"Georgina."
My name came to me from far away, from far down a tunnel without an end. It echoed off the walls of my mind, loud at first and eventually fading to nothing.
"Georgina. Look at me, sweetie."
"Let her sleep, Hugh."
"No, I need to talk to her and make sure she doesn't have a concussion. Georgina, come on. Open your eyes for me."
Through a mist of black fog, my brain parsed the words and slowly found meaning in them. Some basic response in me wanted to comply, but my eyelids felt like they were stuck together. Thinking-let alone answering-was too hard, but more words came to encourage me.
"There you go, sweetie. Try it again. You almost had it."
With much effort, I finally managed to open my eyes. It was excruciating. My lids felt like they were made of lead. At first, I could only perceive one thing: light. I winced, wanting to sink back into that oblivion I'd been pulled from. And with this slight stirring of consciousness, all the pain I'd escaped from before suddenly returned. My head throbbed. My back burned. The clich¨¦ about breaking every bone in the body seemed like a very real possibility all of a sudden, and I was pretty sure I'd broken a few that weren't in my body. Sure, that didn't make sense, but with as bad as I felt, little did.
"Oh God." At least, that's what I tried to say. It came out as more of an indistinct moan.
"Easy there. You don't have to say anything."
I opened my eyes again, this time making out a figure leaning over me. I knew his voice so well that I didn't need to see his face, which was a blur anyway.
"Hugh," I croaked.
"Hey, ask her what-"
"Shut up," Hugh snapped. The jerky movement of his head made me think he'd glanced behind him, but I couldn't be certain.
He moved his face closer to mine, bringing his features into sharper relief. He was paler than I'd ever seen him, his face filled with lines of worry and fear I'd never thought him capable of. He looked even more upset than when he'd come to tell us about Jerome's summoning. Reaching out, Hugh held the lids of one of my eyes open and shone a small light into it. I squirmed at the brightness-or at least I tried-but he was fast and did it to the other eye before it caused too much discomfort. When he finished, he moved his finger around in the air and studied my eyes as I followed it.
"What's your name?" he asked.
The voice behind him piped up. "You already said her name."
Hugh sighed and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "What's his name?"
"Cody," I said. It was getting easier to speak, but the pain was going up the more conscious I became. Cody's voice was as familiar to me as Hugh's, and I felt certain Peter was here too.
Hugh asked me a few other factual questions, like the current year and the location, and also if I was nauseous.
"It all hurts," I said, voice still slurred. I couldn't even move, let alone distinguish nausea from the rest of my pain.
"Yeah, but do you feel like you're going to throw up? Right here? Right now?"
I thought about it. My stomach hurt, but it was less of a queasy discomfort and more of a someone-just-kicked-me-with-stilettos discomfort. "No," I said.
Hugh sat back, and I heard him sigh in relief.
"It all hurts," I repeated. "Can you...make it stop?"
He hesitated, and a moment later, Cody appeared beside him. "What's the matter? You've gotta give her something. Look at her. She's suffering."
"Understatement," I mumbled.
Hugh's face was still drawn. "I'm not gonna knock her out if she's got a concussion."
"She passed your tests."
"Those are field tests. They're not one hundred percent accurate."
"Please," I said, feeling tears well in my eyes. "Anything."
"We know it won't kill her," I heard Peter say. I'd been right about him being here.
Hugh hesitated only a little longer. "Go get some water."
Cody disappeared, and Peter replaced him by Hugh's side. Hugh's expression was still grim. "Sweetie, I've got to clean up your back, and it's going to hurt."
"Worse?"
"A different kind of hurt. But this has to be cleaned up so you don't get an infection, and then I need to shift you to check out the rest of you. The drugs'll help, but it's all going to hurt at first."
"Go for it," I said, steeling myself. At this point, I couldn't really imagine worse pain. Besides, Hugh was a doctor. Everything was going to be okay now.
Cody returned with a glass of water. Hugh made me drink some first, just to make sure I could keep it down. When I did, he gave me two pills to take with the rest of the water. I nearly choked on them-my throat felt raw and swollen, maybe from screaming-but I got them down.
I wanted to ask what I'd just taken, but it seemed like too much work. "Should kick in in about twenty minutes," Hugh said.
I could see him fumbling with something in his lap. Standing up, he leaned over my back. Something wet touched my skin.
"Son of a bitch!" Again, my words were slightly incoherent, but I think he caught my meaning.
Stinging pain-a "different" pain, indeed-raced across my skin where he'd touched it. It was electric, sharp where the rest of my body throbbed. My desire to get away from that horrible stinging was so strong that I actually managed to move a little, but all that did was trigger the hurt in the rest of my body. The world blurred once more.
