The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,164

it began to break, it was in flickers and sparks. Light, too bright to be either pixie or flame, steady and white and burning. Voices raised in agitation. The pain began to return. I tried to pull away from it, and something pricked my leg, distinct from the greater agonies only in its newness. I mewled, once, and then I was mercifully gone again, down into the dark, down where nothing mattered.

I’d always been afraid that if—that when—I died, Blind Michael would be waiting for me, ready to finish what he’d begun. But he was nowhere. There was only the darkness, the blessed darkness, and I allowed myself to fade into it with a sigh and a murmur of thanks. Whatever came next, I’d meet it on a night-haunt’s wings, and I would know no more of fear, or pain, or loss.

My last thought was of Helen.

And then even that was gone.

FOUR

The air was bitter with disinfectant and sickness. It stung the back of my throat and the inside of my nose, making breathing difficult. I sneezed, and the force of the gesture sent waves of pain through my body, awakening injuries that had been content to sleep until that moment.

If there was pain, I wasn’t dead. October had taught me that, whether she meant to or not. I’ve seen her get up from injuries that should have incapacitated her permanently, half her blood outside her body and still fighting. If she could do that, surely I could do something as simple as opening my eyes.

Thinking a thing and actually doing it are sometimes sadly different. I struggled to force my body to obey my commands until finally, exhausted, it gave in, and I was able to part my eyelids slightly. Even that small effort left me panting, and filled my mind with more questions than answers.

I was looking at the bars of a cage. Across from me, in what I assumed was a similar cage, a Siamese cat glared from a nest of blankets, a bandage wrapped around one paw and a long plastic tube taped beneath it, running some clear liquid from what looked like an IV bag from one of Chelsea’s hospital dramas. A great many of them share cast members with her beloved science fiction shows, and it seems that once a starship captain, always a starship captain, at least in her eyes.

Wait.

Digressions are normal things—May once likened a conversation between Quentin and myself to watching two kits chase a ball of string around the house—but not when things are actually happening. We’re capable of focusing. I’m capable of focusing. The fact that I was suddenly trying to remember the name of every show I’d seen Chelsea watch meant something was wrong with the way my mind was working. I turned my head, fighting the exhaustion that threatened to pull me back into the dark. There was a similar bandage wrapped around my paw, connected to a similar length of tubing.

They were doing something to me. They were putting something inside my body that didn’t belong there, and it was making it difficult for me to think the way I needed to. I would never be able to escape with this . . . this medication flowing into my body, unasked for and unwanted.

I would bite it. Yes. I would bite it, and then it would stop, and my thoughts would clear, and I could escape through the shadows.

The shadows! I blamed the tube in my arm for not thinking of them before. They would take me away from this dreadful place, get me out of this cage and back to someplace familiar, where I could think. I reached for them, or tried to. Everything was fuzzy. There were shadows pooled in the corners of my cage—I, a Prince of Cats, in a cage—but they were ordinary, mortal things, and they seemed entirely unaware of my presence. I reached again, and when they failed to respond, I went limp, panting from the effort.

No. Tube first, then shadows. The order mattered. I tried to bite at the tube, but I was too tired, and my body had no desire to obey me. Exhaustion stole over me like a thief, and I fell asleep again, mouth only half-open, tube still securely in my arm.

When I woke for the second time, a woman in pastel scrubs was standing over me, a clipboard in her hands. I opened my eyes. I considered her through the fog of pain and weariness