“Shut up, Paul.” Fingers brushed my cheek. I opened my eyes.
“Let him die,” Paul said.
“He’s not dying.” Jake’s gaze held mine. “You’re not dying.”
I shook my head, although I was afraid that I was.
“Help is on the way. All you have to do is hold on.”
I said, “You wouldn’t happen to have a warm rock, would you?”
“What?”
“If you wrap a warm rock in a piece of cloth and then press it against the wound, it’s supposed to ease the pain.”
His pale mouth quirked. “The only rocks I brought are the ones in my head. I should never have agreed to this.”
“You didn’t.” I closed my eyes. My shoulder was starting to hurt. A lot. I tried to lessen the pain by analyzing it. Nausea, crushing pressure in my chest…maybe better to skip the analysis.
He crouched down beside me, gathering me against him. His hand covered mine, holding the bunched and wet shirt against my shoulder much harder than I was. I let him deal with it, rested my face in the curve of his neck. Breathed in the scent of sunwarmed bare skin tinged with the sweat and gunpowder and the metallic tang of blood. His heart was pounding fast on an adrenaline rush.
I don’t have to be strong, I thought. I don’t have to put a brave face on it. I’m dying. I’m entitled to a little weakness. I hid my face in his chest, smothering the cry of pain that squeezed out of me.
It could be worse. I could be dying alone.
Or he could have hesitated. Even for a moment.
The pain eased up a little.
I could hear Paul continuing to speak urgently, pleading for his own life in that stagy ultraplummy voice.
“Why can’t you see what this means for both of us? This is a second chance -- our last chance. This is fate. Why are you fighting what is clearly meant to happen?”
Jake said over my head, “Paul, one more word and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
Paul gave a strangled laugh. “My God, you are a fool.”
Jake shifted, and I hoped he wasn’t going to carry out his threat.
He tipped my head up.
“Okay?”
“Great.” I’d decided to live long enough to see Paul Kane put away.
His laugh sounded funny.
The pain was getting worse again.
He bent his head and said against my ear. “Hold on, baby.”
I nodded and closed my eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Fuzzy…ceiling. There was something wrong with the light. Sort of eerie…
I unstuck my eyes. Blinked. I was in a hospital room and Lisa was sitting by my bedside.
She looked small and exhausted. She wore no makeup; her face was pinched and suddenly old.
My shoulder hurt. It seemed stiff, bulky with bandages. It hurt to move. My chest hurt. A lot. I became aware of tubes and wires and a soft mechanical swish and hiss. I was hooked up to a bank of machines with blinking lights -- and I didn’t seem to be breathing entirely on my own. Scary. Very.
I must have moved or made some sound because Lisa’s gaze jerked to my face. She looked more scared than I felt.
“Adrien…” Her voice -- little more than a whisper -- shook badly.
I winked at her.
Her eyes filled with tears.
That pretty much felt like a full day’s work. I closed my eyes.
* * * * *
The next time I opened my eyes there were cards and balloons. I recognized Emma’s artwork on a large folded sheet of colored construction paper. I believe I recognized that jubilant stick figure with the spiky black hair, although it had been a long time since I’d felt like jumping for joy.
Everything hurt but I was breathing on my own again. My mother sat beside my bed reading Vogue. She looked immaculately groomed as always, so all was apparently right with the universe once more.
I croaked, “I think Em should have her own horse.”
Lisa looked up from the magazine. For a moment she seemed to struggle for composure, then she said, “Oh, Adrien! She’ll just fall and break her neck.” She wiped hastily at her eyes.
* * * * *
Bizarre though it may be, it took awhile to remember that I’d been shot aboard Paul Kane’s ship. I was so doped up that for a day or two I thought I was in the hospital with pneumonia. My chest hurt like hell and breathing was painful in the extreme. Everything was an effort. Even thinking was exhausting. So I didn’t. I hid out in a cocoon of painkillers and refused to let myself worry about how ill I was and what the future might be.
There was going to be a future, and that was the good news, but I’d apparently had a couple of cardiac events. Everyone seemed a little vague about these “events.” I gathered they were not cause for celebration -- despite the cards and flowers and balloons that accumulated.
“Did someone pick my cat up?” I asked…well, I asked everyone.
“Darling, Natalie is taking care of that cre -- your cat,” Lisa assured me for the fourth time.
I closed my eyes…but I knew there was something I needed to remember. Something I had forgotten…
And that’s when it came flooding back: my own personal voyage of the damned which had ended with Paul Kane shooting me. And I remembered Jake.
I opened my eyes again.
“Is Jake all right?”
Lisa’s delicate jaw gritted against all the things she wanted to say. “As far as I know,” she got out every bit as tersely as Jake.
“Can you find out?”
She huffed out a little sigh. “Yes. I’ll find out.” I watched her steel herself to ask, “Do you want to see him?”
It was a brave effort on her part but I felt a kind of internal flinch. I did want to see him. And I didn’t. Not like this, looking like Emma’s science project with wires and tubes and IVs and catheter and an oxygen tube up my nose.
Watching me, my mother said with that uncanny perspicuity, “Maybe when you’re feeling a little more in control.”
I assented, closed my eyes, drifted.
* * * * *
“What the hell is tapioca,” I asked, studying it on my spoon. “Is it some kind of rice?”
“I don’t know,” Guy said, “but if you don’t intend to spend the rest of your life on an IV, you’d better eat it.”
“You usually don’t get threatened for not eating dessert. Not that I really count this as dessert.”
I took a spoonful.
Watching me, Guy said, “I’ve got some good news. That screenwriter, Al January, recovered consciousness. They think he’s going to be all right.”
The relief was like a weight off my chest. “Thank God. Thanks for telling me.”
He opened his mouth but restrained himself from saying the things he had been longing to say since I regained consciousness -- the things he had already said when I told him my plan to trap Paul Kane. He said instead, “When you’re up to it, the police want to take your statement.”
“Oh.”
His smile was a little grim in response to my tone. “Lisa has been holding them at bay with the threat of court orders and injunctions and curses upon them and all their progeny.”
“Does she think…what does she think?”
Guy raised one shoulder.
“What did Jake tell them?”
“I have no idea.”
“But he is all right?”
Guy’s brows arched. “Is Jake okay? I never thought to ask.” After a few beats he added reluctantly, “He was released from the hospital yesterday.”
My heart did a little lurch, and it felt different. Weird. Although I couldn’t have explained how; I wasn’t even sure I didn’t imagine it.