"You're making it worse," he warned. "Stay still."
Easy for him to say. I bit my lip as he continued. He was using antiseptic to clean the places Nanette had cut me. Necessary, as he'd said, but God, did it hurt.
"Talk to her," Hugh said to no one in particular. "Distract her."
"What happened?" asked Peter. "Who did this to you?"
"Nice distraction," said Hugh.
"Nanette," I said. Saying her name made my stomach turn, and I hoped I wouldn't have to go back on what I'd said to Hugh about throwing up. "She was...mad."
"I guess," said Peter.
"Mad I told Cedric about her..."
"Doesn't this kind of confirm your suspicions, then?" asked Cody.
Yeah, if beating up the person who'd ratted out your secret plans didn't sound suspicious, I didn't know what did. But if Nanette really was behind Jerome's summoning, why not just kill me outright and leave no witnesses?
Explaining that would take too many words and too much effort, so I just said, "I don't know."
"There," said Hugh, straightening. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"
I tried to glare, but I don't think he noticed. He rummaged in his kit once more and then leaned back over to start bandaging up the wounds. With as much as he was piling on me, I had the feeling I was going to look like a mummy.
"Why didn't Dante stick around?" asked Cody.
"Huh? Dante?" The bandage pressure wasn't as bad as the cleaning, but it was still uncomfortable. I wondered when those goddamned drugs were going to kick in.
"He was here," said Cody. "He called Hugh and told him to come over."
Some of the exact details of what had happened with Nanette were foggy, but I felt pretty confident, head trauma or no, that I would have remembered Dante being around.
"Dante wasn't here," I said.
Hugh paused and looked me in the eye. "Then who called me? It was a guy, from your cell phone. Said to get over here and bring medical supplies-that you'd been hurt."
I frowned, and it came back to me, a shadow in the pain-filled haze of my memory. The strong arms and gentle voice.
"There was someone here..." I began slowly. "Not Dante. Someone else. He put me to bed."
Silence fell. A slight fuzziness was starting to tingle the edges of my senses, which I took as a good sign. It was more of a pleasant, dreamlike fuzziness-not the I-can't-handle-this-pain-anymore kind. There was still a fair amount of that, though.
The guys exchanged puzzled looks. "Are you sure it wasn't him?" asked Cody.
"Why would Dante leave her, though?" asked Peter.
Hugh snorted. "No telling with him."
"Stop," I mumbled. "It wasn't him."
"You can't remember a face or anything?" Peter asked. "Was it even someone you knew?"
I thought again, desperately trying to dig out the memory. There was nothing, though. Only that he'd been someone familiar.
"I knew him..." That pleasant drowsiness was growing stronger. I wished it would hurry up.
"There," said Hugh. "All bandaged up. Help me move her so I can look at her ribs."
That was not fun, and the discomfort of the three of them turning me over-no matter how gentle they tried to be-was enough to momentarily break me out of the drug's soothing embrace. They managed to flip me over, putting moderate pressure on my back when I rested back against the bed, but allowing Hugh to examine the rest of me. He poked and prodded and had me take deep breaths. His final analysis was that I had a couple of broken ribs and a lot of bruising and pain that would just go away with time.
"Great," I said. I was so loopy by that point that I didn't even know if I was being sarcastic or not.
Cody was still unable to give up my benefactor. "But who was here?"
"The man..." I said.
"You aren't going to get anything else out of her," said Hugh wearily. "Not for a while. She's going to be in Dreamland any minute now."
"Dreamland. The man..." I repeated. Suddenly, I giggled. "The man in the dream..."
I saw them exchange pitying looks, just before my eyelids drooped closed. They thought I was talking nonsense. None of them knew about the story of the man in the dream, of that alluring and improbable alternate life that Nyx had shown me.
But as I drifted off to Dreamland, it wasn't Nyx's vision I saw. It was more of that same, painless black...at least, it was until I got jolted by a million volts of electricity.
I let out a small cry of surprise, my eyes popping open. It felt like hundreds of icy needles were dancing along my body, piercing every nerve. The room's details, as well as my friends, came to me in sharp, crystalline detail. No more fuzziness. Turning my head slightly, I saw a fourth person.
Mei.
She stood beside my bed, face blank and emotionless, arms crossed across her black silk blouse. "What happened?" I asked. My words were still thick, but my speech capabilities had improved by leaps and bounds.
"I healed you," she said flatly. "Inasmuch as I can. You're still going to hurt."
