Chapter 14

Seraph sat alone in the deserted school parking lot, class having let out over an hour earlier. Idly, she imagined that tumbleweeds should be rolling across the street as she played with the straps on her backpack. She hated this, being left with nothing to do but think.

Finally, a beige sedan pulled in the parking lot and drove over the painted lines to the front steps. Seraph stayed where she was. After a moment, Gabe climbed out of the driver's side and glared at her with bloodshot eyes.

"Well? You waiting for an invitation?" His words slurred ever so slightly.

"You're late," she told him as she stood up.

"Yeah? Well, I'm here now." Gabe snapped at her.

She could smell the alcohol on him from where she stood. Ever since Mom left, Gabe had started hanging out with kids that could get him beer. Seraph understood it even as she hated it- he didn't want to think either.

She climbed into the car and buckled her seat belt.

Gabe slammed his door shut and burned rubber out of the parking lot heading home. Once on the road he turned on the radio to blasting volume, making Seraph's head hurt. She rested her forehead against the cool glass of the side window and closed her eyes. Lifting her hand, she absently ran her fingers over a still healing scar on her upper arm, just under her sleeve.

It was a subtle feeling, but it made Seraph open her eyes. The car was drifting across the lane. She sat up straight in her seat and looked at her brother, he was messing around with the radio and not paying any attention to the street.

"What are you doing? Watch the road," she said.

"Hey," Gabe snarled turning to her. "I could be doing something else right now instead of picking your dumb ass up. So shut up and leave me alone."

"Gabe!"

They blew through a red light into the path of an oncoming truck. Seraph screamed and Gabe swore. The truck hit Gabe's door and the impact sent the smaller sedan rolling. Seraph threw her arms up over her head, still screaming. The world was spinning. Everything was flying through the air. The seat belt cut into her. Something slammed against her arms, her face.

Then it stopped.

In the distance, Seraph heard sirens...

"Ma'am?"

She lifted her head from the steering wheel and blinked her eyes clear. Her head throbbed and the fiery pain in her shoulder was blinding. She couldn't remember what happened or where she was. Slowly, she turned her head toward the voice.

"Don't try to move, ma'am. Can you tell me your name?"

Her throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper. She tried to speak but no sound came out. Her eyes started to get heavy and she fought to keep them open. What was going on?

"Ma'am, can you hear me?"

Her vision turned blurry and gray and she felt hands on her. Someone touched her shoulder, and her vision turned from gray to red and she screamed. Mercifully, she blacked out once more.

~ ~ ~

The incessant bleeping of an alarm clock was the first thing Seraph heard. She couldn't remember why she had to get up and wanted nothing more than to shut the damn thing off, but she couldn't make her body move. It seemed as if sleep was unwilling to let her resume control of herself once again. A moan, like the sound of a bear rising from hibernation, joined the alarm, helping to bring Seraph back. Only after she heard it did she realize that it had been her own voice that made it. Her throat hurt as she tried to swallow. Her head hurt too, and so did her shoulder. In fact her whole body hurt and it was too cold. To spite her, the beeping continued.

Seraph opened her eyes, which immediately teared up, forcing her to close them again. It took her several tries before she was able to make them work and even then she needed to squint in the bright light. What she finally saw made no sense. She wasn't where she went to sleep, she wasn't–

Where had she gone to sleep?

Two thoughts came to her almost at the same time, so that later she could not remember which she realized first: one, that she could not remember where she had gone to sleep, or anything after leaving Mrs. Miller's house, and two, that she was in a hospital.

As if in answer to her thoughts, a nurse carrying a tray with a pitcher on it opened the door and slipped inside her room. Seraph tracked her movement with her eyes, unable or just unwilling to move her head as the nurse first checked the monitors that Seraph was hooked up to before finally turning to her. Opening her mouth to speak, Seraph found the lower part of her face was covered by an oxygen mask. The realization that she had missed something right in front of her face, or in this case, literally on her face, was more upsetting than being in the hospital for some unknown reason. These kinds of holes in her perceptions and memories could put her life in danger.

