“Of course not, hon. I’m just packing up for my flight back this afternoon. What can I do for you?”
“I just had a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, sure.” Her voice softened. “I understand.”
And I realized she thought I wanted to ask about my dad. I did — badly — but now was not the time. Except I couldn’t help but think, what if there wasn’t another time? Who was this Danny Killian that Lucy and the others knew? Like, asa person, not just the secretive and unhappy guy who was my dad?
“Will, are you still there?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, just got distracted for a second.” I needed to keep my focus on the immediate problem. Getting Alona free. “Listen, I know this is going to sound strange, but I’m just trying to wrap my head around everything, and I’ve been hearing some things I wanted to run by you.”
“Okay,” she said cautiously.
“Is it possible for a ghost to possess a person? Not what they show in movies, where everything is all crazy and split pea soup, but like almost undetectable? The person might seem normal or close to it.”
She was quiet for a long moment, a silence that dragged out way too long. Shit, had I just given myself away? “Lucy?”
“You’ve been talking to Mina,” she said with a sigh.
“What?” I asked, confused. “I mean, yeah, but not…”
“She’s insisting that we take this priest’s call seriously, but what she’s forgetting is that red-level manifestations are very rare. I’ve never even seen one before and—”
“Wait, what priest?”
“The chaplain at St. Catherine’s.” Now she sounded confused. “Didn’t Mina tell you that?”
Despite the heat in the car, I felt a sudden chill. Alona had mentioned a priest.
“Apparently, a girl who was in a coma for months and months woke up early this morning, and she’s already talking and moving around.”
“That can be one of the signs,” Lucy continued, oblivious to my distress. “Red-level echoes like that tend to go after weakened targets and make them their own. Like I said, though, they’re incredibly rare.”
“What is the Order doing about it?” I forced myself to ask in what I hoped was a normal voice or the closest thing to it that I could manage at this point.
“Do?” She laughed. “There’s nothing to do. This is just that poor girl’s attempt to win one more chance at full membership with a containment. But I doubt they’ll find anything.”
I froze. “They’re looking to find something?” Looking was bad. Looking meant members of the Order with disruptors and boxes would be in the vicinity of Alona.
“I thought you said you’d talked to Mina,” she said with a frown in her voice. “John took her to the hospital to check it out, even though—”
I snapped the phone shut, dropped it to the floor, and bolted from the car.
14
Alona
The strange thing about a hospital is that you’d think it would run on routine, the same thing every day, every hour.
Instead, it was more like they set out to throw random elements in at odd intervals just to keep you off balance.
Mr. Turner had just left to take Tyler to the cafeteria when an orderly showed up in my room with a wheelchair. “Physical therapy,” he called out far too cheerfully as he pushed the chair up to my bed. His scrubs had dancing teddy bears on them. Blecch.
“Are you serious?” I asked. The last thing I wanted to do in this body was anything physical.
“Dr. Highland never said anything,” Mrs. Turner spoke up with a frown.
The orderly was undeterred. “The sooner we start, the faster she’ll be back on her feet.”
“Okay,” Mrs. Turner said, still uncertain. She set her book down, a tattered paperback that she carried with her everywhere without ever seeming to make progress in it, and stood up.
“It might be better for you to wait here. Therapy is hard on the patient, but sometimes it’s even harder to watch,” the orderly said.
Great. This sounded like more fun every minute.
“No, I think I should—” she began.
“I’ll be okay,” I said. Now that I could talk, I wasn’t completely helpless. And it would probably be a good idea to start putting some distance between us. If Will could figure a way out of this — and he seemed determined, if more for Lily’s sake than mine — then the less time we spent together now, the better. Not that it would help all that much after everything that had happened, but it wouldn’t make thingsworse as further bonding might.
“Are you sure, baby?” Mrs. Turner asked with a frown.
The weird thing was the prospect of leaving Mrs. Turner here and going to therapy alone didn’t exactly spawn the feelings of relief I’d expected. It was almost like I wanted her to go with me.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I said firmly, trying to convince myself as much as her.
“Okay,” she said, beaming.
Oh. She saw it as a sign of improvement. Fabulous. Well, at least it made her happy.
After some very awkward maneuvering that revealed far more of this body than I would have wanted if it were mine, the orderly managed to get me into the wheelchair. That alone was enough to exhaust me, even though I’d done little more than just keep my balance during the transfer.
He spun the chair around expertly to face the door, and only then did I realize I’d left Lily’s cell phone on the bedside table.
If he called.
“Bye, Lilybean,” Mrs. Turner called after us.
This girl had more ridiculous nicknames than I had cute shoes. Or, used to have. Whatever. I wondered if my mom had finished cleaning out my room. Were all my clothes and shoes already on the shelves at the Salvation Army, next to ugly plaid sports jackets and sensible heels that
I shoved that thought away. I had enough to worry about right now.
The orderly moved us down the hall swiftly, like we were running late or something. The momentum, especially around corners, made staying upright a little tricky. More than once I thought I’d slide right out of the chair into a big hospital-gowned heap on the footrests.
But I didn’t ask him to slow down. Because every second we cut off this little adventure was one less in the hallway where everyone stared at me as we passed by. Some of them even followed me down the corridor, whispering to each other.
Look, I get it. It looks like a miracle, talks like a miracle, but…it’s not.
Reaching the service elevator — they never used the visitor elevators to move patients around, as I’d discovered during my bajillion tests earlier this morning — was, quite frankly, a relief.
Humming a tuneless collection of notes under his breath, the orderly wheeled me inside and pressed the button for the basement.
The basement? That seemed vaguely odd. Not that I had any clue where physical therapy took place, but I’d seen most of the basement at various times. After all, the morgue was down there, as was the MRI machine — another discovery from this morning.
Looking back on it, I should have asked. I should have spoken up and said something, anything. Maybe that would have been enough to push events back on course.
