“Ha-ha,” Cooper said flatly. “Now go away.”
Brent shook his head and turned, but there was something familiar about the movement that made Cooper frown. When Brent walked back toward the door—with a bit of a huffy flounce in his step—Cooper said, “Wait.”
“Make up your mind,” Brent said with a smile.
“I …” He stared at Brent, examining the way he was standing, half turned with one hand on his hip and his head just slightly tilted with teasing curiosity. He asked quietly, “Samantha?”
He recognized her giggle now, despite its deeper tone and the form it accompanied. “I wondered how long it would take you to figure it out.” She moved closer this time, her posture still flirtatious, and more obviously feminine now that he realized what was going on.
She reached for him again, and he leaped back with a yelp only partially caused by the pain that shot down his hip from the sudden tense movement.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “It’s not like I’m actually a guy.”
“No, that would be far more okay,” Cooper retorted hotly. “I’d still say no, but … God, Samantha, what the hell? You’re a chick in a dude, who’s hitting on me, which is creepy enough. But that’s not just some random body. It’s taken already.”
“It’s not like I did this intentionally,” she protested. “I wouldn’t know how to undo it if I wanted to.”
Refusing to get distracted, Cooper asked, “Samantha—should I even call you that? Where is Brent? I haven’t seen him, the way I used to be able to see you. Is he okay?”
Samantha sighed and flipped her hair, though it really wasn’t long enough for the gesture.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” she said. “I’m sure he’s fine wherever he is. I managed it for months.”
“Samantha—”
“Cooper,” she crooned. She caught his hand, and held on to it tightly. “Do you understand what it’s like, to have a body? To be able to touch you—or anything, really,” she said. “They gave me applesauce when I woke up, and just a simple thing like that was incredible. I didn’t do this on purpose. I don’t know what you and Brent were doing or tried to do, just that I woke up like this. But I won’t regret it. I can’t regret it. I’m alive.”
She kissed his cheek and then gave a gentle push, sending him stumbling toward the hospital bed.
“I’ll keep in touch,” she said, before the air shuddered again. This time Cooper didn’t think it was his head that was spinning.
When he managed to look up again, Samantha was gone.
What next? Cooper hoped Ryan or Delilah would be able to help, but he remembered how easily Samantha had knocked Ryan down at the start of her hysterical attack on Margaret’s body. Would Cooper find Ryan in another room around here, unconscious or worse?
More importantly, would he find Brent at all?
There was one place Cooper could check for Brent, the only place he could imagine his being able to go. If Brent was there, things were going to be … kind of funny, actually.
21
Brent wasn’t laughing. He was very far from laughing.
The fight with Samantha was hazy in his memory. All he really remembered was trying to use some combination of his telepathy and Cooper’s power over spirits to try to push Samantha away before she hurt someone. He thought he had succeded, but the next thing he knew, he was flying through darkness.
In the world between worlds lay the shadowy demons of which Ryan had spoken. They had reached for him and ripped at him, and all he could do was flee. He tried to find his own body. …
Instead he had woken up here in a hospital bed.
The fact that he was in a girl’s body—even a paralyzed, weakened body—was a very minor inconvenience, compared to the other facts of the matter.
He felt deaf. The ability to read thoughts was something he had cursed many times, but it was a sense he had grown used to. Now, the entire world seemed flat and silent. When he was alone, not speaking to anyone or answering doctors’ and nurses’ questions, the silence was overpowering. He felt like he could hear those creatures in the darkness, beneath the empty air, and it made his heart race. When he did manage to drift off, he had nightmares in which he was lost in a fiery hell, searching for someone very important to him.
A doctor was supposed to be coming later to tell him the details of his condition, but he already knew that there was simply no feeling below his waist, and that was a whole lot better than how he felt above it. He could move his arms, but doing so hurt, and his muscles trembled when he tried. One of the nurses had told him that a lot of the pain and weakness was not a result of injury, but of being bed-bound for months. Physical therapy would help him regain full use of his upper body.
Or, of her upper body—the one he was trapped in at the moment.
He hoped it wouldn’t be his very long. Ryan hadn’t been too concerned when this happened to Delilah, but Ryan hadn’t stopped in yet.
He let out a frustrated noise, and hit the nurse call button. Someone appeared almost immediately to ask what was wrong.
He felt stupid even asking, but the silence was driving him insane.
“Is there a radio or television or something, somewhere?” he asked. “It’s so quiet in here.”
She nodded, with a smile, and patted his hand. “I’ll see what I can get for you.”
Brent had never been so glad to see anyone as he was to see Cooper when he came in the room halfway through some strange anime cartoon show Brent had put on for noise but hadn’t been able to follow. Cooper paused in the doorway awkwardly for a moment before asking, “Brent?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed.
Cooper’s body sagged and he leaned back against the wall with a relieved sigh. “With everything Ryan said about people not being able to survive without their bodies, I was worried you might be—”
“Should I take that to mean you’ve seen where the rest of me got to?” Brent interrupted.
Cooper nodded and looked so guilty Brent didn’t need telepathy to figure out why.
“Samantha,” Brent guessed. He closed his eyes, exhausted from the effort of talking. He had heard his mother yelling at “him,” and so had known his body was up and around, but he had been in and out of consciousness too much since then to track where he had gone. “Where’s Ryan? Is he hurt?”
“I don’t know. I came here first, after I realized what had happened. Want me to look for him?”
“Don’t bother.” Delilah’s voice from the doorway sounded hoarse. At least she ended up in the right place. “He’s pissed at us all.” Brent opened his eyes to find Delilah leaning in the doorway, holding up a gift-shop card with a teddy bear on the front. She read from the inside: “‘When the three of you stop acting like children and make up your minds as to what you want, call me. Until then, clean up your own mess.’ He’s grumpy that Samantha got the best of him.”
“He’s ‘grumpy’ that you nearly got yourself killed again,” Brent replied.
“Do you spend all your life kissing le Coire’s—”
“Enough!” Cooper snapped, stepping between them. “Ryan has a right to be upset. Beyond anything we’ve done intentionally, you two have ended up squatting in a body that used to belong to someone he knows, remember? Someone who apparently died pretty horribly, because she messed up while using powers Ryan was supposed to help her with. I was an idiot to suggest what I did. Apparently even Samantha agrees. And now I don’t know what to do or what to think about her—” He broke off and had to draw a deep breath. “But I think it’s obvious that Brent has a right to his own body. I get that you two had a bad breakup, but can we maybe focus for just a minute on what’s important?”
Brent nodded. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the one who needed to agree, since Delilah was the only one in the room who had any idea how to handle elementals or the shadow-scavengers.
Delilah was staring at Cooper with a lazy, contented smile that seemed ill-suited to the situation. “Cooper Blake grows a spine,” she said. “I’ll help—or try to—”
“Why?” Brent interrupted, suspicious.
