Memory of Fire Read online

  CPR? Lauren looked down at Jake, at the shotgun she held, and back up at the house. She needed to be in there, not out here. She could free Pete up to do cardiac compressions. She knew rescue breathing—that ought to be worth something. And Jake…she would find something to do with Jake.

  Pete was doing CPR on Eric. She sat there staring at the mike, realizing that the one person she could truly trust in Cat Creek—the one who knew who she was and also knew that she was innocent of the crimes that someone had attempted to pin on her—the one person she could have counted on, was in there dying.

  Because if Pete was doing CPR, then Eric was dying. Oh, God. Eric couldn't die on her. He couldn't leave her alone in Cat Creek with people who wanted to kill her and her son.

  She grabbed Jake under one arm and slid out the door. With the shotgun tucked under her other arm and the safety on, she sprinted for the house. She bolted up the stairs, charged inside, and found Pete kneeling over Eric, fighting to remove a bulletproof vest that hadn't been, with a bloody gas mask beside him on the floor.

  She swung around, panicked, thumb on the safety—but she and Pete and Jake and unmoving Eric seemed to be alone in the house.

  "I can breathe him for you," she said. She tried not to see the pool of blood beneath Eric. She had never in her life seen so much blood at one time.

  Pete, fingers interlaced, pressing on Eric's chest, just nodded. He was counting under his breath. "Thirteen…fourteen…fifteen…" He switched position, checked for Eric's pulse, blew several breaths into his lungs, then returned to Eric's chest. "Settle Jake. Then come help."

  She looked around the room, placed the shotgun on the mantel well out of Jake's reach, and told Jake, "Baby wall." She dragged the couch out from the wall, sending clouds of dust into the air and disturbing a mouse—which shot across the floor and under the door into the kitchen—then she jammed the two armchairs into the spaces on either side of the couch and the wall. Instant playpen.

  "Sit right there," she told Jake, dropping him into the enclosed area. "Play. Look out the windows."

  She did a quick check for anything that might hurt Jake—dangling cords, stray mouth-sized objects, electrical outlets and things to stick in them—but she didn't see anything. Praying that she hadn't overlooked something lethal, she hurried across the room and dropped to the ground beside Pete. She felt warm fluid soaking into the knees of her jeans, and did not let herself think of where that warmth and wetness came from. She and Pete would save Eric. He would live. He had to live.

  "Count of four. You breathe when my hands come up on four, move back when they go down on one," Pete said, running his fingers over Eric's chest to find the right spot on the sternum. He rested the heel of his left hand on the sternum, the heel of his right hand on top of the left, and interlaced his fingers. "You ready?"

  She nodded, tipped Eric's jaw back, clamped his nose closed, and opened his mouth. He was still warm. His skin was a horrible blue-gray and his eyes, half-open, stared at nothing. But he was still warm.

  He's going to live, she told herself, and breathed into his lungs, and felt his chest rise, and resolutely did not allow herself to dwell on a day with dappled sunlight, and a single teenage kiss. He's going to live.

  You have to live. You can't leave me here alone with Jake—not in this town where someone wants us dead. You're supposed to protect us. You have to live.

  She heard Pete's voice droning, "One one-thousand…two one-thousand…three one-thousand…breathe one-thousand…" over and over. She breathed. In between breaths, she looked over her shoulder to where she could see Jake's legs and feet moving around behind the couch. She listened with everything in her for the first faint scream of the ambulance siren.

  She prayed. Endlessly, she told Eric he was going to live.

  And then, before she really comprehended what was happening, the rescue squad arrived and strong men and women were pulling her back and out of the way; they put a tube into Eric's airway, started IV lines, shocked him with a defibrillator, injected drugs into their IVs, and strapped him onto a gurney.

  And then they and he were gone, and she and Pete were left staring at each other, both covered with blood, while the Laurinburg cops poured into the place and started asking questions neither of them had answers for. The only one who knew what had happened—the only one who had even the faintest idea what he'd found at the farm—was on his way to Scotland Memorial Hospital at that very moment, with a woman squeezing air into his lungs with a big blue-plastic bulb and a man pressing on his chest to do the work his heart would have been doing if it had still been beating.

  She wandered away from the cop who was asking her questions, gathered Jake into her arms, and held him close to her. Clutching him, she dropped onto the couch and shut her eyes tight. She felt the tears burning their way down her cheeks, she tasted salt at the back of her throat, and choked around the lump there. She hadn't felt so alone in the world since Brian's death.

  Graywinds, Ballahara

  Seolar stood in the doorway for a long while, watching Molly sitting in the sunroom, the firelight highlighting her hair with brilliant red-gold. She sat watching the snow falling; she'd been so still and silent that he began to worry something had happened to her. Then she turned and said, "You might as well come in here."

  "I did not wish to disturb you."

  "I'm just thinking. Nothing much to disturb." She smiled, but her eyes still looked somber.

