the side roads and redlining the engine as I burned the miles to County.
Thirty minutes. Forty-five miles. I’d make it. I had to. I flew through Thurston so fast the cop running his speed trap didn’t see me coming. Didn’t stand a chance of catching me by the time he threw down his sandwich, buckled up, and pulled onto the road.
It wasn’t until County Hospital loomed on the horizon that I dropped down to ninety miles per hour, then fifty, and skidded into the ambulance bay of the ER, parking signs be damned. Grace’s lips had a blue tint to them that couldn’t be good, and she gurgled as her chest shook.
A mob of doctors and nurses waited at the door. God only knew what Aunt Emelia told them. I followed, giving her name, her age based on the driver’s license, and the BSI medical card I dug from her purse. They pushed me out. To the hallway. To the waiting room.
And I waited.
Hell isn’t being attacked by dead things. Hell is hospital waiting rooms, where the clock gets dipped in cold motor oil. Each second ticked by and ticked again, and again. In the background, a newscaster showed clips of BSI field teams firing weapons, and lines of dead meat-skins.
I couldn’t have cared less.
I don’t know when Uncle Bran and Aunt Emelia arrived. It might have been two hundred years after they took Grace in, or maybe just an hour. Emelia wore her doctor’s ID and signed in, disappearing into the warren of hallways.
I watched other cases come in. The drunk who challenged a telephone pole and lost, the cook who filleted a finger.
After hours, the door swung open, and a nurse came out to me. She strode over in comfortable sneakers and purple scrubs. “Dr. Homer says you’re the fiancé.”
I froze. Grace was so very private. She could kick me out later, when she wasn’t in danger of dying. “Yes? Yes.”
I followed her back through the ER to hospital rooms that smelled of bleach and death. There, Grace lay in a bed, covered by a thin sheet. An IV hung from her arm, and the machines surrounding her beeped in rhythm with her heart. Her face, her lips, every part of her had swelled, distorting her beauty but not hiding it.
I took her hand and sat in the folding chair beside her bed.
A doctor knocked, a young man who must have been fresh out of medical school. He sported an orange beard and a stained coat. “I’m Dr. MacArthur, attending today.”
I shook his hand and waited.
“Your fiancée is extremely fortunate. Her heart stopped twice. She was stone-cold dead for almost fifteen seconds before we got her going again.” He looked at her chart and adjusted one of the machines.
I enveloped one of her slim hands in my own. Even her fingers had swelled like tiny bratwurst. “What happens now?”
He held out his hands, palms up. “Now we wait. We monitor her breathing. We get her allergic reaction under control. When I’m sure she won’t drop dead on the ride home, I’ll let you take her.”
Aunt Emelia came in behind him. “I’ll take it from here, Jim.”
When he left, she took out another chair and joined me. “I’ve seen this before. She’ll be fine.”
I nodded.
“Brynner, what’s wrong?”
I looked back at Grace’s still form. “Can she hear?”
“No.” Aunt Emelia looked at the chart on Grace’s bed. “Unless she’s astral projecting, which she doesn’t believe in, no.” Aunt Emelia put one hand on my knee. “Has this one gotten to you?”
“No.” I listened to the churn of emotion inside me. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
She nodded. “You’ve had other . . . friends before. What’s different about her?”
I searched for a lie but couldn’t find one I could stand to tell. “I don’t know. When I’m with her, I want to be better than I am.” There, the truth that frightened me.
Aunt Emelia rose and hugged me, squeezing my head to her like she did when I was ten. “I’ve seen this, too. You’ll be fine, boy. Just fine.”
She rose to leave, and called back to me, “You need to notify her field commander. He’ll want to know, and he’ll make sure her kin know.” After a moment, she returned and tagged a purple band onto my arm. “That says you are family, so you can get back in.”
She left me.
I paced the room, checking every few minutes to make sure Grace was still breathing. When I could put it off no