Charlie huffed, then plopped into the chair at my bedside. “Okay.”
He wasn’t going to give up, but he’d let me win. For now.
“What about you?” Charlie asked, directing his attention to Oberi. “You have a phoenix form now. Don’t you have other healing powers you can access?”
I would love to, but unfortunately, I’ve done all I can here,Oberi replied snidely.Do you honestly think I’d let Ava be in pain if there was something my magic could do about it?
“Yes,” Charlie replied bluntly, and Oberi lifted his upper lip to growl.
What had transpired between them when I’d been gone? They both seemed bitter.
“Anyway,” I persisted, wanting to break the tension between them. “I still want that shower.”
“Let me ask the doctor.” Charlie walked out. It was about fifteen minutes before he came back, followed by a nurse.
“The doctor says it’ll be fine. The stitches will hold up in the water,” Charlie said.
“Let’s get you out of bed,” the nurse offered.
Finally.I was tired of lying around. Charlie turned the water on in the attached bathroom. As he was doing so, the nurse used some sort of machine to pick me up out of the bed and set me onto a wheelchair. She pushed me into the bathroom, beside the stream of water that was coming from the shower head, and went to remove my hospital gown.
I cringed as she started undoing the ties, and Charlie sensed it. He stepped forward to say, “I’ll do it.”
There was a mirror in here, one of those fake, plastic ones with a phony surface that spanned the length of the wall. Still, it showed everything. My cheekbones were elevated on my gaunt face, and two swollen black eyes peered back at me. I’d dropped a scary amount of weight from being in a coma for so long, so much that the bones were poking through the skin.
Shit, no wonder everyone thought I was going to die. I really did look like a corpse.
As the gown fell away, I held in a sharp breath. My skin had blossomed with a variety of bruises. The tone had practically turned purple.
If I shut off my half of our bond completely it would alert Charlie I was upset, so I slowly closed the connection, bit by bit so he wouldn’t notice. Charlie couldn’t see the damage, and I wanted to conceal as much of it from him as I possibly could.
I hadn’t come out of the Underground the same. Part of me had never left there at all.
More carnage caught my attention. A large bandage was wrapped around my middle, and it was matted with dried blood.
That had to come off if I was getting clean. The cloth had stuck to the wound and was painful to pull away. I hunched my shoulders as the nurse tried to peel the bandage off.
“I think it’s best if you help,” the nurse stated to Charlie. She clearly picked up that I didn’t want her near me. Tears dotted my eyelids as Charlie unraveled the bandage, though he apologized profusely.
As the wrappings fell away, my insides withered inward with a simple look at my reflection. Worse than all of it was the scar. From the top of my left shoulder all the way down to my right hip bone was a raised, knotted line, threaded with black stitches and fiery red.
My eyes began to water. I’d had theperfectbody before, and I’d gone and ruined it. I couldn’t let anyone see me like this. They’d get scared and run away, afraid of the Frankenstein monster.
“Is something wrong?” Charlie asked, voice full of concern.
I cleared my throat and said, “Nothing. Is the water warm?”
“Yeah. It’s nice.”
We heard shouting coming from the corridor outside the room, from two different people. It sounded like one student had hurt himself badly. The other was mentally deranged, and looking to make it worse.
“Martha, we need you out here! It’s a code black!” Lady Helga’s voice echoed as she quickly ducked her head inside my hospital room.
The nurse appeared frantic. She glanced toward the door as she said, “I’m sorry— we’ve been overrun with patients this morning, and we’re out of beds. Is it okay if you finish up here, Mister Wahkin? I’ll try not to be long.”
Without waiting for him to say if it was, the nurse ran off. We hadn’t even started my shower.
Charlie’s mouth was flat. “I get this is a prison school, but you need more help than anyone here.”
