tile. I came a little more awake. My right arm was bandaged. My left knee was swollen to about twice its normal size. I probed my ribs gently through the thin blue hospital gown. My right side felt merely sore and angry. I only tried touching the left side once.
Joseph Mfume. I'd been fighting with something-a rider in its full, unhidden form-and I'd been saved by the serial killer and rapist who'd started the whole messy thing. I remembered Sabine Glapion standing in the unfalling rain of the crossroads between the real world and Next Door. Well, she'd still been alive last time I saw her, so that had to be a good thing. I craned my neck, but there were no clocks. I needed to find out how long I'd been there. I needed to find out where exactly I was, for that matter.
I needed to find Aubrey and Ex and Chogyi Jake. The best I could manage was a nurse call button. After what felt like an hour, I hit it again. A couple hours after that, a nurse came, explained to me that I had hairline fractures in two of my ribs, soft tissue damage to the connective tissue in my knee, and they'd stapled my arm closed where it had been cut. When I asked him who'd brought me in, he didn't know. When I asked for my stuff, he said he'd try to find it. He pronounced my name "Jane" and I didn't correct him.
A couple junior cups of fruit juice later, I was feeling almost human. The so-called hairline fractures hurt like hell anytime I moved or laughed or breathed in too deep, but I took comfort in the intellectual knowledge that they only felt shattered. I forced myself to sit up, then slowly, carefully, figured out how I could walk without mind-altering pain. By the time a different nurse appeared with my things, I could see the first, faint light of dawn in the windows.
My clothes were gone, cut off me by the paramedics. My laptop case was rain-soaked, but the interior looked dry enough that it might have escaped harm. The leather backpack I used as a purse was probably trashed. The scraps of paper inside were all waterlogged, and Dr. Inond茅's unpleasant little gris-gris had leaked something gray and filmy over the interior pouch. I checked my cell phone's side pocket with a sense of dread. What I took for dead was actually just turned off, and when I powered it back up, it seemed fine. I had five messages waiting for me. I sat on the threadbare chair by the window, the hospital gown wrapped tightly around me in an attempt to preserve what was left of my modesty, and called voice mail.
"Jayn茅," Aubrey said at about the time I'd been talking with Dr. Inond茅. "You hopped out of the house for a few minutes over an hour ago. What's going on? Call me as soon as you get this."
Then, more faintly, Ex said, She's not answering? and before Aubrey could reply, the message ended.
Oops, I thought, my belly tightening with guilt. In addition to getting my ass handed to me, I had probably just put my friends through a night of pure hell.
The next message was a few minutes later.
"Jayn茅," Aubrey said. "I've just called every Starbucks I can find in the phone book, and you don't seem to be at any of them. We're sending out a search team in the van. Call as soon as you get this message."
Two hours after that:
"Still nothing," Ex said to someone besides me, and hung up.
Fifty minutes after that, Aubrey again:
"Fuck. Jayn茅, if you get this, call in. We're covering as much territory as we can, but no one's found a trace of you. You need to call home. You need to come back."
Then an hour and a half after that, Ex's number again, but only the sound of two or three long, slow breaths together, and then nothing.
I pushed my hair back. The rain and the humidity were making it curl more than I was used to. My knee throbbed. My stitches itched. I'd screwed up.
I called Aubrey's cell number. He picked up on the first ring.
"Jayn茅?"
"Hey," I said. "Really, really sorry. Totally, deeply, profoundly sorry. Didn't mean to scare you. Didn't mean to scare anyone."
"I don't give a shit," Aubrey said, his tone speaking volumes of relief. "If you're okay, I'll kick the crap out of you later. We