“Can you believe that bitch?” Even I heard the petulance in my voice. I hated it, but I couldn’t help but feel as if I deserved a little bit of self-pity, all things considered.
“Honestly?” Pen said, watching the door my boss just exited. “I think she’s kind of awesome.”
I sighed and dropped back in the chair. “Jesus, Pen.”
My best friend came over and grabbed my hands, which felt icy in her warm palms. “We’ll get him better.” She opened her mouth to say more, but at that moment the door burst open and Hurricane Baba blew in.
“Oh, my poor, poor boy!” she wailed. After that, any thoughts of planning revenge or ignoring Gardner’s instructions flew out the window as Pen and I tried to answer questions we didn’t begin to know the right answers to.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Two days later, on my way to the hospital, I grabbed a box of glazed donuts for the nurses and a bucket of coffee for me. I only wished answers were as easy to come by as sugar and caffeine.
The night before Baba had shooed me out of the hospital to go home to shower and sleep.
“You smell like a foot and you look like shit,” she’d said in her most loving tone. “I don’t want to see you back here before dawn.” After that she’d tried to press one of her special teas into my hands, and I escaped just so she wouldn’t make me drink it.
Walking back into that silent house had been like entering a crime scene. Echoes of Danny permeated the place—his shoes on the floor, dirty laundry next to the hamper, his toothbrush by the sink.
When I arrived, there was an e-mail waiting for me from Eldritch. It contained an attached police report detailing the information the cops had gathered about how Bane captured Danny. According to his friend Aaron, they’d arrived at school around seven thirty. Aaron was in the band so he had to go set up for the assembly, which was scheduled right after the first bell. Best anyone could tell, Danny decided to run to the corner store to grab some junk food before school started. The last person who saw him was the convenience store clerk, who reported seeing a tall male with brown hair, about mid-thirties, talking to Danny in the parking lot.
I paused reading and removed the watch they’d found at the scene from my pocket. One of the cops who’d come by the hospital had brought it to me. They’d found it next to the curb where the store attendant saw Danny speaking to the stranger. I closed my fist around the cold metal and squeezed my eyes shut. So much for its bringing him luck. I swiped angrily at the tears I didn’t want to indulge and shoved the watch back into my pocket where I didn’t have to look at it.
By the time the first class had begun and Danny’s teacher noticed he was absent he’d already been abducted. And by the time news of his absence had trickled to Pen and she’d begun leaving the frantic messages I found on my phone later, I had already been fighting Danny in the tunnels.
I’d closed the e-mail with a nagging sensation to go along with the weight in my chest. Why would Danny go somewhere with a stranger? He knew better than that. And the clerk hadn’t reported a struggle between the two. It didn’t add up.
To distract myself from my loneliness and the memories and the theories, I’d called Morales around midnight for an update. He’d groggily informed me that they’d identified some of the Gray Wolf addicts who’d attacked us.
“Shadi ID’d five of them as vagrants who hang out at one of the shelters downtown.”
“Did she go there?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“And what, Kate?” He sighed. “Did she find Ramses Bane sitting on a cot waiting to be arrested?”
The conversation was pretty much over at that point.
It’s not that I didn’t trust Morales and the rest of the team to get Bane—well, that’s not true. I didn’t want anyone but me to deliver the swift kick of justice directly to Bane’s ass. But I also realized that my hands were tied. As much as I hated to admit it, Gardner was right: Danny needed to be my priority.
He might be unconscious, but the doctor felt sure he could register some of what was happening around him. Even if he didn’t remember everything—and Lord knew I hoped he forgot what happened in the tunnels—when he eventually woke up, I had a feeling he’d know deep down that he hadn’t been alone. That had to count for something.
So, really, I had no choice but to put my faith in the team. Which meant I probably needed to add an apology to Morales to my to-do list for calling him an asshole before I’d hung up on him.
The nurses cheered when I dropped off the box of glazed donuts at the desk. Apparently the Cauldron had hosted a busy night of ODs, stabbings, and assorted other magic-related violence that kept the ER hopping. That meant the nurses in Danny’s ward had had to step it up to cover all the staff who had been commandeered to handle triage.
“We didn’t expect you until later,” Rita, the shift supervisor, said with a yawn. “But we’re sure glad you showed up when you did.”
I smiled. Inside I longed to ask them what kinds of potions were involved, but I left them to enjoy their breakfast in peace. Even if the cases were related to Gray Wolf, there wasn’t much I could do with the knowledge besides harass Morales some more.
“I’ll just go check on Danny,” I said to the nurses.
“Oh! Mrs. Nowiki went down to grab some coffee and breakfast at the cafeteria about half an hour ago, but your other friend showed up not too long after.”
I frowned at her, wondering if Morales or one of the task members stopped by. “What friend?”
“Let me check.” She started rifling through stacks of files on the counter, looking for the visitor log. “One of the other nurses was on duty, so she wrote it down.”
I waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll go see for myself.” I started to walk away, thinking it was probably Pen. It wasn’t until I approached the room and saw that all the curtains were closed to the hallway that my gut told me to worry. I reached for the door at the same instant the nurse called down the hall.
“Oh, here it is,” she called. “It’s Mr. Volos—”
My heart plummeted ten stories. I threw open the door and ran inside.
“Hello, Kate.”
My feet froze to the ground. For a moment, all I could do was stare. Volos stood on the far side of Danny’s bed, holding my brother’s hand as though he belonged there.