Divine by Choice

by P. C. Cast

  Clint leaned over and spoke into my ear. “You’re telling a man who spent the better part of a year in a hospital ward? The smell alone makes my skin crawl.”

  “There’s coffee and snacks around the corner in the break room,” the healthy-looking nurse advised us through the half-open window.

  We nodded our thanks like marionettes.

  “Want something? I think I’d better get some coffee—seems like it might be a long day,” Clint said as he pulled himself awkwardly to a standing position.

  I watched his expression war with his pain. It was obvious he was trying to mask it, and it made me feel horrible that I was the reason behind that pain.

  “Clint,” I spoke with low intensity, trying to make him believe my words. “You don’t have to stay. Go on back to the forest. Dad will be fine. When he’s out of surgery I’ll see he’s settled and then I’ll…” Here I faltered, wondering what the hell I was going to do next. “I’ll, um, I’ll borrow one of Dad’s trucks and drive down to your place. Then you and I can plan what we’ll do next from there.”

  “Don’t patronize me.” Clint’s eyes had gone flat.

  “I’m not patronizing you!” I shouted, then immediately lowered my voice at the curious look from the nurse. “I just hate being the cause of your pain.”

  “You are not the cause of it, Rhiannon is.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said, exasperated.

  “Yes, I know what you mean.” He sat next to me, but his body was ramrod stiff—he wouldn’t touch me. “What you mean is that I’m not involved enough with you or your family for you to allow me to stay here with you. I know you don’t believe I love you like he does, but I thought that my actions have proven to you that I belong with you for as long as you are here and as long as you need me.”

  I didn’t know what to say. If I acknowledged what he was saying wouldn’t I simply be causing him more pain?

  “Even ClanFintan told you that I belong at your side.” He stood again, this time without letting me see the effort it cost him. “I’m getting some coffee. Can I bring you anything?” His eyes bored into mine, daring me to challenge him.

  And I couldn’t. I knew that what he said was true. He did belong with me. He was the only person besides my father who I could trust. And he was the only person who understood what we were up against.

  “Some hot tea would be nice,” I said inanely.

  He grunted and turned away.

  “Green tea, please, if they have it, and I don’t take sugar,” I said to his back.

  He just nodded and kept walking, holding himself stiffly, like everything from his waist up hurt to bend.

  I sat and brooded. Well, I didn’t mean that I didn’t think he deserved to be here. And I didn’t mean that I didn’t like him. Okay—love him. I just thought that maybe it would be best if he…

  …He what? Waited in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, Oklahoma, until it was “nice and safe” to reappear? Mr. Hero Fighter Pilot? Oh, please. Error in judgment was an understatement.

  “They didn’t have any green tea.” Clint roughly handed me a foam cup that had the end of a Lipton tea bag dangling off the side of it. He sat next to me and blew on his coffee. We didn’t speak.

  “Doctor says y’all can come back now.” The nurse’s twang echoed through the empty room.

  “Thanks.” I smiled at her, pleased that someone was still speaking to me.

  A nurse in surgical scrubs was pushing Dad’s movable litter into the hall. She paused.

  “The doctor is waiting.”

  I nodded at her and kissed Dad on the forehead. He had about a bazillion tubes stuck into various places. His bad hand was tented and out of sight like a small dead body. The analogy grossed me out. I gave him my best perky smile.

  “We’ll be right here, Dad. Don’t worry about anything.”

  “Hey, Bugsy. This morphine is making me silly as shit.” His words were adorably slurred. “I think I was flirting with that girly nurse.” Then my father actually giggled.

  I laughed and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Now I know why you didn’t want any morphine.”

  “Damn straight,” he said. His fragmented attention found Clint. “Take care of our girl, son.” “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, and you don’t have to worry about Mama Parker.” Dad said. “I called her. Her brother-in-law’s putting chains on their old Buick. She’ll be here before these jailers let me go.”

  “She’s gonna be mad at you,” I laughed.

  “I know.” He grinned drunkenly.