  Seolar walked over to her side. "I am sorry for the distress my actions have caused you—"

  Molly held up a hand to stop him. "Not that. Not now. I've considered the bitterness of life and the unfairness of the choices each of us are forced to make until I can't stand to think of it anymore. We'll talk about the state of our two worlds, and what they both need, and what we must do. But later. Not now. Right now, I'd really just like to have your company."

  He touched her, resting his hand on her shoulder, and trembled with the audacity of it. "Truly?"

  She smiled at him, and did not pull away from his touch. "Truly."

  They stood so close that he could feel her warmth, so close that he could smell the sweet scent of her skin. He smiled at her, and felt his face grow warm with his nervousness.

  She took a half step closer to him and said, "What do the tattoos on your face mean?" She touched a finger to his karayar.

  "Karayar," he said. "They chronicle my life from the time I reached the age of choice; each rank, each honor. A few other things."

  She stroked the finger along the line of his cheek. "They're pretty."

  He laughed a little; when he thought of them, all he ever thought of was the pain he underwent each time a new one was added. "They're words in an old, old language—the first written language of the veyâr. We don't use it for anything else anymore." He started to tell her more about the karayar, but stopped. Out of nerves, he babbled; he felt foolish. He didn't know what to say to her, but he didn't think a lecture on veyâr facial tattoos would accomplish…what?

  What did he hope to accomplish? He looked into her eyes—not veyâr eyes, but not truly human, either. She was exotic, but beautiful. He slid a hand around her waist and stepped a little closer to her. Not close enough that their bodies touched, but so close that he could feel the heat between them as pressure.

  "Molly," he whispered.

  "Seo." Her hand moved from his cheek to the back of his head, and she pulled his face close to hers, and touched his lips lightly with her own.

  He kissed her slowly. She closed her eyes, and he ran a hand through her hair and pulled her so close that their bodies touched along their length; in that instant, he could imagine her beside him in his bed. He wanted to experience the union of their flesh. He wanted to undress her, to claim her.

  Behind them, at the door, someone cleared a throat.

  Molly pulled away, startled, and Seolar turned, wanting to kill whoever had interrupted them.

  Birra stood with his back to them.
r />   "What?" Seolar asked.

  "We have a break in the weather at last. We need to leave now."

  Seolar turned back to Molly. She gave him a tiny smile and an even slighter shrug. "Ah, well. There's always Copper House."

  With his body aching from denied passion, Seolar bowed to her and said, "Then we shall find another time. Soon."

  "You promise?"

  "I do."

  Scotland Memorial Hospital, Laurinburg

  Lauren sat beside Pete in the ICU. Freshly showered and in clean clothes, she still felt like she was wearing Eric's blood. The news was uniformly bad—the doctor had Eric on a ventilator, Eric had never regained consciousness, the staff was trying to track down a family member to tell them whether they wanted to remove life support or not.

  Lauren, holding the finally sleeping Jake in her arms, thought of Oria. If this had happened in Oria, she could have done something to help Eric. She could have tried magic. She couldn't bring Brian back from the dead, but Eric wasn't dead yet, and she sure could have magicked a bullet hole out of existence.

  But the only gate she knew of lay in Cat Creek, and she didn't think the ER staff would let her drag Eric and his life support to Cat Creek so that she could shove him through a magic mirror.

  She looked sidelong at Pete, who had been in and out of the ICU since they'd finally finished up with the Laurinburg police.

  "Pete?"

  "Yeah." He'd been staring in glum silence at the floor for a long time. He barely raised his head when she spoke to him.

  "Are there any mirrors in Eric's room?"

  He shrugged and glanced at her, a little curious, but still clearly focused in his own world. "Mirrors? There are…two, I think. The one over the sink and the full-length one on the bathroom door."

  She knew how to get to Oria. How to find her parents' house there. She could feel it calling her even as she sat on the couch. If she had a mirror, any mirror big enough to pull a human being through, she could make a gate. She hadn't done it since she was ten, but she knew that she could do it.

  The problem would be working around the ICU staff, their glass-walled rooms, their cautious watchfulness.

  "Pete?"

  Now, sensing something from her shift in position or the tone of her voice, he watched her, unblinking, and said nothing.

  "I can save his life."

  Those cool, intelligent eyes assessed her. "This have anything to do with Eric's big secret?"

  "What do you know about that?"

  "Not enough. But you don't live most of your life in a town as small as Cat Creek without getting the feeling sometimes that there's more going on than anyone is willing to admit to. So this is about that."

  "Yes."

  "You have to let me help."

  She nodded. "There's no way I could do it without you."

  "And you have to let me know what the secret is."

  She managed a small smile. "There's no way you won't know. Just…promise me you won't…um, freak out. Or get scared. Or…anything."

  "Not my style."

  "No. It isn't." She cleared her throat, looked down at Jake, who was so beautiful asleep, and dropped her voice to a near whisper. "You have to get all three of us into his room. And you have to figure out a way to get the nurses and the doctors and everyone out of his room for…" She frowned, trying to guess how much time she would need. "…for ten minutes. Maybe more. When we get ready to move…er, to fix him, you're going to have to keep the door shut against them. Because the alarms on the machines are all going to start going off."

