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When North had finished, he was still alive, which meant it was, at best, a slow-acting poison. Shaw rolled him onto his stomach, and then came the sound of a tin being opened, and a moment later, Shaw’s hands were pressing against North’s shoulders, rubbing. Well, rubbing sounded pleasant. Digging in. Biting. When, North wanted to know, had Shaw’s fingers gotten so strong? There was something on Shaw’s hands, something that made his touch glide over North’s bare skin, and the smell of eucalyptus and cumin and clove drifted up to North.
“I’m going to die smelling like a spice rack fell on me,” he mumbled.
“It’s a healing salve,” Shaw whispered. “And it’ll only take away ten percent of your virility.”
North had something to say about that, but the tea, strangely, had settled his stomach, and the pressure of Shaw’s fingers had changed into something almost pleasant, and the smell of the salve—
When he woke, the light had shifted, and he realized, with something like wonder, that he wasn’t going to die. His headache had dwindled to a tiny pulse. His skin no longer felt like it was about to split. His stomach, by some miracle, was back to normal. The motel room was quiet, and when North cracked an eye, he saw that Shaw had left.
For a while, he lay there, enjoying the rare luxury of waking slowly, of riding the cusp of sleep and waking, his body loose and relaxed. His mind wandered, playing back fragments of the last few days. At first, it was the chaos of it all, as some part of him still tried to integrate what had happened into something cohesive: the shock of learning of the murders at the prison; the sniper at the hot springs; the cold-blooded killing of Welch at the self-storage facility; the man in black, and the attack at the old bait shop. He drifted through snippets of the arguments with Theo and Auggie and Jem and Tean and Emery and John-Henry, all the ugly little squabbles from the last few days, everything escalating until John-Henry had fired North and Shaw.
And then he found himself thinking about the day before. Not just Emery showing up unannounced, and the extreme awkwardness (in true Emery fashion) of the offer of friendship. Not even the night at the Pretty Pretty—getting slaughtered at quarters by Theo, or watching Shaw and Emery laughing helplessly as they did their barstool race, or Auggie and Jem’s dance-off. It wasn’t even what came after, those fragmented hours at the high school, when they’d all been kids again. It was…what? North wasn’t sure he had a name for it. He’d had friends before. He’d never had a brother, much less six of them, whose asses he wanted to kick pretty much every day.
A memory swam up at him from the previous night, and North cringed: his arm around Auggie’s neck, with the kind of close, drunken talking that had seemed perfectly appropriate at the time. Telling each other they were going to get tattoos. We should get tattoos because we’re brothers. They’d been talking about being Sigma Sigma brothers, but in a way, North thought, all of those guys—
It was like something snapping into place, and he sat up so fast that his head spun.
The tattoo.
Outside, a key rattled, and the door opened. Shaw stepped inside with a takeout bag, and he smiled and hoisted it, the smell of seared meat and grilled onions filling the room. “I thought burgers—”
“Adam Ezell,” North said. “Did he have a tattoo?”
“What?”
“Did he have a tattoo? Did you see a tattoo?”
“North, are you feeling all right? I didn’t exactly follow Master Hermes’s recipe for that tea—”
“I know we only saw him for a few minutes, but I swear to God he had a tattoo on his arm. Do you think John-Henry would let us look at the body? Christ, where is the body? Did they leave it—God, what county were we in?”
“North—”
“I’m fine, Shaw. You boiled your old stockings in grass water, and I’m healed. Magic. This is important: I need you to look up the name of the county where we found Adam, and I’m going to call John-Henry—”
“Or we could ask somebody who knew Adam,” Shaw said. “One of the other deputies.”
North stumbled out of bed, kissed Shaw on the forehead, and said, “You’re a genius.”
“If you’re fully recovered due to my magic, would you mind giving me an idea of the state of your, um, virility? Because I’m appreciating the view, and also, last night, there was something about that time you tackled Jem—”
Grabbing his phone, North searched for the number of the sheriff’s station.
“—like, I know it was probably a trick of the light, but I could have sworn you had his head between your thighs—”
“That never happened,” North said as he placed the call.
“Right, of course, but you understand how it might have prompted certain needs, um, that might not have been addressed—”
When a woman answered, North said into the phone, “Yes, I need to talk to Deputy Weiss.”
Shaw was looking at him pitifully.
Taking the bag from him, North swatted him on the ass and said, “Rub one out in the bathroom, baby. Good job with the burgers.”
“But I—”
The call clicked, and Weiss’s voice came on the line. “This is Deputy Weiss.”
