The Five Dollar Mail (Book 1: The Green & Book 2: Lynch's Boys)

44: Singed

Cover art by Angela Taratuta. Character art of Saint by Hector Barros. All graphics by me.

"Alright," Lily brusquely snapped at Saint without looking at him. "I need you to go upstairs to Mr. Bender's room and find some whiskey." She leaned Wash forward on the parlor sofa and carefully pulled his coat from his shoulders. "Then we'll need this fire built back up."

She swept a hand over Wash's pinched, exhausted face, and felt the flush of fever. Oh, dear Lord, this is not the time for Bender to be spending the night in town. She listened to Saint's boots clomping clumsily up the stairs and tried very hard to put what had just happened in the kitchen out of her head. At least for now. Outrage and....something else...fluttered around in her stomach and made her hands shake. No time for that now...I'll deal with...with...him later. She heard doors opening and voices on the second floor.

Wash's voice was thready, barely a whisper. "How's things, lass?" he rasped, trying to hitch his mouth into some semblance of a smile and failing miserably.

"Just you hush, now, Mr. Washington," she mumbled, unwrapping the feedsacks from around him. Idiot. she admonished herself. He's not Mr. Washington, he's Mr. Monahan....Oh, God, I need Bender right now. I can't think straight. On top of everything else, she was frightened of being the sole person taking care of poor Mr.Wash while he was in this much pain. She felt a knot sticking in her throat as she refused to allow herself to cry. Taking Wash's hand and squeezing it, she inhaled a deep, steadying breath, feeling her head clear. Bullet wound, looks clean. Burn is neat, not festering. Looks like just a surface burn. Obviously hurts, though. She brushed wet strands of auburn hair off his brow.

Saint hurried back into the parlor with the whiskey. It was already uncorked. He helped Wash take a few bracing gulps.

"Mr. Bari," Lily said, gently feeling around the wound with her fingers. "Who treated him and how deep is this burn?"

Saint was peeling off his soaked coat, revealing a blood splattered workshirt underneath. "Francis Devereux, the stationkeeper at Church Buttes. He just cauterized the surface, he didn't go into the bullet hole with it. He pried the bullet out with a filed-down knife and then closed it with a hot poker. We...we did the best we could, Little Miss, he was really bleeding..."

Lily glanced at him, forcing her anger away. He looked utterly devastated. "No, it's alright...it doesn't look too bad...." She did an alarmed double take. "Are you bleeding?"

"No...it's his."

"Wait," Wash whispered, his blue eyes opening and his eyebrows knitting together. "Dev's real name is Francis?"

"Sssshhh...."

"Jaysus."

"Mr. Wash, now is not the time..."

Saint was fumbling inside the fireplace, rooting around beneath the ashes for some embers and slivering off some fat-wood from the kindling barrel. He pulled some larger pieces of wood from the log bin and carefully crisscrossed them over the smoking fat-wood. Fiona rushed into the room, pulling her dressing gown around herself.

"Lily," she said breathlessly, her voice catching as she saw Wash sprawled against the sofa back. "Saint told me. What do you need me to do?"

Lily breathed a sigh of relief. The addition of people in the room seemed to sort of dilute the amount of Saint in the room. "Can you bring back a jar of honey from the kitchen?"

"Wait." Saint stood up and grabbed his coat. "It's pouring outside, England, let me do it."

"We have to hide it from Storm," Fiona said, pulling on the coat as he held it. "That is why we still have some. It would take you too long to find it and dig it out."

He held the coat so she could slip into it. It swallowed her whole, making her look like she was wearing a collapsed tent.

"Holy..." he did a double take, staring in shock at her swollen eye and bruised cheek. "What the hell happened to your face, England?"

"Later." She grimaced, pulling his dripping black hat off his head and jamming it down over her own before pushing past him and hurrying out into the rain.

Lily turned to Saint, giving him a hard, appraising look. "You're hurt."

"No...I...."

"What is this?" She motioned for him to bend slightly, reached up to his left ear, and swept back the soaked, stiff clumps of hair. Black-red flakes of sticky blood came away on her fingers. Her mouth dropped open in shock. What on earth...

"Mr. Bari, do you know you're missing a piece of your earlobe?"

"Oh." His hand flew to the side of his head, colliding awkwardly with hers. "I forgot...I think a bullet grazed me."

She felt the breath leave her lungs in an involuntary gasp, and the anger she'd been nursing ever since The Kitchen Incident redirected itself. "How do you forget that a...."

"Because it was not too long after that that Wash stepped between me and a rifle shot, Little Miss!" He flinched when her fingers probed the festering edge of ragged skin near the hinge of his jaw. "I had slightly bigger problems to deal with!"

She felt her legs start to shake. It's a miracle he hadn't been shot in the head or throat. It's a miracle the shot that had hit Wash hadn't killed either of them outright. If they'd been beset upon by gunmen with only marginally more skill, he'd be dead, and probably Wash with him. She could feel her heart pounding in her ears and wondered how she would have felt if they simply had never come home. How it would be working here every day knowing they were gone.

It would be...cold. "We..." her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat. It would be cold and empty and bleak. Blood had run down and stained his collar and shoulder. He was mistaken that all of it was Wash's. "We need to get you...dried off and cleaned up. You're shivering." She forced a steadiness she did not feel into her voice. "Go get some dry clothes on, Mr. Bari, before you take sick. Then come back and let me look at your ear."

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