He knew he didn’t have a lot of time. Hospital this size? It was going to have a big security force that was jacked into a central command.
Dragging himself up to his feet, he cut through a rear delivery courtyard, navigating thanks to halogen lamps set up high on the concrete-block walls—
As sirens began to wail, he was willing to bet they weren’t ambulances. Try the real police coming to look for him, too.
Fucking hell, why couldn’t he find a car to break into?
Coming around a corner, a set of squealing tires had him skidding to a halt—just before the heavy steel body of a Mercedes wiped him out.
The passenger-side window went down, and the one female on the face of the planet that he never wanted to see again smiled at him.
“Trouble in paradise?” the demon drawled as she leaned across the leather seats.
“Fuck me…”
“Get in and I will,” she told him with an evil smile. “Otherwise, guess you’ll take your chances with the CPD.”
As Sissy’s hobbling, pissed-off savior launched himself out of the window he’d busted, she bolted forward like maybe she could catch him and pull him bodily back into the hospital room—and she wasn’t the only one with that crazy idea.
Unfortunately, the hospital staff got there first, crowding the view, blocking her out.
Oh, God, if he couldn’t survive a car accident without ending up here? Falling five floors down to the ground was probably going to kill him—
Okay, so maybe he was already dead, but whatever. Angels in the real world could obviously still sustain broken bones and injuries that were more than cosmetic. And maybe there was something she could do to help him—
Frantic, she pushed into the knot of nurses and doctors who were shouting and arguing in front of the gaping hole, forgetting that she wasn’t really there, that she was no longer “human,” that she was—
It was hard to say what happened exactly.
One moment, she was shoving against someone, and the next … she could see out of the window, visualizing the one-story, not five, drop to the roof below.
And that was what she’d been after. The trouble was, it was from a different height. And her sense of color was off. And her body felt really weird.
Bringing up a hand to rub her eyes, she froze…
And then screamed.
Instantly, everyone turned to her. “Mary? What’s wrong?” somebody said.
“Move her to the bed. Get her on the bed! For God’s sake, this is how her brother died—”
“I don’t have a brother,” Sissy mumbled.
“Shh,” one of the nurses soothed. “Come here. Sit.”
Sissy lifted that hand again and found that it was still … not her own. Pudgy, wrinkly, with a set of wedding rings that needed to be cleaned, the thing was under her control—she was able to flex the fingers and turn it over to see the palm—but it was not hers.
Looking down, she saw that she was no longer in the loose baggy shirt and rolled-up sweats Jim had given her. Instead, she was wearing a set of blue scrubs and had a pair of laminated IDs on a lanyard around her neck. Picking them off a chest that was about eight sizes bigger than her own, she stared at a picture of a fifty-year-old woman named Mary T. Santiago.
Wheeling around, she confronted the other angel, the one who had come in before Jim had gone out the window. “What am I?”
The Englishman’s haughty, hard face registered a momentary shock. “You are … not supposed to be able to do that.”
“What did I do?”
One of the male orderlies stepped in front of her and there was real fear on his face. “Mary, you’re okay. You’re all right…”
“What did I do!” she shouted around him.
The first of the female nurses addressed her. “Mary, you didn’t do anything. You weren’t even there when he jumped. Mary, oh, Mary…”
As Sissy was encased in a hug, she smelled a faded perfume, and some kind of astringent, and felt … well, mostly an incredible sense of support. Out of reflex, she put her arms—or Mary’s arms, as it were—around the other woman, her mind scrambling to understand how this was possible.
“Just step out of her,” the Englishman said crisply. “That’s the way it works—or so I’ve heard.”
“Step … out …?” she mumbled.
“Shh, Mary, it’s okay.” The nurse started in with some soothing strokes of Mary’s hair—which Sissy felt as clearly as if it were her own. “Just breathe with me.”
For some reason, maybe because she needed a hug and the nurse was damned good at giving them, Sissy closed the eyes that were not her own and gave herself up to the comfort.
“That’s it. I know this is hard…”
Dimly, Sissy was aware of some others arriving in the hospital room—blue-uniformed officers who had security badges on their sleeves. She then felt herself get inched away so that she wasn’t anywhere near the black hole in the room.
As she breathed a little easier, she became aware of a psyche other than her own. It was in the background, thoughts and feelings and memories of another person, suppressed by God only knew what.
Step out? she thought. How was that going to work? If she had any impulse to move, the other woman’s body responded.
“Will yourself free,” the Englishman said. “Just decide to separate.”
Sissy listened to the command like she had the ones her coaches had given her in field hockey, ordering herself into an action that was more interior than exterior.
As she broke away from the nurse, she watched as the shorter, older woman she had just inhabited went down like a stone, fainting dead away. Immediately, Sissy lunged forward to catch her, but her arms had no substance, and Mary Santiago slid onto the linoleum floor, going through Sissy’s attempt at throwing out a hold like water through thin air.
Sissy backed away until she felt the far wall come up against her back.
“I don’t understand any of this,” she said, panic twitching her face, shaking her hands. “I don’t … know where I was. How I got in there. Why I got out.”
She looked at the man in white. “I need answers.”
It was an accusation—as if he knew, and was deliberately keeping her in the dark just to piss her off.
The man—angel, whatever—drew a hand through his black hair. “Bugger. Fucking … bugger.”
“I’m not sure what that means exactly, but if you think this all sucks? Then I’m right with you—and while we’re bonding? Do you have any idea where Jim went?”