by Jim Butcher
“Harry,” he said. “How you doing?”
I suggested what he could do with his reproductive organs.
He arched an eyebrow at me. “Better than I’d expected.”
I grunted. Then I added, “Thank you.”
He snorted. That was all. “Come on. I’ve got coffee for you in the car.”
“I’m leaving everything to you in my will,” I said.
“Cool. Next time I’ll leave you in the water.”
I pulled my coat on with a groan. “Almost wish you had. Coin? Sword?”
“Safe, stowed below. You want them?”
I shook my head. “Keep them here for now.”
I followed him out to the truck, gimping on my bad knee. I noted that someone had, at some point in the evening, cleaned me up a bit and put new bandages on my leg, and on a number of scrapes and contusions I didn’t even remember getting. I was wearing fresh clothing, too. Thomas. He didn’t say anything about it, and neither did I. It’s a brother thing.
We got into the battered Hummer, and I seized a paper cup of coffee waiting for me next to a brown paper bag. I grabbed the coffee, dumped in a lot of sugar and creamer, stirred it for about a quarter turn of the stick, and started sipping. Then I checked out the bag. Doughnut. I assaulted it.
Thomas began to start the car but froze in place and blinked at the doughnut. “Hey,” he said. “Where the hell did that come from?”
I took another bite. Cake doughnut. White frosting. Sprinkles. Still warm. And I had hot coffee to go with it. Pure heaven. I gave my brother a cryptic look and just took another bite.
“Christ,” he muttered, starting the truck. “You don’t even explain the little things, do you?”
“It’s like a drug,” I said, through a mouthful of fattening goodness.
I enjoyed the doughnut while I could, letting it fully occupy all my senses. After I’d finished it, and the coffee started kicking in, I realized why I’d indulged myself so completely: It was likely to be the last bit of pleasure I was going to feel for a while.
Thomas hadn’t said a damned thing about where we were going-or how anyone was doing after the events of the night before.
The Stroger building, the new hospital that has replaced the old Cook County complex as Chicago’s nerve center of medicine, is only a few yards away from the old clump of buildings. It looks kind of like a castle. If you scrunch up your eyes a little, you can almost imagine its features as medieval ramparts and towers and crenellation, standing like some ancient mountain bastion, determined to defend the citizens of Chicago against the plagues and evils of the world.
Provided they have enough medical coverage, of course.
I finished the coffee and thought to myself that I might have been feeling a little pessimistic.
Thomas led me up to intensive care. He stopped in the hallway outside. “Luccio’s coordinating the information, so I don’t have many details. But Molly’s in there. She’ll have the rest of them for you.”
“What do you know?” I asked him.
“Michael’s in bad shape,” he said. “Still in surgery, last I heard. They’re waiting for him up here. I guess the bullets all came up from underneath him, and that armor he was wearing actually kept one of them in. Bounced around inside him like a BB inside a tin can.”
I winced.
“They said he only got hit by two or three rounds,” Thomas continued. “But that it was more or less a miracle that he survived it at all. They don’t know if he’s going to make it. Sanya didn’t go into anything more specific than that.”
I closed my eyes.
“Look,” Thomas said. “I’m not exactly welcome around here right now. But I’ll stay if you need me to.”
Thomas wasn’t telling me the whole truth. My brother wasn’t comfortable in hospitals, and I was pretty sure I’d figured out why: They were full of the sick, the injured, and the elderly-i.e., the kind of herd animals that predators’ instincts told them were weakest, and the easiest targets. My brother didn’t like being reminded about that part of his nature. He might hate that it happened, but his instincts would react regardless of what he wanted or didn’t want. It would be torture for him to hang around here.
“No,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
He frowned at me. “All right,” he said after a moment. “You’ve got my number. Call me; I’ll give you a ride home.”
“Thanks.”
He put a hand on my arm for a second, then turned, hunched his shoulders, bowed his head so that his hair fell to hide most of his face, and walked quickly away.
