Bound in Shadows
The rain had started an hour before, the kind that didn't fall so much as hang in the air, turning every streetlamp into a smear of amber and every breath into a taste of copper and wet concrete. I should have taken the long way home. I knew that even as I turned into the alley behind Sixth, my sneakers already soaked through, my keys clutched so tight in my fist that the teeth bit into my palm. Twenty minutes shaved off my walk. Twenty minutes I would have given anything to get back.
The alley smelled wrong before I saw anything. Copper, yes, rain-copper, but under it something thicker, warmer, a smell that made the back of my throat close before my mind caught up to why. I stopped walking. My body did it before I told it to, some ancient wiring kicking in, the same instinct that makes a rabbit freeze mid-field when a hawk's shadow crosses the grass.
Two shapes crouched near the dumpsters, folded over a third shape that wasn't moving. At first, stupidly, my brain tried to make it into something ordinary — two men helping someone who'd had too much to drink, maybe, someone who'd fallen and hit his head. That story lasted about two seconds. Long enough for one of them to lift his…