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Not ten miles away from Lazar’s estate, Joey was startled by a noise coming from the back of the van. She might’ve jumped or jerked the steering wheel even in her army days, but after the twenty-four hours she’d just had, she merely flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror.
“What the fuck,” stated what could only be the ghost of Sammy.
“What the fuck,” Joey agreed, not easing up on the gas. If she was going to hallucinate, she could damn well do it while making good progress home.
“What the fuck happened?” Sammy asked. “The last thing I remember was going with Peter to look for her.”
“You died.” Joey didn’t see the point in sugarcoating it. “Abigail possessed you and you killed Peter so I reflected some sunlight at you and you exploded. All over.”
“Jesus. So dramatic.”
Joey didn’t reply. The sooner this apparition left, the better. Said apparition didn’t seem to have any plans of the vanishing variety, though, and clambered up to the passenger seat, still reeking earthily and cloyingly of the corpse pool. She knocked Joey’s elbow with hers as she moved, which gave Joey pause.
Eyes forward, Joey reached over and squeezed Sammy’s forearm. Solid. She then slid her fingers down to Sammy’s wrist to feel the delicate pulse fluttering there.
“You’re alive.”
“Feels like it.” Sammy prodded her own jaw with a finger.
Either the experience with Abigail or Sammy’s apparent reincarnation had to be a hallucination. The hot, tearing pain in her left shoulder was real and so was the blood dried to most of her body, which meant that Sammy’s presence had to be something her mind cooked up. But a corporeal hallucination?
Joey flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror again. “Anyone else back there with you?”
“Just me.” Sammy did restrained jazz hands.
They each digested the news quietly. Joey flipped the blinker to turn onto the deserted highway from the country backroad. The air coming through the vents was crisp, especially after breathing in asbestos, mold, sawdust, and aerosolized blood all night.
“So where we going?” Sammy asked after a mile or two. “A hospital?”
Joey mentally flipped through the catalog of injuries Sammy had sustained besides being bitten and exploding. “Do you need one?”
It was Sammy’s turn to frown. She patted herself like she was looking for her phone (which she might have been doing too), checking her torso and thighs. “Huh. I guess not. You probably need one, though. You look like hell.”
“I just got back.”
“Heathers. Very cute.”
“I’m going home. Where should I drop you?”
“I guess you could drop me off at my place.”
Joey felt the hesitation. “Or?”
“Or you could take me home with you and we could keep each other company?” Sammy said hopefully. “Cases of reanimation should probably be handled like concussions, right? Keep an eye on me, make sure I don’t die again?”
The adrenaline fumes Joey had been coasting on since leaving the mansion were finally coming to their end and there was bound to be a huge crash. She hadn’t slept in nearly thirty-six hours and she knew from her time in the army that things would only get weirder the longer she was up. If Sammy was the product of sleep deprivation, she’d disappear overnight. If she wasn’t... That was later Joey’s problem.
“Fine. But no more talking.”
Sammy mimed zipping her lips.
She lasted about five minutes before fidgeting like hell, but kept her word and didn’t say a single thing even when they reached Joey’s place on the edge of the city.
After parking the van on the street and climbing four flights of stairs, Joey directed Sammy to stay just inside her front door while she went to go grab a garbage bag for their unsalvageable clothes.
“Don’t move.”
Sammy complied, making faces as she shucked out of her gore- and other-assorted-viscera-stained outfit. When she was finished, she folded her arms across her bare chest and Joey took the opportunity to survey her for other injuries.
“Turn around.”
In tiny steps, Sammy did a slow turn. No gaping wounds or displaced bones.
“Let me see your left arm.”
Sammy held it up. No bite mark, just the usual constellation of tattoos.
“Does anything hurt?”
Sammy shook her head. “It should though, right? I didn’t get stabbed or anything, but we all got thrown around by that little freak. There should be some bruising.” She pointed to a bruise forming on Joey’s torso. “Does that hurt?”
“Yeah.” Joey grabbed a dish towel from the oven handle and put it down on one of the kitchen chairs. “Make yourself comfortable; I’m gonna shower first.”
