Dead Waters - Anton Strout [123]
“What happened?” I asked, feeling like a foreign passenger in my own body. Questions were forming, but slowly, not nearly fast enough, and I was having trouble organizing my thoughts.
The Inspectre stepped closer. “You sustained quite a bit of damage,” he said.
“So removing the woman’s heart didn’t work. . .” I said.
“Quite the contrary,” the Inspectre said. “It worked remarkably well.”
I forced my head to do my bidding and I felt it shift a fraction to my left.
“Easy,” Connor said. “You’re in a neck brace. What you did with the lunch box worked, but you still sent that woman into a blind death panic. When she wasn’t trying to drown you, she was trying to crush you with all that water. Your body is pretty battered and bruised, but I asked the docs and they say you’re going to live.”
“What about all those spirits on the bridge?” I asked.
“They moved on,” Connor said with a smile. “To wherever spirits go. Once Scylla and Charybdis were dead, their hold over the Hell Gate passage broke.”
A new thought slammed into my head, pushing past all of its cloudiness. How had it not been there right away? “Jane,” I whispered. “What about Jane?”
Connor’s face sobered. “ ’Fraid not, kid,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“She went down fighting,” the Inspectre said. “She saved us all.”
The meds numbed me. I could barely think, let alone process what had happened to Jane. Fleeting images of her running for the boat and the explosion played themselves over and over in my head, but my mind refused to process the fact that she was gone. I lay there not speaking for a long time. Connor and the Inspectre stood at my side and remained silent themselves as the sounds of life struggled out all around us in the hospital. The figures in the hall passed by until one of them stopped in the doorway. I recognized him, even without his hoodie pulled up.
“Aidan. . . ?”
Aidan Christos stumbled into the room. He was soaked through, his clothes clinging to him, what had survived of them, anyway. Most of what remained of his hoodie was charred or torn. His features, while still human-looking, were drawn and gaunt to the point that he looked like a spectral version of himself. Connor ran over to him and helped him into the room.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked.
Aidan looked at Connor, but he was so messed up I wasn’t sure he could see him in his state. “I told you my kind doesn’t take well to water,” Aidan said. “Not really our element, and I was in it far too long, I think. I’m having trouble healing.”
“At least you can,” I mumbled, still in my daze.
Aidan turned and followed the sound of my voice. He shuffled toward the foot of the bed. When his bony claws of fingers hit the end of it, he grabbed onto it like it was the only thing that could keep him standing. “Simon?” he asked. “How. . . how are you?”
“I’ll live,” I said. I couldn’t hide the darkness in my voice. “What happened to Jane? I saw you let go of the severed tentacle and then dive through the fire into the water.”
Aidan tensed. Parts of him were slowly healing, his features turning back to his normal look of a teenager, everything except his clothes. The better his features got, the worse his actual face looked. The young vampire looked pained and worried.
“There was so much going on,” he said. “There was the monster. It was dying, but not fast enough. Underwater, I couldn’t avoid the tentacles. They were thrashing about everywhere, making it harder to try to find her.”
“Did you find her?” the Inspectre asked.
Aidan nodded. “Eventually, yeah,” he said. “I don’t know how long I was under. I don’t need to breathe, but still the water was having an effect on me. I felt my body giving in to the river, until I finally struggled to the surface.”
I lay there, thankful for whatever painkillers they had given me. My mind filled with sadness, but my body wouldn’t react to it in my condition. When I could finally speak, I did. “At least you found her body,” I said. “Her