Ride and Die (Ridgemore #1)

3 Stealth Ninja

3

Stealth Ninja

A s the sirens shrieked louder, drawing close, I urgently wrapped my fingers around Brady’s wrist, not even breathing as I waited for a pulse. Yes, Zoe had already checked. But none of us had.

“Well?” Layla prodded when not even three seconds had passed, her breath hot on my neck as she crowded me.

I didn’t answer, my attention lasered on my hand and Brady’s, searching for even the slightest thump that would indicate he hadn’t left us after all.

“Anything?” Hunt asked, again too soon, and he was the most patient of us.

“Not yet,” I muttered, willing Brady’s heart to beat no matter how dead he looked, sprawled across a column that had done its best to break him in half.

But sirens consumed the night, and still … no heartbeat.

I shook my head, clamping down on my disappointment. “Nothing.” I let my hand slide away, placing Brady’s gently back against the cement as if being gentle with him now would change a damn thing.

Brady’s entire hand spasmed before it settled back into that eerie stillness that had my nerves in knots.

For a few breaths, we did nothing more than stare. Then we rushed into action, Hunt and Griffin pacing the small diameter of the column like caged jungle cats.

“He’s alive,” Layla said. “He’s gotta be.”

“But he has no pulse,” I reminded her gently. “It must be delayed nervous system activity.”

Layla’s gaze was trained on her brother as she addressed me. “Are you sure?”

“That he has no pulse? Yeah. Or, I mean, as much as I can be without a stethoscope. And obviously I don’t know shit about medicine, so I have no idea about the nervous system thing, but it sounds right.”

“We’ve gotta get him down from there,” Griffin said.

Hunt was already dragging a spent keg toward the pillar. When Griffin noticed, he jogged over to grab a second discarded keg and lined it up on the other side of the pylon.

“Wait,” I said even as the guys were climbing onto the kegs and eyeing Brady’s body, trying to figure out the best way to free him. “You guys, you can’t just un-impale him.”

“Why not?” Layla asked. “Okay, he’s got no pulse, but he’s twitching, Joss. He’s actually moving .”

I stared at my friend, another reminder fresh on my tongue that if her brother’s heart wasn’t beating, he couldn’t be alive. But the devastation welling in her eyes made me swallow it. Finally, I nodded.

“Okay, but then we’ve gotta think about what’s gonna happen when he comes off that rebar. It might be the only thing keeping him from bleeding out.”

It was, of course, an absurd consideration. His heart wasn’t pumping blood throughout his body, hence no bleeding out. But I’d watched enough TV to know you didn’t remove the nasty foreign object blocking a severed artery. That was Hollywood Medicine 101.

“And what about his back?”

“What about it?” Layla asked.

“Well, look at him. Does that angle seem normal to you? He’s bent the wrong way.”

“Not really. He’s flexible. He’s no more bent up than if he were doing a wheel pose or one of those moves that makes him think he’s a fucking ninja.” She snorted, and I couldn’t help but crack a smile despite the dire nature of our predicament. Brady loved saying he was a stealth ninja, though his pretending had grown less absurd over the years as he honed his fighting skills into something respectable.

“Okay. Fair enough. But he’s gotta be hurt from that impact. We could do more damage moving him. Plus, the rebar and the bleeding out bit.”

Layla, Hunt, and Griffin just studied Brady, foreheads scrunched in lines of anguish, obviously desperate to do something—anything—to help our friend.

I added, “The EMTs are almost here, and we could mess things up by trying to help. If he weren’t stuck up there, we could do CPR, try to jumpstart him.”

But that rebar was shoved straight through his chest. There was no way to do chest compressions. No way to do anything helpful, really.

“So, what? We just wait?” Griffin asked in a rough grumble. He made decisions quickly and moved on them even faster.

My shoulders softened with a sigh. “Yeah, Griff, I think so. If there’s any chance of him coming back from this, then moving him could make things worse. Harder for him to recover.” Though when I examined the unyielding steel skewering Brady’s body, our conversation took on even more of a ridiculous edge. I ignored it, as desperate as the rest of them to get our miracle.

“Fine, then,” Griffin grunted on a frown, already jumping down from the keg. “I’m gonna be waiting for the EMTs to rush them back here.”

“Good idea,” I said, not that Griffin would wait for my approval to do what he set his mind to. “And one of us needs to call his parents.”

Hunt and Layla looked at me, Griffin already sweeping through the house to meet the emergency responders.

Layla’s eyes brimmed with tears, and she wasn’t one to cry either. “I just … I just can’t, Joss. Please.”

Swallowing my usual groan of complaint, I was already tugging my phone out of the pocket of the denim miniskirt I was wearing. I knew Celia and Porter Rafferty nearly as well as my own parents. But who wanted to be the one to call a mother and father to tell them their kid was dead?

Probably dead.

Almost certainly .

I exchanged a look with Hunt, confirming that he had Layla and wouldn’t let anyone touch Brady who shouldn’t. Then I hit the dial button and put distance between me and them. Layla didn’t need to hear this.