Sing Sweet Nightingale (38 page)

Hudson leans over me. “Mariella? You with me?”

My lips move, but the words don’t come. All I get is a slight curve that feels like a smile.

“Thank God.”

I barely hear him. There are so many voices and so many images flashing through my head. Emotions that aren’t mine send my pulse flying and plummeting as chills crawl through my body. I’m drowning under the weight of everything I stole from Orane. It’s all a jumbled mess in my mind. Without some idea how to control it, I’m losing ground fast.

Hudson rests his hand against my shoulder and stares down at me with something wonderful in his deep black eyes.

I’ve been silently begging for help, but neither of them has seen it. Neither of them has heard. Hudson finally notices something. His eyes narrow.

“Mari? What is it? What’s wrong?”

K.T. pops up, the color draining from her face. I manage to open my mouth, but images of people I’ve never seen and places I’ve never been swarm my vision. I can’t separate them, and I don’t know what’s going on. Fear swamps me, buzzing through my veins like a swarm of locusts, but so many other emotions hit me that all of them cease to mean anything. They are pure energy, my body is an overloaded circuit, and I can’t keep my mind from taking the only course left and shutting down.

I give in to the blackness as Hudson calls my name.

Thirty-Seven

Hudson

Saturday, September 13 – 12:01 AM

“Mari?” I almost shout, but I catch myself at the last second. Even so, I hear a door open down the hall and know I have to get the hell out of here.

My chest aches and my hands shake when I pull away from Mariella and dive for the open window. I’m barely out of sight when her door opens and I hear Dana’s voice.

“Girls, I thought I heard—oh my God! Mari?”

Forcing myself to keep moving along the eaves of the house, I climb in the next window and slide into the guest bedroom. Horace is awake and waiting for me.

“What happened?” he demands as soon as I appear.

“Don’t know.”

The voices in the next room get louder, and Dana starts crying. I take a deep breath to ease the trembling ball of fear in my chest, open the door, and hurry into the next room.

“What happened? Is everything all right?” I hear myself asking the questions, but it doesn’t sound like me.

K.T. rattles off Mari’s address to someone on the phone. Shit. They’re calling 911. Of course they are, but I’d bet Horace’s entire fortune that the hospital isn’t going to be able to do shit. They won’t even be able to tell us what’s wrong.

Everything was fine until the end. There was an explosion of white light, and then Mari dropped, her eyes rolling back and her body going limp except for her fist locked around her nightingale pendant. I thought it was shock, but what if it’s not? What if I didn’t act fast enough to save her from a danger I never even saw?

My entire body goes cold, and numbness crawls out from the center of my chest. Sooner than I expected, paramedics shove me aside as they rush into the room. From that moment, everything seems to happen in fast-forward. They check her vitals, ask a series of rapid-fire questions—most of which K.T. answers—and then strap a brace around her neck, lift her onto a stretcher, and carry her out of the room.

K.T. follows the stretcher, but I grab her arm, holding her back until everyone else is out of earshot. The last thing I want is to drag someone else into this, but if Mari is going to the hospital, I need an inside man. Someone who knows what’s going on. I came back with the ability to heal in seconds. Who knows what Mari picked up?

“Call Dr. Carroll,” I whisper. “Tell him what happened, and tell him to get his ass to the hospital.”

K.T.’s eyes widen, and she dials as we head downstairs. We jump into the Camaro with Horace, following the ambulance’s blindingly bright lights across town.

After that, it’s a waiting game. For the second time tonight.

We’re not family, so we’re relegated to the outer waiting room. Carroll stops in to see us when he arrives, so that he can get the full story.

He’s not what I expected. Tall and lanky, he’s all arms and legs and can’t have hit thirty yet. His sandy-brown hair is messy, but his expression is tight and serious. I answer his questions as best as I can before he runs in through the doors we’re not allowed to pass.

Minutes tick by. Hours. We’re still here. And Mariella is still in there.

The numbness sinks deeper until all I feel is my heart pounding ten times faster and harder than normal.

My mind goes through what happened in the dreamworld over and over again. Was there
anything
else I could have done? I’m not sure it matters now.

I don’t know what happened or what’s wrong or what they’re doing to her or if we’ll ever get her out of here. All I know is she
has
to wake up because I can’t handle losing her now.

Carroll eventually comes to collect us, shuffling us toward the room they’ve placed Mariella in.

“They’ve admitted her,” he says.

I cringe. That
can’t
be a good sign.

“They’re letting me consult,” Carroll tells us as we hurry through the halls. “Without her parents actually switching me onto the case as her primary, that’s the most I can do.”

We walk into the room, and I can’t tear my eyes away from Mariella. She looks green, and she’s convulsing continuously, having tiny seizures that must be causing her a lot of pain if the grimace on her face is any indication.

The numbness that’s kept me together for the past few hours thaws a little, replaced by a thousand tiny knives stabbing me in the chest. I was so sure if we could make it past her birthday, everything would go back to normal. What
happened
?

The doctor—a tired-looking woman holding a clipboard—is talking to Dana and Frank when we walk in. “The convulsions started after we undressed her for the exam, and they haven’t abated. The movement makes getting scans or X-rays difficult, but from what I can tell the convulsions are not related to a seizure disorder. At least, not one I’ve ever encountered before.”

“Seizure disorder?” Dana asks, horror infusing her breathless voice.

