Chapter 51
After waiting anxiously in the hallway for an update on Hae, a fresh bandage around her palm, Grace stood when the resident emerged from the room.
He wore a patented somber expression. The kind of look doctors used when they were telling you that your loved one wasn’t a goner, but they also weren’t out of the woods yet.
This resident relayed that they still had no idea what was causing the attacks, but promised that they’d be vigilant and run more tests.
Grace nodded. Being on the receiving end of bad news was not new. More memories she didn’t need to borrow. More memories she’d tried to overwrite with better ones.
And despite telling herself this wasn’t the same as when her mother or Halmeoni were patients, she couldn’t help spiraling. It still felt like history repeating itself.
She needed to get out of this stifling hallway where other concerned family members paced the linoleum to work through their own anxiety.
How do you tell a god he’s dying? Maybe he’d be fine as long as he never used his powers again.
Grace shook her head, knowing that wasn’t really an option right now. Not with Habaek and the sonnimne still out there.
She stepped out of the elevator into the quiet lobby. It was completely empty this late at night, with a single security guard at the far end by the elevators.
The floor-to-ceiling window usually let in the bright Florida sunlight, but right now rain snaked down the tempered glass. The sky was darkened by clouds. Palm trees blew in high winds.
Grace sank down on one of the benches, closing her eyes. Letting the quiet surround her. Like this she could pretend that she was alone. That she wasn’t responsible for telling a god that she’d brought him back just so he could die.
The sound of voices broke through her morose meditation on mortality. She glanced up to see a group of doctors walking through the lobby from the direction of the cafeteria. Grace recognized the sound of her father’s voice before she saw him, answering a question from one of his colleagues.
Grace let out a surprised gasp that echoed in the large empty space.
“Grace? What are you doing here?” Her father’s voice sounded surprised as he broke off from the group. He turned to his colleagues. “Go back without me.”
“Oh, hi, Dad.” Grace shook her head to clear the cobwebs and forced herself to smile as the other doctors moved in the direction of the ED.
“You should have called me if you were going to come by.”
He assumed she was visiting him. It was easier not to correct him.
“I thought you might be free for dinner. I’ve missed you.”
He glanced at the rain. “You drove in this?” He sounded shocked.
And a week ago Grace would’ve been shocked to imagine it too. She nodded. “I guess it wasn’t the best night to go out.” In more ways than one.
“I heard they might be asking people to shelter in place to let the storm pass. Come on, you can hang out in my office, where it’s more comfortable.”
He started to lead her back to the elevator. “Oh, how did the BU interview go?”
Grace froze, unable to answer, knowing the inevitable disappointment that would follow. But avoiding it wouldn’t help either. She’d spent far too much time avoiding hard things. She figured she needed to start getting over that mindset. So she straightened her shoulders and said, “I missed it.”
“Missed it?” He wrinkled his brow. “Did they need to reschedule?”
“No, I just missed it. Something came up, and I didn’t do it.”
“What? How could you do that?”
Grace closed her eyes. Of course she knew how it sounded. She’d dropped the ball. She’d failed. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.
“Sorry isn’t good enough, Grace.” It felt like there was a vise squeezing her heart.
“I can’t believe you’d let this happen.” With each jab of disappointment, the vise tightened.
“Some of the people on the selection committee are my peers. Do you know how this will look?” Another notch tighter, and she felt like she was about to explode. “If your mother were here—”
Finally, she couldn’t hold it in anymore. “What? What would my perfect mother say if she were here to see her failure of a daughter? Go ahead, explain how I don’t measure up to my mother.”
“What?” Her father’s voice was dangerously quiet. He was never the type to get loud when he was angry. It was always ice. And this tone was colder than the Antarctic.
But now that the words were out, Grace found that she didn’t want to take them back. “You keep using the memory of my mother as some kind of yardstick I need to measure up to. It’s exhausting, Dad. At this point she’s more like a goalpost than a mom to me. You know that?”
“You will not talk about your mother like that just because you’re angry at me.”
