“It’ll pass. Just got this damned headache.” I shook my head and focused on taking steady breaths until I could force the pain to recede. “Okay. I’m good.”
“Did you learn what you were hoping for?” Murphy asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “I’ll need to look at the others, too. See if the injuries on them give me some kind of pattern.”
“They’re in ICU.”
“Yeah. I need to find a way to them without getting too close to someone on life support. I can’t stay around to talk. I’ll need maybe a minute, ninety seconds to look at them both. Then I’ll get out. Let you talk.”
Murphy took a deep breath and said, “You sure you should do this?”
“No,” I told her. “But I can’t help you if I don’t get to look at them. I can’t do that any other way. If I can stay calm and relaxed, it shouldn’t hurt anything for me to be there for a minute or two.”
“But you can’t be sure.”
“When can I?”
She frowned at me, but nodded. “Let me go ahead of you,” she said. “Wait here.”
I found a chair, and took it down the hall and sat down with Mouse and Rawlins. We shared a companionable silence. I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.
My headache finally began to fade away just as Murphy returned. “All right,” she said quietly. “We need to go down a floor and then use the back stairs. A nurse is going to let us in. You won’t have to walk past any of the other rooms before you get to our witnesses.”
“Okay,” I said, and stood up. “Let’s get this over with.”
Chapter Seventeen
I wasted no time. We went up the stairs, and I was already preparing my Sight. A nurse opened the door to the stairway, and I simply stepped into the first door on my left—the catatonic girl’s, Miss Becton’s. I stepped into the doorway and raised my Sight.
She was a young girl, still in her late teens, nervously thin, her hair a shocking color of red that for some reason did not strike me as a dye job. She lay on her front, her head turned to the side, muddy brown eyes open and blank. Her back had been covered in bandages.
As my Sight focused on her, I saw more. The girl’s psyche had been savagely mauled, and as I watched her, phantom bruises darkened a few patches of skin that remained, and blood and watery fluids oozed from the rest of her torn flesh. Her mouth was set in a continual, silent wail, and beneath the real-world glaze, her eyes were wide with terror. If there’d been enough left of her behind those eyes, Miss Becton would have been screaming.
My stomach rolled and I barely spotted a trash can in time to throw up into it.
Murphy crouched down at my side, her hand on my back. “Harry? Are you okay?”
Anger and empathy and grief warred for first place in my thoughts. Across the room, I was dimly conscious of a clock radio warbling to life and dying in a puff of smoke. The room’s fluorescent lights began to flicker as the violent emotions played hell with the aura of magic around me.
“No,” I said in a vicious, half-strangled growl. “I’m not okay.”
Murphy stared at me for a second, and then looked at the girl. “Is she…”
“She isn’t coming back,” I said.
I spat a few times into the trash can and stood up. My headache started to return. The girl’s terrified eyes stayed bright and clear in my imagination. She’d been out for a fun time. A favorite movie. Maybe coffee or dinner with friends afterward. She sure as hell hadn’t woken up yesterday morning and wondered if today would be the day some kind of nightmarish thing would rip away her sanity.
“Harry,” Murphy said again, her voice very gentle. “You didn’t do this to her.”
“Dammit,” I said. I sounded bitter. She found my right hand with hers and I closed my fingers around hers with a kind of quiet desperation. “Dammit, Murph. I’m going to find this thing and kill it.”
Her hand was steady and strong, like her voice. “I’ll help.”
I nodded and held tight to her hand for a minute. There wasn’t any tension in that contact, no quivering sensation of excitement. Murphy was human and alive. She held my hand to remind me that I was too. I