Page 8 of A Breath of Life
A muffled cry reached my ears at the same moment Echo jerked forward, tugging me off-balance as she tried to race toward a nearbyalley. Echo never pulled at her leash. She sometimes tested her limits when she wasn’t working, but she was usually content to wander only as far as she was permitted.
Not now. Now, she was determined.
She strained and did all she could to force me along, yipping with an urgent bark I didn’t recognize.
When I didn’t immediately respond, she turned to me and barked in my face as though calling me an idiot.
“What?” I asked like she could tell me.
Another bark, but I still didn’t understand.
Then, I heard it again, a long moan followed by a shout from somewhere in the darkness behind the apartment building we were passing. Echo whined and tried again to force me to move, going up on her front paws and yanking the leash with all her might.
My skin blistered, knowing she knew something I didn’t, knowing the types of dangers that lurked in dark alleys in the city at night.
Someone was in trouble.
I had no choice but to follow.
“Stay here,” I snapped at Tallus. A useless command. A waste of breath.
As I allowed Echo to lead me into the dark, jogging behind her when she set a fast pace, Tallus trailed on my heels, nattering questions I didn’t have answers to. “What’s going on? Where are we going? My god, these shoes are not meant for running. Slow down, D. I’m going to drop the food. What the heck is wrong with her?”
Echo barked repeatedly, announcing to whoever was ahead of us that we were coming. We rounded a corner into a narrower alley in time to see a dark figure dart away into the night. I wasn’t about to make chase, so I ground to a halt, using my strength to stop the frantic dog, but Echo whimpered and kept tugging the leash.
“Stop it, Echo. I’m going to send you back to class if you don’t relax. We aren’t running down strangers. What is wrong with you?”
Nose aimed ahead, she barked and barked, determined I should listen.
It was then that I saw a second figure halfway down the alley. A shadowy form lay unmoving on the ground under a fire escape.
“Oh shit.” Tallus noticed the person when I did and darted past Echo and me, shouting, “Oh my god. Oh my god, D. Hurry up.”
“Tallus,” I shouted, but he didn’t stop. Of course he didn’t fucking stop. Tallus could be so single-minded-focused that he would run into oncoming traffic if I wasn’t there to hold him back. “For fuck’s sake. Don’t touch anything,” I hollered, bounding after him.
Echo trotted beside me.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” Tallus ground to an abrupt halt a few feet from the man, and it was indeed a man. In fact, it was the same man we’d crossed paths with on the way to the restaurant. The one who had inquired after the time. He of the Edwardian wardrobe, accent, and theatrics.
And the gentleman had been beaten to within an inch of his life.
Tallus froze. I forced Echo’s leash into his hand and shook him until he blinked his attention away from the spectacle and met my gaze. “Call an ambulance. Do you hear me?”
He nodded, wide eyes flicking to the crumpled body and back.
Once I was certain he understood and would follow through, I dropped to my knees beside the gentleman and scanned him head to toe. His fancy clothes were torn and rumpled, but it was the pooling of blood across his stomach that drew my attention. The dark color of his vest camouflaged it at first, but the object embedded in the gentleman’s abdomen told its own story.
A knife.
I cursed, scanning for more injuries, determining if the stab wound was the worst of his problems or if there was something else of greater concern.
The gentleman was awake and alert, if not petrified. His battered face stood out in the scant light that stretched down the alley from the main street in the distance. Several deep abrasions bled. Purple bruises bloomed to life along his cheekbone and eye socket. His nose was broken, his lip was split, and part of his ear lobe was torn, but none of that worried me. It was the strangled gasps for air, the frantic opening and closing of his mouth that set off red flags.
The man couldn’t breathe.
Instead of grasping for the knife in his gut, the gentleman dragged his fingernails along his bruised neck in desperation, sucking thin whistling threads of air through his injured throat. Fear radiated from his widened eyes as he tried to translate the emergency.
His neck. He’d taken damage to his neck.
