Keeper Chronicles: Awakening (22 page)

“Thank you.” Colette took the proffered cloth and tried to clean herself up. Mia watched, hesitant, and cleared her throat. Colette sighed. “Go ahead and ask.”

The girl blushed. “What happened?”

“That little episode was thanks to the spell we performed. In order to get the best sense of the demon we’re searching for, the memories gained during the spell stay with me. It lets me know the creature’s motives and thought process, if it has one.” She stopped talking as she wiped her mouth free of pancake debris. “Sometimes, especially at first, the memories can return unbidden.”

“So that was...oh.” Mia looked away.

Colette passed the cloth back and stood up. She was about to ask the girl to drive her to the hospital when the sound of tires on gravel drew her attention outside. Instead of stopping at the house, they continued on towards the underground bunker.

Hoping it was Nicholas who returned, she ran out of the house and jogged down the lane to meet him. The patrol car stood empty by the time she reached it, no one in sight. She ran into Nicholas as he carried a small load of munitions to the car.

“You’re awake. Good,” he said, pausing to kiss her on the cheek before continuing with his burden to the car. “Can you...?”

She took the keys from his hand and opened the trunk.

“Thanks,” he said, unloading the weapons. “Dylan gave a description of his attacker. I sent it on to the council to circulate, see if anyone recognizes the body he chose or if there’s a match in the police databases. Any luck, we’ll have a name and lead on his location within the day. Feel like going on a hunt?”

“I’d like nothing better.” She slammed the trunk closed.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Rebekah couldn’t sleep.

The mattress on the bed in the underground bunker was thin and lumpy. Sleeping on the floor would probably have been more comfortable if it weren’t for the fact that the two Hunters had already claimed the spot even if they weren’t currently using it. The sterile concrete cube was so quiet that for a moment she could imagine she was alone. That the home she’d grown up in, the one place where she had felt loved, hadn’t almost been burned to the ground by a rogue demon. One woman died. Twelve people had been injured, mostly from the smoke. People she knew. Friends from town. Regular guests. Dylan. Gabe.

Thinking those names one after the other gave her a headache.

The official report was that someone had dropped a lit candle in the storage room during a tryst; they called it an accident. Rebekah knew better, now. A week ago, she might have believed the lie; after all, two people connecting during a party seemed believable enough. A week ago, she had been a different person.

“Are you still up?” she whispered as softly as she could. The concrete walls, however, echoed anyway.

“I am now,” Mia answered from the other side of the bed. “What’s wrong?”

Rebekah pulled the thin blanket up to her chest. “Do you think he’ll be all right?”

“Yeah. Dylan was released a couple of days ago. You saw him at dinner. He’s...fine.” Mia’s voice trailed off. “Oh.”

Rebekah wished she had kept her mouth shut. “Never mind,” she said, trying to recover, and rolled over on her side.

“Gabe’s tough. He’ll wake up.”

“It’s been a week.”

“Six days,” Mia corrected.

A lifetime. Her father’s death still hurt, but most of the pain had been quick, like having a leg amputated. Gabe’s coma lingered. To all appearances, he looked normal: no obvious wounds or bruising, stable vitals, natural coloring. He just wouldn’t wake up, and it killed her.

Rebekah wiped a tear away, hoping her friend didn’t notice the movement. “Can’t you, I don’t know,
do
something? Magic him better?”

“Don’t you think that if it were possible I would?” Mia stiffened with indignation. “The Keepers wouldn’t have let me leave if they thought I could help. I’ve already tried everything I know.”

Tossing back the blanket, Rebekah sat up and dropped her legs over the side of the bed. Her voice, when she spoke, was thick. “I’m going for a walk.”

Before Mia could protest, Rebekah hurried for the door, thankful for the first time for the glow of the sickly blue monitors which kept her from bumping into anything, and put on her slippers and a wrap. Everything Mia said had been correct. Technically. Accepting it, however, meant also accepting the fact that he was out of options. She couldn’t do that.

The soft light of the moon and stars danced from the tops of pine branches and gravel drives and her skin. Other than the sweeping light amplified by the Fresnel lens in the tower above her, night reigned supreme. The whir and buzz and clatter of insects, louder even than the softly sliding surf colliding with the bottom of the cliff, filled her with a profound sense of loneliness. There were thousands of insects—more, surely, than any one person could distinguish between their individual sounds—and yet, like a solitary island, she stood among them but never a part of them. A stone of silence in their wave of noise.