The doctor shakes her head, but her eyebrows are pinched. “With most states of persistent unconsciousness and comas, this type of movement is highly abnormal.”

“Coma?” Frank repeats as Dana leans heavily against him.

The seizures started
after
they undressed her? Where’s the nightingale? She was clutching that thing like a lifeline when she collapsed. I look around, but there’s no telltale glow and no gleam of silver.

“Now, given what you told me about her previous speech issues, it’s possible that—”

“Where did they take her things? Her clothes and jewelry?”

Everyone stares at me, even K.T. and Carroll. I don’t look at anyone but Dana. She’s the one I have to convince.

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important, Dana.”

She stares at me, her red-rimmed eyes narrow and her lips tight, but she nods and glances at the doctor.

“If you go to the nurse’s station and tell them Dr. Leventhall authorized you to collect them, they’ll get everything for you.”

I’m out the door before she’s finished talking. A few minutes later, I jog back to Mari’s room, searching through the bag as I go. The necklace is at the bottom of the pile. I hit the door with my shoulder to open it as I unclasp the nightingale pendant’s silver chain, adding on an amber charm.

Something about the pendant catches my eye, and I pause inside the door. Something’s different.

Inspect it later
, I tell myself.
Test the theory now
.

“It’ll be okay,” I whisper, bending over Mari and wrapping the chain around her wrist. The pendants fall into her right hand, and she curls her fist tight around them.

For a second, her heart rate spikes and every muscle in her body seizes. My body tenses in response, my pulse jumping as high as hers.

“What’s happening?!” Dana screeches.

Dr. Leventhall shoves me out of the way with an angry glare. But then Mari sucks in a huge breath and heaves a long sigh of relief.

The doctor checks her vitals and the readouts from a few of the machines, but my eyes stay on Mari’s face.

She’s at rest. Her face is relaxed. The only tension in her body is in her fist locked tight around her pendants. If not for the doctor hovering over her and the various wires and tubes stuck in her arms, I’d believe she was sleeping.

Holy hell. It worked.

Everyone is staring at me, but my mind has gone completely blank, emptied by shock and relief. Luckily, I don’t have to think of an explanation for Mari’s sudden stillness. Carroll does it for me.

“Odd as it sounds, I’ve seen stranger things happen.” Everyone looks at him like he told us a pink elephant might know the answer, but Carroll smiles. “We doctors want our patients to believe we can solve every problem and answer every question, but there’s a lot to the world, to human beings in particular and the human
brain
even more so, that we don’t understand yet.”

Leventhall doesn’t seem to agree, but she takes advantage of the situation anyway, wheeling Mari away to run as many tests as they can. When they leave, all I can think is that Carroll better stay on his toes. He’s gonna have to come up with a plausible explanation for anything unusual that turns up on those tests. This hospital has no idea what they’re actually dealing with.

“The tests were all inconclusive,” Dr. Leventhall says later, her nose scrunched. “I’ve never seen activity patterns like this.”

“But what—I mean, is there damage?” Frank asks.

“Not that I can see,” the doctor hedges. “There’s actually an unusually
high
level of activity. In fact, these levels would be considered high even if she were conscious.”

Leventhall rambles on about cortexes, but my mind is racing.

What would
my
brain look like in a scan? More importantly, what would my scans have looked like hours after I escaped Calease? I walk over to Carroll and tug him out of the room, whispering my theories.

“We need to get her out of here,” I insist. “If she wakes up with the ability to turn invisible or something, we don’t want the doctors turning her into an experiment.”

Carroll’s eyes bug out. “Is that a possibility?”

“I don’t
know
! That’s not the point!”

“Right. Right. Sorry.” Carroll flushes and looks away. After a deep breath, he nods. “There’s always home care, but we’d have to convince her parents it’s the better option. Which might not be easy.”

“I think you need to tell them the truth, kid.”

Carroll and I turn toward Horace’s voice, but I can’t quite believe what he’s telling me.

“They’ve got the right to know, ’specially now.”

Jesus. He’s serious. My hands go cold when I think about sitting down in front of Dana and Frank and spilling out a story like mine. They live in a world of music lessons and PTA meetings and green construction and civic pride. What would they do with a story about demons and parallel universes and magic?

“They’re not gonna believe me! Why would they?”

One of Horace’s bushy white eyebrows climbs up. “Besides the fact that you got three people backing up your story? Plus Emily’s case, and that little vanishing-wounds trick.”

“Vanishing wounds?” Carroll asks.

“It’s the only way they’re going to let you get her out of here in time,” Horace says.

There are no gray areas here. I have to make a decision. One of them is the right choice, one of them isn’t, and I have no goddamn clue which is which.

If I don’t tell Frank and Dana, Mariella stays here and we’ll have a hell of a time getting her out if she wakes up.
When
she wakes up.

If I tell them and they don’t believe me, they’ll lock me out. Or lock me
up
.

But if I tell them and they
do
believe me, we actually have a chance of getting her out before anyone discovers
exactly
how weird the things going on inside her head are.

Horace is right. As much as it sucks, I have to take the chance.

“This isn’t funny, Hudson.” Dana’s voice snaps like a whip, and her hands clench like she wants to hit me. “I don’t know if you’re being purposefully cruel or if this is some misguided attempt to comfort us, but you can’t expect me to believe—”