Page 24 of Veil of Death and Shadow (Order of Reapers #1)

24

MAREENA

Approximately Eight Years Ago, Two Years Before The Undoing

T he apartment was empty, so I decided to spend my night curled up in bed—alone, except for the company of a particularly intense horror novel that had my blood pumping overtime.

Fear was a strange phenomenon. I found that I both hated and craved it, and there was something so magical about how something as innocuous as ink on paper could strike so deeply into my bones, forcing my muscles to clench and my heart to race like a trapped bird in its cage.

Stranger still, was the fact that I actively sought this rush out. That I almost craved it.

It was late, and my room was bathed in the soft glow of my side lamp and the crackling flame of a candle.

Just as the protagonist started walking into the desolate basement—truly why did they all do this, let their attraction to danger lead them in the exact direction they shouldn’t be going?—a loud knock sounded in the hall.

I jumped, tossing the book as if the monster in the story might burst from its pages.

My fingers searched for something to defend myself with, but all that I had within reaching distance was my vibrating wand.

Defense by vibrator was better than no defense at all, so I grabbed it, hoping like hell it looked at least a little bit intimidating.

There was another resounding crash as I made my way to the front door, my eye pressed to the small peephole, lime-green wand clutched like a club.

Something slammed against the door, a hand maybe, blocking my sight. I jumped back at the ricochet of the impact, my heartbeat pounding in my ears.

My phone was in my room. Why the hell hadn’t I grabbed it? Phone to call for help beat vibrator every time when it came to intruders. Every. Time.

When I turned to go rectify the situation, there was a loud groan, and then another crash.

I pressed my eye to the peephole again, finding the obstruction gone—and a dark, familiar figure leaning against the opposite wall, hair wet and curling over his eyes.

With a heavy exhale, my body relaxed.

Levi.

Grinning at my own melodrama, I slid the door chain and flipped the deadbolt. No more terrifying myself with scary stories while alone this late at night again. It was lowkey embarrassing how reactive I was tonight.

“You’re breaking the rules, you know,” I grinned, swinging the door open. “Pretty sure we agreed to a minimum of a month between hangouts. I just saw you a couple of we?—”

The words dried up on my tongue at the state of him.

His eyes were wild and drawn, like he was in the deep stages of an alcohol bender, his skin tinged grey and clammy with sweat.

But it was his torso and arm that drew most of my attention. His usual black shirt was torn, the area around his stomach darker and wet. The smooth skin of his forearm was streaked in red.

Blood.

“Oh my god. Levi, what happened?”

His eyes shifted, unfocused until they found mine. “M-Mareena, you’re here. That’s good.” His words were slurred as they rushed out. “Very good. Tried to call first but lost my phone.” His gaze shifted down, brows furrowing. “Is that a . . . vibrator? Who answers the door with a vibrator?” A smug, teasing light flared in his eyes. “Did I . . . interrupt something?

“I—” I glanced down at the vibrator, then back at him. “Levi, you’re bleeding.”

He shrugged. “A bit, yeah.” Then he pressed a bottle which looked about a third full of whiskey to his lips, draining it dry in one smooth chug. There was a crumpled paper bag dangling in his other hand, the one with blood now seeping freely between his fingers. “I might need some of your help, actually. I wouldn’t have come like this, but,” he took a ragged, shallow breath, “I was in the city, and then this happened, and then I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

He swayed unsteadily, and the vibrator thumped on the floor, forgotten, as I rushed forward, reaching him just as his back crashed against the wall. He leaned against it, like he couldn’t fully support his weight on his own.

There was a trail of dark blood through the carpeted hall.

“W-what happened?” I asked again as I pressed my hand to his cheek, unsure where to grab him without causing more pain. “Levi—we need to get you?—”

He dropped the empty bottle, his large hand engulfing my cheek as he pressed his forehead to mine, the gesture so unexpected that I didn’t even flinch at the intimacy of it. “Mars. Sorry, I mean—” He took a deep breath, like he was breathing me in, but then it shifted quickly to a choked gasp as if he couldn’t quite fill his lungs properly, “Mareen?—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Levi,” I snapped, “just call me Mars. What the hell happened to you?”

