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Xhex shook her head. “No, I was escorted out of there. Remember?”
He opened his mouth to answer with something flippant, something appropriately distancing and arrogant. But as the moonlight filtered down through the pine boughs, he saw not the illumination for what it was. Rather, he saw fragments of that old woman, as if her shimmering essence had been split apart, yet not diminished.
Shifting his eyes back to his sister, he felt as though he were standing at the lip of a great fall, one that he had been teetering on for quite some time. For… over twenty years.
“What,” Xhex snapped.
When he could not speak, she threw her hands up and pivoted away from him. “I’m done with your games—”
“I have never forgotten.”
His sister slowly twisted back around. “What did you say.”
He cleared his throat. And yet his voice was no stronger as he repeated, “I have never… forgotten why or how you left the Colony.”
THIRTY-FOUR
EVERY TIME Iget out… they keep pulling me back in.
As Gus ran for the patient room he’d recently been treated in, Al Pacino’s voice banged around his head, but one of the better scenes in the worstGodfathermovie was promptly forgotten as he shoved open the door and flipped into doctor mode.
The patient on the bed was not a surprise.
The options for treatment were going to suck.
And given the amount of blood on the front of that gray sweatshirt, there was a whole lot of nothing good going on.
“What happened,” he asked Lydia as he pushed one of the staff out of the way.
Even with the three or four medical types circling the bed, removing Daniel’s clothes, hooking up leads, the woman was right by her man, and going nowhere. She was clearly scared to shit, her face frozen in terror, her hands shaking as she kept pushing her hair back over her shoulder. Butsomeone was going to have to forcibly remove her if they wanted to reach that left side.
Which, at the moment, they didn’t need to.
“He started coughing,” she said, “and he couldn’t stop—and then he just lost consciousness. I called down here and they came with a stretcher and…”
As she trailed off, he glanced at the monitor. Oh…great. Oxygen stats were in the cellar. Blood pressure was way too low. Heart rate was in the high 180s, trying to compensate for both.
“I need oxygen, stat, and let’s get some blood.” Maybe Daniel had an infection somewhere and was going septic? Except the downturn had been a little fast for that. “When he’s stable, I want to do some imaging—and could someone gimme their stethoscope.”
That last command was followed fast, and as soon as he’d plugged his ears, he took a listen—
“What is it.” Lydia leaned in. “What are you—why do you look like that?”
Well, because the poor bastard’s lungs were full on one side. Not that he was going to talk about that until he had a plan—
The door to the room opened wide, and yup, there she was: C.P. Phalen, still in her tough-guy armor. And as she stepped inside, he fought back his emotions.
Not now, I do not need the distraction—
But instead of interrupting or causing a furtherdisturbance—or even looking his way—the woman stayed quiet and just went to stand by Lydia. And as she put her hand on the shoulder of Daniel’s better half, Gus shook his head and wished like hell that Phalen wouldn’t keep surprising him. The calm compassion was going to be a help.
“What’s happening?” Lydia demanded. “Is he going to—what can we do?”
A mask with positive flow oxygen was strapped on Daniel’s face, and Gus stayed still as he looked at the monitor. “Come on,” he murmured. “Let’s see some better numbers.”
As he waited, he could feel the presence of everybody else in the room—where they were standing, how they were moving, whether they were talking, if they were silent—but all that was a distilled awareness. Daniel was his sole focus, everything else fading away into a buffer zone that he could call on if he needed, but that, if it wasn’t immediately relevant to the survival of the patient on the bed, he could completely disregard.
Fuck. The numbers were not improving. Oxygen stats remained in the low 80s, and heart rate continued to spin out.
