brows nearly brushing his own eyeballs. Gus let out a scream.
The giant head screamed, too, and moved away quickly. Gus’ eyes fought to focus.
“Dude, you’re awake,” Shawn said.
Gus squinted against the light and was able to make out Shawn’s beaming face over his.
“I was just checking to see if you were still breathing,” Shawn said.
“What happened?”
“You were,” Shawn said.
“Before that,” Gus said. “How did I get here?”
“Someone tried to kill us.”
Gus tried to recapture his last, fleeting memory. A red Mercedes flitted across his consciousness before his subconscious hauled it back with the other moments too painful to remember.
“With a car.”
“With a shotgun.”
There was something about a gun tickling the edges of Gus’ brain. For some reason, he envisioned what could only have been the mascot for the University of Idaho’s skeet-shooting team; a giant smiling potato holding a shotgun. And then it all came flooding back. The Echo. The shack. The attendant.
“He tried to kill us!”
Gus fought the screaming pain in his shoulders and moved his arms across his body, checking for spatter pattern. There didn’t seem to be any.
“Don’t worry, buddy,” Shawn said. “Nothing but soft-tissue damage. At least that’s what a fleet of doctors tells me.”
“Doctors?”
For the first time, it occurred to Gus to wonder exactly where he was. He managed to shift his eyes away from Shawn’s face, even his ocular muscles aching with the strain, to see the dull fluorescent tube throbbing on the ceiling, the small TV bolted to the wall, the cheery sailboat painting hanging over the institutional sink. He flexed his fingers over his chest and noticed that his starched button-down business shirt had been replaced with a flimsy sheath of slick, flameproof polyester.
“I’m in the hospital?”
Shawn patted him proudly on the shoulder. It felt like a sledgehammer on Gus’ bruises. “And they were worried about potential brain damage. I knew your brain was too strong for that.”
“Who was worried?”
“And I was right. They all agreed that everything was going to be just fine. As long as you woke up before-” Shawn checked his watch. “Hey, right under the wire. Good timing, buddy.”
“What if I didn’t wake up now?”
Before Shawn could answer, Gus heard the sound of a door opening across the room.
“Shawn?” It was a woman’s voice. Gus risked dislodging several vertebrae and twisted his neck so he could see the door. A pair of blazing red shoes, the toes more sharply pointed than the four-inch spike heels, appeared in the threshold. Gus could hear the heels digging divots out of the linoleum with every step. Forcing his head higher, Gus could make out a long stretch of tanned, muscular legs. He put his hand under his chin and forced his head up farther. The bare legs seemed to go on forever. Finally, far above the point where any normal piece of clothing would have ended, Gus saw a flash of hem. Blazing red hem.
The legs turned and moved assuredly toward the couch.
“I got the paper,” a female voice said. At least, those were the words she used. The voice itself seemed to be promising something much more enticing than the Santa Barbara Times.
“Thanks,” Shawn said, then turned back to Gus. “You and Tara haven’t been formally introduced. Although you have kind of met already. Well, you might have seen her as you sailed over her windshield.”
Shawn moved out of the way, and Gus’ entire field of vision was filled with the image of Tara’s upper thighs. He struggled to pull himself to a shaky sit so he could finally see what she looked like. And immediately wished he’d closed his eyes and slipped back into his coma.
The woman was almost as tall as Shawn, at least in those absurdly high heels. Her long hair was as black as crows’ feathers; her ice blue eyes burned out from lashes that were even blacker. Her lip gloss flashed the same fierce red as her minidress, although the gloss seemed to cover a few more square inches of skin. Tara’s lips parted in a smile, and Gus felt a mixture of terror and attraction he hadn’t experienced since Natasha Henstridge used her tongue to turn a suitor’s brain into shish-kebab in Species.
“I’m so happy you’re awake,” she said in a voice that seemed to promise joys and punishments Gus had only imagined when he was absolutely certain no one could ever read his thoughts. “We were so worried. When you went over the edge like that, I thought my heart was going to stop.”
“Thanks,” Gus said, then grabbed the only part of Shawn he could reach, the tail of his shirt. “Could I speak to you alone for just one moment?”
“We are alone,” Shawn said. “Well, alone with Tara, which is better than being alone alone.”
“Shawn!”
Shawn gave him a disappointed sigh, then turned regretfully to the woman in red. “Not quite himself. Needs a moment to put on his face.”
“I certainly understand,” Tara said. “I’ll be in the waiting room, reading about how amazing you are.”
Gus watched the legs amble out the door, then hissed at Shawn, “Do you know who that is?”
“She just told you,” Shawn said. “Her name is Tara Larison and-”
“Did she mention she’s also the devil’s daughter?”
“We haven’t really talked much about her family. She did say she has a cousin in medical school. That’s why she could be so sure you were alive after we found you.”
“Shawn, she looks just like Satana,” Gus said.
“Isn’t that a kind of raisin?”
“That’s a ‘sultana.’ Satana is the daughter of Satan, raised in Hell and banished to earth to live as a succubus.”
“When did you start going to church?”
“Every Sunday when I was little,” Gus said. “My parents insisted I pray for forgiveness for all the things you talked me into doing. But this isn’t from the Bible. It’s from Vampire Tales number two.”
“That would be one of your lesser-known holy books.”
“The whole story didn’t come out until Marvel Preview number seven.”
Shawn stared at him. “You’re saying she’s a character from a comic book.”
“Not just one. She was all over the Marvel Universe.”
“Gus, I know you hit your head, but you should be able to tell a few things about Tara. Like for instance she isn’t printed on cheap paper. When she talks, her words don’t appear in balloons over her head. And after long and hard study, I can guarantee she exists in at least three dimensions.”
“I know she’s not an actual comic book character,” Gus said. “I am awake enough to realize that. But if someone chooses to look just like the incarnation of all evil in the world, shouldn’t that send some kind of message?”
Shawn sat on the bed next to Gus, sending a shock wave through the mattress that made all of Gus’ muscles scream in pain. He started to pat his friend on the shoulder, but Gus’ obvious flinch made him reconsider.
“Maybe,” Shawn said. “But so should this. When you went over that cliff, she nearly went with you, she was trying so hard to catch you. She’s the one who guided the ambulance to where you’d fallen. She dug through garbage to make sure you were comfortable until they came. And she never stopped fighting for you. She insisted on staying here until you were awake. She badgered the doctors and nurses into giving you the kind of treatment they usually only give to people they actually care about. If you’d needed that surgery, I think she would have scrubbed up and joined in the operation.”
“What surgery?” Gus said.
“Nothing you have to worry about now,” Shawn said.
“And that’s in large measure because Tara fought so hard for you.”
Gus felt the familiar pang of guilt he experienced every time he caught himself judging another human being
