Chapter 51
If I had to rebuild this team from scratch with only one person, I’d choose Zoey.
I come to in slow motion. The world feels soft and filmy, like someone smeared Vaseline on my eyeballs.
The ceiling tiles are white. Everything looks gray and dim. I smell bleach and sterile packaging. Machines beep in that steady rhythm that I know means I’m alive. I don’t feel alive.
I try to sit up, but my body responds with all the enthusiasm of a wet sandbag. The room fills with beeping. An IV line snakes from my arm, and my left hand has been wrapped in bandages and gauze so thick I look like I’m wearing a club.
“Eden?”
Griffin is sitting in a chair next to my bed. His blond hair is rumpled, and there are purple circles under his eyes.
My chest almost caves in with the force of the relief plowing into me. I reach for him. He takes my hand and squeezes, but it’s not good enough. I drag him down into a hug, my fingers grappling for him and knotting into the back of his hoodie. His arms come around my back.
I open my mouth to ask where I am, where Nico is, what happened, but the only thing that comes out is a wheeze.
“Don’t try to talk,” Griffin says. He guides me back onto the pillows. “Your throat’s damaged. No talking until you heal. Doctor’s orders. I know that’s going to be a real challenge for you.”
I get the distant sense that I should give him the finger, but his words are floating past me like he’s not even here, only an illusion that my brain conjured up.
He settles back into the chair and fills me in on what happened.
I’m at a hospital in Ohio. I’m on IV fluids to rehydrate.
The doctors got the glass out of my feet and are expecting a fair amount of nerve damage.
I’m on antibiotics for the infection. The doctors were also able to save what was left of my hand, which was not a lot: all four fingers and knuckles were amputated.
They had to remove more from the top of my thumb than I expected, but the remaining stump will stay functional.
“It could have been a lot worse,” Griffin says.
Ha. That’s what I said. I remember saying that to Nico after it happened. Could have been worse should be the title of my memoir.
I mouth, Nico?
Griffin suddenly looks guilty. His expression cuts right through the fog of painkillers and exhaustion, and I’m painfully awake.
“Not going to lie, he’s in bad shape. He’s been unconscious since you called us. Had a bad infection in his feet, two broken ribs…” Griffin must read the panic on my face, because he adds, “The doctors think he’ll pull through, but it’s going to take time.”
I mime writing, scribbling my good hand in the air. Griffin produces a notepad and pen. My handwriting comes out looking like a drunk chicken has walked through ink, or like one of those paintings the chimpanzees do, but I manage to scrawl: Hands?
“Some nerve damage, but he should regain most functionality,” he says.
Most functionality doesn’t mean he can still draw. At least not like he used to.
I write again, my hand shaking: Where?
“A different hospital.” Griffin glances toward the curtain wrapping around us.
I must be sharing this room with another person, because Griffin lowers his voice.
“He was beaten so badly that facial recognition would be hard, but we couldn’t risk having you both in the same hospital. People would ask too many questions.”
Imagining Nico so broken nobody could recognize his face… I close my eyes and focus on breathing. I need to stop thinking about Nico unconscious. There is absolutely nothing I can do to help him.
Griffin leans his forearms onto the bed, lowering his voice.
“Hey, Eden?” He sounds careful. “I need to ask you something, and I need you to be honest with me.”
I wait.
Griffin’s eyes drift to my throat. “I know the Game Master’s M.O. Did Nico… did he hurt you?”
I shake my head immediately. The movement makes my head swim.
“I know it was a bad situation,” Griffin says. “But I’ve read Donny’s case studies. Under extreme pressure, some possession victims can snap, and I recognize that bruising pattern.”
My fingers curl into the sheets, gripping the cheap fabric until my knuckles ache.
I know he’s being a good friend, but I hate that even the people closest to Nico still suspect he’s capable of snapping.
That Nico was right in thinking they did.
I hate that as soon as Nico wakes up, he’ll blame himself for all of this, and I won’t be there to tell him that he’s wrong.
I snatch the pen and write: Played dead to escape. My idea.
Griffin once said he wouldn’t offer me pity, but the look in his eyes right now is as pitying as any look I’ve ever seen. “Oh, Eden.”
Screwing up my face, I focus on the paper and write: Game Master?
“Still out there,” Griffin concedes. “Got no idea where he is.”
