Elsewhere
22
“Emmy?”
She blinked at the vision above her. It looked like her mother. She blinked again, trying to focus her mind as well as her eyes and finding it much harder than usual. Her attempt at an answer came out as an unintelligible croak, so she cleared her throat and tried again.
“Mom?”
Another face appeared. Her father’s. “Em!”
Memory asserted itself: Kincaid, knife, nothingness. She was dead. They were here. Therefore, they were dead. Somehow, the Organization got to them. “No! Not you too ...”
Her father shot an anxious glance at her mother. “Delirious? ”
Her mother cocked her head, her expressive face twisted halfway between apprehension and hope. “Do you know where we are, sweetheart?”
Fingers crossed that there wasn’t a circle in hell for the terminally foolish. Well, her parents wouldn’t end up there, so ... “Limbo?”
Her mother giggled. It had the tinge of great strain to it, but it was definitely a giggle.
“You’re alive. Alive ,” she repeated, stroking Emily’s cheek with fingers that certainly felt real. “You’re lying in a hospital bed, and you’re going to be all right. The doctors say you’re very, very lucky.”
Emily closed her eyes for a moment to wait out a dizzy spell. When she managed a careful glance around, she saw what did appear to be a hospital-ish sort of room.
Her parents pressed closer, practically luminous with joy, and she tried to arrange her dry lips in a smile.
Her father kissed her forehead. “My God, Em, we’ve been so worried.”
Her mother’s voice: “You were unconscious for nearly twenty-four hours.”
“Everyone insisted it would be okay—”
“—but they would say that, and you never know ...”
“Can you wiggle your toes?”
She tried to comprehend what this had to do with anything. Knife, she recalled with great effort. Back. Moving her toes sent a dull pain through her right foot—broken?—but at least they did move.
“Yes,” she said.
Her mother let out a sigh of relief. “What about your fingers? ”
With every blink, it got harder to open her eyelids again, let alone her mouth. In answer, she wrapped a shaking hand around her mother’s. Which was trembling, too.
“How do you feel?” her parents asked, almost in unison.
“Mmph,” she mumbled before slipping back to sleep.
When she woke again, apparently hours later, a nurse helped arrange her (and the various pieces of medical equipment attached to her) so she lay more comfortably on her side. He put a pillow under the cast on her left arm and offered her a cup with a straw. “Water sound good?”
Water sounded wonderful. But her raw throat protested as the liquid went down.
While the nurse checked her vital signs, she wondered—now that she felt less vague—how she had any to check. Ashburn was miles from a hospital, and surely she’d been giving off far too much anti-magic to teleport. She ought to be dead.
Well—thank goodness she wasn’t. That was enough for now. She’d found out just what an adventure entailed, but the worst of it was over.
She had the gnawing feeling she’d forgotten something, something bad. But she couldn’t put her finger on what it might be, other than having to live with the knowledge that she’d almost gotten her parents killed.
She watched them chatting with the nurse on his way out. How much did they know? Were they aware how close a call they’d had, thanks to her? Tears prickled. Her stomach churned. The heart monitor began beep-beep-beep -ing with alarming speed.
“Mom, Dad ...” Her voice cracked. She took another sip of water and pushed on. “It’s all my fault.”
Her father slipped a calloused, much-loved hand around hers.
“Don’t get yourself worked up, Em.” He gave her a lopsided smile, one that brought to mind the times he’d tried to see the humor in bad weather and broken farm equipment. “Think of all the poor microchips in this room.”
She gaped at him.
“Alex told us.” Her mother shook her head. “Explains a lot.”
Emily was suddenly very aware of her heart pumping in her chest. “Where—where is he?”
“Right there,” her father said, gesturing.
With help, she shifted to her other side. And there he was, slumped in a chair, eyes closed, chin on chest—deeply asleep. Dark brown stubble sprouted from his jaw and head. In one hand, he clutched his mother’s watch—someone must have rescued it from her ruined clothing. (Thank goodness.)
She ought to be angry with him, now that death wasn’t imminent and she could think about how he’d misled her. But any anger was buried deep under the mountain of relief that they’d both made it through alive.
Her father gave a small cough. “This the ‘inappropriate man’? ”
“Yes,” she said, and answered his grin with a weak one of her own.
“Wouldn’t go home to sleep. Very stubborn.”
Her mother nudged him. “Like someone else I know.”
