Текст книги "Midnight blue-light special"

Автор книги: Seanan McGuire

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Twenty-three

“Don’t you worry about whether you failed your family. Family loves you, no matter what. Worry about whether you failed yourself. As long as the answer’s ‘no,’ then there’s still a chance that everything else will be okay.”

—Alice Healy

On the second floor of a warehouse somewhere in Manhattan, facing down a member of the Covenant of St. George

PETER’S EYES TRAVELED the length of my naked, filthy body, a smirk twisting up his lips. He lingered on my breasts for a moment before flicking to my right bicep. “Nice knife,” he said.

“Yeah, I got it from a real asshole,” I said. I didn’t move. The gun– mygun—in his hand told me that moving would be a bad idea. “I have an idea. How about you look the other way while I jump out the nearest window?”

“I have an idea. How about I hold you here while my colleagues come up the stairs, and this time, we make sure you don’t get away?” His smirk turned dark around the edges, transitioning from an implied threat to a very real one. “We want to take you home alive. But ‘alive’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘intact,’ and you’ll do a lot less running away without feet.”

“Mutilation? Really? That’s where you’re going with this? I guess you people have stopped thinking of yourselves as the good guys.” I glanced around while I spoke, looking for something I could use as an escape route. There were windows on the wall, no more than twenty feet away. All I had to do was reach the windows, and I’d be scot-free.

I made my decision in that moment. Maybe it wasn’t the bravest decision I could have made, but it was the only one that made sense. If the Covenant took me back to Europe, I’d tell them everything, and I’d be lucky if they killed me when they were done. No matter what else happened, I couldn’t leave this warehouse in their custody. I gathered what little strength I had left, saying one more silent prayer to whoever might be listening, and launched myself at Peter.

He shouted something that I didn’t quite make out, distracted as I was by the sound of the gun in his hand going off at the same time. A sharp pain punched through my stomach, sending duller shock waves through the rest of me. I did my best to ignore it. I had more important things to worry about, like yanking the knife off my bicep—cutting the shoelaces I’d been using to hold it there in the process—and jamming it into his shoulder as my momentum carried me into him. It wasn’t a fatal wound, but it distracted him for a few precious seconds as he shouted, grabbing at the blade. I grabbed the sides of his head, breathing in to steady myself.

He had time to give me one last, utterly stunned look before I was twisting hard to the left, turning his face away from me. There was a sharp snapping sound, and then he was collapsing, the dead weight of his body pulling him out of my hands. He took the knife down with him. I didn’t try to retrieve it.

I did scramble to grab my gun from his suddenly limp fingers, clamping one hand over the hole in my stomach to keep anything I needed from sliding out. It was a relatively small hole, thank God; if I’d been packing something with a larger caliber, I’d probably already be dead. As it was, the gut wound would definitely kill me if I didn’t get it taken care of fast, but for the moment, it was definitely a distraction from the pain in my feet. Maybe I’d get reallylucky, and shock would set in.

Maybe not.

Robert and Margaret must have heard the gunshot. I didn’t know where the door was, or whether it even had a lock, so I didn’t bother looking; I just turned and started half-running, half-limping toward the nearest window. I’d shoot it out if I had to. I’d do whatever it took to get out of this damn building. I’d die in the open air. If that was the closest I could get to a happy ending, then so be it. It was better than the alternative.

The door banged open when I was still only halfway there, accompanied by the sound of running footsteps. “Freeze!” snarled Robert.

I didn’t freeze. What was the worst thing he could do, shoot me? I was losing blood fast, and the room was starting to go dark around the edges. One more gunshot wouldn’t do anything but finish the job. As long as he couldn’t take me alive, I won.

“No,” said Margaret. Her tone was different, much more anxious . . . and her accent was gone. She sounded American. “You freeze.”

“Margaret?” Robert, on the other hand, sounded utterly puzzled. The footsteps stopped. Thank God. “What are you doing?”

“I’m holding a gun to your head,” said Margaret reasonably. No—not Margaret. It was Margaret’s voice, but it wasn’t Margaret speaking. The tones and accent were all wrong. “Verity? Stop running. I don’t know how long I can hold her.”

I stopped running. I was so tired I could barely breathe. I still managed to turn and smile wanly at the scene behind me: Margaret Healy, the woman who’d lost her anti-telepathy charm, holding a gun against the temple of Robert Bullard.

“Hello, Sarah,” I said.