“No more diet friendship?” His breathing shifted, becoming more shallow and uneven. Too much blood, there was no way a person should be standing and talking with this much of their blood on the outside of their body. “Regular calorie friendship?” A grin tugged at his lips as he added, in a disbelieving whisper-shout, “The good stuff?”

“Regular friendship.” I nodded, my eyes blurring with a film of tears as I tried to put pressure on the gaping wound stretching across his abdomen. Though, judging by the icy fear carving a claustrophobic path through my ribs, I wasn’t sure that I was willing to call anything about this moment good.

His smile swiftly turned into a groan as more of his weight fell against the wall.

“We need to get you to the emergency room. Now.” My hands were shaking, my skin now soaked with blood. His blood. “My phone’s in my room, I’ll call an ambulance.”

I hadn’t seen this much blood since the night we lost Rina—and the relentless similarities between the two scenes made me dizzy as I fought to keep my focus on the present.

“No.” He coughed. “No hospital.”

“Yes, hospital.” I shook my head, trying to understand how this was even a debate right now.

“I didn’t make you go when you didn’t want to,” he said, with the unwavering stubbornness of a child who knew he had no argument to stand on but held to it regardless.

“I had a bruised hand.”

“And?”

“My hand is practically holding together your stomach cavity right now, Levi. There’s a difference.”

“No,” he said, sobering up. He held his hand over mine, adding more pressure to the wound, his eyes holding me with an intensity I couldn’t blink away from. “Promise me. You have to listen. I can’t—no doctors. It’ll be all right. I’ll be all right. I promise.” He stood up straighter as if to prove it to me, but then just slid back down against the wall, wincing. “I heal fast. Lightning fast, in fact.” He chuckled, the sound of it bizarre against the gory scene. “Trust me, you’ll see.”

“There’s a giant fucking hole in your stomach, Levi,” I said again, on the off chance my words landed this time, “you don’t just heal from that. I don’t understand. Were you shot?” The gash was too big for that though, not that I’d ever seen a bullet wound in person. “Please, tell me what happened?”

He grabbed my other hand, where it was braced on the wall, then twined his fingers through mine. His thumb started rubbing circles over my palm, like he was trying to comfort me, like I was the one he was concerned about, of the two of us. “Promise me, Mars. No hospital. No doctors. Just you.”

“Levi—” a tear fell down my cheek and I pulled my hand back from him to wipe it away.

His brows furrowed, as he cupped my face again.

With a gentleness so at odds with the violence of the hallway, he slid his thumb along my cheek, brushing away my tears. When he pulled it back, his thumb came away covered in blood. “No hospital. Promise.”

I held his eyes, my heart racing against my ribcage.

What the hell was I supposed to do right now?

At the look of sheer desperation on his face, I nodded. “Promise.”

Maybe he was right, maybe he was drunk, and this was just a deep cut, and this all just seemed so much worse because he was wasted—judging from the waft of alcohol on his breath, he might have even started that bottle he’d just finished tonight.

I needed to get a better look.

And I would break that promise if and when it came to it.

His trust wasn’t as important as his life.

Propping him up against my side, his arm draped over my shoulder like a shawl, I helped him through the entryway. We would only draw attention, maybe even the cops. And I had no idea what happened tonight, what led to these injuries, or whether Levi might be involved in a less-than-legal career path—as I was beginning to suspect.

There was no use standing out in the hall, I needed to check his wounds, see what we were working with here.

Surprisingly, he didn’t protest, and he moved better than I would’ve anticipated given the state of him. When I started towards the couch, he redirected us towards my room. My phone was there anyway, so that was probably the better option.

Easing him onto my bed as gently as possible, I stared at the impossible amount of blood coating my hands.

This was no small wound, definitely not a trick of the hallway light or his intoxicated stumbling making this look worse than it was. It was worse than worse.