There’s a pause.
“But before we get into any of that super fun and not terrifying stuff, I have to ask.” Griffin looks confused, opening his mouth then closing it again, as if unable to decide how to phrase his next question.
He drags a hand down his face, rolling his lips like he’s holding back a laugh.
“Any chance you know why there was a key in Nico’s bedpan? ”
I recount everything I can remember from the abandoned building, writing in wobbling letters on the pad of paper:
Hospital?
Asylum?
Male cop
White
Ginger
Pudgy
3,784 seconds
Writing is slow and frustrating. The pain medication turns my brain to cotton, making it hard to hold onto thoughts long enough to write them down. I need to do this, so I push through. Griffin calls Zoey and gives her all the information.
The first couple of days smear together.
I drift between sleep so deep I might as well be inside a black hole, and nightmares where I’m back in the abandoned building.
During the day, I can pretend I’m just recovering from the flu or some other normal human ailment that doesn’t involve axes, glass, or the sound of bones breaking.
When the sun goes down, and I’m alone, my nervous system has a hard time not losing its shit.
I need Nico here. I need him with me to tell me we’re not in that room anymore.
The nurses change my bandages. The doctors pump me full of enough antibiotics to make everything feel disconnected, like I’m operating my body via remote control with a delay between thought and action.
The drugs they have me on are doing a bunch of heavy lifting, but I can feel the edges of real pain lurking around the pharmaceutical buffer.
An older woman is sharing the room with me, but she’s in a coma, and it would be easy to forget she’s here if it weren’t for the rhythmic beeping of her vitals monitors.
I eat ice chips and pudding. I watch whichever movies come on the small TV hung up in the corner.
Mostly, I lie in bed and try to ignore the loneliness.
It creeps in when it’s quiet. I never notice it coming until suddenly it’s here, hardening inside me like wet concrete and just as impossible to shake.
But the feeling doesn’t have time to truly settle thanks to Griffin. He’s here every visiting hour, watching movies with me and napping in the chair. He gives me updates on Nico as soon as DJ texts them: still unconscious, stable, no change.
There’s no telling if Morrow changed who he’s possessing.
Griffin doesn’t think Morrow knows we’re alive.
He thinks Morrow definitely would’ve tried to stop me if he watched me climb out of that dumpster, but just in case, every night before he leaves, Griffin sets up a salt ring around my bed in plastic tubing.
It’s not unlike the one I built for my car, but this one works because it’s on the floor.
The nurse tried to remove it on the first night, but I pitched such a fit that she eventually let me keep it.
Because I have the salt circle, part of me doesn’t expect Griffin to come back in the morning, but he shows up.
On day three, the police ask me some questions about what happened.
I nod or shake my head when their questions allow me to, and write any other answers in a notebook Griffin brought for me.
I’d already prepped my answers with Griffin so it’s not hard to remember them: I was hitchhiking when a masked man picked me up, and he held me, alone, in an abandoned building, where he cut off my hand.
I never saw his face. He used a voice modulator.
I escaped when he left the door unlocked and ran through the woods for I don’t know how long.
I’m glad not to be expected to speak because I can choose my words carefully, and my voice can’t betray how much of a liar I am.
By day six, the infection is responding to treatment. I’m given a wheelchair I can drive with one arm and shown how to turn with one rim and how to move forward and backward with both. The doctors encourage me to speak a little.
“You have no idea how hard this has been for her,” Griffin tells the doctor, laying a hand on my shoulder from where he’s sitting by the bed. “It’s been nice to get a word in edgewise.”
“Asshole,” I rasp out.
On day seven, Griffin steps through the curtain, working his jaw from side to side.
“There are journalists downstairs,” he says, whipping the curtain closed behind him. “Three of them. Apparently, someone on staff recognized you.”
“They can’t come up here, right?” I get out.
“Legally? No.” Griffin crosses his arms, planting himself between me and the door. “But that doesn’t stop them from camping in the lobby and harassing nurses for information. One of them tried to convince an orderly that she was your cousin.”
Of course they did. I stopped being surprised at the lengths some journalists will go to a long time ago.
I’ve survived three killers now. I’m worth at least a three-book deal. Those reporters would be frothing at the mouth if they knew about William Caine.
“What do you want me to do?” Griffin asks.