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Her next words drifted through my head as I answered her questions automatically. There wasn’t room for much in there except for the thudding of my pulse and the image of Dad sprawled motionless beside me.
“Don’t try to move him,” the woman said. “That could exacerbate any injuries. It’s a good sign that he’s breathing. If you’ve got something reasonably clean you can press to any wounds that are bleeding to stop the flow, do that. Otherwise, hang tight and be ready to reassure him if he comes to. Don’t let him try to get up until the paramedics arrive. The ambulance is on its way.”
A good sign that he was breathing. I held onto that as I squatted down next to my father. I wrapped a spare shirt from the truck around his head as tightly as I dared, and then I couldn’t do anything for him except wait. Wait and watch his chest hoping it kept rising.
My gaze slid to the remains of the addition’s frame. How the hell had that collapse even happened? Dad was incredibly careful about the wood he used, and he had a good supplier. I couldn’t believe we could have built that whole frame without noticing there was something wrong with our materials.
Looking at the strewn boards around us, I couldn’t see any sign of a flaw in them. No lines of rot, nothing mis-cut. They should have been perfectly sound. There was no way it made sense for them to have just snapped like that.
A chill washed over me. No, there wasn’t any way in the regular world they should have broken like that. But I knew now that the world I’d used to live in wasn’t the only one that existed. A witch had come into town last week to start a freak fire next to Jin’s gallery. I was willing to bet everything I owned that there was some spell that could make wood act like it’d rotted through.
The Frankfords again. Who else could it be? How had they skewed that spell to avoid showing they were targeting us?
A deeper sliver of cold pierced my gut. Had Dad’s first accident with the saw evenbeenan accident, or had they meddled there too? It was the first injury bad enough to require a doctor that he’d had in at least a decade.
That’d happened before the fire. They hadn’t managed to really hurt him, so they’d tried again, weaseling their way around their oath one way or another? The more I thought about it, the more that idea rang true. My jaw tensed.
They still hadn’t won. He was hurt, but he was alive. The doctors would patch him up at the hospital.
Ihadto believe that.
The wail of the siren sounded in the distance. I glanced at the phone I was still clutching. I needed to call Mom so she could meet us at the hospital. And Ky?
I hesitated. There wasn’t any reason to worry him yet. What could he do anyway? I’d listen to what the paramedics said. If it seemed really serious, I’d call him over. Otherwise, I could at least save him some of the stress.
The ambulance screeched to a halt outside the Nelsons’ house. Feet thumped up the drive to where I was crouched. Two of the paramedics were carrying a stretcher. I pulled back as they knelt around Dad, checking him over.
“He’s been unconscious since the accident?” one of them asked me.
I nodded, my jaw tight. “He hasn’t moved at all.”
I restrained a wince as they lifted him onto the stretcher. No one was saying anything about how serious they thought this was. One of them waved to me as they hefted Dad up.
“Are you riding with us?”
“Yeah,” I managed to rasp.
“Then come on. The faster we get him to emergency, the better shape he’ll be in.”
I followed them into the back of the ambulance and listened to the doors swing shut with a clang that sounded way too final.
Chapter Thirteen
Rose
Ilooked at the grandfather clock farther down the hallway. Its steady ticking echoed through the wide space. It was twenty minutes past the hour.
“Seth isn’t usually late,” I said. If anything, he was the most punctual of the guys. Jin and Kyler were prone to getting absorbed in whatever they were working on, art or some new line of research. Damon liked to flaunt social norms. And Gabriel didn’t have to try all that hard, since he lived just across the driveway.
Ky checked his phone. “I texted him, but he hasn’t replied. He’s probably on his way right now. He’s a stickler for leaving the phone alone when he’s driving too.”
Damon shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his shoulders slightly hunched in his loose tee. “Do you think we should get started without him? You snooze, you lose.”
Gabriel shot him a half smile where he was leaning against the wall. “I think that would kind of defeat the purpose of the get-together. The whole idea is to see if we can work those practice forms with all of us together instead of just one-on-one.”
“We made do with four before you came along, in case you don’t remember,” Damon said archly, but there was no venom in the comment. Gabriel just shook his head.
Jin was rolling his shoulders, his lean muscles flexing where his paint-flecked tank top bared them. “Are you getting stiff from the painting?” I asked him.
