Page 26 of Victorious

Gabriel had never counted the steps from the elevator to the morgue—had never needed to—but there weren’t many. Soon they were through the doors. Walsh had phoned down, so the morgue tech was waiting for them. Behind her, the bodies lay on tables side by side, each beneath a clean white sheet.

Here, thought Gabriel. This was surely where his nerve would fail. Where the dam would break, and the horror would come rushing up to overwhelm him.

But it didn’t.

As Walsh exchanged a few words with the morgue tech, and she excused herself, Gabriel’s mind took in the details of the space with strange detachment, as if it were a puzzle to solve. A problem to fix.

The wheelchair stood three steps from the nearest table, the one that held the smaller body. Gabriel rose, legs nearly buckling beneath him.

“Gray,” warned Walsh, but he shook the doctor off.

He continued forward, braced himself against the cold steel table, afraid he’d torn the stitches in his side. But they held, and so did he.

“Give me a minute,” he said through clenched teeth. “To say goodbye.”

Walsh shifted his weight, as if trying to decide, but then bobbed his head. “Of course,” he said, departing.

As the door swung shut, Gabriel drew back the sheet, and looked down at his son.

Not at the Y that marred his narrow chest, or the bruises that had bloomed—as much as they ever would—against his shoulder, his side, his neck, but at the dark curls that swept across his six-year-old face. Ian needed a haircut—it was that peculiar length, where it looked wild, no matter how many times you tried to comb it. His skin had taken on a faint blue tinge, but otherwise Ian almost looked like he was sleeping.

Gabriel rested a hand on his son’s body. It was cold—he had expected that. What he hadn’t expected was the way it made his fingers ache. A dull pain that seemed to spread through his hand the longer he held it there, as if he were touching ice instead of skin. Nor did he expect the way his own pulse began to pound mockingly inside his skull, a reminder that only one of them was still alive.

He drew his hand away, and both feelings retreated as he turned toward the second table. The one that held his wife.

He swallowed, and pulled back the sheet, just enough to see her face, the tips of the Y-incision ending beneath her collarbones. There was a small cut on Iris’s cheek. He brushed his thumb against it, ignoring the brittle chill, ran his hand as lightly as he could over her head, until he felt the damage, hidden by her hair.

Her skull had been caved in.

A shudder ran through him, then. The whole room seemed to tremble, too, and here it was, the shock, the horror. The swell of grief, rising like a wave, threatening to break over his body. The force of it, a physical thing, bending him double over her body, his forehead pressed to hers, even as his head began to ache.

It will be okay, his own words echoed through him. Just come to me.

Gabriel sucked in a ragged breath as the pain in his side was overwhelmed by the cold clawing across his skin, the pounding in his skull, the crushing weight, as if the house were coming down on him again.

But then the feeling crested.

Broke.

And he was still there.

Gabriel blinked, the room settling around him.

He was just about to take his hand from Iris when she breathed.

He felt her lungs expand, slow and smooth, like a body on the edge of sleep. Gabriel pulled back and saw the color creeping back into her skin, the postmortem incisions erased, along with the cut on her cheek, the shadows where blood had pooled beneath her skin. Her head, still cradled in his other hand was now unbroken. Whole.

Her hazel eyes floated open.

Gabriel let out a shaky breath, amazed.

“Iris?” he said softly as he cupped her cheek, which no longer hurt to touch, the skin now as warm as his own.

Her hand mirrored his as it reached up and settled on his cheek. “Gabe.”

It was impossible. Or at least, it should have been. But that word had lost its meaning weeks ago, when he first saw what Paul could do with just a dream. Not impossible. Extraordinary.

“Try to sit up,” he whispered, as if afraid to break the spell.