* * *

Sarah contorted Margaret Healy’s lips into a wan smile. “You know, if you were bored, we could have gone to the ballet or something.” Servitors appeared from behind her, making their serpentine way into the room. Robert’s eyes tracked them, his expression never changing.

“I’ll keep that in mind for next time.” I raised the gun I’d reclaimed from Peter Brandt, aiming it squarely at Robert’s chest. My hand was shaking so badly that I was afraid I’d miss my target, something I hadn’t needed to worry about since elementary school. I removed my other hand from my stomach, using it to steady my elbow.

Margaret—Sarah—gasped. “Verity, you’re hurt.”

“Yeah, single gunshot wound to the abdomen. It hurts like a bitch and I’m losing a lot of blood here, so if you’re not the only member of the cavalry, this would be a great time to bring in reinforcements.” The servitors were good for looking intimidating, but without a dragon to give them orders, they weren’t going to be good for much beyond that. I didn’t know why she didn’t have a dragon with her, and I didn’t have time to worry about it. Spots were starting to appear around the edges of my vision.

“You’re going to die here,” said Robert. He sounded surprisingly calm, considering the situation he was in. “All of you. And you, witch, wherever you are, we’ll find you. You’ll pay for what you’ve done.”

It took me a moment to realize that he was talking to Sarah. I actually laughed a little, snorting indelicately through my nose. “Oh, dude. She’s not a witch. Witches are wayless dangerous.”

“Cuckoo to you, too,” said Margaret/Sarah, digging the barrel of her gun a little deeper into Robert’s temple. “Verity, can you walk?”

“I don’t really know.” Honesty is sometimes the best policy. “I do know I wouldn’t get very far if I tried. So I’m sort of opposed to trying.”

“Verity!” She sounded genuinely upset. No real surprise there. “I can’t hold her for much longer. She’s fightingme!”

“I didn’t know you could hold someone like this at all. It’s a new trick for you.”

“It was Kitty’s idea.” Margaret/Sarah’s face contorted like she’d been punched. “She’s fighting me hard, Very. Come on. We have to get you out of here before I lose her. Please.”

“Yes, do run,” said Robert. “You’ve killed one of us already. You’ve shown us where our weaknesses are. We’ll find you. And when we do, you’ll wish to God that you’d let us take you here and now. Or you could surrender. Let us treat your wounds, tell us where to find your witch, and submit to the mercy of the Covenant.”

“I wasn’t aware that we were in the business of mercy,” said Margaret, all cold fury and hate. Her voice was her own again, all traces of Sarah gone as she pulled her gun away from Robert’s temple and swung it toward me. I widened my stance, trying to cover both of them at once. It wasn’t going to work, and I knew it. From the satisfied gleam in her eyes, so did she. “You’ve befouled my mind, you little bitch. Do you know what that means?”

“It means you lose,” said Uncle Mike, stepping through the doorway behind her and aiming his crossbow at the back of her head. Istas was only half a step behind him, deceptively sweet-looking in a little pink pinafore. Her hair was pulled into girlish pigtails and tied off with white bows. She was smiling. That’s never a good sign with Istas.

“You’re outnumbered,” I said, with as much bravado as I could muster. “Drop your weapons. I promise we’ll be more fair to you than you were going to be to me.”

“No,” said Margaret, and cocked back the hammer on her gun—

–only to freeze as Istas calmly reached forward and fastened one rapidly expanding hand (already better classed as “a paw”) over the gun, completely engulfing both it and Margaret’s hand. “You may fire,” said Istas, as if she were conferring some great favor. “I will remove your entire arm a moment later, but you may fire.”

“I’d really rather she didn’t,” I said. The black spots were spreading. I teetered, catching myself at the last minute, and kept aiming my gun at Robert. “We have to . . . we gotta . . . this has to end. They can’t walk away from this.”

“But we can’t kill them, either,” said Dominic. He appeared in the doorway behind Uncle Mike. His face was set in a blank, expressionless mask. It didn’t waver as he looked past the heads of the Covenant agents to me, filthy, naked, and bleeding all over the warehouse floor. “If we kill them, the Covenant sends more.”

“We win,” said Robert.

Istas squeezed Margaret’s hand. Margaret yelped, unable to help herself. “I am not so sure of that,” said Istas. “There is a difference between ‘living’ and ‘retaining all your limbs.’”

“They can’t leave,” said Uncle Mike. “They know who Verity is. It’s not safe to let them go.”