“Are you going to be able to clean everything with just one arm?” Sammy nodded at the hole the fireplace poker had punched into Joey’s left shoulder.
“Are you suggesting we shower together?”
“When you say it all disapproving like that I sound like a pervert.”
Joey went to a cabinet to retrieve the tylenol and ibuprofen bottles, aching for something—anything—stronger. This over-the-counter cocktail should do something, anyway.
Trying to unscrew the childproof lids on both made her shoulder twinge, the resulting wince Sammy noticed from across the room.
“Fine. But if you make it weird, you’re out. Not just the shower—you gotta go home.”
“You got it, boss.” Sammy immediately backtracked. “Sorry, that was weird. I don’t know why I called you ‘boss.’ I won’t make it weird starting now.”
Joey ignored her and went to the apartment’s single bathroom, turning on the shower to let it warm up before stepping inside. Sammy hovered in the doorway, arms still across her chest. When Joey stepped into the warm spray, Sammy followed and watched the red runoff swirl down the drain. Bits of crusted blood and offal rehydrated on Joey’s skin, coming off with little coaxing.
After the initial rinse, Joey stepped back to let Sammy get directly under the nozzle. Her runoff was less viscerally gross, but the water hitting her hair made the rotting scent coming off her three times as bad. They fought against the bile coming up in their throats, and Joey handed her a bottle of shampoo.
It took two washes for the smell to become manageable and five for it to be gone completely. As Sammy scrubbed, Joey did what she could with one hand in her own hair. If her hair had been longer, it would’ve been a nightmare. As it was, the lather coming away from her cropped hair got progressively less pink until she was pretty certain she’d gotten all of the congealed blood out.
“Did I miss anything?” she asked Sammy as she did a slow turn, taking care not to slip.
When she returned back to her original position, Sammy’s eyes were wide.
“What?” Joey contorted her body to try to see if she had an uncatalogued back injury.
“You look great. I mean, not great. Obviously you’ve been through hell and you said not to make it weird—”
“And yet here you are making it weird.”
“—so I’m not making it weird. You missed some blood.” Sammy indicated at a spot on her own neck. “But you got everything else. I definitely didn’t need to be here and I definitely made it weird so I’m going to dry off and get out of your hair.”
She gingerly made her way out of the shower as if stepping the wrong way would offend Joey.
Joey sighed quietly, letting the shower mask the sound of both relief and frustration. What happened next to Sammy wasn’t her responsibility. Childish as she came across, Sammy was a grown woman who had access to lots and lots of money. Hell, her place must be three times the size of Joey’s.
But Sammy was also the only other survivor of the most bizarre experience of her life.
She shut off the water decisively, the pipes groaning in the wall in protest.
“Sammy?”
“Yeah?”
“How are you going to order a ride? I don’t have a landline.”
A scoff. “You think I didn’t have a backup phone in the van? Come on.”
Joey patted herself down with a towel as best she could before wrapping herself in it and coming into the kitchen where Sammy was lingering by the door.
“You’re gonna go to the van like that?”
Sammy looked down at her own towel-clad body. “It’ll save the mortician time dressing me if I die on the way down.”
There was an undercurrent of fear in Sammy, had been since she’d made her presence known in the van. A different kind than she’d been exhibiting the rest of the time in the house. That had been fear of the external—this was something else. And as much as Joey didn’t have the bandwidth to help emotionally regulate this poor little rich girl, she couldn’t ignore the pulling in her chest.
“You’re not worried about dying,” Joey said. “You’re worried Abigail will make you kill someone again.”
Sammy tried unsuccessfully to look nonchalant. The towel really undermined the whole effect. “Yeah, maybe.”
As she opened her mouth to say that that probably wasn’t going to happen, Joey realized that she didn’t know for sure. Abigail had told her she didn’t have to worry about being Frank’s puppet after he bit her because she and Abigail had killed him. But with Sammy unexploded and unmarked as she was, what were the rules?