I went on into the intensive care ward and found the waiting area.
Molly was sitting inside, next to Charity. Mother and daughter sat side by side, holding hands. They looked strained and weary. Charity was wearing jeans and one of Michael’s flannel shirts. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she didn’t have any makeup on. She’d been pulled from her bed in the middle of the night to rush to the hospital. Her eyes were focused into the distance and blank.
Small wonder. This was her greatest nightmare come to life.
They looked up as I came in, and their expressions were exactly the same: neutral, distant, numb.
“Harry,” Molly said, her voice hollow, ghostly.
“Hey, kid,” I said.
It took Charity a moment to react to my arrival. She focused her eyes on the far wall, blinked them a couple of times, and then focused them on me. She nodded and didn’t speak.
“I, uh,” I said quietly.
Molly raised her hand to stop me from speaking. I shut up.
“Okay,” she said. “Uh, let me think.” She closed her eyes, frowning in concentration, and started ticking off one finger with each sentence. “Luccio says that the Archive is stable but unconscious. She’s at Murphy’s house and needs to talk to you. Murphy says to tell you her face will be fine. Sanya says that he needs to talk to you alone, and as soon as possible, at St. Mary’s.”
I waved a hand at all of that. “I’ll take care of it later. How’s your dad?”
“Severe trauma to his liver,” Charity said, her voice toneless. “One of his kidneys was damaged too badly to be saved. One of his lungs collapsed. There’s damage to his spine. One of his ribs was fractured into multiple pieces. His pelvis was broken in two places. His jaw was shattered. Subdural hematoma. There was trauma all through one ocular cavity. They aren’t sure if he’ll lose the eye or not. There might also be brain damage. They don’t know yet.” Her eyes overflowed and focused into the distance again. “There was trauma to his heart. Fragments of broken bone in it. From his ribs.” She shuddered and closed her eyes. “His heart. They hurt his heart.”
Molly sat back down beside her mother and put her arm around Charity’s shoulders. Charity leaned against her, eyes still spilling tears, but she never made a sound.
I’m not a Knight.
I’m not a hero, either.
Heroes keep their promises.
“Molly,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
She looked up at me, and her lip started quivering. She shook her head and said, “Oh, Harry.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
Charity’s face snapped up and she said, her voice suddenly very clear and distinct, “No.”
Molly blinked at her mother.
Charity stood up, her face blotched with tears, creased with strain, her eyes sunken with fatigue and worry. She stared at me for a long moment and then said, “Families stay, Harry.” She lifted her chin, sudden and fierce pride briefly driving out the grief in her eyes. “He would stay for you.”
My vision got a little blurry, and I sat down in the nearest chair. Probably just a reaction to all the strain of the past couple of days.
“Yeah,” I said, my throat thick. “He would.”
I called everyone on the list Molly had quoted me and told them they could wait to see me until we knew about Michael. Except for Murph, they all got upset about that. I told them
they could go to hell and hung up on them.
Then I settled in with Molly and Charity and waited.
Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, doesn’t make them any less hideous. They’re always just a little bit too cold. It always smells just a little bit too sharp and clean. It’s always quiet, so quiet that you can hear the fluorescent lights-another constant, those lights-humming. Pretty much everyone else there is in the same bad predicament you are, and there isn’t much in the way of cheerful conversation.
And there’s always a clock in sight. The clock has superpowers. It always seems to move too slowly. Look up at it and it will tell you the time. Look up an hour and a half later, and it will tell you two minutes have gone by. Yet it somehow simultaneously has the ability to remind you of how short life is, to make you acutely aware of how little time someone you love might have remaining to them.
The day crawled by. A doctor came to see Charity twice, to tell her that things were still bad, and that they were still working. The second visit came around suppertime, and the doc suggested that she get some food if she could, that they should know something more definite after the next procedure, in three or four hours.
