Consumed (Firefighters #1)

by J. R. Ward

  As the nurse tripped over her Crocs to get out, Anne closed her eyes. “You have such a way with people.”

  “I’m not apologizing.”

  “Yeah, why would you break with tradition.” She lifted heavy lids. “How long did it take them to get him out? And where’s he being treated? Here?”

  “Why don’t we take care of you right now?” When she just looked at him, his lips thinned. “Fine. They found him at the bottom of a ten-foot pile of beams and debris. He had a dislocated shoulder, ruptured spleen, lacerated liver, and the blood pressure of a corpse when they brought him in.”

  As a trained EMT with a lot of experience, she ran the profile on a patient like that. “He’ll make it,” she lied. “He’s going to be okay.”

  Tom shook his head and stared across at the window. Things were pitch-black on the far side of the glass, and his mood matched the night’s dense darkness.

  “Why do you hate him so much?” she muttered, aware that she was too weak for any kind of confrontation. Especially against someone like her brother.

  “It’s you I care about.”

  “Well, I’m going to be fine, too. Give me a week and I’ll be back at the firehouse.”

  “Doing what,” he said tightly.

  “My job.” When her brother went quiet, she glared at him. “Don’t start.”

  “Then don’t lie to yourself.”

  “About what.”

  “Your career is over.” Her brother looked at her. “You’re done.”

  For a moment, she thought of the shocked expression on that nurse’s face. Yup, her brother’s timing was terrific as his delivery: By all means, when someone was in a hospital bed missing part of a limb, let’s bring up the job situation.

  It would be rude not to.

  “Christ, Tom,” she said. “Could you have at least waited until I was released? And screw you, I can do anything.”

  “Are you even kidding me. Anne. Seriously.”

  “Then why are you so pissed off? This is what you’ve been waiting for, right? Me on the sidelines, like a good little girl, letting the real men do the work. These last three years, you’ve just been waiting for me to—”

  “To get killed.” He leaned forward. “You got it exactly right, Anne. I’ve been waiting for the night when I have to go to our mother and tell her that you’re dead because—”

  “I’m alive!”

  “You lost a limb!”

  “My hand! And I can still fight after this—”

  “No,” he ground out as he lashed his arm through the air. “You’re med’d out. Permanently. And you know what? You deserve it.”

  Anne recoiled. “You fucking bastard.”

  “You never follow orders, Anne. Never. You violated safety protocol by sending Chavez up to the second floor instead of proceeding in your pairing—”

  “So I saved his life. Otherwise he would have been trapped with me—”

  “Or maybe he could have gotten you free before Maguire appeared with a goddamn chain saw in his hand.” Tom shook his head. “You want to know why I don’t like him? Fine. It’s because he’s just like you. He doesn’t listen, and he thinks he’s better than the rules. And that’s how people get hurt.”

  “Guess you’ve done your homework. Did you interview everyone before coming in here just so you could stand there in your cloak of superiority and beat me over the head with the rule book?”

  “No, I waited until I could talk to Maguire’s surgeon personally. Because I knew that was going to be the first thing you wanted to know.”

  “Well, now you’ve reported your intel. So you can go.”

  “Don’t get your back up with me. You were in the wrong. Maguire was insane. And both of you are in the hospital. The fact that it only cost you—”

  “A place to put a wedding band,” she snapped as she lifted what was left of her arm. “Right? You want me stuck inside and knocked up with some man’s kid, being just like Mom, waiting for my husband to come home and justify my existence. That was the fucking fifties, Tom. People like me don’t have to be barefoot and pregnant anymore—hey, have you heard they let us drive cars and even vote now, too?”

  “Leave Mom out of it. And this is not about you being a woman—”

  “You sure about that? Oh, and as for Mom, I will bring her into anything I want. I am not going to be like her. No goddamn way I am going to get stuck living her life of reflected glory for someone who didn’t deserve the hype.”

  Tom went quiet. “I do not understand you.”

  “It’s more like you don’t understand our parents.”

  “Yeah, well, excuse me if I’m not in a big hurry to buy into your perspective. For one, you’re in a fucking hospital bed because you did the wrong thing in a situation where your life and the lives of others depended on you following orders. And two, thanks for taking a shit all over the two people who raised us and worked their asses off so we could end up here, arguing in this hospital. Clearly, you’re a great judge of character.”

  “Whatever, Tom.” Unaware she’d sat up, she let herself fall back again on the thin pillows. “You’ve never wanted me to be your equal. Tack whatever vocabulary you want on it, that’s what’s really going on here.”

  “The hell it is. You never will be like me and not because you’re a woman. It’s because you’ve got a chip on your shoulder that makes you impossible to reason with or trust on the job. But like I said, that’s over now. You’re out, Anne. Good work.”

  She stared down at the bandage and felt sick about so much. “You know what’s funny? I can set my watch on you. You just have to kick me in the nuts, especially when I’m down—and don’t bother pointing out that I don’t have any. You’ve spent the last two and a half decades showing and telling me that over and over again. Your position is very clear on the subject.”

