Locked (27 page)

I won’t, Mycroft.

I move just as the noise explodes out of thin air.

It’s so loud.

It shatters everything.

I close my eyes against it, but I feel it as if it had cut straight into me.

And then I open my eyes and see the horror on Ethan’s face.

I sort of fall. I don’t know why. I just do.

“Irene. No. No.
No
.”

It’s Sherlock’s voice, but not like his voice has ever been before. It’s torn open and bleeding.

“
Why did you do that
,” Ethan screams.

I can’t quite breathe right. But it’s not the fear. It’s different. There’s something in my head, pushing everything out, the tears and the terror. A dark fog.

Sherlock is holding me. I don’t know when that happened. His face is above me, but it’s wrong. Blurry. And he’d never wear an expression like that.

Like someone had shot him through the heart.

“Sherlock? Are you okay?” I try to say, but my lips won’t move. I look down. There’s redness spreading across my chest. Blooming. It’s kind of pretty. I smile. Or maybe I don’t smile. I’m not sure.

“Irene. Irene, you’re going into shock. I have pressure on the wound and undoubtedly there’s an ambulance outside, they’ll be here in minutes. Minutes. All you need to do is stay alive for a few minutes. You can do that. You’ve done it all your life.”

There’s pain, but it’s distant, a storm on a faraway shore. I’m somewhere else. Dreaming, maybe. Dreaming of him. Not the real one. The real Sherlock wouldn’t cry like that, tears spilling down his face and turning his eyes into crystal chandeliers.

“You’re all right, Irene.” His voice is breaking. Breaking into a thousand pieces. “You’re all right. I told you you’re going to be all right because it’s your birthday. Remember? I’m never wrong.”

I want to put his voice back together, but I don’t know how. There’s so much blood. Is it really all just coming from me?

“We’re going on a date tonight. You can get angry at me when I go outside to smoke.”

Maybe I could just go to sleep for a little while. I’m so tired. But he won’t leave me alone. He’s pressing his forehead to mine now, cradling my face again.

“If you die, I’ll do every experiment I can think of in your microwave. I’ll smoke three hundred cigarettes a day. I’ll never go back to class. Please. You changed things for me, Irene. Things I didn’t even know needed to be changed.”

I slide into sleep and out again. My cheek is wet. I’m outside the restaurant, it’s raining, he’s kissing me. But—not raining. Him, crying. The tears falling on me. He’s still kissing me, though. At least I hope he is. It’s hard to tell what’s real.

“Listen to this,” he whispers. “I love you. Can you hear me? I was going to tell you tonight. I love you. Stay here and I’ll keep telling you. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

I wonder drowsily if Carol will make fun of me for falling for a guy who cries.

“Irene? No. Open your eyes—”

Sorry, Sherlock.

You can’t keep me awake anymore.

|||

The sky is an almost-dark blue.

“Trust me,” he’s saying.

“No, I know how this goes,” I say fiercely. “But not this time. Because I won, Sherlock. I saved you. I did it.”

His face is cool and expressionless against the backdrop of the sky, the endless still ocean. “Then you have nothing to fear.”

“Exactly.” I step into his arms and for one quiet moment, nothing is wrong with anything.

“What did you get me for my birthday?” I ask into his shirt.

He doesn’t say anything.

“Sherlock?”

I step back. And my heart breaks. Because there’s blood spreading over his chest.

“Sorry, Irene,” he says. “You were so close.”

|||

I wake up by degrees.

Fuzzy whiteness instead of darkness. That’s the first thing. Oh. My eyes are open. For a second, these two things are all I understand in the world—that there’s light and that my eyes are open.

Someone had told me to open my eyes.

“I did,” I try to say, but all that comes out is a dry croaking sound.

A voice floats into the blur. “There’s a buzzer next to your bed if you want the nurses to come.”

I think it’s his voice. Only he would sound that bored. Good. He’s here. That’s four things I know now—there’s light, my eyes are open, there’s a buzzer, and Sherlock is here.

And I have arms. That’s important, too, because I need to use one to hit the buzzer. Except someone’s replaced my muscles with cement sludge. Why doesn’t he just hit the stupid buzzer? I can see it now, the haze shifting and fading just enough for me to make out the red button attached the side of my bed. In front of a bunch of beeping equipment. Why is there beeping equipment? I don’t have any of that in my room.