He asked if Charity knew whether or not Michael had agreed to be an organ donor. Just in case, he said. They hadn’t been able to find his driver’s license. I could tell that Charity wanted to tell the doctor where he could shove his question and just how far it could go, but she told him what Michael would have told him-yes, of course he had. The doctor thanked her and left.
I walked down the cafeteria with Charity and Molly, but I didn’t feel like eating or having food urged upon me. I figured that Charity probably had a critical back pressure of mothering built up after this much time away from her kids. On the way, I claimed that I needed to stretch my legs, which was the truth. Sometimes when there’s too much going on in my head, it helps to walk around a bit.
So I walked down hallways, going nowhere in particular, just being careful not to pass too near any equipment that might be busy keeping someone alive at the moment.
I wound up sitting down in the hospital chapel.
It was the usual for such a place; quiet, subdued colors and lights, bench seating with an aisle in the middle, and a podium up at the front-the standard layout for the services of any number of faiths. Maybe it leaned a little harder toward Catholicism than most, but that might have been only natural. The Jesuits actually had a chaplaincy in residence, and held Mass there regularly.
It was quiet, which was the important thing. I sank onto a pew, aching, and closed my eyes.
Lots of details chased their way around my head. Michael had come in with gunshot wounds. The cops were going to ask lots of questions about that. Depending on the circumstances of the helicopter’s return to Chicago, that could get really complicated, really fast. On the other hand, given the depth of Marcone’s involvement, the problems might just vanish. He had his fingers in so many pies in Chicago’s city government that he could probably have any inquiry quashed if he really wanted it done.
Given what he’d been saved from, it would be consistent with his character for Marcone to repay the people who bailed him out with whatever aid he could render in turn. It irked me that Marcone could ever be in a position to offer significant aid to Michael, regardless of the circumstances.
Of course, for that to happen, Michael would first need to survive.
My thoughts kept coming full circle back to that.
Would he be in danger right now if I hadn’t insisted that he put on that harness? If I hadn’t shoved him onto that rope ahead of me, would he still be up there under the knife, dying? Could I really have been that arrogant to assume, based on one glance at Gard’s face, that I not only knew the future, but had the wisdom and the right to decide what that future should be?
Maybe it should be me up there. I didn’t have a wife and a family waiting for me to come home.
I’d expected Charity to scream and throw things at me. Maybe I’d even wanted that. Because while I intellectually understood that I’d had no way of knowing what was going to happen, and that I’d only been trying to protect my friend, a big part of me couldn’t help but feel that I deserved Charity’s fury. After all, it reasoned, I had gotten her husband killed as surely as if I’d murdered him myself.
Except that he wasn’t dead yet-and thinking like that was too much like giving up on him. I couldn’t do that.
I looked up at the podium, where Whoever would presumably be when someone was there delivering a sermon.
“I know that we don’t talk much,” I said, speaking out loud to the empty room. “And I’m not looking for a pen pal. But I thought You should know that Michael makes You look pretty good. And if after all he’s done, it ends like this for him, I’d think less of You. He deserves better. I think You should make sure he gets it. If You want to bill it to me, I’m fine with that. It’s no problem.”
Nobody said anything back.
“And while we’re on the subject,” I said, “I think the rules You’ve got set up suck. You don’t get involved as much as You used to, apparently. And Your angels aren’t allowed to stick their toes in unless the bad guys do it first. But I’ve been running some figures in my head, and when the Denarians pulled up those huge Signs, they had to have a lot of power to do it. A lot of power. More than I could ever have had, even with Lasciel. Archangel power. And I can only think of one of those guys who would have been helping that crew.”
I stood up and jabbed a finger at the podium, suddenly furious, and screamed, “The Prince of fucking Darkness gets to cheat and unload his power on the earth-twice!-and You just sit there being holy while my friend, who has fought for You his whole life, is dying! What the hell is wrong with You?”
“I guess this is a bad time,” said a voice from behind me.