Emily could feel sleep creeping up on her again. Hoping to clear a few things up before she drifted off, she asked: “How did I get here? How did you get here?”
“Magic,” her mother said under her breath as if it had been as simple as that.
Well, she could ask Hartgrave later, or perhaps Bernie—
Oh, God. That was it. That was the terrible thing she’d forgotten.
She couldn’t face it.
Her father, perceptive as usual, said: “What? What’s wrong?”
“I just remembered we didn’t all ... That is, one of us ...” She covered her eyes. “I have this co-worker, a friend, Bernie Ballantine ...”
The salient words wouldn’t come out. Her father waited politely and then picked up the conversation where it had hit a brick wall. “Nice fellow. He’s one floor up.”
“He’s—he’s here? He’s all right?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Cracked ribs and a concussion. That’s why he’s lying quietly in bed rather than visiting, but he’ll probably be released soon.”
“Your other friend—big German man, can’t recall his name, sorry—he’s fine, never even needed to check in,” her mother said, patting her hand. “Anyway, we got here because Alex came for us once you were in surgery. That was an interesting conversation, let me tell you.”
“I can imagine,” Emily said, though actually she couldn’t. She hadn’t yet visualized a meet-the-parents dinner, let alone a meet-the-parents to inform them their daughter had been gravely wounded by wizards. “How did he persuade you he was telling the truth?”
“Had us call St. John’s to hear that an Emily Daggett really had checked in with life-threatening injuries,” her father said.
“Wait ... what?”
“Oh,” her mother exclaimed. “I suppose you didn’t know that, did you? This is St. John’s Hospital.”
Emily began to feel vague again. St. John’s University was not one of the places she’d applied to, but she knew it was on the East Coast, and presumably the hospital was nearby. “Why?” slipped out before she recollected that the person who knew was asleep.
Her mother shrugged. “It has a good reputation, doesn’t it? He must have thought this was the best hospital in the country, and since he could take you anywhere just like that—” She snapped her fingers. “Well, in any case, it’s in Baltimore. You had never been that far from home before, so of course I immediately believed him when he explained how you’d made the trip.”
“You did not,” Emily said, laughing. (She then wished she hadn’t. Whatever painkillers she was on weren’t strong enough for that.)
“I certainly didn’t believe it,” her father said. “I can see why you neglected to mention what you’d been getting up to, by the by. He popped all around the house and levitated things, trying to prove he wasn’t pulling our legs, and I was sure he was playing an elaborate scam with an out-of-town accomplice who checked into hospitals under the targets’ daughter’s name.”
Her mother snorted. “Which is patently ridiculous!”
“No more ridiculous than magic , for Pete’s sake.”
“So I finally said, ‘Take me across the room, that’ll settle this.’”
“And I said, ‘Absolutely not, Helen!’”
Her mother’s eye roll came with a smile and a hand slipped into his. “So we might have still been arguing over it even now —”
“—except your inappropriate man asked me if I’d ever worried you might try to fight evil villains,” her father said.
“‘Overlords,’ dear.”
Her father waved a hand as if to suggest that overlords and villains were using up more than their fair share of names and ought to work out a merger at the first opportunity.
Emily yawned carefully, trying to hold her back still. “What did you say to that?”
He chuckled. “‘Worried about it every day until she decided to become a history professor, of all things,’ that’s what I said.”
She gave up the battle with her eyelids and smiled into her pillow.
Her mother was laughing. “Don’t believe a word of it, Em—that’s not what your father said.”
He cleared his throat. “Was a bit more succinct, I guess. ”
“And scatological,” her mother said.
“Hartgrave has that effect on people.” Emily yawned again, unable to stop. “Should we wake him?”
“He needs the sleep,” her mother said. “We all do, for that matter.”
“I’m sorry,” Emily whispered, not opening her eyes, unable to face her parents in this moment of truth. “I’m really, desperately sorry. I was wrong to volunteer myself—Hartgrave didn’t want me to, which should have been a clue—and I didn’t consider how it would affect you. I didn’t once think you might be at risk, too.”
Her father squeezed her hand. “If you hadn’t gotten involved, you wouldn’t be you, now would you?”
“I won’t pretend it hasn’t been awful,” her mother said, “but—well—all’s well that ends well. We’re proud of you.”
Archetypal heroes really missed out, not having parents to cosset them afterward.