J Duncan - Deadworld

“You’ll be out of here the second you’re able, and not a second later.” He grinned and set the water pitcher back down. “Back in a minute.”

Jackie watched his solid, bruised figure leave. Damnit, there was a bond. She closed her eyes, pushing his image out of her mind. What the hell was she going to do about this? With everything? Her job was fucked. Her best friend was dead. She had almost died. Where did you go from there? The question faded into the oblivion of sleep before Nick returned.

The following afternoon, she was more than ready to leave. If one more person marveled at her recovery, she was going to deck them. Shelby, at least, had come along, exhibiting her usual charm. Then the doctors fell all over themselves to get things signed off. When they finally cleared Jackie, she sent Nick off to bring the car around front.

“He really likes you, you know,” Shelby said after the hospital-room door closed behind him. “You couldn’t have paid me to sleep in that fucking chair for five days. No offense.”

Jackie stopped packing her overnight bag that someone had brought in with a change of clothes. “He was here the whole time?”

“Yep. Our sheriff is about as loyal a dog as they come. I had to make him go home and take a shower after the first two.” She laughed at Jackie. “Don’t look so surprised. You guys have been through a lot.”

She tried to imagine sitting there in that green hotel-lobby chair for five straight days. Would I have been that dedicated? For Laurel. She would have done it for Laurel because Jackie had loved her more than anyone. God. Not even possible that was why Nick had done it for her. It was just the circumstances.

“He just wanted to make sure someone was around when I woke up, someone who knew what happened.”

Shelby patted her arm. “Guess that’s why he never asked me to take the chair for a while.”

Jackie pulled a Northwestern sweatshirt over her head and zipped the bag. “Can we not discuss this right now?”

“Sure thing, hon. Just saying is all, and I know Nick. There’s something there.”

Jackie shouldered the bag. “Can we go?”

They stopped at the gift shop on the way out, and Shelby bought a bouquet of flowers. Jackie thought for a moment she might be giving them to her, but Shelby said nothing, just smiling with those perfect, brilliantly red lips. Nick waited with the car doors open when they stepped out of the hospital side entrance.

“Get in,” he said, pulling the bag from Jackie’s shoulder. “We move fast, they won’t even notice we’ve left.”

Jackie looked around but saw nobody out of the ordinary. “They who?”

“There’s more than a few folks around interested in how you vanished from the basement of a burning funeral home and reappeared two days later,” Shelby replied. “You can go around front and conduct an interview or ten if you want.”

Jackie quickly ducked into the backseat of the car and hunkered down. What a nightmare that would be. She had not even considered that possibility. “Let’s go.”

They wound through the city’s streets, still wet from an early morning rain. It was cool and breezy, a typical early fall day in Chicago. Nothing, however, felt typical anymore. Jackie had seen things no living person had any business seeing. She was getting a ride home from a couple vampires, one of whom she could not decide what to think of. The man, a good-looking one at that, had saved her life. By itself, that had some potential right there. A couple weeks ago, it would have made for a rollicking, drunken night of sex, and then it would have been back to work the next day, out of sight and out of mind. But now?

Life had shifted in a very peculiar direction, and Jackie could not decide what to make of it. Begrudgingly, she had to admit there was something there with Nick, and it could easily be chalked up to the intensity of circumstance, but there was something more. Yet was it really there, or just because she wanted it to be there, needed it to be there? She could not go back to her old life and ways. That Jackie no longer existed, the one who had bled out into the mouth of the man sitting in the front seat. What was left? Did it matter?

Jackie stared at the bouquet in the seat next to her, bright and summery in color, an overabundance of daisies packed into its tightly wound band.

“What are the flowers for?”

Shelby looked back with a sympathetic smile. “Laurel.”

Before she could wonder why, Nick turned his car into the driveway of the Montrose Cemetery. She stared out the window, row after row of marble stones filing past. They made their way to the back of the property, where it butted up against the edge of the LaBagh Woods. In a few more weeks it would be a beautiful setting with the trees changing into their fall dress. When Nick stopped the car, Jackie could plainly see their destination a few meters off into the manicured lawn, where a mound of flowers still adorned a fresh grave.

For a long minute, Jackie could only stare out the window at it. The finality of everything, of what had happened to them, the unheeded warning to leave all this alone, grew out of the ground before her in an absurdly mocking pile of cheerful color. She began to cry.

“Go,” Shelby said.

Nobody had mentioned the funeral or that she had missed it. The tears would not stop. While she still had any nerve left to get out of the car, Jackie picked up the bouquet from the seat and stepped out. The air had become oddly still and silent. At the foot of the grave, Jackie stopped, holding the flowers limply in one hand. Such a trifling thing to bring them here, a wholly inadequate gesture to someone who had been so much more than just her friend. She wiped at the tears with the back of her other hand, throat too constricted to force out any words. Not that any words could convey her feelings at that moment.

“They’re pretty,” Laurel said. “Daisies are my favorite flower.”

Jackie knelt down and set them at the edge of the others, managing at last to force out a single, choked word. “Hi.”

“It was a lovely funeral,” Laurel said. “Pernetti even cried like a baby.”

Jackie’s clipped laugh came out more as a sob. “Sorry I missed it.”

“It’s okay,” Laurel said. “Better this way anyway.”

Probably so. They might have carted her off if she had begun to have a conversation with the dead. “I’m so lost now, Laur. It’s like I’m treading water out in the middle of the ocean. I don’t know where to go from here.”

“I know. I wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t.”

“You always had the answers.”

Laurel gave her a sad, sympathetic smile. “Even if I had them, I can’t give them anymore, hon. You have to find your own way, leave all that old stuff behind, and start fresh. You’ve got a second chance at life now. Don’t be afraid.”

Afraid. None of the old terrors compared to this. “Do I deserve another chance?” She had not thought to ask the question, but it came out before she realized.

“Don’t,” Laurel snapped back, pointing an accusatory finger. “I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t, so stop. You deserve it as much as anyone I’ve ever known. I wouldn’t have loved you if you didn’t deserve the best life has to give.”

Jackie sniffled and wiped the tears away again. “Okay, fine. I deserve it. So what happens now?”

“I don’t know. How about you go home and have a bath? Give Bickers some love. He misses you.”

“God, I totally forgot about him. He’s probably peed in every corner of my apartment.”

Laurel laughed. “He’s fine. You’ll be fine. Do something that will make you happy.”

Happiness was the furthest thing from Jackie’s mind at that moment. “I don’t see that happening any time soon.”