About the same time my butt hits the ground, my ears, dazed from the experience of Aita’s voice, pick up the chorus of footsteps heading my way. When I glance up from the charred grass of the clearing, I find eight guns pointed at my face, plus ten sets of beggar rings, three swords, a couple of knives, and to my astonishment, an RPG launcher someone must have requisitioned from DSI’s advanced weapons armory. A croak of surprise breaks through my clenched teeth, and I raise one of my hands from Cooper in surrender.
“Um,” I say, “hey guys.”
All the DSI agents, faces shadowed by the sinking sun, slowly lower their weapons in uncertainty and disbelief. A few quiet, tense seconds pass by, before one of them steps forward from the crowd and into a beam of orange sunlight, revealing herself as Ella Dean. “Holy hell,” she mutters. “Cal?”
“Hey, Ella.” I use my surrender hand to give her a little wave. “How’s it hanging?”
Unfortunately, before she can respond with what I know would be a fascinating answer...
…I faint.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The infirmary isn’t my least favorite place to wake up, but it is pretty low on the list, right beneath a ditch on the side of the road and right above a coffin. The reason I’m not too fond of coming around on thin white sheets, head pressed into a flat pillow, dressed in nothing but a medical gown open at the ass end, is that it tends to involve pain. A whole heaping helping of aches, all over my body. And today’s experience fulfills my expectations to a T.
First, I notice the pounding headache. It’s not in my forehead, where my headaches usually are, but spread across my entire skull, a deep, persistent throbbing. When I sit up, it feels like my head is an hourglass full of sand, empty at the top, and the act of moving forty-five degrees flips it over and causes my brain to start spilling into my chest cavity. I wobble, almost fall back on the pillow, and have to use the bed railing to stay upright.
The second thing I notice is my sling, or, well, a new sling in place of the old one. My shoulder hurts as well, and I remember that I wrenched it the wrong way more than a few times during the final battle with my buddy Charun. I’m hoping I didn’t deal any permanent damage to the joint, or to any of the surrounding muscles, by stressing it too soon after the dislocation.
Last (but not least), I notice the sharp sting in my neck, when I turn my head in an attempt to peer through the slit in the blue curtain surrounding my bed. I bring my free hand up to feel a thick gauze bandage covering the side of my neck, a few inches above my shoulder, and I remember then that Vanth almost took my head off with her sword. I wonder if the cut needed stitches, if I’ll end up with a scar, if I’ll have a reminder, in plain sight, of my sheer dumb luck forever. Vanth, had she been angry enough at me, could and would have completed that swing.
Aita asked her to let me go. He didn’t force her to. She could have made a different choice.
She—
The curtain draws back, and Dr. Navarro steps into my space. He’s staring at my chart when he enters and doesn’t realize I’m awake until he pulls a syringe out of his pocket and reaches for my IV line. When he spots me staring at him, he drops the syringe onto the edge of my bed, and his eyes bug out. “Kinsey, you’re up.”
“Looks that way.” My voice is scratchy, throat dry as sandpaper. “What’s with the wide-eyed shock? Was I in a coma or something?”
Navarro recovers, slips the syringe back into his pocket, and moves closer to check my vitals. “No coma, but we weren’t sure what happened to you in…you know, in the Eververse. You’ve been out for over twenty-four hours, despite my best attempts to rouse you, so we were a bit worried you wouldn’t wake up.” He takes my pulse, then uses his stethoscope to listen to my heart and lungs. “But everything looks and sounds good. How do you feel?”
“Like I got hit by a tractor-trailer going fifty-five, but the driver didn’t think that was enough punishment on its own, so he backed up, slowly crushing me with all eighteen wheels, and then ran over me full speed again.” I suck in a shallow breath and release it as a sigh. “And that’s almost an understatement, to be honest.”
Navarro plucks a penlight from his pocket and clicks it on. “Well, luckily, despite what you feel, you’re in pretty good shape. A couple of bruised ribs and that one laceration on your neck are the worst of it, besides the injuries you already had.” He shines the penlight in my eyes, and I recoil, gasping, because it feels like he shoved a torch into my corneas. “Hm, some sensitivity there. You have a migraine?”