  “Maybe you don’t like hearing the truth.”

  “Try telling it to me, just once, and I’ll let you know what it’s like.”

  There was another long, long pause. “You need to call Mom. She’s worried sick about you.”

  “I don’t have the energy to help her with that.”

  “Right. Because you’re having too much fun being a burden.”

  “Does it look like I’m enjoying myself?”

  “Call Mom.”

  Once again, a standoff. And as the two of them glared across the stark room at each other, she was reminded of pretty much every single interaction they had had since she’d entered the fire academy.

  With that, she and her brother had become enemies.

  “Leave,” she told him. “Just get out of here. I’m tired, I hurt all over, and I’m sick of the sight of you.”

  “Call Mom. That’s all I care about.”

  As Tom pushed his way through the door, all of Anne’s energy funneled out of her body and she was left with a skeleton that ached covered by a bag of skin that had ants all over it. Closing her eyes, she was aware of her stomach rolling.

  In the background, that alarm began beeping like it was having a seizure.

  Or maybe she was having one?

  Medical staff ran in, a swarm of blue and white. But as Anne thought about Danny, her brother, her job, her family, she was content to fade away and let them save her . . . or not.

  She didn’t really care one way or another.

  chapter

  8

  And they did.

  Save her, that was.

  When Anne woke up the next morning, she turned her head to the window and looked out on a gray November day. It was impossible not to view the hospital room as a prison, with the wires and tubes going in and out of her as the shackles to keep her in place.

  She had to pee. At least, she thought she did. Maybe it was the catheter irritating her?

  Peeking under
the sheets, she saw that the thing had been removed. Good to know—oh, that’s right. She’d threatened to take it out herself sometime before dawn, and when the staff had challenged her to try, she’d done it with a yank.

  Lifting her left arm, she stared at the bandage and heard her brother’s voice in her head. Fear, an old, toxic friend, sidled up and started whispering all kinds of things in her ear, but even that din was drowned out by the abiding sense that she might well prefer to be dead right now.

  When surrounded by flames, and no alternative, self-mutilation had seemed reasonable. Now, in this hospital room, with nothing but the postnasal drip of smoke down the back of her throat and an unseasonal first-degree “tan” on her arms, that imperative seemed a distortion of reality.

  Which had condemned her to a life she couldn’t even contemplate . . . an acute nightmare of imminent death traded for a chronic one mired in lack of purpose.

  Except come on, she told herself. She was used to proving them all wrong. She would come back from this. She would return to the stationhouse and her crew and her job. Her life. There were prostheses, right? There were accommodations that could be made.

  There were Paralympic athletes who were every bit as strong and powerful as the so-called able-bodied. Attitude to get to the altitude, she told herself. And that shit needed to start right now because she had a long road ahead of her.

  On that note, she sat up and reached for the landline phone on the bedside table. Palming the receiver, she went to—

  As she brought up the stump, she felt her head spin as she realized she had no fingers to push “0” with. Freezing in place, with that receiver off the old-fashioned cradle, she couldn’t breathe . . . but then purpose brought her back to life, and wasn’t that always the case. Hitting the number with her right forefinger, she waited for an answer.

  “Yes, ah—” She had to clear her throat. “What room is Danny—I mean, Daniel Maguire—in?”

  When she got her answer, she hung up and sagged with relief. They didn’t give hospital rooms to corpses, so he must have lived through his surgery.

  After a moment of rest, she took off all the monitoring sensors on her chest and debated removing the IV. In the end, she kept that in, considering it was the source of her morphine and on a pole that had wheels. Both were going to make ambulation easier—

  The nurse who burst into the room was going so fast, her crepe-souled shoes squeaked on the linoleum as she pulled up short. “What are you doing?”

  Anne gave her a talk-to-the-hand—the only hand she had left. “I’m going to the bathroom. And then I’ll be back.”

  As she shifted her legs off the side of the bed and lowered her weight onto her feet, the nurse seemed confused. “Back?”

  “Yeah.” She started for the bathroom. “Like as in leave and return.”

  Man, her voice was hoarse, her breathing more asthmatic going up the stairs than twenty-five-year-old athlete shuffling across the floor.

  “Ms. Ashburn, if you do not get back into bed, I’m going to call the attending—”

  “G’head. Knock yourself out. But I’m just going to tell her the same damn thing.”

  Put like that, it was clear that her and her brother shared DNA. And like Tom, she was used to ignoring people, so she limped her way across the floor. From out of the corner of her eye, she was aware of the nurse hopping up and down and talking all kinds of whatever, but who the hell cared.

  She shut the bathroom door on the noise.

  Over on the left, mounted over a stainless steel sink, the mirror on the wall was like a crystal ball with bad news about the future, at once utterly avoidable and completely inexorable.

  Good God, she looked like an anime version of herself, assuming her character had gone through a coal mine shaft while being chased by a demon throwing compression bombs at her. Her blue eyes were too wide, and there was soot and ash still in her matted hair and all over her face and neck. The hospital johnny she had on was a mismatch to the fire’s temporary tattooing job, the cheerful pink bouquets on their white background making her seem like a trespasser in some grandmother’s wardrobe.

