Twisting his head around, V glared at the door that had been reshut by her will. He was glad she suffered. And no, he didn’t trust her.
As he dematerialized back to the field of combat, he had absolutely no faith at all that she would do right by Rhage and Mary. He had taken a gamble and lost going to his mother, but with her, that was the way it always went.
Miracle. He needed a fucking miracle.
FIVE
The water rushing over Mary’s hands was cold, and yet it burned her skin—proving that opposite ends of the thermometer could coexist at the same time.
The ladies’ room sink she was standing at was white and porcelain. Its drain was shiny and silver. In front of her, a wall-length mirror reflected three stalls, all of which had their peach-colored doors closed, only one of which was occupied.
“You okay in there?” she said.
The toilet flushed, even though Bitty hadn’t used it.
Mary focused on her reflection. Yup. She looked as bad as she felt: Somehow, in the last thirty minutes, black bags had formed under sockets that had sunken in, and her skin was pale as the tile she was standing on.
Somehow? Bull crap. She knew exactly how.
I killed her!
Mary had to close her eyes and pull yet another recompose. When she opened things up again, she tried to remember what she was doing. Oh. Right. There was a little stack of paper towels on a shelf, the kind that interlocked fold-to-fold, and as she went to take one and dripped water all over the others, she thought it was strange that Havers, who was so precise about his facility, promoted such messiness. Oh … got it. The dispenser on the wall by the door was broken, the lower part hanging loose.
Just like me, she thought. Fully stocked with the education and experience to help people, but not doing my job right.
Take her hand. It’s okay …
I killed her!
“Bitty?” When that came out as nothing but a croak, she cleared her throat. “Bitty.”
After she dried her hands, she turned to the stalls. “Bitty, I’m coming in if you don’t come out.”
The girl opened the middle panel, and for some reason, Mary knew she would never forget the sight of that small hand curling around, gripping and not letting go as she stepped out.
She had been crying in there. Alone. And now that the girl was being forced to show her face, she was attempting to do exactly what Mary herself was desperately shooting for.
Sometimes composure was all you had; dignity your only consolation; the illusion of “all right” your sole source of comfort.
“Here, let me…” As Mary’s voice dried up, she went back for the paper towels and wet one in the sink she had used. “This will help.”
Approaching the girl slowly, she brought the cool, soft cloth to the child’s flushed face, pressing it onto the hot, red skin. As she blotted, in her mind she was apologizing to the grown-up Bitty would hopefully become: I’m sorry I made you do that. No, you didn’t kill her. I wish I had let you do it on your own terms and in your own way. I’m sorry. No, you didn’t kill her. I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
Mary tilted the girl’s chin up. “Bitty—”
“What do they do with her now? Where does she go?”
God, that pale brown stare was steady. “They’re going to take her to … well, they’re going to cremate her.”
“What is that?”
“They’re going to burn her body into ashes for the passing ceremony.”
“Will that hurt her?”
Mary cleared her throat again. “No, honey. She won’t feel anything. She’s free—she’s in the Fade, waiting for you.”
The good news was that at least Mary knew that part was true. Even though she’d been raised Catholic, she had seen the Scribe Virgin for herself, so no, she wasn’t feeding the girl false, if compassionate, rhetoric. For vampires, there was in fact a heaven, and they did, really and truly, meet their loved ones there.
Heck, it probably proved the same was true for humans, but as there was less visible magic in that world, eternal salvation was a much harder sell to the average joe.
Wadding the paper towel up, Mary took a step back. “I’d like us to return to Safe Place now, okay? There’s nothing more we can do here and it’s getting close to dawn.”
The last piece was just habit, she supposed. As a pretrans, Bitty could tolerate any amount of light the sun could throw at her. And the real truth was that she just wanted to get the girl away from all the death here.
“Okay?” Mary prompted.
“I don’t want to leave her.”
In any other circumstance, Mary would have crouched down and waded gently into the waters of what was going to be Bitty’s new world. The awful reality was that there was no mother to leave behind anymore, and getting the girl out of this clinical environment where patients were being treated, sometimes in dire situations, was entirely appropriate.
I killed her.
Instead, Mary said, “Okay, we can stay as long as you like.”
Bitty nodded and walked over to the door that led out into the corridor. As she stood before the closed panel, her heavily-washed dress seemed on the verge of falling off her thin frame, her ill-fitting black coat like a blanket she had wound around herself, her brown hair feathering from static across the knobby fabric.
“I really wish…”
“What?” Mary whispered.
“I wish I could go back to earlier. When I woke up tonight.”
“I wish you could, too.”
Bitty looked over her shoulder. “Why can’t you go back? It’s so strange. I mean, I can remember everything about her. It’s like … it’s like my memories are a room I should be able to walk into. Or something.”
Mary frowned, thinking that was a way too mature comment for someone her age to make.
But before she could reply, the girl pushed her way out, clearly not interested in a response—and maybe that was a good thing. What the hell did you say to that?
Out in the corridor, Mary wanted to put her hand on that small shoulder, but she held off. The girl was so self-contained, in the way a book would be in the midst of a library, or a doll in a line-up of collectibles, and it was difficult to justify breaching those boundaries.
Especially when, as a therapist, you were already feeling very shaky in your professional shoes.
“Where do we go?” Bitty asked as a pair of nurses ran by them.
Mary glanced around. They were still in the ICU section of the clinic, but some distance away from where Bitty’s mom had passed. “We could ask for a room to sit in.”
The girl stopped. “We can’t really see her again, can we?”
“No.”
“Maybe we should go back, I guess.”
“Whatever you want.”
Five minutes later, they were in the Volvo heading for Safe Place. As Mary took them over the bridge, she once again bobble-headed the rearview mirror, checking on Bitty every fifty yards. In the silence, she found herself back on the apology train in her head … for giving bad advice, for putting the girl in the position of suffering even more. But all that gnashing was self-serving, a search for personal absolution that was totally unfair to the patient, especially one that young.
This on-the-job nightmare was something Mary was going to have to come to grips with on her own.