“Something close to it.”
“Let me know if that doesn’t ease up.” He turns the light off and drops it back into his coat pocket. “I ran about twenty-five different scans of your entire body, using every piece of tech I have on hand, and I didn’t see anything seriously wrong. But the effects of the Eververse on the human body are not well studied, seeing as most people who go there don’t come back.” He hangs my chart on the end of the bed, then crosses his arms and gives me a hard look. “I would advise you to take it slow, Kinsey, stick to desk duty for a while, but since that advice had no effect last time, I’m going to write you a prescription for some pain meds and put you on mandatory medical leave for a week.”
“But—”
His look morphs into a full-on glare. “I’m your doctor. You do what I say. Or else.”
I swallow my rebuttal. “Yes, sir.”
He holds his glare for a moment longer, until he’s convinced my answer was honest, and then he nods. “I’ll write up your discharge for you, so you can leave when you feel well enough to go home. I recommend you rest, relax, and eat well to get your strength back. Come see me for a follow-up in three or four days. Unless you start feeling worse. Then come immediately.” Another look.
“Yes, Doc.”
“Good.” He moves toward the curtain, tugging a wrinkle out of his coat. “Once I get your ass out of here, I’ll only have one patient left to care for. It’s been a hectic few days for me, let me tell you, between that park raid and the battle in the woods. Had to call up every DSI doctor and surgeon on the roster to handle the influx. What a mess. There were a few times I thought—”
“Wait,” I blurt out, “who’s the other patient? Cooper Lee?”
Navarro halts his retreat and gives me a thin-lipped smile. “Indeed. The other miracle survivor from your Eververse jaunt.”
“Is he okay?” Fear spikes in my chest, a physical weight. “Is his arm okay? It was so broken and burned, I was afraid…”
“Whoa, now! Calm down.” Navarro says, as the heart monitor to my left starts beeping. “Cooper Lee is all right, as far as I know. A surgeon fixed his radius, no problems there, and a burn specialist, another DSI practitioner, did some work on his wrist.” He raises a hand to silence me before I vomit out more panicked words. “Not going to lie to you, Cal—Cooper will have some fairly extensive scars when all is said and done, but the specialist, Kate Lancing, assured me he’ll regain full functionality and won’t have any lingering pain after the rehab. She’s very good. I promise.”
I rub my bruised face with my one good hand and sigh. “Is he awake?”
Navarro shakes his head. “No. He was in surgery for several hours, under anesthesia, and he was already unconscious when he came in. Though he didn’t appear to have a head injury of any kind…”
“It was Tuchulcha,” I murmur.
“What?” Navarro’s eyebrows spring up.
“The fire spirit, Tuchulcha. He used a spell to make Cooper fall asleep.” It only occurs to me after the words leave my mouth that Navarro has no idea Tuchulcha was helping me in the end, so his horrified reaction, complete with a loud gasp, makes perfect sense. Before he rushes out of my space to go check on Cooper and call a sleeping spell specialist, I add, “It was to help Cooper, not hurt him.”
Navarro skids to a stop in front of the curtain. “Come again?”
“It’s a long story. But the spell wasn’t malicious. Cooper was in pain, so Tuchu
lcha used a spell to help him fall asleep.” I shrug one shoulder. “I don’t know how long it was supposed to last…”
Someone on the other side of the infirmary calls out “Hello?” in a weak, wavering voice.
And I’ll be damned if it isn’t Cooper Lee.
I reach over the side of my bed, press the switch for the railing and lower it, then swing my legs off the mattress and use my IV stand to haul myself up. Navarro, who’s itching to run to Cooper’s side, takes a professional moment to disconnect me from all the equipment I was wired to and shut everything down. Then, with him leading me by the hand to keep me steady, we trek across the wide infirmary room toward the only blue curtain still drawn. When we reach it, Navarro tugs it open, revealing the frail, pale form of Cooper Lee lying on the bed inside.
Cooper blinks up at us blearily for a second before recognition fills his expression. “Cal? Dr. Navarro?”