“Mars,” he said again, grinning as he lingered on the name. Like this was just a regular day in the park and he wasn’t bleeding out in the middle of my bedroom. “Mars?—”

“Levi, stop saying my name and talk to me.” I grabbed a clean shirt and pressed it to his stomach, holding more pressure there. Within seconds, it was coated in red, as if the cotton was draining the blood from him, drinking him dry.

“You mean I can’t call you Mars anymore?” His features scrunched into a pout, like I’d stolen his favorite toy. “That didn’t last very long.”

“No, I mean—you can call me Mars.”

“Good.” He shot me a smug look. “I like the taste of it.”

“Right now, you can call me whatever the hell you want.”

“No,” he said with a sad smile, “I don’t think I can. Mars is a good second option. Definitely better than Rick.”

“But right now,” I continued, ignoring his rambling and the way his dark eyelashes perfectly framed the wildness in his eyes, “I need you?—”

He pressed his finger to my lips. “You can stop the sentence there, you know.”

“To tell me what the hell happened,” I finished. “Levi, please—just tell me what to do, how to help you.”

“Do you know how to sew, Mars?”

“Sew?” I asked, the word more a croak than anything intelligible.

He lifted the wrinkled bag at his side. “I brought supplies.”

“Supplies,” I echoed.

He rifled through the bag, tossing a cheap sewing kit, some rubbing alcohol, and a few packages of bandages on the bed next to him. Then he brought out a second, unopened bottle of whiskey and opened it.

“I think maybe getting wasted isn’t the priority right now.”

“Trust me, it is.” He took a long drink, as if it was nothing more than an ice-cold bottle of water on a hot day. “I metabolize alcohol quickly.”

“Exactly how much have you had?” I asked as he took another very generous sip.

“Not enough. But it helps with the pain.”

“You know what else would help with the pain?”

“No hospitals,” he said again. “Can you sew?”

I glanced down at the package of needles and thread. “Not well.”

“Not well will do just fine for my purposes.” He shot me a look that was maybe supposed to be comforting and assuring, but it lost all verity when it ended in a sharp wince. “Where’s your bathroom, I need to get the wound cleaned up. Then we can begin.”

My stomach dipped at the thought, but I showed him to the bathroom anyway and helped him sit at the ledge of the tub without another word of protest.

When I tried to lift his shirt up over his head, he groaned.

I dropped the fabric back down, terrified of hurting him more.

“It’s out of the socket,” he whispered, face scrunched in pain. “How’d I miss that?” His eyes shifted to mine. “Can you grab me that bottle, Mars?”

I nodded, then rushed to grab it.

When I got back, he was attempting to cut his shirt down the middle, while also trying to balance his weight on the ledge of the tub.

He was failing at both.

“Let me.” I set the booze on the counter and took the scissors, trying to be as clinical as possible as I cut the material away, whispering a panicked “sorry,” when I had to slide it over his—now that I got a look at it—very-obviously dislocated shoulder.

Once he was no longer covered by fabric, I felt light-headed at the sight of him. His torso was a mottled canvas of bruises and blood—the worst stemming from the deep gouge in his stomach.

“It looks much worse than it is,” he said, catching my look of horror, “trust me. I’ll be fine.”

“Levi, there’s too much blood for this to be anywhere in the vicinity of fine. How the hell are you still standing? How did you even make it over here like this?”

He took another long pull from the bottle, until there was less than two-thirds of it left. If the blood loss didn’t kill him, the alcohol poisoning was going to.

Maneuvering around me, he positioned himself next to the door frame, his fingers bracing against the wood, expression determined.

Then, in one swift movement, he pushed forward. A deep, agonized grunt echoed through the bathroom as he shifted his shoulder back into place.

My stomach clenched and I stood there, stunned and breathless and hoping like hell I might wake up any moment to find this all a dream.

He kept his back to me, taking fast, shallow breaths through the pain, the muscles in his back contorting as he fought for control.

