Darker Angels (bsd-2) by M. L. N. Hanover

Author:M. L. N. Hanover [Hanover, M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy_city
ISBN: 9781416576778
Publisher: Pocket
Published: 2009-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

In the years before I left home, I went to the emergency room exactly once. Christmas Day, when I was twelve, I had a stomach flu so bad I was getting dehydrated. My father put me in the car, gave me a towel to puke into, and drove me to the ER where they drugged my guts into submission and kept me alive with an IV drip. By the time I got home, my brothers had opened all my presents for me.

Since inheriting Uncle Eric’s money, I’d spent a lot more time in the hospital recovering from wounds of my own and caring for the people who’d been hurt working with me. Swimming back to consciousness, I recognized the dim fluorescent twilight, the smell of antiseptic, the squeak of nurses’ shoes against linoleum. I tried to remember what had happened. A car wreck? No. Someone had stabbed me. Or something.

I tried to sit up and my left side from collarbone to hip lit on fire. I fell back to the bed, gasping. The ceiling above me was all-white acoustical tile. I came a little more awake. My right arm was bandaged. My left knee was swollen to about twice its normal size. I probed my ribs gently through the thin blue hospital gown. My right side felt merely sore and angry. I only tried touching the left side once.

Joseph Mfume. I’d been fighting with something—a rider in its full, unhidden form—and I’d been saved by the serial killer and rapist who’d started the whole messy thing. I remembered Sabine Glapion standing in the unfalling rain of the crossroads between the real world and Next Door. Well, she’d still been alive last time I saw her, so that had to be a good thing. I craned my neck, but there were no clocks. I needed to find out how long I’d been there. I needed to find out where exactly I was, for that matter.

I needed to find Aubrey and Ex and Chogyi Jake. The best I could manage was a nurse call button. After what felt like an hour, I hit it again. A couple hours after that, a nurse came, explained to me that I had hairline fractures in two of my ribs, soft tissue damage to the connective tissue in my knee, and they’d stapled my arm closed where it had been cut. When I asked him who’d brought me in, he didn’t know. When I asked for my stuff, he said he’d try to find it. He pronounced my name “Jane” and I didn’t correct him.

A couple junior cups of fruit juice later, I was feeling almost human. The so-called hairline fractures hurt like hell anytime I moved or laughed or breathed in too deep, but I took comfort in the intellectual knowledge that they only felt shattered. I forced myself to sit up, then slowly, carefully, figured out how I could walk without mind-altering pain. By the time a different nurse appeared with my things, I could see the first, faint light of dawn in the windows.

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