The boom was built of scaffolding-like bars that crossed and crisscrossed the heavy outer beams that were the corner supports of the boom. Everything was size huge. There was a catwalk along the left edge of boom that ran all the way to the top. It would have been easy to use if the boom had been flat. As it was, I was forced to scale the thing, clinging to the top rail like Batman in the old sixties TV series.
I don’t have a problem with heights, generally speaking. But, I decided, clinging to my perch and fighting an attack of vertigo, when cars started to look like they belonged in a Matchbox set, that was too freaking high. No more looking down.
Jaw clenched and sweating, as soon as the dizziness subsided, I climbed and climbed some more. My shoulders and arms ached, but my hands took the worst of it. I wished I’d brought a pair of driving gloves. My palms grew blisters that burst. My fingers were sore from grabbing the rail.
“What do you think you’re doing?” said a man’s voice. He sounded pretty close, and it startled me.
I froze, then wrapped myself around the bar I was climbing on before I looked up. Just a car length from me, Sherwood sat on the last, highest rung of the boom, his leg and prosthetic both dangling off the side. He wasn’t holding on.
Reflexively, I looked down before I remembered how bad an idea it was. I put my forehead against the cool metal and swallowed until I knew I wasn’t going to throw up. I looked up at him again.
His words had been pretty aggressive, especially for a wolf addressing his Alpha’s mate, but the tone was soft and relaxed. I answered the tone, not the words.
“I’m climbing up after you,” I told him.
He turned around—balanced on his rump until he could get all the way around—so he could see me easily. I was going to take a wild guess that the height didn’t bother him at all.
Bastard.
“That’s dumb,” he said. “Where’s one of the werewolves? If they fall, they might be able to catch themselves. What’s Adam thinking to send you up here?”
I growled at him. “Adam is otherwise occupied. Next time you decide to kill yourself, wait until he’s home and can climb up here himself. If I have to do this again, I might just push you off myself.” It probably wasn’t what I should have said to someone sitting five hundred feet—more or less—in the air, but my hands hurt, and I had made it up here by concentrating on how mad I was at the stupid werewolf who made me do it. Also, I have a problem with suicide, and have ever since my foster father had left me alone at fourteen because he couldn’t bear to live without his wife. I couldn’t take my anger out at him, so I let Sherwood be the scapegoat.
He laughed.
“And yes, I agree with you,” I said. “Climbing up here is very, very dumb. I know why I did it. Why did you?”
He sighed and spun around again, making me cling more tightly to my bar. “I’m a useless freak,” he said, gesturing at his leg. “It’s hard to kill a werewolf, but I’m pretty sure that drop would do it.”
Me, too. But that wasn’t a productive thing to say, so I found something else. “Marley was going to fire you for climbing up here until the other Lampson guy told him who you were. Apparently you are too useful to them to fire.”
He snorted, and I had a thought. He’d been working here since the third day he’d come to the Tri-Cities.
“Just how many times have you climbed up here without getting caught?” I asked.
“All of them but one,” he said.
“You came here to get out from under Bran’s eye so you could kill yourself,” I said.
He didn’t say anything, which was a “yes” in my book.
I thought of the kind of courage it would take to climb all the way up here to kill yourself, decide not to, and climb all the way down nearly every day for the better part of the month. And the question that occurred to me then wasn’t “why?” but “why not?”
“What stopped you?” I asked his back.
He raised his head and looked up, gesturing to the night sky with one hand, waving with what I considered to be reckless abandon. “Look at that. Do you see the lights? And the sky? Beautiful. Up here? It feels like the huge tightness in my spine that contains all those things I’ve forgotten loosens up a little.” He tapped his forehead. “I can feel those things, curled up inside me, waiting like the sword of Damocles. And I think, maybe I should wait and see if I can find myself. Then I’ll have a better idea of what I have to lose.”
I made sure my grip was tight, then I looked—out, not down. And he was right. It was beautiful.
And the wind decided right then to blow hard enough to send a buzz through the rail I was holding on to. I felt the vibrations of it under my fingers and had to reassure myself that this crane had been sitting here for at least a couple of years and hadn’t fallen down yet. It was certainly designed to hold up more than the three or four hundred pounds that Sherwood and I represented between us. Surely.
And still, the metal vibrated.
“I see your point,” I said tightly. “But I think your hiding place has been found out. You think maybe we could talk with our feet on the ground? Fair warning, if I fall and break every bone in my body, Adam will never forgive you.”
He laughed again. “Okay,” he said. “Do you need any help getting down?”
About halfway to the ground, I stopped to rest. He was below me. When I’d told him I’d get down the same way I got up, he’d scrambled around me to get underneath where he could catch me if I fell. He hadn’t said it, but he hadn’t had to.