  The initial burst of I-can-triumph-over-this collapsed, a house of cards hit by the cold, hard gust of her reflection.

  And what do you know, that all got worse as she turned away and hobbled over to the toilet. Her new way of life became immediately apparent when she tried to lift up the johnny. One hand. Only. Which meant sloppy, flappy, ends of the hem everywhere, and then she couldn’t hold the thing up and move the IV pole closer to the seat and settle her weight properly.

  When she finally sat down, tears threatened to explode out of not just her eyes but her soul as well.

  I can’t do this, she thought as she awkwardly reached across with her right hand for the toilet paper while holding the johnny up, while peeing, while not passing out, while not getting tangled in the IV tubing, while being terrified about everything, while mourning her mother, her father, her brother . . . Danny.

  The bathroom became so crowded with her mind’s chaos and sorrow that the oxygen was forced out of it, her lungs pulling nothing in as she began to hyperventilate.

  It was a while before she reemerged. And she would have preferred to wash her hands and face first, but this wasn’t a hotel. There weren’t guest towels hanging off to the side of the sink or little bars of soap. No bath mat to warm the soles of her bare feet or printed notice that there were toiletries available courtesy of the front desk if she forgot to pack something.

  This was not a vacation. And there was going to be no getting away from what she had lost.

  That hand that no longer existed was going to take up more space than it ever had when still attached to her arm.

  Back out in the room, two nurses, a resident, and an attending were standing in a kick line, and they were singing the bars to an old familiar: “You’re a Slip-and-Fall Risk, Please Lie Back Down.”

  Which was the theme to a little-known Disney movie, actually: Why Can’t She for Once Be F*cking Reasonable.

  Anne just walked out on that production. She already knew how it ended. Had the T-shirt, the download, and the book.

  Heading down the hall with her IV pole, she discovered that she had to force her eyes to focus or she was going to lose her balance. Every step required a tremendous concentration, her forward motion not anything that happened naturally, but rather a conscious orientation of hips and shoulders that required constant maintenance.

  The marching band of medical staff behind her was so annoying.

  At the elevators, it took her a couple of tries to peg the up button, her forefinger trying to hit a moving target—which seemed a little weird given the fact that the hospital should have been a static inanimate, but whatever. She managed to light it up.

  As the doors opened, she was just about to step inside when something hit her hard behind the knees—and as her weight went out from under her, she pinwheeled in a panic.

  Only to land in the seat of a wheelchair.

  “I told them this was a losing battle. So we were just going to have to roll with it.”

  Anne looked over her shoulder at the familiar voice. “Oh, God, Moose . . .”

  Robert “Moose” Miller, Danny’s former roommate, came around and lowered his heft down at her feet. His familiar, bearded face made her eyes water.

  “Come here, baby girl,” he whispered.

  As he held out his arms, there were tears in his bloodshot eyes, especially as he looked at her bandage.

  “Don’t call me ‘baby’ or ‘girl,’ ” she choked out.

  “Okay, Anne. I won’t.”

  She went up against his chest and held onto his shoulders, staring off to a nursing station she saw nothing of.

  “I was going to his room,” she said roughly. “Danny’s.”

  “I’ll help you get
there, but they may not let us in. He’s in ICU.”

  “I want to try.”

  “Okay.” When they pulled apart, he took a bandana out of his pocket. “Here.”

  She unfolded the red-and-black square and pressed the faded, well-washed softness to her hot, swollen face. “I don’t want to look weak in front of him.”

  “You could never be weak, Anne.”

  Moose shooed away the medical staff, and then wheeled her into the elevator while she held her IV pole like it was the leash of a dog with biting history. They went up four floors, and then they were going down a hall with signage she couldn’t seem to read and foot traffic that had only two speeds: fast and distracted or slow and somber.

  “How bad is he?” she asked as they went along close to the wall. “Do you know?”

  “Bad.”

  “Is he paralyzed?”

  “They haven’t even gotten to the part where they worry about whether he can walk.”

  As they came up to the nursing station, Anne was aware of the staff stopping whatever they were doing and staring at her, but she kept her eyes straight ahead as Moose did the talking—and they must have gotten clearance to proceed because they started forward again.

  Passing by a number of glassed-in rooms, she saw patients swaddled in blankets, like caterpillars cocooned. On this floor, there were few visitors, and no one was coming and going with flowers or balloons. Death was what paced these halls, playing “eeny, meeny, miny, mo” with its bony finger, picking and choosing, at random or perhaps with a plan, who it would play with next.

  Moose stopped them about halfway to the end and went around to open the glass door for her. “You want to go in alone?”

  “Yes.”

  With resolve to get on her feet, Anne went to put both her hands down on the armrests, but as a bolt of pain lightninged up her arm, she gasped. No hand there. Only that raw open wound that had bandages for flesh.

  Blinking back the agony, she thought, I can’t deal with this. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

  Who am I going to be?

  Pushing all that aside, she struggled out of the wheelchair and went to enter the room—