Queen of the Dead (14 page)

The silence held for a long moment, her hopeful words still hanging in the air.

“So what does that mean?” I asked finally. “What do you want from me?” My head was spinning, but not so much that I missed the distinct under current of tension in the room. There was an endgame here, even if I wasn’t sure what it was.

“Undergo formal training, see if you can officially become one of us,” Silas said with a shrug.

“If?” Lucy scoffed at him.

“If he stays in the Central Division,” John said, “he can continue to live at home and—”

“Except your last trainee has not yet completed her certification,” Silas said sharply.

John jerked around to glare at him.

“Silas, don’t,” Lucy said.

“There’s no sense in denying it.” Silas pulled a handkerchief from inside his suit coat and dabbed his face. “Besides, my division has the most extensive resources for—”

“So you keep saying,” John snapped. “But I have yet to—”

“Stop. Just stop,” I said loudly. “Yesterday, I didn’t know about any of this or any of you. And now you want me to make some kind of decision? I don’t even know what I’m choosing!”

“You need some time to think,” Lucy said instantly.

“Not too much time.” Silas tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket with a frown.

“This must be very overwhelming, I’m sure,” John said.

No kidding.

“You have our number,” he continued. “We hope you’ll be in touch with
one
of us soon.” He gave Silas a glare.

I nodded. Yeah, yeah. Right away. After I’d had a chance to sort through everything they’d just dumped on me…and maybe taken a look through the boxes and papers my dad had left behind in the basement. I wanted some independent verification on all of this. I got the distinct sense that they might have told me just about anything to get me to come with them.

I walked out through the theater front doors, after Lucy demonstrated they weren’t nearly as boarded shut as they had seemed at first glance, but I had to double-back to the rear of the building for my car.

Mina was leaning against her car when I slipped through the fence into the empty lot.

“Are they fighting over you yet?” she asked as I walked by.

I didn’t say anything.

“Yeah.” She smiled tightly, her face pale in the glare of the theater’s security light. “Thought so. You are cash money, my friend.”

I stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She straightened up. “The better the talent in your region, the more jobs you can take, the more money you make.”

“They didn’t say anything about that.”

“Of course not. It’s all about the mission, right?” She rolled her eyes at my apparent stupidity. “All of them work other jobs. My dad’s in construction. Lucy’s a real estate agent in L.A. Silas does something with a bank. The more they make for the Order, the less they have to contribute out of pocket to the cause.”

“There have to be others who—”

“We’re a dying breed. Every generation the gift gets weaker. The Order is going to have to relax their standards soon, or there’ll hardly be any full members after they’re gone,” she said, tipping her head toward the theater. “Except, of course, for you, the wunderkind, who actually ended up with real talent even with only one gifted parent. The
rest
of us…” She shrugged.

“You make it sound like you’re half blind. You can still see and hear the…echoes.” That term did not sound right. Just the taste of it my mouth felt…wrong.

“Yes, and if they hold perfectly still, I can catch them just fine,” she said mockingly.

“Catching them is not everything. You can help in other ways.”

“By being friends with them, like you?” She grinned at me. “Bet you didn’t tell them that, did you, superstar?”

I looked away.

“You’re going to have to choose, you know. The Order doesn’t exactly endorse free thinking like that.”

I edged closer to her, touched her chin to tip her face to the light. The bruise looked worse in the stark shadows. “And this is how they show it?”

She pulled away. “Training exercises.”

“Right,” I said. “Your dad?” John had seemed like a nice enough guy, except when he’d yelled at Mina. Then…it had been like a glimpse of someone or something else under the surface. I had a hard time seeing my dad, who’d been the most laid-back parent I knew, being friends with him.

She glared at me. “No. I told you. Training. I didn’t move fast enough.” She let out a breath. “I’m never quite fast enough.”