Her shoulder throbbed. The skin around the entry point felt hot and tight. She’d have to hit up her guy for some antibiotics.
“You can stay,” Joey said at last.
She led Sammy into the bedroom and tossed a pair of sweatpants and t-shirt onto the bed for her.
Sammy stood there, not moving towards the clothes.
Joey glanced at her over her shoulder as she pulled on her own clothes one-handed. “What?”
“Well now that you said I can stay I’m not so sure it’s the best idea. What if the person Abigail makes me kill is you?”
Joey’s head pounded from the memory of Sammy’s lips and chin slick with gore after she’d torn Peter’s throat out, from her own loss of blood and lack of sleep.
“I faced four vampires today and you were the easiest to kill,” she said finally. “Don’t try to crack me open and I won’t explode you again, deal?”
“You’re being very chill about this,” Sammy remarked before taking her borrowed clothes into the bathroom to change.
Joey climbed into her unmade bed. She didn’t feel chill. She felt like she was choosing the better of two shitty options. It was so unthinkable that the last time she’d been in these sheets, all of her worries had been infinitesimal in comparison to what they should’ve been. The exhaustion would probably do the trick in helping her sleep through the night, but she’d need something stronger before too long.
Returning from the bathroom, Sammy paused at the threshold, the question she didn’t want to ask written so clearly on her face that it made Joey want to sigh again. She couldn’t imagine advertising her desires so blatantly to the whole world like that.
Joey opened up the blanket, inviting Sammy inside. “Just for tonight. And nothing weird.”
Sammy crossed her heart and climbed in next to her. She was warm, much warmer than the Twilight vampires were supposed to be, but that wasn’t an indication of vampirism. Abigail had had a normal body temperature—anything higher or lower would’ve clued Joey in much sooner.
“Nothing weird,” Sammy promised, keeping her arms straight by her side like a toy soldier.
“Oh my god,” Joey muttered.
She turned on her right side, her back to Sammy, trying to make herself comfortable without aggravating her shoulder injury. The fatigue that had settled deep into her bones fought against her hyper-awareness at having another person next to her. It sometimes took weeks for her to acclimate to a new partner staying the night, her body on high alert for some unknown threat either to or from the person. The first doctor she told about it had merely shrugged and said that with such finely tuned senses she should be in the army and, like an idiot, she’d thought it wasn’t a bad idea.
“You’re like really tense,” Sammy whispered five minutes later. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Lots.”
“What have you been doing to relax since you gave up drugs?”
“Meditation.”
“Does that always work?”
Joey turned on her back with a stifled groan. “Sometimes it works better than others.”
“Okay so I’m not trying to make things weird, but I can’t sleep if you can’t sleep.”
“So go sleep on the couch.”
Sammy was quiet for a moment. “Yeah, okay. You’re right, I’ll go.”
As she went to pull the blanket back, Joey said, “What were you going to suggest?”
“What?”
“You said you weren’t trying to make things weird. That means you were going to suggest something weird.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to do that.”
“I don’t, but there’s no guarantee I’d be able to sleep with you out on the couch either. What were you going to say? That we should have sex?”
Sammy snuck a glance at Joey’s face in the darkness, then looked up at the ceiling. “I had this partner who had really bad night terrors and the only thing that would calm them down was me tickling their back. So like. We could try it. If it doesn’t work, I’ll go sleep on the couch.”
“Fine.”
With some wincing, Joey laid on her stomach, her head turned toward the wall. Sammy’s fingers brushed her back so gently that she wasn’t sure she was touching her at all at first. Just light traces up and down her shoulder blades, giving the area in the top middle of her left shoulder wide berth.
Joey breathed into it. It was almost like meditation. If she focused on the singular points of Sammy’s fingertips, she could let the rest of her body ebb away temporarily. Slowly the rigidity in her muscles loosened notch by painstaking notch. Her breathing slowed. Her blinks got longer and longer to the point that it was more work to open them than to keep them closed.
She was almost gone when she thought she could feel Sammy leaving the ghost of a kiss on her shoulder.