Though less disastrous looking than the front of him, there were still an impossible number of bruises and cuts on his back as well.

With as little pressure as possible, I set my fingers on his good shoulder, trying to offer comfort, even though I knew how futile the gesture was.

He shivered at my touch, then leaned into it a bit. After a moment, his breathing evened out and he turned to face me, most of the pain now washed from his expression. “Can you start the water? Not too cold, not too hot.”

I did as he asked, because it was becoming abundantly clear that no matter how much I wanted him to come to the same realization I had—that this was a ridiculous project, he needed to see an actual doctor—he was going to do this, with or without my help.

He kicked off his pants but kept his boxers on as he stepped under the stream.

I averted my gaze—keeping it on his face to interpret his now stoic expression, or else on the floor of the tub, where the red-stained water slipped down the drain.

When I let myself catch a brief glance of his back again, I relaxed a little.

Maybe he was right. With most of the blood washed away, I could almost convince myself he wasn’t an inch from death.

But then he turned around again, facing me, and I saw that the gash in his stomach was somehow worse than I thought, blood so dark it looked black still bubbling out from his skin.

He grabbed the rubbing alcohol I’d been unconsciously holding onto, my grip denting the plastic bottle. With hands somehow steadier than mine right now, he poured it liberally over the worst of his wounds.

I blinked back a fresh wave of tears, and reached for some towels, then went back into my room to find the largest pair of sweatpants I had.

Handing them to him, I turned around, busying myself with grabbing his things and cleaning up as he put them on, as if modesty mattered at a time like this.

“All good,” he said, his voice laced with the barest trace of amusement. “You can look now.”

I added the boxers to the pile of his things when I noticed them on the ground, then glanced up. The sweats were at least a foot too short for him, but they were better than the soaked, bloody, and torn options he otherwise had. So, for now, they’d have to do.

He grabbed another towel from the shelf behind me, and the bottle of whiskey, then led us back to my room.

Eyes glassy, cheeks flushed with the heat of a buzz, he draped the clean, dry towel over my bed. After another healthy swig of booze, he tossed me the sewing kit, then collapsed back onto my bed, his head falling on the pillow.

I stared at the package, my fingers trembling.

This was just regular run-of-the-mill thread. The kind you mended stuffed animals or old clothes with. Not human flesh.

“Levi, I?—”

“You just need to close it as best as you can. I’ll pull the thread out in the morning when my people can take a better look at it. But I really think I just need to give my body a chance to heal while I sleep. Speaking of,” he glanced up at me, looking sheepish, “sorry, I should have asked. Is it okay if I crash here? I can take the couch if you and your roommates are cool with it.”

“Yes, and you’re not taking the couch. But that’s beside the point. This wound is how-are-you-still-alive serious, not sleep-it-off serious. I can’t just sew you up like one of those bears in the mall.

“Trust me, you can. And it won’t be that bad,” he added, his face stretching into a loopy smile, “and if it is, I’m drunk enough now that I’ll probably forget the pain by tomorrow.”

Blackout or not, I had no doubt that he’d be intimately familiar with pain tomorrow. But sensing I was getting nowhere, I simply nodded, wondering, briefly, who exactly his ‘people’ were and if they were used to him showing up looking like Frankenstein’s monster, then spent the next five minutes furiously washing and sanitizing my hands until they were raw.

When I got back, he had a satisfied smirk on his face as he scanned my room.

I kneeled next to the mattress, trying to get a better angle on the wound. It was still bleeding profusely. He had bandages pressed to his stomach and they were already soaked through.

“You know,” he leaned back against my pillow, eyes glassy and amused, “it smells like you in here.”

“Well, I do live here.” Under different circumstances, I might be concerned about that observation, wondering what I smelled like and whether it was a good thing.

With fumbling fingers, I opened the sewing kit, then took a slow, deep breath, trying to calm my nerves. The last thing he needed was me shaking while I tried poking holes through wounded flesh.

With the needle threaded, I lifted the bandages to study the wound. It was bad, but it did seem to be a bit less dire than I’d remembered it being when I first got a look in the bathroom.

