Chapter 1 · The Regular Human (2)

"Okay," I said, backing away. "Cool. Good luck with that. I'm just a regular human, mind your own business — I mean, mind MY own business. I'm going to go home now. This is not my alley."

I turned. I walked. I made it three steps.

Then I heard him fall.

Not collapse-gracefully. Fall. Face-first into the puddle, a sound like a bag of wet meat hitting the ground. The kind of fall that means the person is done.

I stood there. In the rain. For a full thirty seconds. The cold thing in my chest said <em>leave him, this is not your war, this is exactly how it starts.</em>

And that, unfortunately, was the problem. Because I knew exactly what "this is how it starts" meant — I'd seen it in a hundred horror movies, and I'd always rooted for the idiot who went back.

I went back.

"Okay," I said, crouching next to him, hauling one massive arm over my shoulder. He was dead weight, and I am five-foot-four and built like a disappointed noodle. "Okay, listen. I'm going to get you inside, because it's raining, and you're bleeding, and I have a strong moral objection to watching people die on my commute. But we're going to have a conversation about your life choices, and you're going to apologize for ruining my Tuesday."

He didn't apologize. He also didn't die, which I decided to take as a win.

Getting him up the stairs took nine minutes and approximately all of my remaining dignity. Mrs. Kowalski from 2B opened her door at one point, took one look at me dragging a bleeding giant up the stairwell, and said — with the unbothered cadence of a woman who has seen it all — "Honey, whatever he did, he's not worth a felony."

"He's not a criminal!" I wheezed. "Probably! He's just — injured! And wet!"

"Mm-hm." She closed her door. I heard her chain slide. Good. At least one of us had functioning self-preservation.

My apartment is three hundred square feet. That sounds small until you try to fit a dying supermodel in it. I dumped him on the floor of the bathroom — the only place with a surface I could wipe down — and went to work.

Here's the thing I need you to understand about the next hour: I was a barista, not a medic. My first-aid training consisted of a workplace safety video about not putting your hand in the blender. But I had a first-aid kit (gifted by my mother, who lives in constant fear that I will "choke on a grape and die alone"), a towel, and a stubborn belief that I had not carried a man up three flights of stairs just to watch him bleed out on my bath mat.

I cut away his shirt with the kitchen scissors.

And then I stopped.

His torso looked like a road map of violence — old scars, thick and white, layered over each other like tree rings. But the wound itself. The wound was wrong.

It was a gash across his ribs, deep enough that I could see something I really, really did not want to identify. And it was closing. Not healing — closing, the way a zipper closes, the edges knitting together in slow, impossible motion, black veins retreating from the skin like they were being called home.

I blinked. It kept closing.

I blinked again. It was halfway there.

"Okay," I said, to no one, very calmly. "Okay. That's — that's a medical phenomenon. That's probably a medical phenomenon. That's definitely not — I'm going to check my phone now."

I checked my phone. No new messages. The group chat was still arguing about the girl from Mia's chem class. The world had not ended. The wound had finished closing, leaving behind a red, angry line of fresh skin, like a scar that didn't want to admit it existed.

I sat down on the edge of the tub. My hands were shaking. The cold thing in my chest had gone very, very quiet, which was somehow worse.

Then he opened his eyes.

They were gold.

Not human gold — amber, maybe, honey — no. They were gold the way a furnace is gold. Gold with a fire behind it, banked and waiting. He looked at me, and something in his face changed — something I couldn't name — and he grabbed my wrist.

His grip was iron. Not painful — careful, almost, like he was afraid of breaking me. He pulled my hand to his chest, pressed it flat over the fresh scar, and said something in a language I'd never heard. The words were old. They felt old. They crawled over my skin like heat from a fire you can't see.

And in my chest, the cold thing — the stone that has sat there for sixteen years — flickered.

Warm.

One heartbeat of warmth, bright and impossible, like a match struck in a frozen house.

Then his eyes rolled back, and he went limp, and the warmth died, and I was alone in my bathroom with an unconscious man and a panic attack the size of Rhode Island.

I did not sleep.

I sat on the floor with my back to the tub, phone in my hand, 911 typed and un-sent, watching him breathe. At some point the rain stopped. At some point the radiator made its whale noise. At three in the morning, something tapped on my window.

My window is on the third floor.