Page 57 of Shadow Secrets
And then, from the corner of her eye, she saw the shooter dragging himself. One leg ruined, but the other still working, using his elbow and his knee and the broken floor to crawl.
He’d taken a round to the chest—how was he still moving?
Sebastian was looking at her, not at him. His face was above hers, his hand against her cheek, and he was saying her name like the world depended on her answering. “Sutton. Sutton, look at me. Stay with me. Where are you hit?”
She tried to turn onto her back and point. Her body remained curled. Her hand felt like it belonged to someone else.
Sebastian’s gaze snapped up. The shooter had pulled a second pistol. It was in his hand. He pointed it at her—not Sebastian—from four feet away.
He wanted to finish the assignment. His face was gray and sweating. His hand shook, but the barrel steadied.
Sutton didn’t think. She squeezed her eyes shut and kicked out as hard as she could. Her steel-toed Doc Martens connected with something soft. The shooter grunted.
Another gunshot echoed in the parlor.
She screamed and threw her arms over her head. Her mind was sliding sideways, and the room had stopped being a room. It was all a series of sensations—the ringing in her ears, the smell of gunpowder, the wet heat of her shoulder, the dust on the floor against her cheek.
“Sutton.” Sebastian’s voice, closer than ever. Rough. “Open your eyes, Ink. I need you to open your eyes.”
She opened her eyes.
The shooter was dead.
He lay sprawled on his side, his face turned toward her, eyes open and empty. There was a small dark hole in the center of his forehead. The second pistol was a foot from his hand, his fingers slack around nothing. The blood was starting to pool under his head in a shape that looked, from where Sutton lay, like the outline of a continent.
Sebastian had fired. He’d gotten the shot off after her kick.
The shooter is dead. We’re alive.
Sebastian was on his knees beside her. He turned her carefully onto her back. He removed his flannel shirt, balled it, and jammed it against her shoulder.
It hurt. She made a sound. The words came out thick. “It’s just my shoulder…Lynx.”
“There’s blood on your head.”
The sentence took her a week to assemble. “Hit the edge of the…station. I’m okay.”
“You’re not okay.”
The room chose that moment to lurch sideways—everything in her visual field rotating about thirty degrees counterclockwise before snapping back. Her stomach turned over. Bile rose at the back of her throat again. She swallowed it down because throwing up would require coordination she did not currently possess.
“Okay,” she conceded. “Maybe not…okay. But it’s just a nick. I can feel it. It’s not…it didn’t…”
“I’m the one who gets to make that assessment.”
“You’re not…a doctor.”
“I’m a trained field medic, and you are going to lie very still and let me work.”
His phone appeared in his bloody hand. He hit a few buttons and then said, “Woman down with a gunshot wound.” He rattled off the address, hung up.
“Sutton, tell me your name. The date. What you had for breakfast.”
She blinked. Blinked again, trying to engage her brain. “Sutton Crenshaw. October—twenty-something. Pancakes.”
“Pancakes?”
“I made you pancakes.”
