off the counter and use the knife to slice it in half.
“What do you mean?” I try to act nonchalant like I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about.
“Where’d Delilah go?” he asks.
“Who?”
He rushes at me and grabs the hand holding the knife before slamming it onto the cutting board. It knocks my knuckles into the hard wood and makes me drop the knife. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Did you scare her off?”
“No.”
“This… bullshit is getting out of hand, Killian. I don’t know if you think you need to protect your mother or what, but I’m getting sick of this. I can do as I want, and you would do best to remember that.”
“I will.”
He notices her phone and picks it up. I watch him as he lifts it to his face and breathes it in like he’s pulling a smell off it. “I’d better return her phone, hadn’t I?”
I turn away and walk over to the sink before sticking my hands under the water. As the water shifts from cold to hot, I keep scrubbing them. Even as my fingers turn red from the scalding heat, I scrub and scrub and scrub.
But I know it’ll never wash it away.
Eleven
After a full day of lazing around the hospital, Shepherd decides it’s time for us to move on. We wait until dark, when the hospital is nearly dead, before leaving.
“Tony and your father will probably have people watching the house, so we’ll need to be careful,” Shepherd says as I follow after him.
“You’re like a motherfucking ninja, I’m not concerned.”
He glances at me as we casually walk out the front door with his dog of destruction. “Well, thank you. I didn’t realize how much you’d been watching me. Do you have a crush?”
I want to laugh but I realize with horror that my face is heating up a little. “On you? No. I think I’m already taken.”
“Oh, you mean when the dog was licking your face.”
“It was fucking trying to eat me!”
“You were squealing like a little pig!”
I glare at him. “Does it have a name?”
“It has a gender, so you don’t have to call him an it,” Shepherd says.
“But does it have a name?”
“It.”
He heads off, clearly knowing where he’s going without any help from me. Why does he know the quickest way to my house? “Alright. I’ll stop calling it an it. Give me a name then.”
“He kind of looks like a sweet little teddy bear,” he says.
“Of death. Did he not have a name before?”
“Yeah, Tony called him Killer.”
“A little macabre for my taste. You’re trying to get me to like the dog, which…” I stare at his eyes and fangs and shudder. “How about something a little… better?”
Shepherd looks at me with narrowed eyes. “You don’t like him? What kind of heathen doesn’t like him?”
I stare at him in disbelief and look back at the monster. “It’s alright.”
“You don’t like dogs?”
“I’ve only been around dogs a few times ever since one tried to eat me. It literally looked me in the eyes and went ‘That right there would be a great snack’ and bit my arm.”
“I’m sure you were annoying it.”
“I was five.”
“Exactly. Think of how annoying you are now, so imagine how annoying you were back then!”
My expression has to be showing him what I think of that. “Me? You’re the annoying one!”
Shepherd dodges across the street and I have to run to catch up. “Be careful. I literally just shot the man who cared for me for many years. I have no qualms about who I’ll shoot and why.”
“If you hadn’t saved my life, I would call you a monster.”
“Now I’m your guardian angel. It’s okay. You can call me Saint Shepherd, the light of your life, the guardian of your soul.”
I cringe. “This just got weird as hell.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That makes two of us,” I say. “Are we going to walk all the way there?”
“Yeah, it’s only about three miles.”
“Well, you didn’t nearly bleed out like I did.”
“I missed that… when did that happen?” Shepherd asks.
“Name the damn dog.”
“Floof.”
I look down at the monster who looks like he’s smiling as he walks. I’m positive he’s doing it to show off his fangs. “I’m not calling your demon dog Floof.”
Shepherd shakes his head. “I just… don’t get you sometimes. You’re never happy. Does that make you sad?”
“A bit, yeah. Especially when I’m forced to call your demon Floof.”