“You could leave,” I said. “You’re over eighteen, and—”

“And go where? Do what?” she demanded. “This is my whole life.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“No.” She shook her head. “All I need to do is pass this last test, and I become a full member. Then I can go anywhere,” she said. “I can move to Lucy’s territory or even Silas’s.” Mina rolled her eyes, but there was a wistful edge in her voice.

She seemed to hear herself then, and she straightened up, folding her arms across her chest.

“You worry about your own problems, Casper lover. Let me deal with mine.” She gave me a ferocious smile. “After all, I’m not the one who has to explain all of this to her majesty.”

That was a good point.

E
ven though it was the middle of the night, the hospital kicked things up into high gear for the miraculous recovery of coma girl. There were CAT scans, MRIs, X-rays, blood work, reflex tests, and a sleepy neurologist, with truly spectacular bed head, paged from home.

In some ways, it was almost worse than the last couple months of being invisible. Everyone asking me how I was doing, did this hurt, could I wiggle my toes, and telling menot to be afraid. All this intense attention and caring focused on a me that was not really
me
…and I couldn’t escape it. It was almost torture. Here’s what you want, but
you
can’t have it.

Mrs. Turner stayed with me through all the tests and scans. She followed where she could and waited outside doors like the most persistent of guard dogs until the nurses or technicians brought me back within her sight. It was both reassuring (I didn’t want someone to forget about me in a corner somewhere when I couldn’t exactly speak up and remind them) and kind of sad.

It was like she was afraid Lily was going to disappear…or go back to sleep. She was right, of course, even if she didn’t know it yet. I felt bad about that. She seemed like a nice enough woman, her horrible taste in sweaters aside. She didn’t deserve to have her hopes crushed—as they inevitably would be once I got out and Lily went back to “sleep.” And I
would
get out. I refused to contemplate any other possibility. It was just a matter of when and how.

During one of the breaks in testing, I’d used one of the many Ouija boards to painstakingly spell out a request for Mrs. Turner to call Will’s cell—she’d had Lily’s phone charged and waiting in the bedside table, just waiting for this day…or rather the day she thought it to be: the return of her daughter.

The call had gone to voice mail, but she’d left Will a message, telling him Lily was awake and asking for him.

That should have been more than enough to trigger a callback, or, more likely, a frantic visit to find out what was going on, because I knew he thought Lily was gone, far beyond the point of waking up and asking for anything.

But no, not yet.

“Are you doing okay?” Mrs. Turner asked, when we got back to my room—no, Lily’s room—after the last test.

I nodded, a new skill I could add to my repertoire. Dr. Bedhead (I couldn’t remember his real name) was “amazed” at Lily’s sudden improvement, progress that could not be justified based on early test results. Medically, there were signs of increased and unusual brain activity—something I did not want to contemplate—but nothing that would allow Lily to be awake and moving around like this. Meanwhile, with every hour that passed, I gained more and more control over her body, which was freaking me out.

Hurry up, Will, hurry up.
I repeated the words over and over in my head.

I was also starting to get a little bit grumpy. I was tired, my head hurt—or Lily’s did, and I could feel it—and I’d just discovered, during one of the many times I’d been bodily shifted from a gurney to one machine or table or another, that while Lily Turner might have a waist even smaller than mine, her hips and thighs were enough to make me run screaming. If I, you know, could actually
run
anywhere.

Lily was all curves and soft where I’d had very hard-earned muscles. God, it was awful.

Look, I understood that she’d been in a coma for months and months. So, call me shallow, accuse me of being cruel to an injured girl, whatever. This wasn’t my body. I didn’t like it, didn’t want it. Being trapped inside of it was like…well, wearing my worst fears on the outside. Not that anyone knew it was me in here, but
I
did.

“Lots of tests, but you should be done for a while now,” Mrs. Turner continued, squeezing my hand reassuringly as she resumed her seat next to my bed.

Thank God. I was surprised we weren’t glowing green from all the radiation, contrast, dye, and whatever else had been shot into us over the last few hours.

