Chapter Sixteen
Astrid
“I still think we should have taken them to the hospital,” I whispered, clutching one of the doilies on Olga’s end table in one fist.
I wished it was a barf bag. I wanted to puke.
When I’d seen him the first time, I thought he was gone. There was just a profound sense of death hanging around all four of their bodies. It had been most upsetting to see the kids that way, but seeing Mav so still, so blank... well, I thought Tally would forgive me if I found that worse than her death mask. Don’t get me wrong—hers was plenty upsetting, but not as much as I’d thought. She was already pale as a corpse with her winter complexion. Maverick wasn’t.
I’d been standing in the doorway to Olga’s room for a few minutes, just staring at my brother’s prone body. He was so damn tall, his feet dangled off the end of the bed. He was loose-limbed, his eyes glassy. I had a horrible insight into how it must have felt for him to see me as a vampire. It was hard not to think of them as bodies, even though they were technically alive.
Rook gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. I wished it made me feel better.
“And tell the nice mundanes what?” Rook asked, shaking his head. “Enchanted sleep is bizarre to us, let alone to them. The four of them are going to star on some medical mystery show and make Haven Hollow famous. You know they wouldn’t want that.”
He was right. I hated that he was right. I wanted the doctors to fawn over my brother and his little family and somehow find a cure where we couldn’t. Every spellcaster in the Hollow had examined them, and we still had no freaking clue who could have done this. Olga made noises about it being evil, but we didn’t know more than that. A lot of creatures could force you to sleep and not wake. Night hags were a really common example, draining their victims to death on accident (and sometimes on purpose.) Faeries put people into an enchanted sleep for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it was a prank. Other times, it was revenge. But none of them ever put off an aura of non-life so potent, it made my eyes water.
My head knew Mav wasn’t dead. My heart wasn’t so sure.
“I just want some sign that someone is trying to keep them alive,” I whispered. “It feels like they could slip away at any second.”
“If they hit our senses as dead, the mundanes that found them would have buried them, Astrid,” Rook said. “We had to bring them to the coven house. It was the only safe place for them right now.”
He was right about that, too. We’d been forced to scramble for an explanation for Tally and Mav’s sudden absence. We’d been lucky it was Cain and Darla who stumbled on the bodies, not one of Tally’s deputies, because that would have meant a quadruple homicide investigation on top of all the problems we were already facing. As it was, the four of them were hanging in a limbo between life and death that I couldn’t breach.
“I’m going to Blood Rose,” I said, keeping my voice low so none of the witches milling on the floor below would hear me. Lorcan was the only person present with superhuman hearing who might rat me out. Thankfully, Wanda had him getting supper while the rest of them tried to come up with a solution.
Rook’s sigh ruffled the hairs at the back of my neck. Goosebumps rose on my arms, but I smoothed them away with a guilty frown. This was not the time to get excited by my sire.
“I knew you were going to say something like that. Is there any chance I can talk you out of it?”
He sounded resigned, not angry. He’d finally begun to adapt to dating an ex-witch. He’d been old-fashioned in the beginning, trying to act like a gallant knight. It wasn’t the way to a witch’s heart. He was slowly learning I liked to fight my own battles, not rely on rescue.
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.” He sighed. “Give me a minute to step out and make a call.”
“Who are you going to call?”
He shrugged like that much should have been obvious. “Father has earned a favor from Aurea, so she’s been letting me mirror-walk back and forth from here to Blood Rose. I’ll give you an ETA when I have one.”
My throat felt tight. I wanted to cry. Wanted to shake Maverick and scream at him to wake up. This wasn’t fair. He wasn’t supposed to actually drop dead. Or a very close equivalent. The four of them were supposedly locked in, unable to move but able to think. It had to be terrifying. If traumatic shit kept happening in this town, I was going to have to nominate someone as a therapist. At this point, we all deserved some time on someone’s couch.
“Thank you.”
Rook smiled gently and leaned in to kiss my cheek. “Anything for you.”
“I’m counting on that, actually.”