“Oh, my head…” This time I woke up to a much more welcome sight next to my bed. “Hey, hon.”
Julie startled awake. She’d been sleeping in the chair next to the bed. “You’re up.” I was glad to see the relief on her face. “Thank goodness. You’ve been out forever. How’re you feeling?”
“Sore and drugged.”
“You took a beating. Two broken bones in your foot, a compound fracture in your arm, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Sore is understandable.”
“Is Stricken still here?” I asked suspiciously.
“No…He was never here. Nobody’s seen him since he left the city during the dragon attack. There are several hundred Hunters in town who’d love to make him have an accident.”
“He was just here,” I looked over at the potted plant, suspicious that it would be turning brown already, but it was fine. “I think he was.” The concept of linear time was still a little fuzzy.
Julie reached over and stroked my cheek. “I’ve been here almost the whole time, and when I wasn’t, somebody else was. Trip and Holly have been practically camped in the hall. We didn’t see anybody.”
Weird. Had I imagined that conversation? I felt okay. The memories started coming back. “You…You came back on the chopper…”
Julie nodded. “What’s a girl supposed to do? And by the way, that twenty millimeter is great. It’s so big I had to use all the bungees to hold it up, stick the barrel out one door, then hang myself out the opposite side to aim it.”
“But the Nachtmar—” It had wanted to possess a new host. “The baby!”
“Don’t worry.” Julie patted her abdomen. “Tanya promised she could ward it off with elf magic if it came around. Skippy almost had an aneurism when he found out she was drawing runes on his helicopter, but I talked him down because they were only in Sharpie. Tanya said she could handle anything disembodied.”
“And you trusted her?” I raised my voice.
Julie raised an eyebrow. She won the argument. “And if I hadn’t come back…”
“I’d be getting dissolved inside a dragon right now,” I admitted. “Sorry. It’s one thing to worry about one of you. I don’t know if I can handle two.”
“Better get used to it. I took a test an hour ago. Earl’s nose was right. I guess this is official.”
“What if—” There were a thousand questions.
“We’ll deal with whatever happens, like we always do.”
And that pretty much summed it up. We’d be okay. “You’ll be a good mom.”
“And you’ll be a great dad.”
We sat in silence for a long time. It was weird to have time to think again. I didn’t want to ask, but had to. “Who’d we lose?”
“We’re still trying to figure that out, but he hurt us.”
“Lacoco and VanZant?”
Julie shook her head. “MIA.”
I closed my eyes and tried to sink back into the bed. They were dead because of me. “I had to make the call,” I whispered.
“You were right, though. The Nachtmar concentrated on us. The demons attacking the conference center lost focus, and when the Nachtmar followed us through the clouds, it broke the spell. If he hadn’t followed us, who knows what would’ve happened. If we hadn’t made it off that roof, the Last Dragon might still be on the other side.”
Being right didn’t make it any easier. Lacoco had a little girl. “I had to make the call.”
She patted my hand as she began to cry. “I know.”