  “Time to go, Mr. Parker.” The nurse continued pushing the gurney down the hall.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “I love you, too, ol’ Bugsy.”

  The elevators that led to the surgery unit closed silently. Clint followed me as I walked dejectedly back to the waiting room. I glanced at the clock and was amazed to see it was well past noon.

  The E.R. nurse was back at her station. “Doc said your daddy’d probably be in surgery a couple hours.”

  I nodded thanks to her.

  “I think I’m hungry,” I said to Clint, testing the waters.

  “It would probably do you good to eat.” His voice was neutral. Not pissed and not unpissed.

  “But I don’t want any hospital food.” I wrinkled my nose.

  At this the nurse pricked her ears. “If y’all have something that can drive on that mess outside, the Arby’s down the street is open.” She giggled. “A whole shift got stuck there when the weather turned, and they’re just cooking their little brains out.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Nurses don’t like hospital food, either.”

  “Arby’s sounds good. Thanks,” Clint said to her.

  “Do you want us to bring you back anything?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. We’ve already been.” She slid the window shut, waved us out the door and returned to her very steamy-looking romance novel. (Wonder if she’d let me borrow it if Clint kept refusing to talk to me.)

  The afternoon was cold and slate colored, but it still hadn’t started snowing again. I took Clint’s hand as we stepped out into winter. The Hummer was parked in one of the Emergency Room Patient Parking Only slots. Its engine turned over and growled like a sports car.

  “The Arby’s is on the corner of the next intersection just south of here.” I pointed and Clint nodded, carefully pulling out onto the nearly deserted street that ran in front of the hospital.

  The silence grew.

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “You already said that.”

  “Oh.”

  The big Arby’s hat sign came into view. “There it is.”

  “My vision is just fine,” Clint said sarcastically as he pulled into the parking lot.

  I waited for him to turn the engine off. Then I confronted him. “Look, you don’t have to be such an ass.” His lips narrowed but he didn’t say anything, so I continued, “I never said I didn’t want you here. I never said I didn’t think you had a right to be here. I’m just worried about your damn back, and I don’t want anything to happen to you.” I paused and looked away from him. “I almost lost one man I love today. I don’t want to take the chance of losing another.”

  I felt the heat of his hand as he brushed a curl back from the side of my face. I tilted my head in his direction and he laid his palm against my cheek.

  “You won’t lose me, Shannon my girl.” His deep voice made me feel warm and liquid inside.

  I turned my body toward him and his arm went around me while my head rested on his shoulder. He kissed the top of my head.

  “Will you feed me now?”

  Clint squeezed my shoulders and kissed me again before letting me go. “Come on. I’ll feed both of you.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “There’s nothing quite like a Giant Arby’s sandwich with extra horsey sauce, large curly fries and a Diet Pepsi.” (It’s a well-established fact that a Diet Pepsi cancels out a large curly fries.)

  Back in t
he E.R. waiting room I smacked my lips contentedly and sucked on the straw, trying to get the last little speck of liquid. “Now that I don’t feel sick all the time, food is tasting yummy.”

  Clint watched me with fond amusement. “Woman, you can eat!” He purposefully played out his Okie twang.

  I patted my tummy. “Yes, we can.”

  “Feel better now?”

  “Amazingly.” I grinned at him.

  “Ready to talk about our plan?”

  “We have a plan?” I asked, surprised.

  “If we don’t, we should.”

  “Well, I know what I don’t want to do,” I said, suddenly serious.

  “That’s as good a place to start as any. Let’s take out what we won’t do and build from there.” He sounded very Military Man In Charge. Thank Goddess one of us knew what we were doing. I think.

  I lowered my voice. “I’m not going back out to Dad’s place.” I shivered. “I couldn’t stand to be around that pond.”

  “I agree. It wouldn’t be safe, even with the trees to aid you. They’re powerful, yes, but there’s a difference between their power and that of the grove—and you’re going to need true power from the ancients in the heart of the forest to kill Nuada.”

  “If he can be killed. I mean, shit, he’s already supposed to be dead.”

  “Then he needs to be sent back to the darkness where he belongs.”

