Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
But I will, Elena thought after the doctor left the room. I’ll remember every word. Words exchanged while her father was stripped of his inhibitions and his walls.
Perhaps she should’ve been angry at being denied those words when he was fully himself, but Elena had lost too many people that she loved. She wasn’t going to throw one away when there was a chance to salvage a relationship from the wreckage.
Taking a seat on the stool, she took her father’s hand again. “I’m here, Papa.” She kept her word through the rainy hours that followed . . . all the way to two hours after dawn, when the machines went haywire and what felt like a hundred people rushed into the room.
13
Elena moved with hunter speed to get herself and her wings out of the way, glad the medics were focused enough not to be put off by her presence. The numbness that had protected her earlier was gone, her heart pounding so hard that it hurt, as if it was beating itself to a pulp against her rib cage.
The doctors and nurses were saying medical words in shorthand bursts but she couldn’t process them, didn’t understand. All she knew was that they were injecting drugs into her father’s IV line and a thin doctor with fine black braids was yelling, “Shut those damn alarms off!” and a nurse whose skin bore evidence of a recent sunburn was racing in with a cart and her father was motionless, and she couldn’t tell if his heart was beating any longer.
So when everyone went silent, her ears yet rung and she didn’t hear what the doctor was saying when she spoke to Elena. The name badge clipped to the pocket of her lab coat said Dr. Sharice Gupta. A nice name, Elena found herself thinking, the world a chamber of silent echoes.
Dr. Gupta’s mouth stopped moving. She reached out, placed a hand on Elena’s arm, her wedding ring a bright gold against the deep brown of her skin. “Ms. Deveraux?”
Elena looked up. “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding so normal that she wondered if she was having an out-of-body experience. “Is my father all right?”
Is my father dead?
The real question. The one she couldn’t ask, couldn’t even shape in her mouth.
“We’ve stabilized him.” Dr. Gupta shoved her hands into the large lower pockets of the lab coat. “The acute downward spiral is concerning, but this type of thing does sometimes occur post-surgery.”
Tiny lines flared out from the corners of her eyes as she frowned. “His stats are what they were before the incident, and we’ve switched to another post-operative drug on the off chance that he had a reaction to his current meds. We’ll be monitoring him intensively over the next few hours to see how he responds.”
Elena’s mind flashed to the image of her father as a small boy who’d had to watch his mother be murdered, helpless and scared and unable to stop the monsters. Jeffrey hated being out of control. “Can I stay with him?”
“Yes, but you’ll have staff walking in and out throughout.”
“That’s fine.”
Nodding, the doctor cleared the room, but paused to say, “I guess I feel like I can say this because you were one of us once. Human. Able to die. And because I know hunters are tough—I’ve had more than one of you under my care.”
When Elena didn’t interrupt, Dr. Gupta nodded in Jeffrey’s direction. “Make the most of the time you have with him. There are no guarantees in life or in death. He could make a complete recovery, or he could slip away. If you have anything to say, say it now. There’s a lot of literature to support the idea that people in states like his can hear what’s spoken to them.”
“I will,” was all Elena said, and after the doctor left, she went and sat with her father, her hand over his for a long time. But she didn’t talk about the past—because she and Jeffrey, they’d already spoken the most critical words. “You won’t be alone while you’re here. If I’m not here, then Gwendolyn, Beth, Amy, or Eve will be with you. Your family. All of us.”
Jeffrey might’ve buried the majority of his heart with Marguerite, but he hadn’t been a bad father to her half sisters, and he hadn’t been an awful husband to Gwendolyn. Oh, he’d had his moments, as when—driven by protective fear—he’d tried to forbid Eve from becoming a hunter, but he’d also bought Eve a motorcycle as a graduation present when she finished her training at Guild Academy.
That motorcycle was the precise color and model Eve had been salivating over.
Jeffrey was a complicated man, but he paid attention to his children and treated his wife with respect. He’d loved Eve and Amy, even Beth, as much as he could—and it had been enough for them to love him back. Because that was the only Jeffrey they’d ever known.