I turned around and found a little old guy in a dark blue coverall whose stenciled name tag read, JAKE. He was pulling behind him a janitor’s cart with a trash bin and the usual assortment of brooms and mops and cleaning products. He had a round belly and short, curling silver hair that matched his beard, both cropped close to his dark skin. “Sorry. I’ll come back later.”
I felt like an idiot. I shook my head at him. “No, no. I’m not doing anything. I mean, you’re not keeping me from anything. I’ll get out of your way.”
“You ain’t in my way, young man,” said Jake. “Not at all. You ain’t the first one I ever seen upset in a hospital chapel. Won’t be the last, either. You sure you don’t mind?”
“No,” I said. “Come on in.”
He did, hauling the cart with him, and went over to the trash can in the corner. He took out the old liner. “You got a friend here, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting down again.
“It’s okay to be mad at God about it, son. It ain’t His fault, what happened, but He understands.”
“Maybe He does,” I said with a shrug. “But He doesn’t care. I don’t know why everyone thinks He does. Why would He?”
Jake paused and looked at me.
“I mean, this whole universe, right? All those stars and all those worlds,” I continued, maybe sounding more bitter than I had intended. “Probably so many different kinds of people out there that we couldn’t count them all. How could God really care about what’s happening to one little person on one little planet among a practically infinite number of them?”
Jake tied off the trash bag and tossed it in the bin. He replaced the liner with a thoughtful look on his face. “Well,” he said, “I never been to much school, you understand. But seems to me that you assuming something you shouldn’t assume.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That God sees the world like you do. One thing at a time. From just one spot. Seems to me that He is supposed to be everywhere, know everything.” He put the lid back on the trash can. “Think about that. He knows what you’re feeling, how you�
�re hurting. Feels my pain, your pain, like it was His own.” Jake shook his head. “Hell, son. Question isn’t how could God care about just one person. Question is, how could He not.”
I snorted and shook my head.
“More optimism than you want to hear right now,” Jake said. “I hear you, son.” He turned and started pushing the cart out the door. “Oh,” he said. “Can an old man offer you one more thought?”
“Sure,” I said, without turning around.
“You gotta think that maybe there’s a matter of balance, here,” he said. “Maybe one archangel invested his strength in this situation overtly and immediately. Maybe another one was just quieter about it. Thinking long-term. Maybe he already gave you a hand.”
My right hand erupted into pins and needles again.
I sucked in a swift breath and rose, spinning around.
Jake was gone.
The janitor’s cart was still there. A rag hanging off the back was still swinging back and forth slightly. A folded paperback book was shoved between the body of the cart and the handle. I went over to the cart and looked up and down the hall.
There was no one in sight, and nowhere they could have conveniently disappeared to.
I picked up the book. It was a battered old copy of The Two Towers. One page was dog-eared, and a bit of dialogue underlined in pencil.
“‘The burned hand teaches best,’” I read aloud. I made my way back to my seat and shook my head. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Grimalkin mewled from the pew beside me, “That your experience with resisting the shadow of the Fallen One has garnered the respect of the Watchman, my Emissary.”
I twitched violently enough that I came up off my seat an inch or two, and came back down with a grunt. I slid down as far as I could to the end of the pew. It wasn’t far. I bought myself only another inch or three before I turned to face Mab.
She sat calmly, dressed in a casual business suit of dark blue, wearing plenty of elegant little diamonds. Her white hair was bound up into a braided bun, held in place with ivory sticks decorated with lapis. She held Grimalkin on her lap like a favorite pet, though only a lunatic would have mistaken the malk for a domestic cat. It was the first time I’d seen Grimalkin in clear light. He was unusually large and muscular, even for a malk-and they tended to make your average lynx look a little bit scrawny. Grimalkin must have weighed sixty or seventy pounds, all of it muscle and bone. His fur was dark grey, patterned with rippling black fur almost like a subtle watermark. His eyes were yellow-green, very large, and far too intelligent for any animal.
