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Brigit’s weight toppled into me, and we crashed through the door where I landed hard on my back in the middle of a brightly lit Starbucks. I was covered in blood, and there was a dead body on top of me.
I lay dumbfounded under her, staring at the ceiling fan. What had happened? The gate should open for those in genuine need. What need was more genuine than this?
A woman’s scream pierced my thoughts and brought me reeling back to the present. To the bulky presence pressing down on my chest. I struggled to come up to my elbows and pushed a curtain of Brigit’s long blonde hair out of her face. Her vacant eyes stared back at me, but they saw nothing. Her lips were slightly parted and red with her own dried blood. She wasn’t trying to apologize anymore.
She wasn’t going to do anything anymore.
A huge sob bubbled from my lips with an ugly-sounding hiccup.
I’d had one last chance, one final hope, and I had failed.
Brigit was dead.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Hospitals didn’t smell like death.
I’d spent enough time around the dead and dying to know what real death smelled like, and the hospital waiting room didn’t smell like any of that. It reeked of antiseptic and hopelessness, but not death.
Desmond and Lucas, having followed the trail of blood from my apartment to the cafe, were sitting across from me, looking larger than life in the tiny, badly abused chairs. I hadn’t spoken to them the entire time we’d been here, and they’d proven to be exceptionally patient up to this point.
“Secret…” Lucas hazarded to be the first to speak.
“I want you to kill them all,” I replied, my voice raspy from all the sobbing.
“What?”
“Mercy’s pack. I want you to kill them. All of them. ” My initial request was going to be for him to drive them out of my city. Now banishment didn’t seem nearly suitable enough.
Maybe he was wishing he hadn’t spoken. “I can’t—”
“You can. You will. You owe me this. You owe her this. ” I hugged my cardigan over my blood-stained sundress. One of the nurses had offered me a pair of scrubs to change into, but they were sitting on the chair beside me, untouched. I wasn’t ready to take the dress off yet.
I also didn’t know why we were waiting.
We’d been taken to a human hospital. Brigit should have been declared dead on the scene, but I think they’d recognized Lucas and wanted to make a show for him of how dedicated they were to saving lives. It was horseshit anyway. She’d been undead first. Now she was just dead.
A new wave of tears started streaming down my cheeks. I’d stopped trying to fight them, and the boys had stopped asking if I was okay. I wasn’t, and there wasn’t much anyone could do to change that. Unless Lucas killed Mercy’s pack.
When he killed Mercy’s pack.
A short man with round, ruddy cheeks and circle-framed glasses came into the waiting room. With his tousled receding hair and boyish face, I couldn’t help but think of Radar from M*A*S*H, a show I’d spent much of my youth watching with Grandmere. Lucas, ever the one to take charge, rose to his feet to meet the doctor.
“I’m Doctor Nicholas,” he said, then removed his glasses.
I swore doctors only wore glasses so they could take them off to heighten dramatic moods. Dr. Nicholas needn’t have bothered, there was no more room for drama here.
“You’re Miss Stewart’s…friends?”
“We were her family,” I whispered, looking down at my hands. She’d been my family.
“You were the one who carried her to the coffee shop. ” The way the doctor phrased it, there wasn’t a question. Since he already had his answer, I didn’t bother replying. “That was a very brave thing you did,” he added with admiration.
I didn’t have enough emotion left in me to appreciate his sentiment.
“Doctor,” Lucas said, trying to get the conversation back on track. “About Brigit?”
Dr. Nicholas reached to his face before realizing he already had the glasses in his hands and couldn’t remove them a second time. “I’m afraid I have bad news. ”