“So they can’t live and they can’t die.” It was taking everything I had just to keep myself upright. “Oh, and here’s one more for you: Dominic can’t stay here if we send them home. They’d never forgive another defection.” There was no way to win. There was no way to get out of this with everyone still standing.

“No. But they might be willing to bury a traitor.” Dominic stepped around his former colleagues and crossed to where I was standing. He took the gun from my hand, aiming it at Robert as he slid an arm around my waist, holding me up. I let myself sag into him.

Then I realized what he’d just said. “What? No! No. We’re not going to kill you.” I wanted to pull away and glare at him. I didn’t have the strength.

“I wasn’t going to ask you to,” said Dominic. “Sarah?”

“I’m here.” Sarah stepped up behind Uncle Mike, moving into the room on silent feet. “Istas, let go of Margaret’s hands. Robert’s anti-telepathy charm is attached to his medal of St. George. Take it off him.”

“Yes,” said Istas. She released Margaret—although she didn’t release Margaret’s gun, and from the way Margaret groaned as Istas yanked it away, she broke at least one of Margaret’s fingers in the process—and turned toward Robert. To his credit, he didn’t flinch when Istas reached for his throat with her vast, taloned paw. The chain on his medal snapped easily when she pulled on it. Istas looked at the medal curiously for a moment, then shrugged and tucked it into the neckline of her dress.

“Sarah . . .” I said.

“It’s all right, Verity.” She smiled at me, uncertainly. “I can do this.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“We have no choice,” said Dominic softly. He tightened his arm around me. “They have to live. I have to die. I can’t let them endanger you, or your family. This is the only way.”

“But Sarah . . .”

“Trust her,” said Dominic.

I closed my eyes. “Okay.”

* * *

Cuckoos are natural memory manipulators. It’s part of how their power works. They fit into the world without leaving a seam, and that means they have to insert themselves, retroactively, into the lives of every person they meet. It’s an autonomic function most of the time, something that just happens around them, as easy and as natural as breathing. Sarah spent her days working to keep that very thing from happening; she wanted to be known and cared about for who she really was, and not because everyone she met decided that she was their long-lost sister, daughter, or best friend from college.

Even autonomic functions can become intentional, if you’re willing to work for it. I opened my eyes to see Sarah standing in front of Margaret and Robert, her eyes glowing such a brilliant white that it actually chased the black spots away from the edges of my vision. Margaret looked terrified. Robert looked resigned, like this was the fate he had been preparing himself for since the day he reached American soil.

“You’ll pay,” he said, in a calm, quiet tone. “We found you once, and we can find you again. Eventually, your whole stinking family will have to pay for your crimes against the Covenant, and against humanity.”

“Maybe that’s true,” I said, letting myself slump against Dominic. “But you know what? You won’t be the ones to come looking for us.”

“Hold them up,” said Sarah. I think I’m the only one who heard the tremor in her voice.

Istas grabbed Robert while Uncle Mike lowered his crossbow and grabbed Margaret. Sarah reached out and touched their foreheads, making skin contact. Skin contact always made it easier for her. The Covenant agents went limp.

That seemed like a good idea. I couldn’t feel my feet anymore, and I was so tired. I stopped fighting to keep myself upright at all. Staying awake and on my feet didn’t matter. We’d done it. The Covenant didn’t know—wouldn’t know—that the family survived. There would be no purge of Manhattan. We’d won, and that meant that I could rest.

The last thing I heard was Dominic shouting my name. Then there was nothing but the white glare from Sarah’s eyes, chasing away the shadows, and I fell into the light . . .

* * *

. . . only to fall back out again as Dominic shoved me away, grabbing the gun from my hand in the same motion (didn’t he already have my gun? Something was wrong, and I couldn’t tell what it was anymore . . .). Sarah was on the floor, clear fluid leaking from a hole at the center of her forehead, and Margaret was somehow free, her own gun aimed at Dominic’s chest. “Traitor!” she shouted, and fired.

For some reason, the servitors were gone. For some reason, nothing moved to stop her when she pulled the trigger. Something should have stopped her. Instead, Dominic staggered back, making a sharp barking noise as the bullet slammed through his collarbone. Then he raised my gun and fired three times, aiming for Margaret, who ducked easily out of the way. One bullet went into Uncle Mike. The other two went into Istas. I knew from past experience that two bullets weren’t going to do much but slow her down.

Slowing her down was more than enough. The force of the bullets knocked her backward and allowed Robert to break free. He spun around, pulling a knife from his belt, and drove it into her throat. Istas keened like a wounded animal, and fell. And all this before I could hit the floor.

