Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Heat burned off him when I touched his shoulder. Delirious from fever? Possible. But he was also a criminal defense lawyer and a successful one. Sharp. Used to seeing what people wanted to hide.
“We’ll find out. I’m photographing everything.”
He gripped my wrist, his hold stronger than it should be. “Promise me you won’t let me have an accident, too.”
My skin flashed between hot and cold. “I promise,” I said, my throat rough.
He didn’t let go. “Lunes.” Wild eyes. “I saw an angel while you were all gone before. All in white. She stroked my hair and told me I’d be okay.” A shudder rocked his frame. “I don’t want to die, Lunes. Tell the angel I’m not ready to go with her yet.”
Fuck, he was hallucinating. I knew that was bad. It meant the fever was affecting his brain. “I will, Kaea,” I told him, not sure he was capable of listening to reason. “I’ll keep you safe—no one will take you.”
It took me several minutes to convince him to lie down, close his eyes.
Panic was a trapped butterfly inside me as I walked out. Because I didn’t know if I could keep that promise. Things were escalating. Someone was dead. I might’ve convinced the logical part of myself that it had been an accident, but my hindbrain was hyperventilating, seeing monsters out of the corner of the eye.
“Thanks for waiting,” I said to the others when I reached them.
Grace stood beside a small pile of bedding. “Should we . . . wrap him up here?” she whispered hesitantly.
Everyone looked at me. I didn’t know when I’d become the person making the decisions, but this one wasn’t hard. “Yes,” I said, hoping that was the best way to keep any evidence on him intact.
Then I lifted my camera.
And took photographs of my friends rolling another friend into a white sheet. They were careful, but Phoenix was still dead weight and my stomach lurched with every thud and roll.
The sheet was scarlet around his face by the end.
“I’m going to be sick.” Ash staggered backward with his forearm over his mouth.
But he returned after a few seconds to help finish the task. Together, we made the call to further wrap Nix in a blanket to protect his body from postmortem injury—and though none of us said it, to hide the blood that had soaked the sheet.
His heart might’ve stopped pumping, but there was still so much red.
I took photographs of every step of the progress, including when Ash and Aaron lifted him up and how they carried him. I also captured images of the painting that had fallen off the wall—that disturbing photo of Clara and Blake after their wedding, no happiness in either of them—and made a mental note to clear away the shards of glass after we got back.
“Fuck, he’s heavy.” Aaron grunted. “He always looked light to me.”
Dead weight.
“Should I—” I started to say even as Grace parted her lips.
But the two men shook their heads. “We have it,” they said almost in unison.
Thus began our slow, solemn march to the cellar. It felt like it took forever, and the tears I couldn’t shed, they turned into a lump cold and rigid inside my chest. Painful. My tears calcified.
Grace and I did have to help Ash and Aaron get Phoenix down the stairs to the cellar—the access door for which lay between the kitchen and laundry. I’d taken it to be a storage closet.
Just a mannequin, I repeated silently inside my head.
Not our friend.
Not Nix who’d been Vansi’s husband.
Not Dr. Phoenix Chang.
Just a mannequin.
Grace’s sniffled tears were a counterpoint to my grim silence, her face wet with the fluid I couldn’t produce.
By the time we reached the cellar floor, my heart was thumping from the effort of ensuring I didn’t slip up, allow Nix to fall.
“Over there.” Ash nodded to a spot below a narrow and high window that let in smudged gray light, partially as a result of the weather and partially because of the layer of dirt on the glass.
“Outside wall,” Ash explained. “Probably the coldest place in the entire cellar.”
Because Nix was a creature of the cold now, no warmth to him.
After we put him down with as much care as we could, Aaron massaged one hand with the other, the motion too hard, too fast. “He went to church. Not all the time. But enough. He had faith.”
Without a word, we clasped our hands in front of our chests and lowered our heads, eyes closed.
Aaron spoke the Lord’s Prayer in a voice that trembled.
“Go with God, my friend,” he said at the end, a single tear rolling down his face.
“Go with God, Nix,” I echoed, even though I wasn’t religious in the least. But it seemed right that I support his final journey in the way he would’ve wished. “Thank you for all the scrambled eggs you made me over the years, all the talks we shared late at night on our camping trips while everyone else slept”—a fact I’d near forgotten—“and most of all, for being who you were: a good husband, a good son, and a good friend.”