Queen of the Dead

She glared at me. “No. I told you. Training. I didn’t move fast enough.” She let out a breath. “I’m never quite fast enough.”

“You could leave,” I said. “You’re over eighteen, and—”

“And go where? Do what?” she demanded. “This is my whole life.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“No.” She shook her head. “All I need to do is pass this last test, and I become a full member. Then I can go anywhere,” she said. “I can move to Lucy’s territory or even Silas’s.” Mina rolled her eyes, but there was a wistful edge in her voice.

She seemed to hear herself then, and she straightened up, folding her arms across her chest.

“You worry about your own problems, Casper lover. Let me deal with mine.” She gave me a ferocious smile. “After all, I’m not the one who has to explain all of this to her majesty.”

That was a good point.

10 Alona

Even though it was the middle of the night, the hospital kicked things up into high gear for the miraculous recovery of coma girl. There were CAT scans, MRIs, X-rays, blood work, reflex tests, and a sleepy neurologist, with truly spectacular bed head, paged from home.

In some ways, it was almost worse than the last couple months of being invisible. Everyone asking me how I was doing, did this hurt, could I wiggle my toes, and telling menot to be afraid. All this intense attention and caring focused on a me that was not really me …and I couldn’t escape it. It was almost torture. Here’s what you want, but you can’t have it.

Mrs. Turner stayed with me through all the tests and scans. She followed where she could and waited outside doors like the most persistent of guard dogs until the nurses or technicians brought me back within her sight. It was both reassuring (I didn’t want someone to forget about me in a corner somewhere when I couldn’t exactly speak up and remind them) and kind of sad.

It was like she was afraid Lily was going to disappear…or go back to sleep. She was right, of course, even if she didn’t know it yet. I felt bad about that. She seemed like a nice enough woman, her horrible taste in sweaters aside. She didn’t deserve to have her hopes crushed — as they inevitably would be once I got out and Lily went back to “sleep.” And I would get out. I refused to contemplate any other possibility. It was just a matter of when and how.

During one of the breaks in testing, I’d used one of the many Ouija boards to painstakingly spell out a request for Mrs. Turner to call Will’s cell — she’d had Lily’s phone charged and waiting in the bedside table, just waiting for this day…or rather the day she thought it to be: the return of her daughter.

The call had gone to voice mail, but she’d left Will a message, telling him Lily was awake and asking for him.

That should have been more than enough to trigger a callback, or, more likely, a frantic visit to find out what was going on, because I knew he thought Lily was gone, far beyond the point of waking up and asking for anything.

But no, not yet.

“Are you doing okay?” Mrs. Turner asked, when we got back to my room — no, Lily’s room — after the last test.

I nodded, a new skill I could add to my repertoire. Dr. Bedhead (I couldn’t remember his real name) was “amazed” at Lily’s sudden improvement, progress that could not be justified based on early test results. Medically, there were signs of increased and unusual brain activity — something I did not want to contemplate — but nothing that would allow Lily to be awake and moving around like this. Meanwhile, with every hour that passed, I gained more and more control over her body, which was freaking me out.

Hurry up, Will, hurry up. I repeated the words over and over in my head.

I was also starting to get a little bit grumpy. I was tired, my head hurt — or Lily’s did, and I could feel it — and I’d just discovered, during one of the many times I’d been bodily shifted from a gurney to one machine or table or another, that while Lily Turner might have a waist even smaller than mine, her hips and thighs were enough to make me run screaming. If I, you know, could actually run anywhere.

Lily was all curves and soft where I’d had very hard-earned muscles. God, it was awful.

Look, I understood that she’d been in a coma for months and months. So, call me shallow, accuse me of being cruel to an injured girl, whatever. This wasn’t my body. I didn’t like it, didn’t want it. Being trapped inside of it was like…well, wearing my worst fears on the outside. Not that anyone knew it was me in here, but I did.

“Lots of tests, but you should be done for a while now,” Mrs. Turner continued, squeezing my hand reassuringly as she resumed her seat next to my bed.

Thank God. I was surprised we weren’t glowing green from all the radiation, contrast, dye, and whatever else had been shot into us over the last few hours.

“Do you feel like trying to get some rest?” she asked warily, clearly caught between motherly instinct and her own fears of what might happen if I…we went to sleep. Honestly, I wasn’t too sure either, nor did I want to find out. What if I got stuck, down in that darkness again, and couldn’t find my way back up? This was not ideal, but it was better than that.

I shook my head in answer. It was getting easier and easier to do that.

“How about some television?” she suggested, reaching for the remote.

She turned on the television and flipped to a channel with an infomercial about a juicer.

I relaxed a little into my pillows. It was kind of nice beingtaken care of instead of always taking care of someone else. A novelty for me, really. Even though my experience with Lily’s family had only been over the last few hours, I’d seen enough to make me the teensiest bit jealous. They cared about her. They didn’t throw her things away even when it looked like she might not come back. Heck, they’d re-created her entire room here at the hospital. There’d been no garbage bags full of her belongings, no donations to the Salvation Army of hermost precious memories. And she’d been in this irreversible coma a LOT longer than I’d been dead.

If it had been me in this coma instead of Lily…

You’d be here by yourself.

I shoved that thought away, even though I knew it was true. When I was fourteen, I fell from the cheerleading pyramid at practice — stupid Ashleigh Hicks and her wobbly knees — and hurt my wrist. Coach had taken me to the hospital for X-rays, but she couldn’t stay. They’d tried to reach my parents, but no one had answered at my mom’s house (shocker) and my dad was in Germany (or possibly the Days Inn downtown with his then mistress, now wife, and not taking any calls to keep up with the illusion of international unavailability).

I could have called friends or whomever I was dating at the time — I don’t even remember who that was now — but who wants to put their family’s dysfunction on display like that? Hi, my parents are so messed up, they don’t even care that I’m in the hospital? I’d have sooner invited them over to myhouse to watch my mother stumbling around in her bathrobe.

So, I’d taken a cab home with my arm in a sling. My dadonly found out about it when the hospital sent a bill, andthen he was pissed. Apparently, I’d used the wrong insurance card.

That would never have happened to Lily.

Whatever. None of that mattered now. I just needed to focus on getting out of here.

Why wasn’t Will calling back? What if it was because he was with her, Mina, Miss Frizztastic? Just the idea made me sick. But even if he was, no way would he ignore acall about Lily. He knew better than that. So what was the deal? If she’d gotten him in some kind of trouble that I was going to have deal with, I would kill her. Then we’d see how she felt about getting boxed, wouldn’t we?

Mrs. Turner turned the channel to some early morning news program, and the brighter flickering of the screen hurt my eyes.

The first time I’d ever seen Lily, she was staring blankly ahead at the television, the twin reflections of screen