“Because you’re forever, ‘Grandpa,’” I mocked, an argument we’d long thrown back and forth between each other.
“Damn close.” He sounded smug. He sounded less so when I told him Hell had set the Roses free. “That’s nice for the Roses, escaping torture and being a demon’s supper, but it doesn’t help us with the Cronus situation or the Eligos situation when he finds out what you’ve done. You managed to kick Hell’s ass and fuck up intentionally all in one. That is quite a trick.”
“But it’s a good one, isn’t it?” I asked, an excitement no trickster could deny sparking through me . . . distant fireworks on a passing Fourth of July. What I’d done was more than good. It was, for one, nearly impossible to pull off. Second, it saved thousands of souls from horror, then nonexistence. Third, and best of all, it screwed Hell itself. You couldn’t ask for a better hat trick than that.
“Yes,” Leo admitted with a mixture of reluctance and an echo of the same excitement in his voice. “You are now legend with this one.” As if I weren’t legendary before this, ass, I thought, somewhat disgruntled. “I’ll be at the hospital as soon as I can. The tourist doesn’t want to go down. Hard digging out this way. I picked a bad spot. But I’ll be there in at least two hours. Griffin will live, won’t he?” He didn’t sound worried, but he was. Griffin and Zeke had been his strays as well as mine when they’d shown up at the bar as teenagers on the run.
“If I had my doubts, I’d be in Hell myself right now, beating Cronus to the punch. Oh, and if you see Beelzebub on the way, kill him for me, would you?” I clicked the phone shut as Griffin was pushed back on his gurney into the curtained enclosure of ER bed 7. Lucky seven, I was fervently hoping.
Zeke immediately took the plastic chair I’d disdained and pulled it up to Griffin’s side. “No hematomas, subdural or epidural.” He might not bother himself over the larger words that made up the English vocabulary, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know them. He did, and when it was important, he could not only use them, but he could amaze with what he knew. “But his Glasgow Coma Scale is seven.” He put his hand very lightly on Griffin’s forehead, the purple bruising feathering up under his palm.
“And that’s not good?” It didn’t sound particularly good the way Zeke said it. Lucky number seven wasn’t so lucky this time.
“No. I made the doctor explain it to me.” I wished I’d been there to see that—what sort of medical equipment had been involved and where it had threatened to be inserted. “It means he won’t open his eyes, he won’t speak, but he does react to pain. He’s in a coma. Deep.” Zeke bared his teeth briefly, as I saw him thinking how Griffin had gotten there, but he recovered his calm quickly in a manner so unlike him, I felt like the one who needed guidance. Tutoring, as his partner gave him. I felt like the one who was lost. When Zeke was more on top of things than I was, I was through the looking glass hanging out with the Mad Hatter. But that was making this about me, and it wasn’t. It was about Griffin and what I could do to help him.
Whisper was a healer I had helped months ago. “Whisper,” I said, “is in Louisiana. I can call her. Get her to fly back.” That was something, and I had to do something. That’s who I was. Created to do, teach, act, save. But forgetting all that, it didn’t matter what I’d been born to do; it was about what I had to do—anything I could. I was already standing and slipped my hand into my pocket for my cell phone again.
But sometimes it wasn’t my place to do.
“No. I’ll bring him back,” Zeke said without a shred of doubt in his voice.
“But, Kit, you’re not a healer.” He was many things . . . some good, some mysterious, some disastrous, but he wasn’t a healer.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll bring him back.”
“Zeke, you can’t pull someone out of a coma because you want to. No matter how much you want to.” I hated to be the voice of reason when it came to this, when what he needed was the voice of hope. But even more than hope we needed a healer, and I couldn’t ignore that, not for Griffin’s sake—not if we wanted him back. “You just can’t do it.”
“You fucking watch me.” Zeke closed his eyes while I watched, and, equaling almost anything I’d seen in my life, he did. He actually did. I would never underestimate the bond between a telepath and an empath. I never had in the past, but this . . . This was some serious tough love if ever I’d seen it—tough and untouchable.