I landed hard, my head bouncing off the wood before I managed to catch myself. I raised my head, squinting, in time to see Margaret shoot Dominic again. This time, her aim was better, befitting a Healy girl: she grouped her shots at the center of his chest, three holes appearing in the fabric of his shirt. He looked surprised. Then he fell, too.

(This is wrong, this is wrong, we don’t lose like this, this iswrong  . . .)

I tried to scream, but the air wasn’t there. Margaret smiled as she turned toward me, raised her gun, and pulled the trigger again.

And then there was nothing at all.

Twenty-four

“Don’t you dare leave me, baby girl. There’s been enough dying. Mind your momma, now, and stay.”

—Frances Brown

Waking up in an unknown location—but at least it isn’t a warehouse somewhere in Manhattan, being held captive by the Covenant of St. George, which makes it a definite improvement (also, not dead)

“NOTHING” LOOKED a lot like the glaring white of an active cuckoo’s eyes. I opened my eyes. The unrelenting whiteness didn’t go away, although it did change forms, becoming the overhead lights which were shining directly down into my face. I groaned and tried to block the light with my arm, only to discover that the various tubes connected to my body made that impossible.

They don’t usually connect tubes to dead people. Not unless they’re preparing them for embalming, and this wasn’t a funeral home. It didn’t smell right for that. I blinked, abandoning my efforts to cover my face. The glare got a little more manageable as my eyes adjusted. Only a little, though. I blinked again, finally settling for squinting through my eyelashes as I tried to get a handle on where, exactly, I was—other than “not dead.”

The memory of being shot the first time, by Peter, was still very vivid and real. The memory of being shot the second time, by Margaret, was already fading like a bad dream. “Dammit, Sarah,” I muttered, and twisted in the bed enough to look around.

It was a small room, with walls painted a cheery shade of eggshell blue and trimmed in even cheerier yellow. Various machines beeped quietly to themselves, monitoring my vital signs. I followed one of the tubes in my arm up to an IV stand, where a bag of clear liquid was presumably responsible for keeping me hydrated. That also explained the weird pinching sensation at my groin; I’d been out for long enough that they’d needed to catheterize me to keep me from wetting the bed. Always the sort of thing a girl wants to wake up to.

On the plus side, nothing hurt. Maybe that meant that I was flying on morphine, but at the moment, I’d take it. It was better than the alternative. Better still would be having some vague idea of where I was. I started looking around for something that looked like a call button.

I was still looking when I heard footsteps. I turned to see Dominic standing in the room’s doorway, white as a sheet and holding onto the lintel for balance. “You are an insufferablewoman,” he said, barely above a whisper. “You slept for three days, and then you simply had to wake up during the five minutes that I was out of the room, didn’t you?”

My heart leaped, even as my lungs gave up working to pull air into my body. “Hi,” I managed, forcing the word out despite my lack of oxygen. That was enough to get my lungs working again, at least. “You’re okay. Are you okay? You’re okay.” I was babbling. I didn’t care. Just seeing him, alive and standing on his own two feet, was more than enough. I half-remembered him dying, bleeding out on the warehouse floor, and—

–and—

–and that had never happened. The memory was shredding like a cobweb even as I tried to look at it. I shuddered all over, trying to wipe the false events out of my mind. “Whoa,” I said. My voice quavered. I hated it for that. “I thought I was protected by that anti-telepathy charm.”

“It turns out that when your cousin really, ah, ‘turns on the juice,’ she punches rather harder than any of us suspected she was capable of,” said Dominic, as he came to stand by the side of my bed. “Even Istas—who claims to possess a natural resistance to Sarah’s manipulations—got somewhat confused about what had actually happened, which could have been rather unpleasant, as it seems that she dislikes zombies. Strongly. And when she saw me up and moving about, despite having seen me ‘die,’ she was sure I was a zombie. I very nearly found myself put down as a menace to the public health.”

I laughed at that. I couldn’t help myself. It was a small, strained thing, but it still made Dominic smile.

“I didn’t think the irony would be lost on you,” he said. “The former cryptid hunter, killed by a cryptid, asa cryptid. You would doubtless have been disappointed that you’d missed it.”

My laughter died. “No, I wouldn’t have been disappointed,” I said. “I already saw you die once today.”

