* * *
Sending two high and drunk teens out onto the streets of New York may not be her finest moment, but Holly doesn’t care. They’re lucky she doesn’t call their parents or, worse, the police. But she has no time for them. She grabs paper towels from the kitchen and uses them to clean off Jack’s face. His nose is swollen, but she’s pretty sure it’s not broken. She gets another paper towel, wraps ice in it, and makes him sit at the kitchen table with the ice on his nose.
She scrubs the kitchen floor, mourning every single drop of blood she cleans up. She has no idea whether it’s still potent. For a second, she considers trying to save it, but the scientist in her points out how unsterile it is, so she puts the paper towels in the sink and burns them, one at a time, so she doesn’t set off the fire alarm. She wets down the remains until they’re formless black sludge, then throws them in the trash. Only then, when she’s expended some of her energy, is she ready to face Jack without killing him.
She takes off her cleaning gloves, snapping them away from her wrists, and tosses them in the garbage. She leans against the counter, arms crossed.
“Now talk.”
“What?” Jack says, his voice muffled through the cloth. If he rolls his eyes at her, she swears to god, she’ll undo all the years she’s spent trying to keep him alive with one blow.
“Oh, I don’t know, let’s see. Let’s start with why aren’t you at school? Who punched you? Or, my personal favorite, where the hell did you get the pot?”
She sees him thinking about a way to deny all of it, can recognize the thoughts as they come and go behind his eyes. But his brain must be too muddled from the beer and the weed to lie. He shrugs his shoulders.
“Some guy. Brett knows him.”
“Really, just some guy, huh? Does he have anything to do with the bloody nose?”
He starts to shrug again, but even in his inebriated state, he can recognize the warning signs. He’s fast approaching her breaking point. “Yeah. He got here and tried to overcharge us, and then he tried to stiff us. So Brett and I took care of it.”
“You had him here? And what do you mean, you took care of it?”
“We pushed him around a little bit, that’s all. There were three of us, and he’s some skinny dude from Brett’s sister’s college. And he . . . he didn’t like it, and he tried to fight back. And he was flailing around and hit me in the nose, that’s all,” Jack says defensively. “He couldn’t have hit me on purpose if he tried. It was a total accident.”
“So what, he just left after that?” She knows Jack, and she thinks she knows Brett, that little piece of pond scum. There’s no way they’d let the dealer just walk away.
“Well, not exactly. Brett hit him a few times first while Vince held him down. But the guy was fine. He totally got off easy.”
Holly closes her eyes. She can imagine it.
“Did you bleed on him at all?”
“What?”
“When you got hit in the nose. Did you bleed on him? Or on anyone?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, I wasn’t exactly worried about it,” he says. He looks affronted that she’s not more concerned about his own injuries.
There’s nothing she can do. It’s not like she can go find this drug dealer—she can imagine how that conversation would go. Besides, Jack would have had to have dripped blood directly on a cut for there to have been any significant reaction, and even then, what are the odds a bunch of teenagers would notice? But she doesn’t like it. Not one bit.
She leaves Jack sitting in the kitchen, goes to her bedroom, and takes the plastic jar out of her drawer. She catches sight of her face in the mirror and stops. Her eyes are wide with panic and anger, her face is flushed, and her normally perfect blowout is sticking up in clumps around her head. She looks wild. She takes a deep breath, counts to ten, then ten again, before going back into the kitchen.
Jack is still where she left him. She takes the ice pack off his nose and inspects him. He’s stopped bleeding. She doesn’t know if that’s natural or the result of the infusion he got last night. Still, to be sure, she scoops out a tiny amount of the cream and rubs it all along the sides and bridge of his nose. She tries to be gentle, but even so he jerks away.
“Ow! What is that?”
“Something I’ve been working on at the lab,” she says. “It will make the swelling go down.” It won’t work as fast or as well as an injection might, but she can’t afford to use another one so soon, not until she finds Eden. She won’t think about what might happen if she doesn’t.