Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,48
No, jeez Carmen! Look, Piper’s in her own room sleeping anyway. Jetlag, sunburn, and too many in-flight drinks. So we need to reschedule any fun and take twenty-four to recover. Especially you. You need me to bring you anything? Some ginger ale or Saltines?”
It seemed all of Annaleia’s friends were succumbing to illness this holiday season. Holidays sucked.
There was a brief pause on the other end of the line before Carmen returned in a voice raw from vomiting. “You’re alone on Sixth at midnight,” she croaked softly. “I don’t like it. You know you can’t come back a second time.” There was a sound, like someone holding back a rising tide of something nasty with the thin veil of a spasming epiglottis. Anna winced. “You die again, you’re gone for good,” Carmen finished.
Carmen Seville and Piper Maddox were the only two people in the world Annaleia had ever told about her death, her resurrection, and the gift that came with it. And for some reason, it made them worry about her constantly.
What was it about having two lives instead of just one that made the second one seem so much more precious? It was like in a video game where you were given several lives. People tended to blow through the first few. But the last one was so precious, gamers never took any chances whatsoever with it. They were even less daring than they were in real life, where they only had one life.
For some reason, knowing there was no coming back a final time made all the difference.
Anna cringed as her friend made a pathetic sound on the other end of the line. She shook her head, silently thanking the stars that they’d all gotten separate rooms for this trip so she could actually catch some sleep later. But at the moment, Carmen needed her. “I’m coming up right now to help you. Someone’s gotta hold your hair.”
But Carmen rushed to reply before Anna could hang up. “Don’t you dare,” she croaked. “The last thing I want right now is company. No one needs to see me do this! Keep away from me and leave me the hell alone, bruja.”
As Carmen panted a little on the other end, Anna weighed her options. When she herself was stick to her stomach, she wanted nothing to do with any other living being. God and country and the cosmos could keep their ever-loving distance and forget she was alive, so long as none of them barged in on her when her head resided in the toilet and her soul in Hades.
“Okay,” she sighed. “Our rooms are connected. If you need anything, let me know immediately. Otherwise, Pipe and I will see you tomorrow and we’ll all have a late lunch or a tea kind of thing, if either of you are up to it.”
“Yeah,” said Carmen softly. Now she sounded more tired than sick. Anna hoped she was rounding the end of the food poisoning she’d probably gotten from an airport meal somewhere between LA and Austin. That was the shitty thing about meeting best friends online. They always lived far away, and getting to meet up and spend time together was a rare thing.
“It’s a deal,” Carmen whispered. “Sorry your friends suck. Go hook up or something. Hell, hook up twice for all of us.”
“No one says hook up anymore,” Anna said. “Buenas noches y dulces sueños.” They hung up and Anna repocketed her phone to resume her stroll down Sixth street. She was feeling jetlagged herself, but knew from experience that giving in and sleeping was like slowly peeling off a bandage instead of just ripping it off once and for all. She would rather the raging, angry exhaustion of a single terrible morning than the unending, quiet misery of two weeks’ worth of zombie-state.
She hugged herself against a sudden chill and forced her legs to keep moving. Where to, she had no idea. She was just moving. The sun had gone down and the air was changing. The temperature had dropped drastically over the last few hours; she was only truly noticing it now. She huddled a little further into her jacket. This kind of fast temperature change wasn’t rare for Texas, but it was still irritating. It was hard to look nice when you always had to dress in layers.
And she was suddenly pretty sure that she hadn’t worn enough of them.
Maybe her skin retained enough heat from Oz that she’d forgotten the bipolar nature of Texas