“Ah, yes. I was spared the strain of seeing you shot down; I fell first, after all.” Dominic walked over to the bed, where he sat down gingerly on the very edge of the mattress. “Your Uncle Mike informs me that Sarah put together a thoroughly rational and believable scenario.”

“Peter?” I asked.

“According to the memories she gave them, I killed him myself, when I broke in looking for my false ‘Price girl.’ You were a cocktail waitress that I was cultivating to look like an enemy of the Covenant, so that I could rally the cryptids of Manhattan to my side.” He leaned over and pressed a kiss against my forehead. “Even when you’re not allowed to be a true representative of your family, you’re dangerous.”

“Yeah, well.” I sniffled. It was getting hard to keep from crying. “I guess some things never change.”

“No, I guess they don’t.”

“But why would you—?”

“Turn traitor? It’s happened before, Verity, and it will happen again. Bogeymen and dragons offering wealth and knowledge, succubi and Oceanids offering love . . . it happens. Most traitors simply die quickly. Few are as successful as your family at thwarting us.” He paused, grimacing. “Thwarting the Covenant. I suppose I need to adjust my thinking.”

There was nothing I could say to that. Leaving the only place he’d ever called his own was still a raw wound in his voice; any words of comfort would have just been salt rubbed into it.

Dominic sighed, and continued, “I killed Peter, and Margaret killed us both, while Robert took out our allies. As for the bodies, there was an unfortunate collision between a stray bullet and a gas pipe, and the warehouse was lost. All remains were destroyed.”

I closed my eyes. “That’s convenient.”

“True. But they both believe it with all their hearts.” I felt his fingers on my forehead, brushing back my hair. “They’ll return to England and give their report to the Covenant. By the time another team can be dispatched, the cryptids of the city will be ready to disappear as if they’d never existed.”

“The dragons can’t move.”

“The Covenant still believes dragons to be extinct, and dragon princesses are on the books as too difficult to tell from humans to be worth hunting. They’re to be killed if encountered, but a waste of resources to search for unless the coffers are getting low.” Dominic stroked my hair back again. “Manhattan will be safe. Margaret and Robert uncovered a conspiracy by one of their own. All the trainees and journeymen will be kept under closer attention for a while; I doubt they’ll be sending anyone any time soon.”

“Wait.” I opened my eyes, staring up at him. “They really believe you’re dead.”

“Yes. And as they were the target of your fair cousin’s ‘whammy,’ they’re going to keep believing it.” Dominic grimaced. “Remind me never to make her angry.”

“Smart man.” I looked around the room again. “Where am I?”

“In the recovery ward of St. Giles’ Hospital,” said a familiar, if unexpected, female voice. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Very-Very.”

“Grandma?” Eyes wide, I turned toward the voice. “Grandma!”

The black-haired, blue-eyed woman standing in the doorway smiled. “Hello, sweetheart. How are you feeling?”

“Surprisingly good, given the whole ‘shot in the gut and lost consciousness’ thing and– Grandma! What are you doing here?” I glanced to Dominic. “Have you met my grandmother?”

“Yes.” Dominic stood, offering a nod to my grandmother. “Ma’am.”

“Dominic,” she said.

He looked back to me. “I’m going to let Mike and Ryan know that you’re awake. Please. I know you’re a madwoman, but try to stay still and take it easy.” He pressed a kiss to my forehead before turning and leaving the room before I could react. Grandma Angela stepped aside to let him pass.

Once he was gone, she stepped fully into the room, pausing to close the door behind herself, and started walking toward my bed. “I’m glad you’re awake.”

“So am I.”

Angela Baker is my mother’s mother, and we’re not related by blood: Mom was adopted, since Grandma wasn’t willing to spend enough time with a member of her own species to have a biological child. She looks more like Sarah than anyone else in the family, with pale skin, black hair, and improbably blue eyes that sometimes go white around the edges. She’s old enough to be my mother’s mother by birth, not just adoption, but she looks like she’s barely Mom’s age. I have long since resigned myself to the fact that I won’t look nearly as good as either of my grandmothers when I’m their age, since Grandma Alice spends most of her time in dimensions where time runs differently, and Grandma Angela isn’t human.

She adopted Mom because cuckoos can only have children with other cuckoos, and—like all sane individuals—Grandma hates pretty much every cuckoo she’s ever met. She adopted Sarah because Sarah was just a little girl who needed a home, and she wanted to find out whether cuckoos were really innately sociopathic.

