Mongrel [bxb] | Bad Moon Book III

chapter 27: bones

an; this is not the actual chapter I was going to post, but the next one is going tobe bigger than expected and it's taking me a while. I know you guys have been waiting WEEKS so I figured why not check in with Bailey? Sorry it's short. I'm working on the next one, I promise. I just have so much going on right now. Anyway, enjoy.

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"What is it?"

"The Celtic tree of life," Danny said, fingers pale and gripping as he drilled an image of an ever-looping tree onto the marred skin of Bailey's shoulder. His hand paled against his sun-tanned bicep as they squeezed the skin to keep him still. He wore a face marked with serrated memories of a former life—one he didn't talk about often. A scar here, a burn there, just enough pockmarks to show he'd known far more needles than the tattoo gun in his hand. "Represents harmony between the forces of nature."

"Not my thing," said Bailey.

Danny considered him with quick green eyes, then pressed the needle back in place. "No, but it'll look nice on you. Better than these scars. He's going tobe pissed when he sees it, you know."

Bailey shut his eyes and let the fire of his needle burn. "I don't give a shit."

"I do," Danny whispered, just above the buzz of the needle. "You know that."

"He won't know you did it."

Then the needle lifted from his skin. Danny nudged him up by the chin with his gloved hand. "I meant you." And like always, he pressed a kiss to the side of Bailey's head. It was easy. Discrete. Just Danny's style.

"Now stay still for me," he said, bringing the needle down again. He always said things like that—like it was more intimate than it really was. For me. Stay still for me.

But Bailey loved it when he said those things. So he did. He sat beneath the sting of the needle in their cramped bedroom quarters. The ceiling was stained with water damage, the wallpaper flayed and faded by the sun. Rico stained every inch of this place from the claw marks in the floor to the busted wood of the door frame where a lock was once the only thing keeping him out.

"Almost done," Danny said when he felt Bailey tense restlessly in his hand. "Stay still."

But the needle went deeper. It popped through his flesh and jabbed him bone-deep and Bailey jumped.

"I said stay still."

And those fingers that held him became needles themselves, piercing through his arm—in one way and out the other. And Danny's handsome face turned from faint scars and pockmarks to decay. His skin tightened around the bones of his sockets like melted wax, until he was a skull in a draped, sliding flesh sheet.

Bailey panicked, scrambled back against the bed with those ever long threads in his arm. The ground fell away from him and those needle fingers were the only things holding him up, and when they retracted from his flesh, he fell, hurdling into a dark, endless pit until his skull cracked against wet dirt. And then it was Danny who stood on the ledge of his grave, made of only naked bones and blood. And as that bone-man shoveled dirt into his grave, a cold touch wrapped Bailey's wrist. He knew it was Matt beside him—he knew because he'd seen him there in his last dream. And though he shouldn't have—though he knew he shouldn't have, Bailey turned to look at him.

He was blue and bloodless, his lips purple, his flesh ice. His eyes gazed, dead and glazed and Bailey stared back at them with tears threatening his own. Danny's corpse flung dirt from above, covering them both in cold soil, and he wished desperately that heat would come to Matt's fingers. That he'd touch his face and feel fire. But he was colder than the night and colder than the dirt. Matt was cold as death beside him.

Bailey woke with the taste of soil still in his mouth and sat up from his make-shift pillow, the graphic from Matt's sweater sticking to his cheek. Through the round attic window, headlights flashed, the persistent waah waah waah of a disturbed pickup crying into the night.

His eyes burned and he hated to entertain the idea of tears, but they were there, dampening the gray Adidas sweater. Bailey Walters hated himself and always had, but more now than ever. For killing his wolf, for taking Cowboy's money, for leaving him behind. In the moment, what he hated about himself more than anything else was this. That in ten years of physical pain and emotional deadening, that after being beaten and abandoned, manipulated, raped and forgotten, the first real tears he'd cried came while he was asleep. While he was safe and sound, hundreds of miles out of Rico's reach.

He sat up and laid his head back against the rough, raw wood of the attic wall. Bandage-wound fingers touched at his face, hot with sleep and heartache. It wasn't the dream; he was used to those. It was Cowboy. The way he'd sounded when he said goodnight. The way it felt like goodbye, and the way it should've been. Cowboy made him feel. He hated it.

Bailey shoved himself up from his frameless mattress, lying on the dusty, wooden attic floor of Billy's Burgers. It was a decent size for an attic, not much packed away but a few boxes and a single neon restaurant sign. The hardest part was fitting his tall frame through the square hole in the floor and down the rickety ladder. Nearly every time now, he knocked his head against the wood.

Since the wolf in him had died, he'd been tired, he'd been clumsy and he'd been stupid. More than anything else, he'd been weak. In every way, for every reason, weak.

Bailey dropped from the latter and met the cold laminate floor of Billy's Burgers, cracking his neck with stinging fingertips. He'd laughed when he first saw the sign out front—a cow with a burger in its hooves, greasy muck dripping from it's grinning face. Billy's Burgers, it read in glaring yellow neon lights.

If it were a better time—if things made sense, he would've snapped a photo. Would've texted it to Cowboy with the caption billy lives on, but nothing was right and nothing made sense and he'd left his phone behind, anyway.

Bailey stopped at a garbage bin and peeled the bandages from his fingers, the skin red and raw beneath. Since his wolf had died, he never healed quite the same. Sometimes not at all. He hated the way burned flesh felt—tight, shockingly sensitive.

He was human now. He was stupid and human. He burned himself on hot grills and he felt sick after too many fries. He drank soda for the first time in a decade, laughed at the way it felt. Like beer but bigger. Firecrackers on his tongue. He watched the sunset from the roof of the restaurant, for the first time not seeking yellow eyes in the night. He felt cold and he felt hot and he smelled nothing but burger fumes and cut grass in the air, and the bottle of cologne Cowboy had stuffed in his bag. To remember him by, probably. The idiot.

He wasn't supposed to roam the restaurant floor at night, but Bailey couldn't return to the heat of the attic just yet. He sat at the bar and held the restaurant phone in his hand, listening to the dial tone rumble. He'd memorized Matt's number on a whim, and now it never left him. Neither did that night, the feel of his smooth spine. The pale skin in his hands and the sounds he made against the sheets.

Bailey dropped his phone on the counter and laid his head in his arms.

He'd come back. One day, he'd come back. Until then, he was starting to like this feeling...being human. Being weak and stupid and human.

No. He loved it. He loved the terrible smells, the hot, sticky attic. The burns on his fingers that he hated so much—he loved those too. He loved this place, and he loved Cowboy. But he couldn't love both at once. So, for now, he'd love the one he couldn't hurt.

He'd come back one day. When he was a little less broken.