And my sheets aren’t white, either.

I hit the buzzer.

After a minute in which I blink repeatedly, trying to clear my eyes of all the fog, someone flies into the room. A nurse. A nurse?

“Hello, madam. Glad to see you awake.” She smiles at me. She’s pretty, even with my vision swimming, young with a pixie cut. “Open your mouth.”

I obey, and she pats moisture onto my tongue with a little sponge on a stick and water from a Styrofoam cup.

“My eyes are weird,” I say thickly.

“They’re dry.” She takes out a little bottle and administers drops of liquid to my eyes. I blink it away. “They’ve been closed for most of a week.”

“A week?” That’s wrong. I sleep a lot, but I’ve never slept that long.

“Yes.” The smile fractures and falls from her face. “Do you remember your name?”

“Irene Adler.” Another thing I know.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“We were going to go on a date,” I say slowly. “And then…”

I wake up a little more, to the echo of a gunshot.

And then.

“Oh my God.” Ethan. Sherlock. School. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Before the panic can finish closing over me like a mouthful of teeth, someone else hurries into the white room. Mom, pale and in disarray. Mom is here. “Oh, baby,” she says, through tears. “You’re okay.”

“Yeah—” I pull up as much as I can and try to look around. The room is cut in half by a heavy curtain. “Where’d Sherlock go?”

The nurse takes a step back to let Mom get closer to my bed. She smooths back my hair, a hundred new lines on her face. “He’s not here, sweetheart.”

“I heard him,” I say. “He told me where the buzzer was.”

“Must have been James,” the nurse says, glancing past the heavy curtain. “Funny. He hasn’t been speaking much.”

The teeth hover over my heart. “Where’s Sherlock, then? Is he okay? He was talking to me after it happened, I think—I don’t remember what he said—”

“He’s fine. Don’t worry about him.” Mom keeps smoothing my hair back, over and over again. “It’s after hours, so they’re only allowing visitors who are immediate family. He’d come if he could.”

He’s
fine
. Those words are the cleanest breath I’ve ever taken. The oxygen after the fire. I close my eyes and let those words stay with me. He’s fine. He wasn’t wrong about how we’d both be all right. We can still go on a date. I can still tell him.

Then a second fear grips me. “Did anyone—was anyone else—?”

“Just—just the shooter. He shot himself.” Mom sounds like something is caught in her lungs. “They…they often do, I guess. You and he were…were the only ones. He fired a couple warning shots at the beginning to scare everyone, that was all.”

“Oh, good,” I whisper. “No one else. That’s good.”

“Excuse me,” says the nurse gently, “but I need to take her vitals.”

Mom steps back but doesn’t look away from me, her hands twisted tightly together.

“You’re a lucky girl, Ms. Adler.” The nurse shines a small light into my eyes. “Shot very low in the shoulder, almost the chest. The bullet took the cleanest path it could straight through you, and out the other side. Missed your lung by centimeters. Without the bullet inside, the surgery was much less complicated.”

“Why have I been out for a week, then?” I try to sit up higher, but it’s hard.

“You haven’t been, hon. You’ve been popping in every now and then. I doubt you remember it, though—the painkillers.”

“Oh.” My head still feels thick and heavy. There’s a needle in my skin, attached to a plastic bag. Things dripping into me, keeping me heavy. I glance down. Beneath the hospital gown, there’s a white bandage.
Underneath that, I ache.

“Immediate blood transfusion,” says the nurse, taking my pulse. “Saved your life. You’re lucky you’re type AB negative. Universal receiver. Very rare.”

“Maybe we can save all the medical talk for later,” says Mom, her expression still taut.

“Certainly.” The nurse backs toward the door. “I’ll go get Dr. Stevens. I’m sure he’d like to take a more thorough look at you.”

Mom sits close to me again as soon as the nurse is gone. There are still tears in her eyes. This must have been so hard for her, after Carol. “The people in that classroom, they told me how you saved their lives. How you talked the shooter into letting them go. It was very brave. They’ve been bringing things by.”

My bedside table is bursting with flowers and cards and chocolate. I turn back to Mom. “So Sherlock is definitely okay?”