I looked at her face, so grim, so serious, and felt a chill run down my spine. Maybe she was here because we finally had the answer. “Grandma,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Mike called me once they managed to get you and Sarah both here and stabilized,” said Grandma. She pulled a chair from against the wall closer to the bed, sitting down in it. “It was pretty touch and go for the first twenty-four hours.

I bit my lip. “How bad?”

“Your doctor will tell you exactly what the bullet perforated that wasn’t supposed to be perforated, and all those other nasty things. All I know is that if you didn’t have a Caladrius working on you, you probably wouldn’t have lived. Pleasedon’t get shot like that again. I don’t think my heart could take it.” She smiled weakly at her own joke. Cuckoos don’t have hearts. Their circulatory systems are entirely decentralized, controlled by micropulses of muscles throughout the body.

Cryptid humor is weird sometimes. “Why didn’t Uncle Mike call Mom and Dad?”

“He did, but I was the only family member who could get here before you were out of surgery . . . and given the circumstances, I was the only one for the job.”

The Bakers lived in Columbus, Ohio, the same city where my brother was doing his research project on basilisk breeding. I frowned. “Is Alex here?”

“No. I couldn’t reach him when the call first came, and I told him he didn’t need to come once we were sure that you were going to live.” Her smile was fleeting, and strained. “I didn’t see any point in filling this hospital with anxious relatives before we had to. Not when Mike and I are already filling that role, and your various cryptid friends are coming and going at all hours.”

She wasn’t mentioning Sarah. The chill intensified. “Grandma, what aren’t you telling me?”

She took a deep breath. When she let it out, she seemed smaller somehow, like she had deflated. “Verity, it’s important you understand that I am not angry with you. I’m not angry with anyof you. You were in an impossible situation, and it was a choice between doing . . . what you did . . . and endangering the whole family. I might have done the same thing, if I were in your position. Sarah made her own choices.”

Alarm bells were ringing in my head. I sat up a little straighter. “Where’s Sarah?”

“She’s asleep.” Grandma’s lips thinned into a hard line. “She’s been asleep since I got here. I made her sleep, because it was the only way to make her stop screaming.”

“Oh, God,” I whispered, slumping against the pillows. “Is she going to be okay?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Verity: I don’t know. I don’t have any way of knowing. Cuckoo psychology is such a strange thing, and Sarah didn’t start out like me.”

I swallowed hard, looking at her as levelly as I could. “You mean Sarah didn’t start out knowing right from wrong.”

Grandma didn’t say anything.

* * *

By human standards, cuckoos are born sociopathic. They get it from their mothers. Literally: when a telepathic sociopath carries a baby for nine months, that baby is going to be born with a radically skewed moral compass. Grandma Angela was born “normal” by human standards, because she’s not a receptive telepath. So she didn’t get the in-utero conditioning to teach her that other people existed only to be pawns and playthings. Sarah, on the other hand . . . did. Grandma adopted her when she was seven years old, after her human foster parents died, and spent years after that carefully removing the deep conditioning Sarah had received from her biological mother.

Sarah is a sweet, thoughtful, empathic person. She didn’t start out that way. And there was no way of knowing whether Grandma had managed to get all the little mental land mines out of Sarah’s head. That was a large part of why Sarah always arranged to audit courses at schools near one of her cousins. If she ever went back to her cuckoo roots, she wanted one of us close enough to kill her before she did too much damage.

My mouth was suddenly dry. I swallowed several times before I managed to ask, “Is there anything I can do?”

“What she did . . .” Grandma shook her head. “I couldn’t do that if I wanted to. If you’d asked me, I would have told you it wasn’t possible. But she managed it, and now she won’t stop screaming. She hurt herself, Verity. She hurt herself very badly. Not in a physical way, although that would have been easier. Somewhere inside her mind.”

“Like pulling a muscle?” I ventured.

“Something like that.” Grandma sighed, very briefly looking every one of her years. She reached over and patted my hand. “I’m glad you’re all right. And I truly don’t blame any of you for what happened. But Sarah’s going back to Ohio with me, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take her to recover.”

Or if she was going to recover. Grandma didn’t say that part; she didn’t need to. It was written in the tension of her mouth and the defeated slant of her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Don’t be sorry. Just get better.” Grandma leaned forward and hugged me tight. “You had us all scared, Very-Very, and you know Sarah wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t love you more than anything.”

“I know,” I said, and returned the hug as best I could with the tubes sticking out of my arms. “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

“Just get better,” Grandma repeated, and let go, standing. “I don’t want to tire you out. You’re supposed to be still recovering.”