I glanced at the clock next to my bed and froze, the needle hovering an inch above his skin.

It was a few minutes past midnight.

Realization of what that meant left my lungs forgetting how to work.

“It’s my birthday—” I said, my voice flat.

“I know.” He shifted to look at the clock, his eyes sparkling with the exact opposite energy that I felt. “That’s one of the reasons I was in the area tonight. Happy Birthday, Mars.”

“I can’t do this.” I shook my head and sat back on my heels. “We need to get you to the hospital.” He didn’t get it. I didn’t mention the day because I wanted to celebrate it. The people I loved died on my birthday, and now Levi was lying here, pale as a ghost, with a serious gut wound. “You can’t—Levi, you can’t?—”

“Just breathe.” He grabbed my hand, squeezing it softly. “I won’t die, Mars. Not today. I promise you that. You can kill me if I break it.” His mouth twitched at the joke, but when I didn’t react, his humor dried up. “It’s okay, I get it, I shouldn’t have asked this of you. I wasn’t thinking. Didn’t put it together—what this might mean for you, today of all days. Here, I can just—” He grabbed the needle, and shoved it through his skin, wincing as he sloppily tried sewing himself back together.

My mouth went dry at the absurd horror of the situation.

If I was bad at sewing, he was downright atrocious.

“Stop.” I took the needle from him, and the bottle, so that I could coat my mouth with a small sip of whiskey. Not enough to impair me of course, but enough to get the taste in my mouth, to center my nervous system on something sharp and biting so that I could focus on the task and not my own fear.

The first stitch was the worst. My thoughts were attuned to every twitch of his body, acutely aware that it was my hand causing each inflection of pain. I had no fucking clue what I was doing, and I was absolutely terrified that I might make things worse.

But then, I created a mental wall around my emotions—something I was more than used to doing, but had grown sloppy about whenever he was around. This was going to happen, one way or another, and so the best I could do for him was numb my own terror and give it my best shot.

After cutting the third stitch, it got easier—both of us growing accustomed to what to expect. I closed the largest of the wounds as well as I could, then started properly sterilizing the other, smaller ones when I was done. One of them, though much better than the abdomen, also needed a stitch or two, so I got to work on that.

I was vaguely aware of Levi’s eyes on me, but I didn’t let myself look up, wouldn’t let myself get distracted by whatever flash of pain I saw reflected there. Not until I was done.

His head dipped forward, studying my work. “Not bad, Mars. You’re pretty good at this. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” I went to the hall closet, returning with a scarf.

Sensing my intent, he leaned forward, and I wrapped his arm and shoulder in the thin material until it formed a makeshift sling. Not amazing, but it would hopefully keep the joint still while he got some rest.

Only after I washed my hands, cleaning up the final traces of his blood beneath my nails and the bathroom sink, did I finally let myself take a full breath.

When I returned, I set a glass of water within his reach, then kept my back to him as I wordlessly climbed out of my blood-soaked clothes and changed into a baggy shirt and pair of sweats.

Trying not to touch him or jostle the bed too much, I crawled over him to the other side of the mattress. I pulled my hair from the tight messy bun I’d had it in while I worked, then fell back against my other pillow, letting the weight of the evening sink from my bones.

Levi grabbed the slim hairband I’d temporarily set on my stomach and started stretching it around his fingers, the silence thick between us.

“I owe you a truth,” he said, voice hoarse, “from that day on the bus.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, trying to fight my way back inside my body, to calm the raging panic that still quivered in my bones.

“But I am worried about it. I don’t like having debts. Ask me a question and I’ll answer it. If I can.”

“Fine,” I said, my voice trembling. “What the hell happened to you tonight?”

He shook his head. “Not that. Ask me something easier.”

I searched for an easier truth, but all the truths that I wanted from him were messy and hard. And right now, what I wanted, even more than the truth, was for him to rest, to get better, to survive. So, I went with the most frivolous thing I could think of. “Was Sora right?”