Her feet carried her down the gravel path connecting the lighthouse and the bed-n-breakfast, then further toward the parking lot. She shouldn’t do this and she knew it—tomorrow the insurance inspectors were supposed to come to the house and finalize the claim, a pair of contractors were meeting her to give estimates for repairs, and Moore would come by in the evening to continue Rebekah’s Keeper training—but she got in her car, grabbed the spare key she kept under the floor mat, and turned the ignition. It’d only take a minute. She’d go, see that he was alive, and then come back. A half hour at most.

The drive to the hospital passed in a blur. She parked her car somewhere and hurried inside, each moment of delay tightening the knot of anxiety that’d formed in her chest. He’d be dead. She knew it. She pushed the elevator button a dozen times, pressing it and pressing it until the doors finally opened with a ding. The ride to the fourth floor was agony, each second of waiting increasing her fear and bringing it to a boil. “Hurry,” she whispered, tapping her foot. “Hurry.”

The doors opened and she ran out past a startled, sleepy orderly, almost knocking him over in her haste. “Sorry,” she called over her shoulder as she kept walking.

Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three—there. Twenty-two. Gabe’s room. Her heart raced as she ran inside. He was alive. The monitors next to his bed confirmed it, even though he was wired and tubed into the wall like some Borg-like monster.

She collapsed to her knees next to his bed, glad no one was around to see her display of psychotic emotion. The thought of him not waking up, of never being able to hear his voice or listen to his sarcasm, terrified her. He’d always been there for her, even when she hadn’t wanted him to or hated him for it. Even his absences, like those last few years of high school, she now realized were his final gift to her. Letting her live a normal life where witches and demons were the substance of bad horror movies and not the day-to-day function of her life. She owed him for that. Him and her parents.

Gabe’s mother usually sat vigil in the room, her presence keeping Rebekah away as surely as if there were a sign posted saying
No Admittance
. But not this time. Pulling up a chair, she positioned it next to his bed and folded his hands in hers. He’d do the same for her, she knew, and as long as she left before sunrise, no one would be the wiser. It could be her little secret. A way of saying thanks.

A while later, a movement startled her awake. His hand.

“Gabe?” She sat up and put her hand on his face. “Are you there?”

He didn’t open his eyes, but his head, like a sunflower following the light, turned to the sound of her voice. “Jul...Juliet?” he whispered.

Rebekah blinked, sitting back like someone had punched her in the gut. Juliet? Who was...and then she remembered. His dead fiancé. In his delirium, he sought the person he loved the most.

“Yeah,” she answered. “I’m here.”

The smile on his face made tears spring into her eyes.

“Love...you.” he whispered.

“I love you, too,” Rebekah said and kissed him.

Letting her free hand caress his face, she sat back down in her chair. He started convulsing, violent, angry seizures wracking his body. “Nurse!” she screamed, letting go of his hand and trying to hold his head to keep him from bashing his brains out on the side of the bed. “Someone help!”

A nurse rushed in a moment later, took one look at Gabe, and yelled something down the hall. “We need to get him on his side. Hold his head.”

Rebekah did as the woman said, holding Gabe’s head as the nurse rolled him over on his side. A moment later, two more nurses ran into the room, forcing her out as bloody red foam oozed out past his lips. “What’s happening?” she asked, longing to jump in and help him.

“He’s coding. We need a crash cart,” the first nurse said.

“Coding? What do you mean? Tell me what’s happening?” Someone pulled her out of the room and closed the curtain around Gabe, blocking him from her sight.

“You need to wait out here,” the man said, standing her out in the hall like a child asked to go stand in the corner. “We’ll come get you when we can.”

Rebekah paced the hall for what felt like an eternity as a steady stream of nurses pulling carts and monitors ran in and out of his room. Two older men in lab coats rushed past her, giving her a glimpse of a room awash in sprays of blood as he hemorrhaged and seized. A pair of orderlies pushed a stretcher in the room and loaded him on it, wheeling him out with his team of nurses and doctors in tow. She followed them down the hall and all the way to the outer doors of the surgical wing where she was stopped at the door.