“Do you feel like trying to get some rest?” she asked warily, clearly caught between motherly instinct and her own fears of what might happen if I…we went to sleep. Honestly, I wasn’t too sure either, nor did I want to find out. What if I got stuck, down in that darkness again, and couldn’t find my way back up? This was not ideal, but it was better than that.

I shook my head in answer. It was getting easier and easier to do that.

“How about some television?” she suggested, reaching for the remote.

She turned on the television and flipped to a channel with an infomercial about a juicer.

I relaxed a little into my pillows. It was kind of nice beingtaken care of instead of always taking care of someone else. A novelty for me, really. Even though my experience with Lily’s family had only been over the last few hours, I’d seen enough to make me the teensiest bit jealous. They cared about her. They didn’t throw her things away even when it looked like she might not come back. Heck, they’d re-created her entire room here at the hospital. There’d been no garbage bags full of her belongings, no donations to the Salvation Army of hermost precious memories. And she’d been in this irreversible coma a LOT longer than I’d been dead.

If it had been me in this coma instead of Lily…

You’d be here by yourself.

I shoved that thought away, even though I knew it was true. When I was fourteen, I fell from the cheerleading pyramid at practice—stupid Ashleigh Hicks and her wobbly knees—and hurt my wrist. Coach had taken me to the hospital for X-rays, but she couldn’t stay. They’d tried to reach my parents, but no one had answered at my mom’s house (shocker) and my dad was in Germany (or possibly the Days Inn downtown with his then mistress, now wife, and not taking any calls to keep up with the illusion of international unavailability).

I could have called friends or whomever I was dating at the time—I don’t even remember who that was now—but who wants to put their family’s dysfunction on display like that?
Hi, my parents are so messed up, they don’t even care that I’m in the hospital?
I’d have sooner invited them over to myhouse to watch my mother stumbling around in her bathrobe.

So, I’d taken a cab home with my arm in a sling. My dadonly found out about it when the hospital sent a bill, andthen he was pissed. Apparently, I’d used the wrong insurance card.

That would never have happened to Lily.

Whatever. None of that mattered now. I just needed to focus on getting out of here.

Why wasn’t Will calling back? What if it was because he was with
her
, Mina, Miss Frizztastic? Just the idea made me sick. But even if he was, no way would he ignore acall about Lily. He knew better than that. So what was the deal? If she’d gotten him in some kind of trouble that I was going to have deal with, I would kill her. Then we’d see how
she
felt about getting boxed, wouldn’t we?

Mrs. Turner turned the channel to some early morning news program, and the brighter flickering of the screen hurt my eyes.

The first time I’d ever seen Lily, she was staring blankly ahead at the television, the twin reflections of screen dancing in her glassy eyes. Was that still how she looked even with me in here?

I shuddered.

Maybe…but maybe not. Tyler had noticed some kind of difference in Lily. I wondered what it had been that had tipped him off. I couldn’t ask—not even with the time-intensive and laborious “spell it out through the Ouija board” method. (That was seriously getting old, and fast, by the way.) Mr. Turner had left to take Tyler, who’d been more than a little shaken up, home a while ago. I’d scared Tyler, apparently. I hadn’t meant to. Then again, it had worked and the Turners were no longer talking about taking Lily home to die…so I was going to count that as a win. She had to stay alive long enough for Will to get me out of here, at the very least.

I tried to shift to alleviate the dull ache and pressure all up and down my left side, but I couldn’t quite manage that much movement yet. Nor did I really want to be here long enough to attain that new level of skill. And yet, the cell phone on the bed side table next to me stubbornly refused to ring.

Mrs. Turner caught me staring at the phone.

“He hasn’t called back, I promise,” she said. “I just checked it.”

When? I hadn’t seen her do it.

“You’re scowling at me,” she said with wonder in her voice.

Yeah, well, she should get used to it. How hard would it be for her to check it again and show me? I mean, seriously.

