God, what a mess.
Blood all over the place, me, Cash, the bodies on my livingroom floor leaking rivers and ponds, smears where I’d crawled across, some ofthat blood theirs, some mine. Chunks of shattered plaster, shards of glass,wood splinters, looked like a billion shiny brass shell casings. The placereeked of plaster dust and burned nitrates and more of that dead-body stenchthat covered this whole case.
Cash. What I could see,looked like superficial cuts and scrapes. But at least one of those grenadeshad blown right inside her room. Total wreck. I didn’t care.
What I did care, shelay funny, something about her hips and legs. No life — she’d dragged them towhere she lay using her arms and upper body, and they stayed right where sheleft them.
“Goddamn grenade threw me across the room. Something broke.” Shesounded calm and rational.
I ran my hand down along her spine, not touching hernightgown, the same way I’d “felt” those documents and the earlier corpses. It’sone of those medical magic things for doctors and patients who aren’t scaredsilly of magic and of wizards — I can feel a person’s “aura.” It’s sort of theprickly feeling I get from a light switch, tracing the voltage as it waits inthe wires, a different feeling than current flowing when you close the switch.The aura felt normal from her head down to around her lower ribs.
It stopped there.
I reached deep down into my reserves, trying to pull up somepower and use it to bridge the gap, connect nerves and twitch her muscles. Ithas to be done fast, while the body still remembers how things are supposed towork. You have a few minutes, max. And more than half the time it doesn’t work,and you can’t do it for yourself, and a whole shitload of other examples of whyit is magic instead of medicine.
I felt my touch slip right off her, like trying to push twomagnets together with the polarities wrong. That business of different magicalsystems got in the way. Her own shielding wouldn’t let me in, and she’d neverlearned how to control it. Couldn’t turn it off, because she’d never turned it on in the first place. Maybe if I’d beenstronger, fresher, not hurt. . . .
The first cops on the scene had been straight patrol officers,not SWAT team or anti-terror specialists. They looked scared shitless. I thinkthey expected the rest of a terrorist army to storm through the door at anysecond. I tried to tell them that they’d already be dead if there were anyother commandos in the building. I don’t think they believed me.
Time passed, I don’t have any idea how much, stress does thatto your brain. EMTs showed up, two teams.
I waved them all over to Cash. “Spinal injury.”
They nodded. They insisted on working on me, too. I didn’targue. The pain had caught up with me, and the blood loss. Someone hit me witha hypo, I managed to warn them that both of us were wizards and to use themedicines and doses appropriate for that. Part of me didn’t want medication, didn’t want treatment, needed to stay with Cash.
But that part of me didn’t make it through to my tongue. I wasfuzzing in and out.
I think I knew what was coming. Somewhere, some deep darkbrainstem thing, I knew Cash.
They hauled us in separate ambulances. I saw her again in theER, again in the X-ray suite, but they rolled us off in different directions.Different kinds of injuries and different treatments. I’m not going to give youa lot of details. Remembering it hurts too much.
They ran me into emergency surgery, burrowing for a slug underall those inches of fat, and that didn’t make things easy for them. They didn’tfind any serious damage beyond the blood loss, a severed vein or two. It tooktime, though, one 9mm slug right next to my long-suffering liver, and I laythere out cold under the knife when I needed to be alert and talking to Cash.
They didn’t knock her out. She wasn’t hurting much, and theyneeded to test reflexes and things, talk to her. So I think she heard themoutside her cubicle discussing her X-rays and talking about displaced fracturesand severed nerves.
Either that, or her body talked to her. I’ve told you, I neverdid figure out her magic. I just wish she’d had a chance to learn from thatconjure-woman.
When I came out from anesthesia and gave them pure hell aboutkeeping secrets, throwing a tantrum in the recovery room, as much of a tantrumas I could manage flat on my back and groggy, quoting chapter and verse abouthow I was her designated next-of-kin for medical information, they told me shewas dead.
I don’t know if they cranked up the dope in my IV drip then,or I blacked out and saved them the trouble.
~~~
When I rejoined the world and started raising hell again,I got that displaced fracture explanation and not much more. Doctors got vagueat that point, fuzzy medical-language things like severe trauma shock andconcussion injuries to her brain from the grenade blast and central nervoussystem collapse. In plain words, they didn’t know why she died.
Me, I think she decided she didn’t want to spend the rest ofher life in a wheelchair. She told herself to die.
Yeah, I know about wheelchair marathons and Paralympics andeven wheelchair curling, for God’s sake. And paralyzed women getting pregnantand giving birth and able to care for their babies. A wheelchair isn’t death.She still had every brain cell God gave her, and that was the essential Cash. She didn’t need to die.
I think I could have helped her decide to live. I never gotthat chance. Doctors and EMTs looked at us and thought my wounds were moreimmediate, more life-threatening, whereas hers were in the stabilize-and-waitcategory. Some part of me knew better. That’s one of the places I failed, oneof so damn many in this story.
I never promised you a happy ending. I did the best I could,the best that fate or circumstance would let me. And I’m not sure I could have helped her want to live.Underneath all that complexity, Cash was a
