And yet I was there, I was dead. My chest had been carved out – my heart. My heart!
I couldn’t take it anymore. My mind shut down. Dizziness encased me, my thoughts spun, and I felt my body lean back. I fell off the chair, head cracking against the floor. And I, Chi McLane, fell unconscious. When I awoke, everything would change.
Chapter 5
It took a long time to rouse. My head didn’t feel like it was attached anymore. My thoughts didn’t feel like they were mine. Everything simply spun and slipped around me as if my sensations had been loaded into a blender and set to maximum chop.
The first thing I became aware of was my breathing – heavy, uneven, pressured.
… No, it wasn’t my breathing. It was someone else’s.
I started to feel the lights, feel the bed beneath me, hear some kind of machine.
But not the bed, not the lights, not the hum of electricity – none of them were enough to pull me out of my reverie. No, it was that breathing. That pressured, stressed breathing. Somehow, it was like rungs on a ladder – a ladder I could climb until I found the strength to open my eyes.
I heard someone push to their feet, press towards me. I felt two large, warm, reassuring hands clasp around my hand and wrist.
I tilted my head and tried to blink back against the strong illumination of the lights above me and the equally strong light streaming in through the window behind.
“Chi, thank god – you’re awake. Finally.”
Max.
At first, a surge of welcome happiness spread through my heart at his words and his presence. It had been his breathing, ha? His presence that had finally brought me back to the land of the living.
The sun was streaming in through a window behind him, and it lit up his body as he leaned forward. And Max? Max smiled.
I’d seen a lot of smiles in my life – but precious few from Max. And yet, the way his lips spread wide, the way his chin crinkled down and his cheeks met his eyes – Christ, it was the nicest thing I’d ever seen.
And yet, of course, it couldn’t last.
Rather abruptly, he pulled away from me. “What happened?” he demanded.
I blinked. I scrunched my eyes up, felt my nose crinkle hard as I pushed my mind into the task of answering that question.
What happened?
The last I remembered….
I half closed my eyes. I’d… I’d been in the interrogation room in the police station, looking over photos. Terrifying photos….
No, that wasn’t right. I’d been in a factory somewhere, strong lights above me, blood-covered, mildew-infested plastic had been beneath me. There’d been a man – shiny shoes. Fagan! A sword.
And he’d, he’d….
I jerked back, yanking both hands up and cramming them over my chest as I frantically searched for a hole in my torso.
Max bucked forward, grabbed my wrists, brought them down, and stopped me from tearing a hole in my medical tunic. “Chi, calm down. Calm down. You’re all right. You’re in the hospital. Nothing happened to you. Did you have a vision?”
A vision?
No. It couldn’t have simply been a vision. It was too visceral, too real. Too violent. I’d felt my blood, my heart – my beating heart take its last—
“Chi,” Max leaned in, the light highlighting him once more, “you’re here. You’re fine. I’m with you. Just breathe. Just breathe.”
Just breathe, ha? It was that easy, was it?
I’d died!
I squeezed my eyes shut as tears touched my cheeks and trailed down my throat.
Though I could feel my chest, and though my heart beat at a million miles an hour, I could also feel it still as it was sliced through with a sword.
I didn’t sob, didn’t cry – just pressed myself as far back into the pillow and mattress as I could as I screwed my eyes shut until it felt like I was trying to force my eyeballs through the back of my skull.
But just before I could give in to that awful sensation again, Max leaned forward, took his hand from my wrist and placed it gently along my jaw. The feeling was electric. As his fingers rested against my cheek and throat, it was as if my fear gave in.
Though his touch was the most welcome, reassuring thing in the entire world – he was also using magic on me. Subtle, but there. I felt tantalizing tingles of power charge down his hands and sink into my throat, plunging quickly into my chest. And as they did, the awful, visceral sharpness of the memory started to wane until finally I opened my eyes.
I stared at him. But, for a flickering moment, I swore I didn’t see him. Because I swore I wasn’t in hospital at all. I was back on that green pastureland, that beautiful sunshine streaming down from above. And beyond? I heard those horse hooves, someone traveling towards me, someone screaming my name.
Someone reached me, clasped my shoulders, and pulled me up from the grass—
Just as soon as the vision began, it ended in a snap as Max jolted backward.
I opened my eyes to stare at him, just as a slick of sweat spread across his brow.
He didn’t appear to know what to do with his hands, and he clutched them uselessly by his sides.
He always did this whenever I glimpsed that pastureland, whenever I heard those voices. Was it something I wasn’t meant to see? But I saw it every single time he used his magic on me.
We remained in silence for several seconds until Max made the first move. He
