The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [54]
Grace hesitated, then breezed into the room. During her time in the Dominions, she had discovered that if you acted as if you belonged in a place, people invariably assumed you did.
“Can I help you, Doctor?”
“I doubt it,” Grace said. She made a quick glance at the chart by the bed. “Dr.… Chandra mentioned he had a persistent vegetative case in here. I’m doing a study.”
The nurse frowned. “A study? Which department is funding it?”
Indignation rose in Grace, so strong it startled her. Who was this woman to question her authority? She started to open her mouth to speak outraged words.
Stop it, Grace. No one thinks you’re a duchess here. You can’t just dismiss someone with a wave of your hand.
True, she was no noble. But she was a doctor, and in this place, that meant more than a jeweled crown.
She gave the nurse a stiff, impersonal smile. “Why don’t you leave us for a minute?”
The nurse stared at her for a heartbeat, then in one swift motion folded her aluminum clipboard and sailed from the room—no doubt off to the lounge to warn the other nurses that there was a skinny new witch of a doctor to watch out for. She wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Forgetting the nurse, Grace approached the bed.
She had not seen Beltan since the day she and Travis had touched the half-coins together in Spardis, leaving Eldh behind. A heartbeat later, they had blinked as the silver light dimmed around them and had found themselves next to a Dumpster not twenty feet from the ED entrance. Travis had run inside for help, and seconds had passed, each one an agony. The Weirding was present on Earth—Grace had sensed it at once now that she knew how to look for it—but it was crowded, noisy, and dirty. And thin, so terribly thin, a silk cloth worn into a filthy rag. The thread of Beltan’s life had begun to slip through her fingers. She couldn’t hold on.
Then, thankfully, in a rush of commotion and light, the ED personnel were there. In the confusion, Travis slipped away and pulled Grace with him. She had wanted to stay, to make sure they could stabilize him, to warn them he had never had a tetanus shot or inoculation in his life, but Travis had pulled harder. It was too dangerous for them there. She had cast one last glance back at Beltan, pale as a ghost on the bare asphalt, then they had run into the dry Denver night.
The days that followed had seemed peculiarly unreal, as if it were Earth, not Eldh, that was the foreign world. Again and again Grace reached out with the Touch, but she was like a fresh amputee groping for a phantom limb. For instead of a shimmering web of gossamer spanning between every living thing, all she found were faint echoes of magic.
Then there was the shadow, leaping out to consume her without warning. And when she was not failing to use the Touch, or caught in the shadow of the past, she spent her time thinking of Tira—the fragile, mute, red-haired girl who had turned out to be so much stronger than any of them. But while Tira was gone, she was far from lost. It was Grace who felt lost.
If it hadn’t been for Travis, she didn’t know what would have happened to her. He seemed to adjust to life back on Earth far more quickly than she, as if he really belonged here. It had been his idea to sell three gold Eldhish coins—their faces deliberately scratched—at an East Colfax pawnshop. With the money they had gotten food, then had hopped a bus west down Colfax, past peeling storefronts and spastic neon signs. At the Blue Sky Motel they took a room that looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the carefree, shaggy, burnt umber days of 1965. The TV was so old Grace had expected it to show I Love Lucy when she flicked it on. Instead, a faint column of smoke drifted up as several cockroaches wriggled out the ventilation holes in the back.