Inked

did this.”
    I shook my head. “Not safe for you.”
    His lips brushed my ear. “Justice, Maxine.”
    I tore my gaze from the blood spreading through Winifred’s clothing and gave him a sharp look. Found nothing in his eyes but that old grim determination; and deeper yet, anger.
    I stood, and his hands replaced mine, pressing down on the wound. My fingers snapped at Raw, who was peering at us from around the ruined remains of the door.
    “Protect them,” I snarled.
    And then I was gone, kicking out the remains of the glass to run into the street, searching for a shooter.
    It was a cool Sunday night in New York City, and while this particular street was quiet, I heard the growling hum of cars and people rumbling through the night. No screams, though. No fingers pointing. Just me, and windows across the street, a mixture of light and dark. I stared, searching for movement, anyone watching—but found nothing except for a handful of people strolling across the intersection toward me. No sign that any of them knew what had just happened. I heard their careless laughter.
    I began walking in the opposite direction. Zee flitted through the shadows, appearing briefly in nooks between brownstone stairs and garbage cans; leaping from the branches of slender shade trees and then reappearing moments later in the darkness beneath parked cars. I kept waiting for him to say something, but all he did was give me brief, uneasy glances that made my stomach hurt.
    “What,” I finally asked,” did you find?”
    “Nothing,” he rasped. “Gone.”
    “You can find the shooter. Don’t play dumb.”
    Zee fell backward into the shadows. I kept walking, scanning the street. Trying to let my instincts do what my demons would not. But ten minutes later, I had no answers. Nothing. Nothing, anywhere. Winifred’s attacker had escaped. I had known it the moment I stepped free of her apartment building.
    Zee peered at me from beneath another parked car. I gave him a long hard look. He ducked his head, fading away. But not far. Close as my own skin, if anyone threatened me. The boys felt those things. My life was sacred. They would have known a gunman was close. They had known. But the threat had not been for me, or Grant—who they protected almost as carefully. And so they had let the bullet go.
    But that failed to explain why they did not want the killer found.
    Winifred was being loaded into an ambulance when I returned to the apartment building. A crowd had finally gathered. I was trying to push through them when my cell phone rang.
    “Stay where you are,” Grant said, as soon as I answered. I found him by the ambulance, staring at me.
    I stayed. I lingered, watching like everyone else. Grant was helped into the ambulance with Winifred, and when they left, I walked away, rounded the corner, and headed toward Central Park. Headlights dashed through my vision, warm fetid scents blowing over me, briefly. It was easy to get lost, to feel lost, to lose my thoughts to bullets and demons, and question what the hell I was good for if I could not protect one old woman.
    I’d been having that conversation a lot with myself over the past several months. People always seemed to get hurt around me. It was why I had been raised to be a nomad, to never linger in one spot for long; to avoid making ties, roots, relationships that mattered.
    I was such a bad daughter.
    I walked for a good twenty minutes until my phone rang again.
    “We’re at St. Luke’s. Tenth and Fifty-ninth,” Grant murmured, and in the background I heard voices chattering, shouts, metallic clangs. “Police coming to question me. Winifred’s in surgery.”
    And then he hung up again.
    I flagged down a cab and headed for the hospital. Took me another twenty minutes to reach the ER entrance, but I did not go inside. I circled the hospital until I found a small stone wall to sit on, and perched there in the shadows, watching cars and people. A homeless man slept on a slab of cardboard some ten feet away, and beyond him a young woman crouched with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Gatorade in the other. She was humming to herself. No one paid attention to me. I sent a text to Grant’s phone. Five minutes later, I received a reply.

    STAY AWAY. GOT IT COVERED.

    Which was the best I could hope for, though it bothered me that I was not in there with him. Where there was one bullet, there would be another. The killer would want to make sure the deed had been done.