“I am angry at you.” Grace blinked back tears. “You’re all I have left. I’ve needed you, and you’re not—” Her voice cracked.
She was finally admitting it aloud. That she needed her father.
The one person who might be hurting the same way she was.
But she had no idea what he’d felt after Halmeoni died.
He was never around. Maybe that’s how he coped with his grief, but it had left Grace all alone with hers.
To pretend like everything was okay. When all she’d wanted to do was cry. “I just needed you.”
Her father cleared his throat. “I don’t know—”
He broke off, staring at something just beyond Grace’s shoulder.
“Dad?”
“What is that?” He stepped past Grace and she turned just as a trash can crashed into the glass.
“Grace!” Her father shoved her to the side. She fell hard onto the tile, pain radiating up her back from the impact, just as the metal bin slammed into her father instead.
Shards of glass rained down. Grace curled into a ball to avoid the worst of it. But a shard still slashed across her arm.
“Dad!” She scrambled up now, ignoring her own aches as she crawled over to where he lay under the heavy metal trash can. It took most of her strength to push it off her father.
Then she heard it. The low, telltale hiss.
She turned just as the sonnimne stepped through the window pane. Pale and ghastly. Gray skin stretched tight over protruding ribs, like it was a corpse reanimated.
“Dad, wake up.” Grace shook her father’s shoulder, even as she knew it was useless.
“Stop!” The security guard had rushed over, lifting a Taser with shaking hands. Before Grace had a chance to warn him, the sonnimne pounced, tearing into him with horrendous snarls. She averted her eyes, unable to watch the attack, even as she couldn’t avoid the sound of ripping flesh.
“Dad, get up,” Grace whispered, desperately trying to rouse him. But it was futile, and her pleas must have drawn the sonnimne’s attention, as it turned to Grace again, the security guard’s blood now painting its chin.
“Help!” she screamed, holding on to her father, unwilling to leave him. “Please, someone help us!”
She was so focused on her father, Grace hadn’t heard the sound of rushing feet.
She hadn’t heard Yuhwa let out a mighty shout as she raced across the lobby and slammed into the sonnimne.
Grace heard the sickly crunch of bones breaking as it flew into the edge of the windowpane, screaming before crumpling to the floor.
Yuhwa snatched up a shard of glass, wielding it like a knife, shouting at Grace to get out of here.
Too quickly the sonnimne recovered and charged at Yuhwa again.
She brought the shard down in a swift arc, cutting flesh and bone in one move.
The sonnimne’s severed claw fell to the floor in a pool of blackened blood.
It screamed before leaping out the window and racing into the night.
Yuhwa pursued before Grace could call after her.
She started after them, her body moving automatically to help, even as she had no idea how.
“Grace,” her father groaned.
“Dad.” Grace spun back to him. “Are you okay? Don’t move, I’ll go get help.”
“No, just bring that here.” He pointed to a wheelchair left by the elevator.
Grace grabbed it, helping him climb on. He pressed a hand to his head, and it came away red.
“Blood loss. Possible concussion,” he said, self-diagnosing.
“I might be hallucinating. I thought I just saw a girl cut off someone’s hand. ”
“Yeah, seeing things because of a head injury, definitely a possibility,” Grace said as she wheeled him toward the emergency department. “Hold on, okay? We’re going to get help.”
She used her father’s badge to open the automated doors to the noisy emergency room.
At first, no one noticed them. Then an orderly gasped at the sight of Grace and her father.
Even though they were veterans of a level-one trauma center, it probably wasn’t often that one of their attendings arrived covered in gashes and blood.
Nurses hurried forward, shouting questions as they wheeled her father to a bed.
“What happened?”
“It looks like a crush injury.”
“Do you know what hit him?”
“Looks like pretty bad blood loss. Call for a bag of O-neg!”
“Grace?” Anna said, stepping over to her. “Are you okay?”
“Huh?” Grace turned to the nurse, her vision starting to cloud.
The sounds of the ER were drowned out by the whoosh of adrenaline and energy leaving Grace’s body. The last thing she remembered before she passed out was Anna calling her name.