Navarro sighs in relief. “Yes, Cooper. That’s right.” He moves closer and starts to run through all the same checks he gave me a minute ago. “Do you know where you are?”
“The infirmary?” Cooper says, uncertain. “Am I really here? I thought…”
I have no idea how much Cooper remembers from his ordeal, given that Charun’s hammer blow knocked him for a loop when it broke his arm. Since he took a more direct hit to the arm than I did in the Memorial Garden, the spell on the hammer must have scrambled his brain with overwhelming false pain signals, to the point where he was incapacitated. He never seemed to be completely awake, in the woods or in the Underworld, but he wasn’t completely unconscious either until Tuchulcha spelled him asleep as we were leaving. There may be snippets of Charun, of Vanth, of Aita—God forbid—that he remembers. Or perhaps he only remembers glimpses of the Underworld itself. The craggy cliffs. The starless sky.
For his sake, I hope it’s the latter.
I sink into a visitor’s chair next to his bed, while Navarro is doing his work, and take Cooper’s good hand into my own. “You’re back on Earth, Cooper. They didn’t get you.”
“They didn’t?” Cooper’s watery blue eyes shed a few confused tears, and he sniffles. “I thought for sure…I thought they were going to kill me, Cal. I remember a woman with a sword, and she was mad at me, and she called me a thief, and she said she was going to execute me for my crimes, and I was…” He chokes on his words. “I was so scared. I didn’t know what was going on.”
Navarro shoots me a questioning glance as he’s pressing the stethoscope to Cooper’s chest, but I ignore it. I squeeze Cooper’s hand harder and lean close to him. “Oh, Cooper. I’ll be honest with you. All that stuff did happen. That key I gave you the other night, to hand over to evidence—turns out it was the key to the gates of the goddamn Underworld. That’s what Brendon and the other kids stole in their heist. And my ignorant ass gave it to you, and because you had it, Charun and Tuchulcha took you to the Underworld, so that Vanth could execute you as a thief.”
Navarro gapes at me in unadulterated horror, while Cooper’s confusion begins to dissolve.
The battered archivist says, “The key. Yeah. I remember now. I took it home with me to…oh.” He clenches his eyes shut and fidgets in his bed. “Fuck. I took it home because it looked weirdly familiar, and, right before I fell asleep, I figured out why: it resembled something I’d read about earlier in the day, in the book. So I got up, opened the book, found the article on Vanth, and…I realized what the key really was about thirty seconds before that big blue monster walked into my house.”
Cooper stares at his injured arm, wrapped in a mountain of gauze, and tears start pouring down his face. “Stupid. I’m so stupid.”
“No, Cooper.” I grab a tissue from the box on his nightstand and start dabbing at his cheeks. “I’m the stupid one. I gave you the key, assuming it wasn’t dangerous. A good detective would have known better than to make an assumption like that.”
Cooper tugs the tissue out of my hand and continues wiping his own face. “Yeah, but I told you I’d hand it in for evidence, and I didn’t. I shouldn’t have—”
Navarro clears his throat. “While this blame game is certainly fun to listen to, I’m sure if you look at the running tally, you can agree that what happened, however it happened, either paid for or canceled out any and all mistakes you two made during this case. So, I would advise you to drop the back-and-forth guilt trips. Because they’re not going to help you heal any faster.” He grabs Cooper’s chart from the end of the bed and scribbles a few notes on it.
“What happened…?” Cooper mutters, echoing Navarro. “Wait, what did happen? Why did those Etruscan monsters not kill me? How did I get out of the Underworld?”
Before I can gloss over the question with a non-answer, Navarro replies, “Kinsey went into the Eververse and brought you back.”
Cooper’s jaw drops open, and the look he gives me implies he thinks I’m an angel with golden, fluffy wings who descended from heaven in a shower of trumpet music. (I want to punch Navarro for that—the last thing I need from Cooper is hero worship.) “Cal, you…”
“Don’t thank me, Cooper.” My voice grows rough. “Please. It’s my fault you ended up in the Underworld in the first place. Don’t thank me for rectifying a mistake that almost cost you everything.”