Demons, though once angels, didn't possess that power to heal that their heavenly counterparts had. They could do it in small bursts, however, and in expanding my senses to assess my body, I could feel how she'd gotten rid of the worst of my pain. I still ached in some places, and even bandaged, my back still stung. I no longer wanted to die, however, so that was definitely an improvement.
"Thank you," I said.
Mei didn't look particularly compassionate or benevolent. Her expression darkened. "They say Nanette did this?"
I hesitated. I'd already gotten in enough trouble with the archdemoness for telling on her. Of course, my friends had undoubtedly already told Mei the truth, and anyway, she was the closest I currently had to a boss. I wasn't entirely sure if I could trust her, but if I had to place my money on the demon most likely to have my back right now (no pun intended), it was her.
"Yeah," I admitted. "I told Cedric that Nanette had met with Jerome. She'd met with Cedric too, so it seemed kind of like she was manipulating both of them."
Mei's face grew harder still. Whether she agreed with me or not, she didn't reveal. "Nanette won't bother you again."
And with no more than that, the demoness vanished.
"Girl fight," said Hugh, looking the happiest I'd seen him today.
"I don't think it's going to be in creamed corn or anything like that," I remarked dryly.
"Her sense of humor returns," said Peter. "Definitely on the road to recovery."
I tried to sit up and winced. "Or not."
"Don't push it," warned Hugh. "Mei can only do so much-"
"What the hell's going on?"
We all turned. Dante stood in the doorway to my bedroom. His face was a mixture of incredulity and utter confusion. Without waiting for an answer, he hurried over to the bed and knelt down so that he was at my level.
"Are you okay? What happened?"
His expression was so tender, so full of concern that I was momentarily taken aback. Dante was indeed selfish and arrogant, but he did care about me, no matter what my friends thought. And in dire situations-like now-that bitter façade of his fell, revealing someone whose soul hadn't turned completely black yet. He tried hard to hide this side of himself, but I knew it was there.
"I had a run-in with a demon," I said. I gave him a brief explanation of what had happened.
He grew more and more incredulous as I spoke. When I finished, he glanced around the room, studying everyone accusatorily. "How does something like this happen? I thought demons couldn't go around roughing people up. Aren't you under some kind of protection?"
"Technically Jerome's," I said. "But he's kind of busy right now."
"Maybe you're under Grace and Mei's protection now," mused Cody. "Mei looked pissed."
"She always looks pissed," said Hugh.
"I should hope so," snapped Dante. "Are they going to go kick this other demon's ass?"
"She's not likely to smite her, if that's what you mean," said Hugh. "Grace and Mei are under the same scrutiny as everyone else, but I bet Mei'll bitch Nanette out."
"Great," said Dante. "A stern talking-to. That'll show her."
"It's unlikely Nanette'll do anything else. If she was going to kill Georgina, she would have already." There was an almost gentle tone in Peter's voice. I think Dante's outrage and concern had convinced the vampire that Dante might not be the complete and total bastard he'd always believed.
My immortal (or not so immortal) friends finally decided I was in reasonable enough condition to leave me in Dante's care. Hugh promised to check on me tomorrow, and I thanked him again for his help. He and the others looked like they wanted to hug me, but with my back, they knew better.
When they were gone, Dante went out to the kitchen and came back with a bowl of ice cream. "Good for what ails you," he said.
I was surprised to discover I had a considerable appetite. Judging from the time, I'd been out quite awhile before Mei had shown up. It had only felt like a few seconds.
"Careful," I teased. "People are going to think you're a nice guy."
"Well, I'll have to go rob some orphans to save my reputation."
He lay in bed beside me, curled on his side so that he could gently keep his hand on my arm and talk to me. As the evening passed, our conversation mostly touched on inconsequential things, topics to distract me from Seattle's increasingly dangerous situation. Finally, when it came time for both of us to sleep, Dante brought up the attack again.
"Succubus...who was here earlier?"
I knew he didn't mean Hugh and the vampires. I frowned. Even with Mei's healing, my memories were sketchy. "I don't know. But I think...I think it might have been Carter."
"Really? I still can't believe that angel hangs out with you guys. But if it was him, why didn't he heal you? He could have fixed everything."
Through the fog of that ordeal, I recalled my rescuer's words. I can't heal you .
"Because he's not supposed to interfere," I said slowly, remembering my earlier rumination on whether blowing up a stove was interference. "Heaven's supposed to stay out of this. He probably shouldn't have even carried me to bed-which is why he would have then gotten out of here and left it to Hugh to patch me up."
"An angel breaking the rules and a demon healing the sick," Dante said. "You and your associates just get more and more fucked up."
I shifted slightly, cautious of my back, and rested my head against him. "That's for damned sure."