“About what?”

“The dog park?” I grinned, then sniffed back another threat of tears. “Favorite place in Seattle?”

“No.” He shook his head.

“No?” When I turned to him, his face was so close to mine, our noses just an inch or two from brushing.

“This.” His eyes found mine, the wild storm of grays more subdued now as exhaustion seeped into them. “This is my favorite place in Seattle.”

He shifted slightly, then closed his eyes, settling in for sleep.

I turned off the light, and blew out my candle, easing back into the silence.

Then he added in a low, exhausted mumble, “Nowhere else even comes close.”

It was hours before I finally let myself fall asleep. Instead, I stayed up until the sun greeted me, not moving, barely even breathing.

I watched him, my heart stopping each time his chest deflated with breath, as if that might be the last time.

My thoughts spiraled, and I found myself counting to three, tapping my fingers silently, wincing as my nails pressed into the fleshy pads of my thumbs over and over again in search of some ever-illusive valve to dissipate the fear—my brain conjuring images and possibilities of his death, what might happen to him, how it was all, somehow, my fault.

Diet friendship or not, it had been a futile pursuit. He’d found a way in. Obliterating my defenses, while giving me the illusion that I had control, that my armor could withstand him.

And now he would die, just like everyone else, and all I could do was sit here and watch, breathing in the same air until, inevitably, his body chose to stop. I’d wake up to find that I’d slept next to a corpse.

So, I fought off that reality, fought off sleep.

Obsessively, my eyes tracked his wounds.

At first, when I noticed some of them shrinking, healing, I thought it was a trick of the shadow, a product of my exhaustion. But when the hours passed and some cuts disappeared entirely—and even the worst of them, the one in his stomach, looking more like a week’s old wound than something fresh and weeping as it had been just before he’d closed his eyes—I could no longer logic away the truth.

For so many months, I’d been focused on trying to understand what Levi did for work, where he went when he wasn’t here, how he spent his time.

Who was this strange boy that had chiseled his way into my life?

Now, the ever-present alarm blaring sharp and loud in my head shifted the question from who, to what.

Only when the early rays of light illuminated him next to me, when I saw some of the color return to his skin, his breathing even and steady, did I fully let myself believe that he was alive, that whatever he’d experienced last night wouldn’t kill him.

I set my hand on the warm skin of his uninjured shoulder, soaking in the feel of his aliveness, and let sleep finally take me under.

I’d intended to only doze for a few minutes, but when I woke up, I found myself alone, my room empty of all signs that Levi had been here at all. The only tell was the soft scent of him on my sheets and a small box on the pillow where his head had been.

It was black, the cardboard crumpled in the corners and flattened on one side—a casualty of whatever brought Levi, bloody and broken, to my doorstep.

I opened it to find a thin, silver ring with small shifting beads—simple and elegant.

Underneath was a folded note:

Sorry about last night, I shouldn’t have put you through that.

This is no family heirloom of course, but I saw it and thought of you.

The guy I bought it from called it a fidget ring—supposedly they help with restlessness and anxiety. Probably should have given it to you right when I showed up, now that I think about it. Sounds like a gimmick, but also maybe worth a shot?

Either way, I liked the look of it and thought you might, too.

Happy Birthday, Mars.

—Hot, Mysterious Savior (though I guess technically you’re the savior now)

P.S. Lost my phone, but I’ll be in touch when I can. Take care in the meantime.

I slid the ring on and ran my finger over the beads as my door burst open.

My head shot up, expecting to find Levi in the doorway, but it was Sora instead.

“Happy Anniversary Extraordinaire,” she yelled, her giant smile melting into concern as she stepped into my room. “Mars, you okay?”

The first tears slipped down my cheek without my notice.

My chest was tight, and I choked back a sob, a useless attempt to even out my breathing, to swallow back whatever wave was threatening to drown me.

But then Sora wrapped her arms around me, holding me close to her, so tight I almost couldn’t pull in a full breath of air—until I had no choice but to let the weight of the night pour out of me.