"Hold on, let me get that for you," the nurse said. "It's nice to see you awake and back with us, Ms. Hunter."

Seraph's first attempt to talk resulted in little more than a croak. "What happened?" Seraph tried again, her voice rasping so much she wouldn't have recognized it if it hadn't been saying the words she meant to say.

The nurse held a spoon with ice chips up to Seraph's lips. "I don't have the details," she answered as Seraph gratefully sucked on the ice. "But I do know you were in a car accident. The police will know more."

"Police?"

"Don't worry, it's standard with any accident."

"Don't remember."

"That's normal too, with head injuries," more ice was offered and taken. "The doctor can tell you more, would you like me to go get him?"

"Mmmm," Seraph hoped the noise was affirmative enough– it hurt to speak.

"I'll get him then," said the nurse. Leaving the ice tray where it was, she walked to the end of the bed and quickly wrote a note on the chart there before leaving Seraph to her thoughts.

The last thing she remembered was leaving Mrs. Miller's after getting the ring­– The ring! Where was it? She had put it in her pants pocket– now she was wearing a standard issue hospital green paper apron. Also it looked like her arm was strapped to her chest. Seraph felt disoriented and confused, she needed to take stock of the situation.

Looking down at herself she saw her left arm was in a sling and immobilized against her side. Luckily her right arm looked fine, with only an IV line taped to her wrist. She couldn't see her legs through the thin blanket but they didn't hurt and she couldn't detect the bulge of a cast either. As hurting went, she felt like crap all around, but the greatest sources of pain were her arm and head. The hospital room she found herself in was nothing interesting.

The lights that had seemed so blindingly bright when she first woke up were actually dimmed. Her bed had guardrails which had bed controls next to her hand, which Seraph used to move up into a halfway upright position so that she could see better. An empty chair was to one side of her and the pressboard nightstand, with the ice tray and an old corded phone, to the other. A curtain, hung from a track along the ceiling and pulled forward to hide half the room, was almost but not quite blocking a wall mounted TV. On the far wall was a clock, which Seraph could only barely read in the poor light. If her room had a window, Seraph could not see it.

For the life of her, she could remember nothing of the accident. Now she found herself without the Ring of Joining and no way of finding it– if it was really lost. She could never feel an item once she found it– would that change if it was no longer in her possession? Seraph dismissed that train of thought. The ring might be with her other personal property, if the hospital knew her name, they must have her wallet– that was somewhere. And if it turned out she had lost the ring, there was nothing she could do about it now.

Did her brother know where she was? How long before the hospital tried to contact him, or the police?

No matter how many times they happened, Seraph was never prepared. Like an earthquake, the visions came without warning and left only destruction in their wake. She saw a room filled with more strange things than she could hope to identify, and displayed among them was a bright purple-green jewel cut like a flower the size of a egg. The Rose of the Queen.

When Seraph came back to herself she was still alone in her hospital room, but now she remembered. She had been shown this before. The crash. She had driven off the road because of the vision.

"Hello, Ms. Hunter. I'm Dr. Sumtin. Glad you could join us, we were getting worried about you," the doctor said in a cheerful voice with his best bedside manner. He picked up the chart and read it while he continued to talk. "You've been through a lot tonight haven't you?"

Seraph could only stare. If he had come in just a minute sooner he would have walked in on her while she was in the throes of a vision. She would have been found out. She would have been sent away.

"It looks like you've got quite a laundry list of hurts here. Let me ask you first, do you remember anything from the accident?"

As a matter of fact, she did. "No," she said.

"Well, that's not unusual with head injuries. Your tox-screen came back clean, which we always like to see. We'll have to wait for the police to finish their investigation."

She hadn't been driving drunk, but she might as well have been. How could she have been so stupid? She should have foreseen this possibility before even thinking about driving a car, let alone buying one. She could have killed someone– oh god–

"Others?" She croaked out. "Was anyone else..."

"No, no one else was involved in the accident."

She closed her eyes, saying a prayer to whatever gods might care to listen, thanking them for small miracles. Nobody should suffer from her stupidity except her. "What's wrong with me?" She managed to ask.

