“That’s my car!” I shouted again, then gasped when Ivy spun me around and yanked me back into the elevator. My back hit the wall and I put a hand to my stomach. “Who said”-I panted through the sudden vertigo-“you could drive my car?”
The doors snicked shut and cut off the doctor’s protest. I clutched at the walls when the elevator started to go up, then forced myself to let go. Damn it, I am not going to get sick. “Who said you could drive my car?” I said again, louder, as if I could hold off the dizziness with my voice.
Jenks’s wings hummed nervously, and Ivy flushed. “What was I supposed to pick you up with? My cycle?” she muttered. “I’m in a legal spot. I had thirty minutes left.”
“They’re towing my car!” I shouted again, pointing, and she shrugged.
“I’ll get it out of impound.”
“How are we going to get home now!” I yelled, not liking the feeling of helplessness, and Ivy pulled out her cell phone from a slim case at her belt. God, the thing was the size of a credit card. “I’ll call Kist-” Her voice broke, and I stared at her suddenly riven features. “I mean, Erica,” she amended softly. “She’ll come get us. She works near here.”
Turn it to hell. Ill and heartsick, I pressed into the corner of the elevator and tried to find my equilibrium.
Jenks landed on my shoulder. “Relax, Rache,” he said, his eyes darting to Ivy as she hunched in pain, her fingers tapping out a text message as fast as if she were at a conventional keyboard. “You saw the hag of a doctor. It’s not Ivy’s fault. They knew you were making a run for it.”
Hands splayed, I propped myself against the two walls surrounding me. It felt as if we were rising through thousands of pinpricks of ice as the world hit me raw, unprotected without my full aura. It wasn’t as if I was in a position to do anything. And Dr. Mape would have been a fool for not expecting this. Multiple escapes were in my record. My mom used to sneak me out all the time. “Where are we going?” I breathed, forcing myself to keep my eyes open even though they kept shifting on their own, like I had been on a merry-go-round for too long.
“The roof.”
I eyed Ivy, then carefully leaned to push the button for the third floor. “There’s a walkway to the children’s wing on the third floor. We can go out that way,” I muttered, and my eyes slid shut. Just for a moment. Ivy and Jenks’s silence pulled them back open. “What?” I said. “Why should I go through the laundry chute to the basement floor when I can roll out in a wheelchair?”
Ivy shifted her feet. “You’ll sit down?” she asked.
Before I fall down? Not likely. “Yes,” I said, then accepted Ivy’s arm when the elevator stopped and the world magically returned to normal.
The elevator doors slid open with a ding, and Jenks flew out, darting back before we had gone three steps. “There’s a chair over here,” he said, and I leaned against the wall beside the fake potted plant as Ivy used one hand to keep me upright, and the other to almost throw the chair open, the locks snapping in place from the sudden shock of being jerked to a stop.
“Sit,” she said, and I gratefully sat. I had to get home. Everything would be better if I could just get home.
Ivy pushed me into motion, taking advantage of the empty hall to race for the walkway. Dizziness roared from everywhere, slipping out of the corners where the walls and floor met, chasing after me as Ivy raced. “Slow down,” I whispered, but I think it was my lolling head that got her to stop. Either that or Jenks screaming at her.
“What the hell are you doing!” Jenks was shouting, and I gritted my teeth, struggling to keep from throwing up.
“Getting her out of here,” she snarled from somewhere far away and distant behind me.
“You can’t move her that fast!” he yelled, dusting me as if he could give me a false aura. “She’s not moving slowly because she’s hurt, she’s moving slowly to keep her aura with her. You just freaking left it back at the elevator!”
Ivy’s voice was a mere whisper of “Oh my God.” I felt a warm hand on me. “Rachel, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
It was getting better surprisingly fast, and the world stopped spinning. Looking up, I squinted until she came into focus. “Yeah.” I took a cautiously deep breath. “Just don’t go that fast.” Crap. How was I going to handle the car?
Ivy’s face was scared, and I reached up to touch her hand, still on my shoulder. “I’m okay,” I said, risking another deep breath. “Where are we?”
She pushed us back into motion, almost crawling. Jenks, flying a close flank, nodded. “The children’s wing,” she whispered.
Fourteen
Anxious, I pressed my knees together as Ivy wheeled me down the hall. We’d passed the long walkway over the service drive, and we were indeed in the children’s wing. An awful feeling of dread and familiarity settled in me, and my gut clenched.
The smell was different, holding the scent of baby powder and crayons. The walls were a warmer yellow now, and the railings…I eyed them as we rolled past. There was a second, lower set, which just about killed me. Pictures of puppies and kittens were on the walls at seated height. And rainbows. Kids shouldn’t be ill. But they were. They died here, and it wasn’t fair.
I felt the prick of tears, and Jenks landed on my shoulder. “You okay?”
It isn’t fair, damn it. “No,” I said, forcing myself to smile so he wouldn’t ask Ivy to stop. I could hear kids talking loudly with the intensity that children used when they knew they had only a short time to make their voices heard.
We were going by the playroom, the tall windows with the blinds open to show the snow, and the ceiling lights turned up to make it almost as bright as noon. It was just after midnight, and only the Inderlander kids would be up, most of them in their rooms with a parent or two, having their dinner. If they could swing it, most parents visited during meals to try to make their child’s hospital room into a piece of the familiar by eating with them, and the kids-without exception-were too kind to tell them it only made home look that much farther away.
We slowly rolled by the bright room with its night-black windows. I wasn’t surprised to see it empty but for the pack of kids whose parents were too far away to stop in for meals or had other responsibilities. They were an independent bunch, and they talked a lot. I smiled when they caught sight of us, but shock filled me when one of them shouted, “Ivy!”
Immediately the table in the far corner emptied out, and I sat in amazement as we were suddenly surrounded by kids in brightly colored pj’s. One was enthusiastically dragging her IV stand behind her, and three had lost their hair from chemotherapy, still legal after the Turn, when more effective biomedicines were not. The oldest of the three, a skinny girl with her jaw clenched, lagged behind with a tired determination. She wore a bright red bandanna that matched her pajamas, and it gave her an endearing bad-girl look.
“Ivy, Ivy, Ivy!” a red-cheeked boy about six shouted again, shocking the hell out of me when he flung himself at Ivy’s knees in an enthusiastic hug. Ivy flamed red, and Jenks laughed, spilling dust in a sheet of gold.
“Did you come to eat with us and throw peas at the parrot?” the girl with the IV asked, and I turned in my chair to see Ivy all the better.
“Pixy, pixy, pixy!” the boy on her legs shouted, and Jenks flew up out of his reach.
“Uh, I’m going to do a nurse check,” he said nervously, then zipped off at ceiling height. There was a chorus of disappointment, and Ivy disentangled herself, kneeling to put us all on the same level. “No, Daryl,” she said, “I’m sneaking my friend out for some ice cream, so lower your voices before they check up on you.”
Immediately the shouts diminished to giggling whispers. One of the bald kids, a boy by the cowboys on his pajamas, ran to the end of the hall and peeked around the corner. He gave us a distant thumbs-up, and everyone sighed. There were only five of them, but they all apparently knew Ivy, and they clustered around us like…kids.
“She’s a witch,” the red-cheeked boy, still attached to Ivy’s leg, said, pitching his tone imperialistically. His hand was on his hip, and he was clearly the floor’s self-proclaimed king. “She can’t be your friend. Vampires and witches don’t make friends.”
“She has a black aura,” the girl with the IV said, backing up. Her eyes were wide, but I could tell by her plump,
