over her cheek. It harshly illuminated the severity of her expression and grim set of her jaw. I caught a slight movement in her right shoulder and then noticed a telltale bend to her elbow.
The delineated shadows grew larger, taking over from the light once again as she lowered the curtain carefully back against the frame and turned to her left. She began stepping lightly toward the door, and though I was not fully awake, I was no longer being pulled under by sleep, so I spoke again.
“Are you going to tell me what’s really going on?” I asked.
“I already did, Rowan,” she replied, voice still hushed. She made a stellar attempt at keeping the concern out of her tone. Unfortunately, for her sake, she failed. “It’s nothing.”
“Sure,” I replied. “Then you started skulking around in the dark with your hand on your gun.”
“I’m serious. It’s nothing,” she repeated. “You’re safe. Felicity is safe. Don’t worry. Go back to sleep.”
“I’m not worried, I just want…”
“Dammit, Rowan,” she hissed. “Will you just shut up and let me do my job?”
I immediately fell quiet in the wake of the rebuke. I waited a moment in the pregnant silence and then muttered, “Sorry.”
“Me too,” she sighed quietly. “But, you just need to let us handle this, okay?”
“You’re right,” I agreed softly.
“Everything will be fine,” she added. “I promise.”
“Okay.”
There was another thick pause, and then she said, “I guess I don’t really need to tell you to stay put, do I?”
“No, I guess not.”
She clucked her tongue. “But then again, this is you we’re talking about… So as ridiculous as it sounds, I’m telling you to stay put. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” she replied.
I heard her exhale heavily, almost as if she didn’t believe me. Then without another word, she pulled the door open and slipped out, tugging it shut behind her.
I lay there in the darkness, listening to the sound of my heart beating in my chest. Whatever was happening was obviously serious. Whether Constance would admit to it or not, it didn’t matter. Her actions definitely weren’t in step with a routine status check, and anyone could see that.
My mind raced as I tried to recall what little I had picked up from the one-sided conversation. She had asked when something had happened, and then she had asked if there was a description. From the sound of what followed, I had the impression that the answer to that latter question had been a yes.
I concentrated on the vague pieces of information, trying to fit them together but finding only frustration in the task. My body was still floating in numbed comfort as the unspent remnants of the morphine coursed through my system. I could feel that the drug was starting to overtake me once again. The phantom echo of Constance’s voice rang inside my head, “Go on back to sleep…”
As my brain slipped back into a sluggish stupor, her suggestion seemed like as good a plan as any. I stopped fighting and let the mantle of slumber surround me. I was just slipping out of consciousness when the phone began to ring.
CHAPTER 33
Now, I was wide-awake.
An unearthly chill was chasing itself up and down my spine, and the earlier ballet performed by the hair along my neck had morphed into a full-blown tap dance. The stinging sensation of the gooseflesh pulsed in time with the throb that had set up housekeeping in the back of my skull. And all of this was happening before the first ring had even come to an end.
I waited in the darkness as the telephone blipped out another pair of warbling alerts in languid succession, but still no one came. Of course, with the door closed they probably couldn’t hear it. I really didn’t know.
I stared at the nightstand where the phone was sitting and tried to judge the distance. In the dark and without my glasses, it wasn’t an easy task. Even so, I concluded that it wasn’t comfortably within my limited reach, and I’d already been admonished more than once for moving around too much.
As ring four bounced from the walls, I sent my hand searching for the control pendant with the nurse call button. Unfortunately, I found nothing more than a tangle of sheets and blankets. Reaching up next to my head and beneath the corner of the pillow brought the same result. By now, peal number five was demanding attention.
At this point, the ache in my head was bringing with it a sickly familiarity. I knew this wasn’t just your average ethereal migraine. It had Miranda’s sickly perfume wafting all around it, and that was almost enough to set my gag reflex into motion.
By the sixth ring I was still laying there alone. For all I knew, Constance had declared my room off limits until whatever threat she wasn’t willing to admit had finally passed. By the seventh clatter of the electronic bell, it was apparent to me that if the phone was to be answered, I was going to have to do it myself.
I was already on my side, so I stretched out my arm, only to have it meet resistance a full foot away from the handset. I tugged slightly and felt something pulling on the back of my hand. I withdrew my arm and fumbled about then discovered that I had snagged my IV line on the bedside railing at my back.
I rolled slightly and, after a trio of horribly uncoordinated attempts, managed to unhook the loop and free myself. The phone was now well into its tenth ring. Whoever was at the other end definitely wasn’t giving up.
Rolling back to my left once again, I pressed myself up against the railing and reached over the top toward the nightstand that held the phone. Once again I came up short; although this time I could almost touch the chirruping device. I sucked in a deep breath and then blew it out as hard as I could, groaning while I stretched. My fingers brushed against the plastic but couldn’t wrap themselves around it.
The eleventh ring filled the room.
I allowed myself to fall back to the right and summoned everything my tortured body could give. Rolling as hard as possible to the left, I thrust out my arm and lunged against the railing. My index finger hooked the handset cord, and as I fell back I pulled it with me.
The telephone base clattered over the edge of the nightstand in the middle of the thirteenth ring, unceremoniously bringing it to an end. The device hung there by a thin wire while I maintained a tenuous one- fingered hold on the coiled cord that was attached to the receiver. Pulling my arm back, I managed to fish the handset up over the rail and wrap my hand around it. Breathing heavily from what apparently qualified as extreme physical exertion, I bent my elbow and shoved the handset up against the side of my head.
“Hello?” I said.
Without pause I was greeted with the response, “You sound tired, little man.”
The voice that flowed into my ear was one that I had never heard before. However, there was no mistaking who was behind it. If the choice of words wasn’t enough evidence, the drawling accent that artificially insinuated itself on top of them was familiar on levels beyond just the audible.
“I am tired, Miranda,” I replied.
The response that came was unexpected, to say the least.
“As am I, little man,” she said.
Her tone lent a bewildering substance to the comment. She literally sounded as if exhaustion was taking a heavy toll. Had it not been for the obvious distinguishing differences in the voice itself, I would have almost believed that I was talking to Annalise instead of Miranda. But, I knew I wasn’t. I couldn’t identify the body at the other end of the line, but it definitely didn’t belong to the malignant soul that was using it at the moment. That simple fact made anything she said to me automatically suspect.
“Are you honestly expecting me to believe that?” I asked.
“It really does not matter what you believe,” she told me.
“If that’s true, then why are you calling me?”
“To give you one last chance.”
