Page 75 of Shrapnel

Elijah stuck his head around the corner, eyes going wide when he saw him. “Jamie!” he hissed, dragging Jamie into a tight hug.

Biting back a yelp of pain, Jamie returned the hug. “We seem to have acquired a parasite.”

Elijah ignored him. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling you for a day and a half!”

“One Direction concert. Drained my phone battery trying to get Liam to read my reverse harem fanfic.”

“Seriously.” Elijah made that face, the one that Jamie couldn’t say no to. The one that saw him trudging through the fucking salmon capital of the world.

“I did text you,” Jamie pointed out as he moved toward the kitchen. Grabbing a glass, he filled it under the sink. “You can’t be mad at me.”

“You sent me, ‘got the owies BRB’ then another incomprehensible text about a church.”

Jamie finished his water then shrugged. “What wasn’t clear about that?”

Elijah scowled at him and Jamie realized he must be really upset. He narrowed his eyes and took in the bags under Elijah’s eyes, the papers scattered all over their kitchen table, and the presence of White Sand Mesa’s leader on their couch.

“What happened?”

Elijah looked like he wanted to strangle him, but he relented and told Jamie about the explosion at the church. Jamie tried not to look too excited at the thought of a bomb that size, but he was having trouble. He wondered if anyone got any footage. It would have been a spectacular blast.

Jamie gingerly lowered himself to the kitchen chair. “Sounds like more than one bomb.”

“What do you mean?”

“Most explosives don’t start a fire. Not unless they hit a gas main or something like that. If this place went up like you think, there were either two bombs or the first was so big it set off a fire.”

Elijah joined him at the table, his face looked pale. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing you don’t already know.” Jamie shrugged. “Except that our killer wanted to fuck shit up.”

Dropping his head into his hand, Elijah pulled at his hair. Jamie had never seen him so stressed. The man was the definition of sagely drinking tea in a rock garden. Nothing got under his skin. Nothing except Noah and all things to do with him.

Unlike Jamie, Elijah was a good person. He had real emotions and virtue. Noah wasn’t bad either. They were both products of their environment, organisms that adapted to survive. They could be saved. They didn’t deserve this.

“I went to see some tweakers that ran with Koehler. They mentioned a church over on Church St.”

Elijah lifted his head, raising an eyebrow. “How was I supposed to interpret that from your text?”

“In my defense, I was bleeding out and the buttons on cell phones are entirely too small.”

The table was almost knocked over by Elijah standing. He shoved Jamie back into the chair, nostrils flaring at the way he winced in pain.

“You idiot,” he said in a way that was not fond. He wrenched up Jamie’s t-shirt and grits his teeth at the bandages. “Take them off.”

“Ooh—”

“If you make one more joke, I’m going to tell Grant you were hurt.”

Jamie made a face but began unwrapping the gauze. He waited until Elijah left to get their hospital quality first aid kit before muttering, “Narc.” under his breath.

Elijah poked at the wound, took Jamie’s temperature, and cleaned the wound again before wrapping it back up. “Where did you go?”

He didn’t answer, pretending to be focused on rewrapping his wound.

“Owen?”

The gauze slipped from his fingers, and he tried not to let Elijah see his face. The guy could read him like a damn book.