TWELVE
IDIOT BOYS.
Having gotten Christian to the emergency room, Nolan Gregor was trying hard to be mad instead of sick to his stomach and scared out of his skull.
As a former army ranger, Nolan would have felt concern if he’d seen this much blood in the field. Panic—no. But this was Nolan’s eleven-year-old nephew with the ugly ax wound to the shoulder, which made everything different.
Yeah, he’d done his share of idiot things when he was a kid and later put his life at risk for his country. But even with a bullet wound he had never bled like this. Christian’s shirt was saturated by the time the EMT cut it off. Blood continued to flow despite the efforts to stanch it.
It took everything Nolan had to pretend nonchalance, to keep his posture confident and reassuring. A big man, he had retreated to a corner to be out of the way of the medical personnel clustered around Christian. He braced a shoulder against a wall of the emergency room cubicle. Nothing and nobody could have made him leave.
Face taut with pain, Christian kept his gaze fixed on Nolan, who was the closest thing to a father he’d ever had.
The doctor straightened, his eyes sharp above the mask. “Mr. Gregor, do you know Christian’s blood type?”
The question ramped up Nolan’s tension.
He frowned. “No. His mother is AB, but I have no idea about his father.” Or who Christian’s father was, for that matter. Nobody but Marlee knew, and she wasn’t saying.
To one of the nurses, the doctor said, “Let’s go with universal, but type him, too.”
Christian tried to rear up, restrained by the team working on him. “Am I bleeding to death?”
“No, I’m just being cautious.” The doctor laid a gloved hand on the boy’s uninjured shoulder and squeezed. “You’ve learned a good lesson. Chop yourself open, and you might end up needing a transfusion.”
A nurse was already pulling blood to check its type. Someone else was on the phone just outside the room requesting a unit of O neg.
Christian knew the rules: he used an ax only under the direct supervision of his uncle or, on occasion, a friend’s parent. Today, after overhearing Nolan grumble about the cold and whether he’d split enough wood to last until spring, Christian and his buddy Jason had decided to surprise Nolan. They got cocky and did some roughhousing. Somehow, Jason swung an ax that dug into Christian’s shoulder. Blood spurted. Jason ran screaming to the house.
Nolan wouldn’t soon forget his first sight of Christian, crumpled to his knees, his thin shoulder sliced to the bone, blood gushing. He hadn’t felt sickening terror like that since an IED had killed two men in his squad and left three others missing body parts. As he had then, he’d forced himself to calm down and done his damnedest to stop the bleeding while he waited for help.
Now, watching the doctor and nurses work on Christian, he saw that they were finally having success. The strain gradually leached from his muscles.
Sure enough, by the time the unit of O-neg blood arrived, the doc waved it off. He did decide to keep Christian for the night to recover from the blood he’d lost.
Eventually, Nolan and his nephew were left alone while overnight arrangements were being made.
“It wasn’t Jason’s fault,” Christian said in a desperate voice. “Don’t blame him.”
“Safe to say, we’ll let you share the blame,” Nolan said drily. He felt sure Jason had already caught hell from his dad.
Christian seemed reassured. His eyelids sank, but he mumbled, “We were dumb, weren’t we?”
“Yep.” Now standing right beside the bed, smoothing the boy’s dark blond hair back from his forehead, Nolan said, “We’ll talk about it once you’re in fighting form again.”
Christian made a fist with one hand and managed to raise it a few inches.
Nolan chuckled. “Oh, I’m scared.”
The small smile on the boy’s face caused relief and something sharper to squeeze his heart. Nolan didn’t have much family: his sister, Marlee, and her son. And Marlee... He loved her, but she was a constant worry and aggravation he had inherited when their parents were killed by a drunk driver. Medication gave her stretches of stability, but more and more often she refused to take it, which meant her mental illness dominated all their lives. Nolan could deal with the ups and downs, but watching her put her son through so much enraged him.
After their parents’ deaths, he’d given up his military career to take care of his sister and her kid. When he came home to Lookout to stay, he told Marlee that, from here on out, Christian would be living with him. She was welcome, as well, or they’d arrange occasional overnights. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her, but the boy he loved had to come first. He’d made sure she knew that if she didn’t agree to his conditions, including her signature on papers giving him the right to make decisions for Christian, he’d challenge her in court for guardianship. Neither had any doubt he’d win.
So they’d made an uneasy peace, with her coming and going but Christian gaining in confidence now that he had a stable home and someone he could count on.
Thank God for that agreement. Today was typical. Nobody had been able to reach Marlee. Nolan hadn’t seen her in a couple of days. She might be holed up in the apartment she maintained with disability payments, or she might have hitchhiked to Portland or somewhere else. In the grip of her schizophrenia, she tended to wander. If she could get her hands on drugs, she took them. He knew she spent weeks and months at a time living on the streets in one city or another, vulnerable to predators. It was almost inevitable that someday she would disappear for good. His parents had tried to gain guardianship so that she could be committed to an institution when she was at her worst, but they had failed. Nolan wasn’t sure he loved that idea, anyway.
When an orderly appeared to take Christian upstairs, the boy was sound asleep.
Not liking his pallor, Nolan