“Huh? But Cal…” Cooper’s starry-eyed expression sours, and he gawks at me for a silent minute. Then his face turns pink as he sputters out an incomprehensible string of words that almost has me worried he’s on the verge of a seizure. Then he snaps, huffing, puffing like he wants to blow the DSI building down, throws his crumpled tissue in my face as hard as he can, and shouts across the infirmary, “Calvin Kinsey, you’re an idiot!”
Navarro, wide-eyed, sits Cooper’s chart back in its spot and creeps out of the bed space, closing the curtain behind him and leaving me alone with the infuriated archivist. Cooper drills his harshest glower into my face, and he would cross his arms if one of them wasn’t wrapped in a bandage the width of a cinderblock. I open my mouth to speak, but he shushes me with an angry, pointing index finger, an inch too close to my eye for comfort. For a few seconds, he remains silent, breathing hard, before he finds his voice again.
“So help me God,” says Cooper Lee, “if you ever try to apologize for saving my life again, I’ll beat you over the head with the heaviest book I can find. I don’t care how much you want to stupidly blame yourself for events beyond your control, Cal, don’t you ever apologize for risking your own life to save mine. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. Don’t apologize for being a hero. Don’t apologize for saving the world. And don’t, for a moment, think you have the right to apologize for not saving everyone and everything all the time.”
His words sink slowly into my stubborn skin, but I do absorb them, even if I won’t admit it for a long time to come. “Okay. Okay, I won’t apologize.”
“Good,” he sighs out. “Now that we’ve cleared that up, let me say this: thank you for saving my life, Cal Kinsey.” He waves his finger in front of my nose. “What do you say in response?”
“Uh, you’re welcome?”
“There we go!” He lets a tired laugh slip past his lips. “You got it. And now I say: Since you’re such a brave, valiant knight, coming to my rescue in the Eververse and all, I think you also have a right to stop by my house for food whenever you want. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Breakfast for dinner. You name it. It’s yours. I can cook anything.”
I join him in his laughter, despite my best efforts. “So that’s my reward for saving a life? Good home cooking?”
Cooper snorts. “Unless you want me to design you an iPhone app. Because those are the only two things I’m good at, other than research. And I can’t give you anything with research, except knowledge, and that’s a really boring present unless we’re on a case. And I think I’m done with this whole me-at-the-task-room-table, direct-involvement-in-murder-cases thing for, you know, at least a couple weeks.”
We look into each other’s eyes for a second,
quiet, and then we burst into a fit of giggles. And then we both say Ow because our bodies feel like they just came out from under the business end of a steamroller.
“I mean it, Cal. Thanks.” Cooper wipes a stray tear from his cheek. “I can’t believe you went into the Eververse to save me. I can’t believe you got out of there, with me, alive. I don’t think anyone at DSI’s ever been to the Eververse before. We might be the first two agents to survive the other side.” He lightly punches my arm. “That’s a cool distinction, huh?”
“Yeah.” I punch him back. “It is.”
Navarro pokes his head inside the curtain. “I don’t mean to break up this touching moment, but I feel like I should tell you, Kinsey: There’s a task room meeting going on upstairs. Everyone and their mother is there, including Commissioner Bollinger, to discuss the case wrap. Since you’re up, I thought you might want to stop by.” His tone sharpens. “Before you head home for medical leave.”
“Right.” I tug at my IV line. “I have some explaining to do.”
“To put it mildly,” Navarro quips. “I’ll help you get that needle out. And I’ll grab a spare uniform for you from the back room.”
“Thanks.” I turn to Cooper Lee again. “Are you okay with me leaving? Or do you want me to stay?”
Cooper smiles at me, bright and true and happy, and it might be the greatest thing I’ve seen in the two years since Mac died. He pokes my chin with his finger and replies, “Of course you should go. You have an epic hero tale to tell! Breaking into the Etruscan Underworld to rescue a kidnapped fellow agent?” He shakes his head. “Man, that’s the kind of stuff they’ll write into the books one day. Mark my words. You’re going to be so famous, Cal.” His gentle hand pushes me toward the curtain—
“One day, Calvin Kinsey, everybody will know your name.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 25