My fingers twitched with the desire to snatch the phone away and see for myself.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, amused. “I’m still your mother.”

Uh, nope.

“Go ahead. If you can get it, you can have it.” She nudged the phone a few inches closer to me, but it was still much farther away than Tyler’s wrist had been.

After one final glare at her, which seemed to have no effect on her serenity, I summoned all of my effort and made a lurching sideways grab for it.

The phone skittered away from my fingertips and plunged toward the floor. Mrs. Turner caught it before it hit.

She put it back on the nightstand and then shifted me by the shoulders in the bed until I was upright again. “Give it another try.”

When she could just hand it to me? Why? What was this, some kind of game to her?

I frowned at her, which didn’t seem to bother her at all.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to, if it’s too hard.”

Right. If I wanted that phone, I would get it. Period. I took a deep breath, focused on the phone, and tried to control my slide/fall toward it. This time I managed to lock my fingers on it before it slipped away.

I shrieked in frustration on the inside, but nothing louder than an annoyed huff escaped my lips.

Mrs. Turner just put the phone in place and set me to rights again without a word.

It occurred to me then that she
was
actually playing a game of sorts. She was using something I wanted to push me into further progress.

How wonderful for her and Lily. But just give ME the damn phone! I didn’t want further progress. I wanted Will and I wanted out!

I locked gazes with Mrs. Turner, doing my best to convey that sentiment without words.

A knock on the door startled both of us. My head whipped around, the response time almost as fast as if it had really been me rather than me in a Lily shell.

A priest stood in the doorway, his hand still raised in the knocking position. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“Of course not, Father. My daughter and I were just having a disagreement.” She smiled at me fondly, which made me want to kick her. I would not be so easily dismissed.

“I’m Father Hayes, the chaplain here at St. Catherine’s. I was visiting another patient down the hall, and I heard about your daughter’s miraculous recovery. I had to come and see for myself.” He gave us a shaky and uncertain smile.

Um, okay, Father. You’ve had your glimpse of miracle me. Now, go away so we can get back to the matter at hand.

But oh, no…it couldn’t be that easy.

“Come in.” Mrs. Turner waved him forward. “I’m Corrine Turner. This is my daughter, Lily.”

He stepped farther into the room and nodded at us. His gaze met mine for a bare second before it bounced away swiftly, focusing on Mrs. Turner.

“Is it true she was in a coma for almost a year?” he asked. His Adam’s apple bobbed above his collar like it was an independent creature trying to escape his throat.

What was making him so jumpy? Also, hello, I am here and can hear you.

“Since last September,” she said.

“Now she’s awake. Just like that?” he asked, sounding more concerned than overjoyed.

Mrs. Turner didn’t seem to notice. “Yes,” she said, beaming.

“And they have no idea why. The tests—”

“Don’t show anything yet, but as you know, some things are still beyond the understanding of science.”

“God truly works in mysterious ways,” he said with a tight smile.

I was not liking the vibe I was getting from him.

“Can I ask, have you noticed any…changes in her personality or unusual behavior?” he asked in a rush.

What the hell?
I stared at him, and once more, his gazedarted toward me and then away just as quickly, like hewas afraid to look at me for too long. Did he…actually suspect something was going on? I supposed in a technical sense what I’d done could be seen as a form of possession, even though that was far from what I’d intended. And priests and possession, well, I didn’t need Will and his bottomless bank of movie trivia to know there was a history, to say theleast.

Mrs. Turner cocked her head to one side with a laugh. “My daughter has been awake for only a few hours after coming out of what was called an irreversible coma. I’d say all of it has been unusual, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.” He shook his head, flustered.

“Is there something in particular you’re asking about, Father Hayes?” For the first time since the start of the conversation, Mrs. Turner’s voice held a hint of suspicion.

“No, no.” He raked a hand through his sandy brown hair before seeming to realize what he was doing and making a belated attempt to smooth it down. “Just trying to find pieces of hope in her story to share with other patients who might need it.”