"As I was saying before, memory loss, at least of the trauma, goes hand in hand with head injuries and you've got a whopper of a concussion. Headaches are the most common side effect. How is your head?"

"It hurts," Seraph said, and Dr. Sumtin noted it on her chart. He listed off the other side effects writing down what Seraph indicated that she felt. He checked her eyes for light sensitivity and double vision as well as running a few other small tests. Once finished, he warned her about the other, non-physical symptoms. "...difficulty focusing and irritability, which are all normal and should pass. In addition you've dislocated your shoulder here. You've got a nice bruise on your chest from the seat belt. One thing you have that isn't from the accident is a mild fever from an infected bite wound on your forearm."

Seraph spared a moment to hate the Ratlord.

"We would like to keep you overnight for–"

"No," Seraph interrupted.

"Excuse me?"

"I don't want to stay here," she said. There was no way she could stay in the hospital and not get caught.

"Ms. Hunter, you're really hurt. With your concussion and infection–"

"I don't care, I don't want to stay here," Seraph insisted. She sat up, gritting her teeth against a wave of dizziness and pain. She popped one of the sticky monitors off her chest.

"Ms. Hunter!" the doctor exclaimed, putting his hand on her good shoulder to restrain her. "Please, you'll hurt yourself."

Seraph stopped, breathing heavily. She was hurting herself, but it didn't matter. "Look," she panted. "I'll sign whatever you need me to sign, but I'm checking myself out. I need a phone so I can call someone to come get me."

Dr Sumtin's lips were compressed in a thin line of displeasure, but finally he nodded and pressed the call nurse button. He checked the chart once more and scribbled a note before flipping it shut.

"The police will need to talk to you," he said flatly.

"Am I being arrested?" The doctor shook his head. "Then I'm leaving, I'm sure the police will be able to find me." It was a terribly stupid idea and seemed suspicious as hell to run out of a hospital after driving her car into a light-post, but it wasn't as if she had a lot of viable options.

A nurse came in then, a different one this time. "Rose, Ms. Hunter will be checking herself out, could you get the paper work ready?"

"And my stuff," Seraph added.

"You'll have to sign it out from the cashier at the administration desk."

Seraph closed her eyes both in irritation and against the growing headache. "I need to make a call," she said.

"You can use the room phone," he said.

"Fine." Seraph didn't open her eyes as the nurse left, nor as the doctor finished doing whatever he was doing and finally left too. Once finally alone Seraph reached for the phone and dialed Gabe from memory. It only rang twice.

"Hello?" Gabe said, his voice sounded strange and far away on the old receiver.

"Gabe? It's Seraph."

"Christ, where the hell are you? You couldn't call? I was beginning to think you were dead–"

"I'm in the hospital."

There was a moment of static filled silence that followed her statement that stretched on long enough that it started to make Seraph uncomfortable.

"Are you okay?"

"No, not really. I was in a crash and I need someone to come get me."

"How bad are you hurt?"

"Goddamn it! I'll tell you all about it when I get home, alright? Just fucking wake up Brad and get him to get his fucking ass over here!" Seraph snarled into the phone.

"Whoa! Okay, okay!"

"I–" Seraph took a deep breath. "The doctor said irritability was a side effect of a concussion."

"Must be."

"I'm sorry I snapped at you."

"I'll get Brad up and over there. Be nicer to him, 'kay?"

"Yeah."

"Seraph?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm glad you're safe. Please try and make it home in one piece, promise? For me?"

"I will. Thanks, Gabe," Seraph said, smiling weakly.

"See you soon."

"Sure thing," Seraph placed the phone back in the cradle. All she could do now was wait.

Dr. Sumtin had turned off the heart monitor, or at least the noise from it, so that the only sound was the ticking clock. Even though they came at unpredictable intervals, one fact had remained true throughout her ordeal, they never came slower. Seraph stared at the twitching hands that counted down to her fate. It was twelve-twenty a.m., and she had left Mrs. Miller's house at a little after eight.

She had less than four hours until her next vision.

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