I kiss him again, but it’s slow and tentative, almost unsure. I don’t want to hurt him. And holy fuck, is he hurting right now. Cal is the one that cups the back of my head and brings some heat to the connection between our lips, tasting me and savoring whatever it is that he finds there. I want him to dance for me again, to show me with his body what he sometimes struggles to say with words. Love me for every dark, ugly, hideous thing that I am.

“We should get those stitches in,” I murmur absently, letting him take over holding the bag. It’s a little weird, to see a man holding a bag of saline that’s connected to his arm, but it works. I’ve seen Pamela, in her part-time work at the nursing home, set up plenty of IVs. And let’s be honest: anything that bitch can do, I can do. Ten times better at that.

“I’d rather feel the warmth of your body pressed against me,” Cal murmurs, nuzzling the side of my face like an animal seeking out the comfort of his mate. “You ground me, Bernadette. Mason was right: I am still human. But only because of you.”

“Who’s Mason?” I ask, but Cal just keeps on smiling.

“Stitches, let’s get them over with,” he whispers, his voice as hoarse and dark as it’s ever been. Whoever Mason is, I imagine he’s the one that put Callum in this state. And Cal, he isn’t used to coming up against anyone that’s at his level.

I scoot back and open the kit. I’ve never actually put a stitch in human flesh before, but I took home ec during freshman year. That counts, right? Besides, I saw Victor do it to me, that day Billie stabbed me in the bathroom, that very same bathroom where I ducked to hide from the shooter only yesterday. Poor Stacey. Poor fucking Stacey.

“Should I go get Aaron’s laptop so we can Google this?” I ask, already missing the ease of having my phone around. But Cal’s already shaking his head.

“No,” he says, leaning back into Oscar’s pillows. I wonder if ‘O’ will mind. I also wonder if ‘O’ will ever let me call him that. It’s a cute nickname, but if he wants to save it for his Cal bromance that’s fine by me. “I’ll guide you.” He nods his chin at the kit, a calm and peaceful expression settling over his features. When he first got here, he actually looked like he might kill someone—even Vic. This is better, this strange expression of contentment. “Needle driver,” he begins, pointing at one item in the kit. “Tissue forceps. Scissors, obviously. Needle and thread. We’re going to do an interrupted suture which means you’ll cut and tie off each stitch as we go.”

After cleaning his arm off with another antiseptic wipe, I do as he tells me, using the needle driver to hold the tiny, curved needle and threading it through his skin, just above the fat that I can see inside the wound. We start with the gunshot wound on his arm, this clean hole that goes straight through him. It looks too neat, too pretty to actually be real.

“I want you to go to the hospital. It isn’t like the VGTF doesn’t know about the shooting. Sara Young was looking for you.” My words come out quiet and low, almost absent-minded. In reality, all of my attention and focus is on this needle, this thread, these scissors. I make a stitch, tie it off. Make another stitch, tie that off, too.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” he promises me, azure eyes like bright gems in a pale face. “Tonight, I’m staying with you.” I look up to find him watching me and not the needle. He’s more interested in my expression, in the way my hair falls forward like a red and blond shield when I lean down to continue the stitches. Once we’re finished, I start on the exit wound. I have no idea if this is proper medicine or not—very likely it isn’t—but we’re rachet as hell here in Prescott. We do our own thing.

“Callum, I was pregnant,” I say, before I lose my nerve. There’s a long pause in his breathing that freaks me out, so I move my eyes from his wound to his face, only to find him with his eyes closed. Panic sweeps over me in a wave and a scream gets caught in my throat. My worst fear in the world would be to lose one of my boys. But then he blinks a few times and exhales.

“Oh, Bernie,” he tells me, face breaking. There’s sympathy there, but behind that emotion, there’s nothing but the endless black of rage. It startles me enough that the needle slips and Cal sucks in another sharp breath. He isn’t dying, Bernie. He’s in pain. Each time the needle goes into his flesh, he stops breathing until I’m pulling the thread through. It must hurt like a bitch. At the hospital, they always numb the spot first. We’re just running on a wing and a prayer here.

It occurs to me that I should get him some fucking booze. Or weed. Or both.

“When you were beaten on the lawn,” Cal says next, surprising me. He saw that? I keep my attention on the stitches, trying to give him time to process what I’m saying. “They beat you into miscarrying.” It isn’t a question. I told you: Callum understands me in a way that nobody else does.

Each boy holds a different spark, like a different color in a single rainbow. It just isn’t complete without all those shades, now is it?

“I’m not upset,” I say, which probably isn’t true. I am upset. But in a way that’s hard to explain. There’s relief there, too, which I feel guilty about even though I know I shouldn’t. I think, if this had happened any other way, I’d be alright. It’s just the idea that unsolicited violence is what got me to this point.

My cramps squeeze again, and I choke on my next breath as pain washes over me.

“You’re in pain,” Cal observes, but that’s a funny thing for someone with a GSW, a stab wound, and a slit throat to say. “You don’t have to want a baby to be upset, you know. You can just be upset, even if it’s for no reason at all.”

“Don’t lecture me,” I warn him, finishing the final stitch on the exit wound. Next, I spread apart the fabric at his shoulder and grimace at the torn, ragged edges of flesh. He really needs to see a fucking doctor. But I can also understand that the endless chasm of rage that I see in him, it needs to be soothed, too. And he can only do that if he feels safe, if he’s with me. “If anything, I should be the one telling you that.”

I take a brief moment to touch my fingers to his throat, and he shudders, snatching my wrist so hard that I actually cry out from the shock of it. But there’s no pain, not the way he holds me. Instead, his face is sad, distant, a reflection of the involuntarily reaction to having his neck touched.

He almost didn’t have to live this life. He almost got the fuck out of here.

The thing is, you don’t always have to run to make things better. You can fight. You can inflict change on a world that rallies against it as if it’s the fucking plague. That’s what we’re going to do here, take this city under our dark wings and give it the underground it deserves, one that allows the normal people who dwell in the sun and live on the surface a chance to live a normal life.

People like Heather, like Kara, like Ashley. People like that girl, Alyssa, that we rescued from the beach house. People like Ms. Keating. Even people like Sara Young.

Because no matter what, the world will have an underground, an unsavory fragment of darkness that casts shadows across anything that dares to play in the sun. If we can control it, if we can redirect that darkness, funnel it, punish it, leash it, then we can change things for Prescott. For the city. Maybe even more than that.