Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [175]
Of course, Marianne had taught me other things, and one of those meant I could check myself. I could run my hand down my own aura and see if the holes were there. The trouble was I needed my left hand for that, and it was wrapped in bandages, strapped to a board with a tube in it.
Now that I was alone and not being pestered with hard questions, I began to feel my body. It hurt. Every time I moved my back, it hurt. Some of it was the dull ache of bruises, but there were two spots that had the sharp bite of things that had bled. I tried to remember how I could have cut my back. The glass in the window when the corpse took us back through it, that had to be it.
My face ached in a line from jaw to forehead. I remembered the corpse hitting me backhand. It had been almost casual, but it had knocked me half-senseless. Just once I’d like to meet a type of walking dead that wasn’t stronger than a living person.
I lifted the loose neck of my hospital gown and found little round pads stuck to my chest. I glanced at the heart monitor beside the bed, giving that reassuring sound that said my heart was still working. I had a sudden memory of the moment when my heart had stopped, when the master had willed it to stop. I was suddenly cold, and it wasn’t the overly ambitious air conditioner. I’d come very close to dying yesterday . . . today? I didn’t know what day it was. Only the sunshine pressing against the drawn blinds let me know it was day and not night.
There were red patches on the skin of my upper body like bad sunburns. I touched one, gently. It hurt. How the hell had I gotten burns? I lifted the gown until it made a cave and I could see down the line of my body, at least until mid-thigh where the weight of the covers hid me from view. There was a bandage just below my rib cage. I remembered the thing’s mouth opening over my skin while he cradled me, gently. The moment when he bit down. . . I pushed the memory away. Later, much, much later. I checked my left shoulder, but the scrape marks from teeth had already scabbed over.
Scabbed over? How long had I been out?
A man came into the room. He seemed familiar, but I knew I did not know him. He was tall with blond hair and silver-framed glasses. “I’m Doctor Cunningham, and I am very glad to see you awake.”
“Me, too,” I said.
He smiled and started checking me over. He used a penlight and made me follow the light, his finger, and kept staring into my eyes so long, he had me worried. “Did I have a concussion?”
“No,” he said. “Why? Does your head hurt?”
“A little but I think it’s from the sage incense.”
He looked embarrassed. “I am sorry about that, Ms. Blake, but she seemed to think all this was very important, and frankly I don’t know why you almost died to begin with, or why you didn’t just keep on dying. I let her do what she wanted.”
“I thought my heart stopped,” I said.
He tucked his stethoscope into his ears and pressed it to my chest. “Technically, yes.” He stopped talking, listening to my heart. He asked me to breathe deeply a couple of times, then made some notes on the chart at the foot of my bed. “Yes, your heart did stop, but I don’t know why it stopped. None of your injuries were that serious, or for that matter, that kind of injury.” He shook his head and came back to stand by me.
“How did I get the burns on my chest?”
“We used the defibrillator to start your heart. It can leave mild burns.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Two days. This is your third day with us.”
I took a deep breath and tried not to panic. I’d lost two days. “Have there been any more murders?”
The smile wilted on his face, leaving his eyes even more serious than they had been. “You mean the mutilation murders?”
I nodded.
“No, no new bodies.”
I let out the breath. “Good.”
He was frowning now. “No more questions about your health? Just about the murders?”
“You said you don’t know why I almost died,