“Definitely.”

Something relaxes inside me, but then the echo of the gunshot rears up and some of the terror filters back into my chest. Ethan’s eyes. “I was so scared, Mom.”

“I know. I know.” She takes my hand. “But everything’s okay now.”

“Can you tell Sherlock to come see me when he can?” I smile. “I have something to tell him.”

He’d saved my life so many times. I’d wanted so badly to pay him back for that. For everything. And this is my start.

Because Mycroft was wrong.

I’ll have a minimum of
two
uses as a human shield.

|||

They make me stay for another week.

In that time, I send fourteen texts:

IA:
So you still haven’t come to see me. Wondering why that is.

IA:
I know they’re letting non family in now.

IA:
Robyn came and left this horrible giant teddy bear.

IA:
I’ll let you put it in the microwave, if it’ll fit. We could chop it up.

IA:
Mom thinks your phone must have broken in all the panic. Get a new phone, idiot.

IA:
I know you have the same number, I’m not getting a send failure alert.

IA:
Seriously, are you mad at me?

IA:
Because I don’t want to play the ‘saved your life’ card, BUT…

IA:
I’m totally playing the ‘saved your life’ card. Get over here.

IA:
Are you avoiding me because you feel guilty? Don’t feel guilty.

IA:
You figured it out before anyone else. I was the one who convinced you it wasn’t him.

IA:
Pleaaaase come. I don’t even have one of those little hospital TVs.

IA:
Now I know why you’re always complaining about dying from boredom.

IA:
Sherlock, come on, I have something important to tell you.

“I think you’re probably right about him feeling guilty,” Mom says one day after I vent for nearly an hour. “He probably feels like he could have stopped all this.”

“Well, he’s at home, isn’t he?” I demand, angrily eating chocolates. “Drag him here if you have to. Tie him up and throw him in the trunk. I want to see him.”

“Oh, damn, I’m going to be late for work. I’ll come by later, Irene.”

The days stretch into meaningless blank nothings. I end up talking a lot to the person on the other side of the curtain. I only know his first name—James. I don’t even know what he looks like, because the curtain’s always pulled. But his voice reminds me a little of Sherlock’s, and apparently he’s recovering from a surgery. He hasn’t said anything since he told me where the buzzer was.

I spend most of my time complaining about Sherlock.

“He’s an idiot. He’s a total, total idiot. Also an ass. I jump in front of a bullet for him and what does he do? Ignore me. I’m going to punch him in the face. And the balls. Both at once.”

No comment from the curtain.

“Where does he get off? He hasn’t even given me my birthday present yet. Like I said. Ass.”

I grab my phone and check it for the umpteenth time that day. Still nothing.

“Okay, I’m sure he feels guilty. He’s probably mad at himself for not proving Ethan killed Daphne when he figured it out in the first place. And—oh. Maybe he feels bad that I got shot trying to protect him. That makes sense. Wait, what am I saying? No it doesn’t. It was my choice and now he’s punishing me for it by never speaking to me again? I’m going to smack him right in the stupid cheekbones.”

There’s a rustle and I wait hopefully, but no response comes.

“He’s actually kind of a genius, though. It’s amazing. He can look at a person and figure out everything about them just from their clothes, and yet he doesn’t understand emotions. At all. Or he didn’t. I think he might now. A little, anyway. He’s complicated. Basically he’s rude and obnoxious and blunt to pretty much everyone, and when he’s bored he’s the worst, but when he’s excited it’s like…he’s this force of nature. Unstoppable, and he sweeps everyone up with him. And he smokes. And he plays the violin.”

Nothing.

“I sort of miss him, in case you couldn’t tell.”

I roll over. I
really
miss him. I’d been planning on icing him out for at least twenty minutes when he finally does come to see me, but now I don’t know if I’ll be strong enough to keep from hugging him right away. At any rate, they’re going to release me tomorrow, and he won’t be able to avoid me then.

And suddenly I’m smiling like an idiot. I’m going to tell him. I can’t wait to tell him.

The door opens. It’s a nurse, but not my usual nurse—this one is red-haired and tall. She carries a tray with a wrapped sandwich and a cup of Jell-O. I sit up, pushing the hospital sheets back. “Where’s Anna?”