  He spoke with a confidence I wish I felt. And I couldn’t help but wonder where the dark god Pryderi fit into all of this. Fighting a resurrected Nuada was horrible enough. Fighting an ancient god would be…

  “It hasn’t started snowing again, yet.” Thankfully, he interrupted my morbid thoughts. “But the way it looks, it could begin again at any time. Which probably means Nuada will not be trapped for very long.”

  “We need to find friggin Rhiannon,” I said, not for the first time, “and make her tell us what the hell’s going on.”

  “You mean what the hell she’s done,” Clint corrected.

  I nodded grimly. “Didn’t she leave you with any phone numbers or any way to reach her?”

  “She tried.” His jaw was set as he remembered. “I wouldn’t take them. I didn’t want anything to do with her. It was like every place she touched in my life she left a dirty stain. I needed to be clean of her.”

  “That’s it!” I yelped. “Why didn’t I think of it before?” Clint was looking at me with his forehead wrinkled in confusion, but as I continued to explain, his expression cleared and changed to an understanding grin. “We don’t need a friggin phone to call Rhiannon the Great! She’s bound to me. Remember you said she and I have the same auras? Knowing that, you could probably call her by yourself, or at least with the help of the ancient grove, but imagine what kind of message the two of us plus the grove could send together.”

  “It’d definitely be something she couldn’t ignore.” His grin mirrored mine.

  “And if she does manage to ignore our first invitation, well, we’ll just keep inviting and inviting and inviting.”

  Clint whistled low. “She’ll be madder than a wet cat.”

  “Don’t insult cats—I like them. I was thinking more like a pissed-off cobra.”

  “She’ll see it as a challenge.”

  “Good—that’s what it is.” The confidence was back in my voice. I may not know how to vanquish Nuada or a dark god, but Rhiannon was something I knew I could handle. She was me—a selfish, bitchy, hateful version of me. And I’d been successfully vanquishing that side of me all my life. I thought about what my ex-husband would say about that and cringed. Well, I’d been vanquishing that side of me most of the time.

  I looked up at the clock. More time had ticked away—it was now past 5:00 p.m. Peeking outside, I could see the slate-colored sky had turned a deeper coal. Night again. The thought of the long drive back to the forest made me sigh in weariness.

  “Not tonight.” Clint read my thoughts. “We’ll wait till morning. Make sure your dad’s settled in and your stepmom’s on her way here. And we’ll travel during the day.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Freeman.” The sound of Dr. Mason’s voice made me jump, and my heart beat wildly, but the satisfied look on her face as she approached us allowed me to relax. “Your father came through the surgery just fine. There was more damage than I had originally thought, which is why the surgery lasted longer than I expected.”

  “But he’ll be able to use his hand?”

  “It’ll take several months of rehab, but yes, he should be able to return to training his racehorses and baling his hay.”

  Dad must have been doing some talking. “May I see him?”

  “We have him pretty drugged up, and he’s exhausted from the hypothermia, so he’s sleeping right now.” The doctor dug through one of her pockets and handed me a slip of paper. “Your father made me promise to give this number to you. He said you were to call his neighbor so that his animals could get fed. And he wanted me to tell you that he didn’t want you or your husband to go out to his place. He seemed very concerned about you having some kind of accident if you drove back there.”

  I took the paper. “Thank you, Doctor. Would you please have the nurses reassure Dad that Clint and I are not going out to his place? We’ll stay in town. I’ll call, and leave the number of the hotel with the nurses’ station.”

  “Excellent. He should be up and around in the morning.” She gave us a polite dismissive nod. “And drive carefully.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Clint said and took the number from me. “There’s a phone in the snack room. I’ll call the neighbor…”

  “He probably means Max Smith,” I supplied the name.

  “…Smith, and tell him what’s happened.” We shared a look. “I’ll tell him an edited version of what’s happened.”

  “I’ll be here when you get back.” He nodded and I allowed myself a lingering glance at the strong line of his retreating body. Broad shoulders—tapered waist—tight ass—long, strong legs.

