“Don’t touch her.” I sound feral, and some detached part of me wonders what hell this desperate man crawled out of. “Don’t put your hands on her—”
I’m searching for an exit, though an exit is the last thing I need, when a familiar face elbows her way through the crowd. I’m the person with the poker face in every situation. Carina Jain wears one now. Shoulders relaxed, hands in view, she gestures the others back. They’re all on edge, tense and waiting, and if even one of them steps close again I will pull this building down around us. “Zeus, she’s losing a lot of blood.”
A lot of blood folds in on itself and then explodes like the back wall of my building. “She’s dying.”
“You have to let us help.” A hand on my arm, near my wrist, and I take a big step back. Don’t touch her. “Put her down. Right here. I promise you, no one will do her any harm.” Carina snaps a stretcher into being at my side. “Just lower her. Carefully, carefully...”
It feels like death, like being cut open at the core and flayed alive, but her voice seems so reasonable. This is what I came here to do. I did not anticipate that it would melt my skin off, but I lower Brigit down to the stretcher nonetheless. Carina moves to the other side and blocks the rest of them so that I can get my arms out from underneath her.
“Let’s go,” says Carina, and if I was burning alive before, now the flame has reached my bones and taken them all out.
Because this bitch has double-crossed me.
She motions in the others and there are too many for me to stop. Three of them tangle up with my feet while they start to wheel Brigit away.
“Sir,” one of them says, an insolent gnat begging to get his nose broken. “Sir. You can’t come this way.” The stretcher disappears through a set of swinging double doors and I am still being harassed by these assholes. The door gives way beneath my hand and sets off an alarm. Four of them, in front of me now, a fifth diving in to join the fray.
I can’t let her out of my sight.
It’s controlled chaos back here, much like the main floor of the whorehouse on a party evening, and I see its patterns like I’d see the whores turning in their neat circles around me. Brigit, surrounded by scrubs so that all I can see are her feet, is getting farther away.
“We have to stop you,” one of them says, a tremble in his voice. “Sir, we have to stop you.”
Another set of doors.
They take her through.
The last part of my carefully constructed facade turns to ash. The ashes burn.
“I’ll kill you,” I warn the one who’s bold enough to put himself between me and the doors. “I’ll kill you now.”
“You can’t go back there, sir. It’s against hospital policy to let visitors go into the operating suite—”
“Get out of the fucking way.”
“Sir—”
I sweep them all to the side with one arm, with more power behind it than I intended. One goes flying into the side wall. The double doors open again and Carina comes out, running again. “Let me see her.” I grab for the front of her white coat. She lets me have it, but she’s not the only one coming. The controlled chaos is turning to actual chaos, and I know, I know, that I should sit down and let them do their jobs. I know. But I can’t let it happen. I can’t die like this. I can’t die with my heart stopping in another room, not for the second time. Not tonight. Not now.
I drop Carina and push through, a laugh bubbling up and escaping. It’s everyone in this emergency room against me, and I cannot hear a thing they’re saying. None of it matters. Let them keep coming forever. Let them keep pulling at my arms, my clothes.
A door with a window looms up in front of me and through the window I can see her feet again. Where are her shoes?
I wrestle an arm free to open the door.
My palm never makes contact.
A hand comes down on my shoulder and wrenches me straight backward. Who the fuck—
“Back up, fucker.” I hate the voice in my ear, hate it with every bit of my soul. “Let them help her.” Hades gets one arm across my chest and this time, this time, I’ll kill him. This time, I won’t let him go back to his precious little mountain.
I go for his hands first, but he’s in his right mind and I’m not. It’s a wrestling match in the middle of the hall, all the hospital staff backing up. I stomp on one of his feet but he only swings me to the side, one arm pinned under his. We collide with a short man in scrubs and I reach for the guy’s throat—I’ll kill him too, every one of these people keeping me from Brigit—but Hades slaps down my hand.
“She’s dying,” I shout at him, at everyone. “I’ll kill all of you if you don’t let me see her, you fucking animals, I will raze this motherfucker to the ground with all of you in it—”
“A coin for the ferry,” Hades says, his hands moving quickly. Lightning speed.
“What the fuck are you talking about, you piece of—”
He puts something between my teeth and clamps his hand down hard over my mouth. A pill. He’s given me a pill. Panic explodes, shattering what’s left of me like glass, and I fight him like a man possessed. But the fucker is prepared this time. A tray with medical instruments goes over, each slice of metal ringing like a bell on the floor. In my attempt to scream at him I’ve swallowed whatever it was, and with every passing moment his arms lock down harder. I can’t even break his wrist.
I can’t do anything but let him drag me backward down another hall, kicking at the floor, trying to rip his arms from his body, but he’s too strong and getting stronger. We’re through another door, a smaller room, and he hauls me bodily over to a corner where there is a bed. He tips me into it like he’s just kicked me out of a third-rate bar and fuck me, I fall. “Who told you I was here? I’m going to kill you too.”
He adjusts his jacket and puts his hands in his pockets. It’s fucking infuriating, how possessed he looks, while I’m—
What the fuck? I’m drunk. Or—
“Do it, then.” Hades has the nerve to throw me an impatient look. “Get up and kill me, Zeus. I don’t have all night.”
I’m a very good host, so I try to oblige him.
And I can’t.
Because a clean, sweet darkness is closing in, and closing fast.
“I hate you too,” I tell him. “I hate you so fucking much.”
“You really are an ungrateful bastard, aren’t you?” I can’t answer. Too dark. Too tired. “Sleep it off. You can thank me in the morning.”
2
Brigit
The world turns upside down.
One minute, Zeus is saying something to me. Something I can’t hear, because something has happened to my ears. A terrible thing. Only a terrible thing would dull the world this much. The beat of my heart is the only sound, but after a while it stutters to a halt. A clear, bright pain at my back spreads out and wraps me in its wings until everything is white, white, white. White like driven snow. White like the burn of the sun.
It’s so white, so unbroken, that it takes even longer to realize it’s still turning. A deeper white glow turns over head. Sunrise, sunset. I try to laugh but it hurts. There was a joke—what was the joke? I’m expensive. I don’t feel expensive now. I feel nothing, a blissful nothing interrupted only by firework bursts of pain from my back.