  He looked at her, nodded thoughtfully, and stared down at the floor again. Now, however, he didn't seem lost in despair. He just looked like someone who was thinking.

  After a moment, he nodded. "Got it. Bring Jake and come on."

  CHAPTER 13

  Scotland Memorial Hospital

  THEY HID OUT in the cafeteria until shortly after Pete knew the shift change would be complete. Then he took Lauren and Jake upstairs, presented them and his badge at the door, and told the nurse who answered, "Found his fiancée and their little boy. You got any of the rest of the family yet?"

  The nurse who answered the door gave Lauren and Jake a pitying look. "We haven't managed to get in touch with anyone. We're short-staffed because of the flu, and all our beds in all our units are full, so the supervisor is having to do a lot of relief. If she was his wife, we could let her sign papers but…they're not married, so she can't…but if you or she could call a family member…" Her eyes kept straying back to Jake. "You're his fiancée?"

  Lauren nodded.

  "Aw, honey," the nurse said, "you'd better come on in and see him."

  Lauren nodded again, not saying anything.

  Still the nurse blocked the way in, obviously struggling with something. At last she said, "We shouldn't let the little boy in. Children aren't allowed in the ICU."

  "His son," Pete said, his voice thick with emotion.

  The nurse winced. "Screw it. Supervisor's tied up with flu cases down in the ER. She won't be able to get back up here for ages. Fifteen minutes, and I didn't see anything."

  "Thank you," Lauren told her. She didn't have to feign the anguish in her own voice.

  Eric looked like hell. His skin was still gray, in spite of the IV fluids and the unit of blood running in via controllers. He had a big plastic tube shoved down his throat, taped in place and connected to a machine the size of Lauren's washing machine with a bellowslike contraption inside a clear plastic casing that sucked in and out in rhythm to the rise and fall of his chest. Its display blinked and flashed like cheap Christmas ornaments, and it hissed and clicked and beeped and bubbled. Over Eric's head, a wall unit displayed a green line that she could identify as a heartbeat, along with a number of other scrolling green lines that she couldn't even begin to guess at. His eyelids were padded with white gauze and taped shut. His big, strong hands lay limp on top of the smooth, neatly turned-down covers. A thick pad of white bandages, blood-stained at the very center, and with ballpoint-pen lines marking the periphery of the bloodstain, with the date and time neatly inked by an arrow connecting to the line, covered his chest and belly.

  "His doctor is in surgery right now—we had another case come in through the ER," the nurse said. "We have another doctor on call for emergencies, but I know that Dr. Sakamurja would prefer to talk to you when he's free. If you can wait."

  Lauren nodded. "I'm not going anywhere. What can you tell me about him? About all of this?" She pointed to the machines, the monitors, the IV controllers.

  The nurse licked her lips. "He's not good. We have a ventilator breathing for him—he isn't doing it on his own. His heart is beating pretty well at the moment, but we had an awful fight earlier just to keep it going. The drugs going into his IVs seem to have stabilized that, but I can't promise you it will stay that way." She took a deep breath and said, "There's more, too. One of the two bullets went through his spine at the third thoracic vertebra. It…damaged the spinal cord."

  "How badly?"

  "The doctor will have to give you the full details of the damage, but it was severe. Leaking of the cerebrospinal fluid and swelling of the tissue are complicating our attempts to treat him."

  "But he won't be able to walk again, even if he ever does wake up, will he? He'll be lucky to be able to feed himself, or say his own name. Right?"

  "Well…" Lauren could see the nurse fighting with herself—trying to figure out how much to tell, how much to hold back. She was searching for a way to sugarcoat the bad news. Lauren decided to make it easier for her.

  "Um…Ms. Baldwin…"

  "Just call me Nancy."

  "Nancy…Deputy Stark told me he was pretty sure Eric was going to die. I just want to know, if a miracle happens and he doesn't, how much of him is going to be left?"

  The nurse nodded. "Neural injuries are…are difficult to assess at best. But the damage to his spinal cord was…well, severe. I saw the X-rays—the…um…injury…"
>
  "The bullet," Lauren said quietly.

  "Yes. The bullet. It severed the spinal cord completely, tore the sheath that covers the cord, shattered the bones that are supposed to protect it, and badly damaged one of his lungs, his liver, his gallbladder, and portions of his intestine on its way through and out. The other bullet nicked the aortic artery and hit his left kidney, and got more of his intestine."

  Lauren closed her eyes. "The bastard," she whispered. She turned to Pete. "Why didn't his bulletproof vest protect him? He was wearing it. You had to take it off him to do CPR."

  "Plenty of bullets go right through body armor," Pete said. "Any bullet shot from most any rifle, or armor-piercing bullets shot from just about anything…Armor can help you. But it's no guarantee."