  He glanced over his shoulder and caught me looking. “Did you want something, Shannon my girl?” he asked with a smile playing in his voice.

  “Nope, uh, I was just, uh, thinking,” I stammered, blushed and turned away. His laugh trailed down the hall.

  “He is one damn fine-lookin’ man,” the nurse said with a sigh.

  “Yeah,” I muttered, returning to sucking on my straw. And, no, I wasn’t going to think about sucking on anything else. Really. I mean it. Really.

  At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

  Clint was back almost before I could quit grumbling. He charmed the nurse into giving him the direct line to the Surgical Intensive Care Unit, pulled me out of the chair by my elbow, and before I had time to get cold, he had me stuffed into the passenger’s side of the Hummer and we were rolling.

  “Which way to the nearest hotel?” he asked as he adjusted the vehicle’s heater.

  “I don’t suppose you know anything about what happened to my condo?” If Rhiannon hadn’t sold it, or let it get repossessed, or whatever, we could stay there. I always kept a key hidden outside, so getting in shouldn’t be a problem. My wistful thoughts said it would be easiest to stay the night in my own place.

  “Uh, that was one of the first things she had her oilman take care of.” He gave me an apologetic look. “If I remember correctly, he sold it very quickly.”

  “That bitch,” I breathed. But it figured. Why would she stay in my cute but modest condo when she had world domination and random acts of evil to commit whilst a millionaire lapped from her hand? “Go north down Elm. Right before you come to the highway, there should be a couple of hotels.”

  Clint nodded and the Hummer slid out onto the frozen street. I stayed quiet and let him concentrate on the short drive. Again, the streets were deserted. It was almost dark, and the streetlights cast weird, ghostly halos of color around them.

  “Nuclear winter,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “It re
minds me of a scene from The Day After, that miniseries about the aftermath of nuclear war that was on TV in the eighties.”

  “I remember it. Damn grim movie.” He reached over and patted my knee. “Are you okay?”

  I shook myself. “I guess I’m just tired.”

  “Need another Arby’s?” He smiled at me.

  “Maybe later.” I smiled back, trying to ignore the somber mood that had suddenly settled over me. “Now I think I just need some sleep.”

  “That I can help you with.” He motioned to the buildings ahead. “Looks like there’s a Canterbury Inn and a Luxury Inn. Which is your favorite?”

  I studied the two hotels that sat next to each other. “Looks like it’ll have to be the Luxury Inn.” The Canterbury had a red neon sign that read No Vacancies.

  “Luxury it is.” Clint downshifted and the Hummer crawled up the incline to the front of the small hotel. “Damn, looks like this parking lot is packed. Wait here—I’ll go see what’s available.”

  He returned much too quickly. “All full. Where else?”

  “If I remember correctly, they were just opening a new Best Western a mile east of here. Let’s try there.” Actually, I remembered the Best Western because it had been built behind a lovely little liquor store, BA Wine and Spirits. I drove past it frequently as it was being constructed. I sighed nostalgically, remembering the fun of browsing their well-stocked wine racks for a new, tempting red, especially on Ten Percent Off Tuesdays.

  “Why the sigh?”

  “I was just thinking about a very cool liquor store not far from the Best Western, and remembering my hunt for the perfect bottle of red wine.”

  He laughed. “Shannon my girl, I don’t think your daughter can appreciate red wine.” He paused. “Yet.”

  “Definitely not—and I won’t appreciate it for another—” I counted quickly “—seven months or so.”

  “A spring baby?”

  That did make me smile, and I felt my dark mood lift. My hand rested lightly on my stomach. “A spring baby.”

  The Kenosha Street Best Western had that sparkling look of a newly built hotel, especially as it was illuminated by a row of blazing lights. It sat behind the Reasor’s Grocery Plaza (which included “my” liquor store, as well as a Quick Trip, a Blockbuster Video and various other typical little yuppie shops). It was ringed by the dark shapes of snow-packed trees and had a frontage of what I remember as azalea bushes, but now they looked like another blob of light shadow covered in a white canvas of snow. The parking lot looked too full.