Page 27 of Victorious

Iris sat up, effortlessly.

He smiled.

She smiled.

“What in God’s name…” said a too-loud voice.

Gabriel hadn’t heard Walsh come back, but he turned in time to see the man recoil, color draining from his face as he took in the scene—Iris, sitting upright on the cold steel slab, eyes open, and sheet held against her chest.

“Walsh,” he started, wondering what his next words might be, how to explain what he himself didn’t understand. But there was no point.

The doctor scrambled backward, not toward the door, but the emergency call button on the far wall.

Gabriel moved—injuries forgotten, or at least, suppressed by the hierarchy of need. He swept a scalpel from a nearby tray, reaching the call button just before Walsh. His body had come free of his mind, and he watched, as if outside himself, as one hand caught the doctor’s shoulder, spinning him round, and the other drew the blade in a quick, clean slice across the man’s throat.

Walsh’s mouth opened and closed as the line at his neck began to well red.

Blood spilled down his front, and he grasped uselessly at his neck, trying to staunch the wound before his legs gave out. He fell, hands slipping from his throat as his body hit the floor.

Gabriel stared down at the scalpel in his hand as if both belonged to someone else. He’d never hit another person, let alone hurt them. Let alone do this. But the numbness that had surrounded him since waking held. He welcomed it.

Carefully, he wiped the blade down. Pain was blooming, burning, in his side, where several stitches must have torn, but they would have to wait. He returned the scalpel to its tray, then crossed to the morgue door, and locked it before turning back to Iris.

“It’s all right,” he said, to himself, and then to her. “It’s going to be all right. I promise.”

Iris met his gaze. “I know.”

She looked the way she had, sitting up in bed that night, eyes wide, the sheet pressed to her chest. But then she had been afraid. Now, her face was strangely calm—shock, he presumed—as he helped her down. Her attention drifted, almost absently, from Walsh’s body on the floor, to Gabriel, to their son.

Ian.

She didn’t wail or clutch at his small body. She just stood there, watching, waiting for Gabriel to act. So he did.

He didn’t know how he’d brought Iris back to life, only that he had. And he needed to do it again. He flexed his fingers as if warming up. He took a single steadying breath, then splayed his hand across his son’s small chest. He shivered at the contact, and then he felt it—the icy pain, plunging into him. Like a hook.

It ached, but he welcomed the ache like a tithe. Even as the pain spread up his arm, and through his chest. Even as it wrapped around his skull, clawed behind his eyes. He closed them and imagined reaching out for Ian. Catching his son’s fingers as he couldn’t on the stairs, pulling him forward, and there it was again, that cresting feeling, the swell he’d taken for grief. But this time, he understood.

It was something else.

A force of will.

A hand on the scales.

It was Gabriel declaring war against the nature of the world. And winning.

The cold broke, and beneath his hand, he felt his son’s heart begin to beat again, his lungs inflate, bones that must have broken snapping back into place.

His eyes drifted open, and for the first time since he woke in the hospital bed, Gabriel felt like he could breathe. “Hi, Ian.”

His son blinked up at him. “Hi, Dad.”

If grief hadn’t broken him, those two words should have. The joy of it, the sheer relief. Still, the numbness held.

He lifted Ian from the table, wrapped in nothing but the white sheet, and set him, barefoot, on the tile floor before remembering Walsh. Ian had always been afraid of blood. He’d burst into tears at the sight of a cut finger or scraped knee. But now, he didn’t even seem to notice the wide red pool still spreading from the body.

That was when Gabriel began to suspect something was wrong.

Ian, whose favorite question was why and Iris, who was never truly still, even when she was sleeping, both waited silently, their faces placid. As if they weren’t standing in a morgue, naked save for the sheets he’d wrapped around them.