“I know.” Suddenly the coffee was flat in my mouth, sawdust with a burnt-charcoal chaser. “Thanks for that. There’s just nothing for them to do. Dempsey’s done. He doesn’t want to… try anymore. So, now we wait.”
“You going in to see him?” Another glance over his shoulder at the people gathered behind us pulled a sigh from his somber mouth. “Or is he keeping everyone out?”
“They just wanted some time to make him comfortable. I think they’ve run out of tests to do on him.” I couldn’t imagine what they could do to make the carved-in pain lessen on Dempsey’s craggy gray-skinned face, but I hoped it would be enough. He’d nearly broken my hand when he woke up, racked with a rolling anguish tightening his bones. “Doc said he’d let me know when—”
It had been a long time since the sound of a door opening made my muscles clench so hard that my bones cracked. The memories I had of being in Tanic’s cage were clouded by pain and starvation, living in a stew of bruises and iron hammered through my body. I still carried the mark of my father’s House on my back—a cicatrix in the shape of a black-pearl dragon’s wings, the ghost of its body traveling down my spine. The keloids were extensive and horrifically beautiful to someone who didn’t know the elfin healed without scarring for the most part and that every bit of ridged and mottled skin was put there by shanks and bars of a metal so poisonous to the Unsidhe that Tanic wore gloves to handle it as he worked them into my body.
Back then a door opening meant I would be forced to live through another seemingly endless nightmare, nothing but a meat puppet made to dance on Tanic’s strings. This time the double doors swinging apart brought a different horror, the grim face of a human doctor emotionally distancing himself from his dying patient with every step he took toward me.
“Mister Gracen?” the doctor called out, his hand on one of the doors to keep it open. He scanned the waiting room, eyes flowing over Jonas’s extended family and Sparky gathered around a low table overflowing with paper cups and candy wrappers. The doctor finally found me, his eyes widening as if he’d forgotten I was elfin. Or maybe he hadn’t and finally spotted Ryder the Great and Gorgeous to All Humans standing next to me. “Ah, um… you can come in now.”
Sparky stood up, and then Sarah, the Post Mistress, followed, both of them shuffling through the maze of people and chairs, but a shake of the doc’s head stopped them in their tracks.
“Just Gracen, please. Mister Dempsey is tired, and he’s not always able to maintain consciousness.” He met my gaze, twisting his mouth into a thin line. “You’ve got five minutes to visit with him, and you have to—”
“I’ll take however fucking long I want,” I growled back, baring my canines. “The only one kicking me out of that room’s going to be Dempsey.”
I knew the way, but I followed the doctor down the hall, forcing my feet to take each step. Dempsey’s room was at the end of the hall—private but close enough to a nurse’s station so they could get to him if he needed anything. I didn’t want to think about how much this all was going to cost. I hated that it even flickered through my brain, but that’s how he’d raised me. “Don’t pay for someone to put you together when you’ve got duct tape, a needle, and some thread, boy,” he’d said more times than I could count. “Nothing flows quicker in and out for a Stalker like money and blood, so don’t be handing it out to some quack with a handful of aspirin and a stethoscope.”
There wasn’t enough duct tape for this. Never would be.
I don’t know when the doctor slipped away, but it wasn’t like I was expecting him to stab me in the back with a knife he kept hidden on him. He whispered away, leaving me behind with the smell of death and antiseptic clinging to my face.
Dempsey was awake, his eyes hooded and glazed. His once brawny body was now stripped of its flannel-and-denim armor. There were machines chirruping along in some sort of dissonant song, keeping track of every time his heart beat or his lungs drew in air. For all I knew, there was one marking each time he peed or shit. He hated being here lying in that bed, flat on his back and waiting for Death to come knocking on his door. I could see it in his eyes and the set of his stubbled jaw when he stared at me, drugged to the gills so he wouldn’t feel any pain but not deep enough for him to sleep through his final breath.
I probably hated it as much as he did, but nothing was ever going to make me turn my back on him and walk out that door. The hospital was going to have to pry me out of the chair, and since I came in armed, I could take out anyone who tried.
“Tell me you’ve got a cheeseburger on you, boy,” he coughed out at me, a bit of spittle sticking to his lower lip. “Bastards are telling me only liquids for now.”
“I can get Ryder to get you something to eat. Fuck them,” I replied, holding out my nearly full coffee. “Here. This is liquid. They can’t bitch about that.”
I had to shove a straw through the sippy hole and hold the cup steady until he could get his fingers around it, but once Dempsey took a hit from the so-not-hot coffee, he sighed happily. Clearing his throat, he struggled to bring up his other hand. He tangled his elbow in the plastic lines taped to his arm but eventually fought his way clear of them. I didn’t move to help him. Hadn’t planned on it because he still had one hand free and I was within slapping range. Instead I grabbed the plump upholstered armchair from the corner and dragged it closer to the bed.
The view from the hospital room was spectacular—a breathtaking sweep of San Diego’s skyline with the ocean stretching out from its shores, the water glittering from the city lights, and the moons rising swollen and full, kissing the edges of the rolling waves. After dropping a quick thanks to Ryder and a plea to get Dempsey a Double-Double with extra-crispy fries, I closed my eyes and took a moment to finally breathe.
“Don’t fall asleep there, asshole,” Dempsey croaked, breaking through the singsong bell tones of his pet machines. “I’ve got a couple of things to tell you before I kick the bucket.”
“Old man, I don’t want….” I ground my teeth together, rubbing at the grit and dried tears tangling my lashes. My tongue tasted more of sulfur and chickenshit than whiskey and coffee, with a faint hint of resignation and fear ghosting around the edges. “Save your strength. Ryder’s going to grab you that burger, and you’re going to have to eat it, because I sure as hell ain’t going to chew it up like a momma bird and spit it in your mouth.”
His eyes glistened, either from the moonlight or maybe tears. I wasn’t sure. Still, I was damned certain I was out of swinging distance just in case he was done with my sassing him and had rallied enough strength to clock me. Dempsey might have been dying, but he was still the same mean, irredeemable asshole who raised me.
“Just… shut up for a few minutes. I need to talk,” he grumbled back, stopping for a moment to suck on the straw again and wheeze through another blast of oxygen. “There’s shit you’ve got to know. And I’ve been holding this off for as long as I could because, well, it didn’t seem like it mattered, but now… what with everything going on, you’re going to have to deal with some crap, and you should know about it.”