“You can’t go in here,” a kindly old woman said. Her badge proclaimed her a volunteer. “You have to wait out here. The doctors will be out when they know more.”

“No,” she protested, shaking her head in shock. “I have to go. He can’t die.”

“Ma’am,” the woman said firmly, taking Rebekah by the arms and leading her to a dark, empty waiting room where a television mumbled something incoherent, “right now, your husband needs you to be strong for him. Can you do that? Can you be strong and wait here? Is there someone I can call to come sit with you?”

Call? Why did she want to call someone? Stop this, she ordered herself. Calm down. There was someone who needed to know: Gabe’s real family. They needed to be there in case...she refused to finish the thought. “Yes. Yes. His mom. Can you call his mom?”

“Do you know her phone number?”

Rebekah shook her head. “No.”

“Okay. I’ll look it up in his file. Can you sit down for me?”

“Yes. I’ll be fine.” So the woman would leave, Rebekah sat down in the waiting room chair, her nerves frayed. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t be told that he was dead, too. No matter what she felt about him or he felt about her, she just couldn’t take losing anyone else. Not after her parents were taken within six months of each other. Her home nearly burned down. Her world turned on its head. What would his parents think if they saw her there? Would they blame her for the sudden illness?

Rebekah couldn’t wait around to find out.

Once the old woman was out of sight, Rebekah hurried down the hall to the elevator that would take her down to the parking garage and back to her car. Heart racing, she sat down in the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut, the echo reverberating in the nearly empty parking garage. She should go home, she knew, or back to the bunker and pretend to sleep, but just as she couldn’t stay in the waiting room like the grieved relative the woman assumed her to be, Rebekah couldn’t leave, either. She was trapped.

Rebekah closed her eyes and prayed that Gabe would be all right to a god she was no longer sure she believed existed.

****

A knock on her window woke her.

Startled, Rebekah hit her head on the steering wheel of her car before she remembered where she was and why. Gabe’s mother waited on the other side of the glass. Running her hands through her hair a couple times, Rebekah straightened her shirt and rolled down the window.

“Mrs...Mrs. McDaniel. What...?”

“My son’s awake,” the delicate half-Japanese woman said. “He’s asked to see you.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay.” Rebekah rolled down the window and opened the door. Her legs felt like pins and needles, but she pushed past the feeling and stood. Gabe’s mother had always scared Rebekah. Sometimes the woman looked so much like a porcelain doll that the wrong movement or word could shatter her; other times, she seemed more indefatigable than a mountain.

“How is he?” she asked with a blush, pulling her wrap tight around her shoulders as she followed the woman toward the hospital entrance. She’d never changed out of her pajamas once she’d decided to go to the hospital. Where his mother looked perfect, no hair out of place or wrinkle in her dress, Rebekah looked like a bum in navy flannel bottoms and a gray, long-sleeved thermal shirt.

“Recovering. Thanks to you.”

“Me?”

She nodded delicately. “His illness was outside their skills to treat. Had I not been called to the hospital, they would have cut open his chest and killed him.” She hesitated. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome?” she asked more than said. “What was wrong with him?”

“Demon blood.”

The mechanical doors leading into the hospital opened automatically. “I thought that just caused hallucinations...the punch at the party...”

“Had only been spiked with a very small amount. One or two drops.” Gabe’s mom stopped talking as a pair of nurses appeared at the end of the hall and walked towards them.

More than a little confused, Rebekah waited as the woman pushed the button to call the elevator and the two nurses passed gossiping about something they saw on television the night before. The Keepers had discovered the spiked punch during their investigation, citing that as to why everyone had acted so strangely, including the witches that Gabe had had to handcuff to keep from attacking him. That a demon had been in her house, attacking her guests and killing one woman, while Rebekah ran off into the woods after Gabe and Mia, sill stung.

Once the elevator doors closed behind them, Mrs. McDaniel stood with her back to the small surveillance camera in the ceiling. “After he had fallen unconscious from the smoke, the demon must have forced him to swallow a large amount of its blood, hoping to ensure his death. Demon blood is highly caustic; while his body healed from the initial injuries thanks to his Keeper lineage, the demonic essence continued to work on him. That seizure you witnessed was his body expelling the foreign substance.”