with this. Can you take your jacket and shirt off?”
Dean looked away, almost as though he was shy.
“I just mean, I might need to cut them off around your arm if you can’t.”
“No, I think I can manage.”
Dean let out a slow hiss of air as he peeled the jacket away from the wound. I helped him pull the sleeves free of his wrists since he worked one-handed to undress. He tugged his t-shirt off over his head. It took him a while so I cut the dishcloth lengthways down the middle, and started working around in a zigzag cut line to turn one half into a long strip. I dropped the makeshift bandage on the bed and soaked the other half of the cloth in vodka.
Clenching my teeth against nausea, I bent forward to inspect his arm. A mixture of running, dried and coagulated blood made a gory mess. I dabbed around where it sat on his upper bicep until I could see the bullet hole clearly. I leaned so close to Dean I could feel his body heat radiating off him and his breath against my face. The smell of blood mixed with the smoky-musk scent I noticed on him before.
With the blood cleared, there was a clean hole passing straight through the edge of his muscle. Just half an inch and the bullet would have missed him completely. A couple of inches the other way and I didn’t want to think about it. I just finished cleaning it off and it started
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