Page 43 of Deacon

He tried once more to force the memory back, searching for grass beneath his palms and Lila’s laugh instead of the machines. For one flicker, the night almost returned.

Then pain struck with everything it had.

It tore through his chest and side, splitting across his skull until the memory disintegrated around him.

The darkness remained, but its purpose had changed. It no longer offered refuge or a place to hide. It had become a threshold, and something waited on the other side, pulling with steady hands.

Lila.

Her voice. Her touch. The sorrow she had carried all these years.

Come back.

The words held no trace of memory. They felt like command and prayer, the last thing in the world he had any right to want and the one thing he wanted anyway.

Jackson turned toward her, and wanting Lila became stronger than wanting the dark. He wanted out.

12

Lila

The room had settled into the late-night hospital stillness I knew too well, the kind where nothing looked urgent until suddenly it was.

I sat beside Jackson’s bed with a paper cup gone cold between my hands, listening to the low mechanical hum surrounding him while pretending I wasn’t watching the monitor. Priest had taken the chair across from me, his big body folded into hospital furniture never designed for men his size. We had run out of conversation a while ago. Or maybe I had. Priest seemed perfectly comfortable allowing silence to exist without trying to beat it into submission.

Jackson looked the same as he had for days. Too still, yet somehow still too solid for the bed holding him. His body seemed to have dug in somewhere deep, stubborn even unconscious, as though he would return on his own schedule and everyone else could damn well wait.

I had spent enough years in medicine to know better than to expect anything from a quiet night.

Hope was useful until it made you careless.

So when his breathing changed, my entire body reacted before my mind caught up.

The inhale snagged halfway into his chest.

It was subtle enough that someone unfamiliar with the rhythm of the room might have missed it, but I had listened to him breathe for too many hours. This wasn’t the steady pattern I knew. Air dragged in again, uneven and rough at the end, and the monitor beside him ticked upward.

My coffee hit the table.

“Jackson?”

Priest moved at the same instant I leaned forward, coming out of his chair fast enough to make the cramped room feel smaller. Jackson’s fingers twitched against the sheet.

Once.

Then again.

His brow pulled tight, the muscles around his mouth shifting as though he were fighting something I couldn’t see. After everything I had watched his body endure, that tiny crease between his eyebrows nearly stopped my heart.

I rose, the chair scraping softly behind me, but kept my hands to myself. Years of training fought every instinct demanding I touch him.

Then his eyes opened.

They drifted without finding anything at first, sliding over the ceiling and the blurred edges of the room as his mind struggled to catch up with his body. I watched the confusion move through him, the effort it took to understand light and sound after so much darkness.

Then his gaze found me.

Everything in him stilled.