Кей Хупер - Blood Ties

“Maybe because we were getting too close?” Hollis said, a hopeful note in her voice.

“I wish I thought so,” DeMarco said.

Nodding, Miranda said, “I wish I did too. But it feels to me more like him just being clever. Playing games. Staging a ‘sniper’ for us to find, and on the roof of an old theater, is pretty dramatic.”

Before anyone could respond to that, a doctor came in to the room. Wearing scrubs and exhaustion, he looked around with eyes too old for his youngish face and settled immediately on Miranda as the one to speak to.

“She’s made it through surgery,” he said, in the flattened voice of someone who had been fighting a long battle he was afraid he might have lost. “We’ve done as much as we could to repair the damage. Her heart stopped twice on the table, and we’ve got her on a ventilator. Honestly, I’m surprised she made it this far. But she’s strong—and he’s not letting go. If she makes it through the next forty-eight hours, she has a chance.”

“A chance for full recovery?” Miranda’s voice was steady.

“I don’t know,” he said bluntly. “There are some… variables here I don’t really understand, including an unusual amount of electrical activity going on in her brain.”

“Going on now?”

“We’ve done three scans, initially to check for damage to the spine because the bullet passed so close. On the first scan, her brain lit up like a Christmas tree. Very unusual. So we scanned again, after we got her a bit more stabilized, and again after surgery. A hell of a lot of activity in the first and third scans, much less in the second. As if she’s in and out. Or maybe using energy in a peaks-and-valleys kind of rhythm. But the peaks are very high, very intense. Too intense. If they occur too often or last too long… I frankly don’t know how long that can go on before it damages her brain, just the way a high fever would.”

Hollis said steadily, “You can’t be sure of that.”

He looked at her briefly. “No. But it’s what my training and experience are telling me.”

Miranda said, “The brain activity is in an area you wouldn’t expect it to be?”

“In several areas I wouldn’t expect. And all I feel certain of is that she’s a long way from being brain-dead. Whether that will have any positive effect on her physically or will do the opposite is a question I just can’t answer.”

He sighed. “The bullet missed her spine, but there was a lot of damage and she lost a lot of blood. I’ve seen people come back from worse. Not many, but some. Look, there’s nothing any of you can do for her now. She’s being settled in the ICU and will be there for days yet.” Assuming she survives . “No additional visitors for at least a few hours, not until morning preferably, and even then I’m asking you to make it one at a time and brief. It’s difficult enough for the doctors and nursing staff to work around Agent Hayes.

“Go get cleaned up, get some sleep. I have your number, and I’ll call you if there’s any change.” His mouth twisted slightly. “Or he will.”

“We appreciate you allowing Quentin to stay with her, Doctor.”

“There wasn’t any allowing about it, and you know that, Agent Bishop.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen something like that only once before, and I believe it made all the difference that they were able to stay together. I’m not too proud to accept all the help I can get. So. The staff has instructions not to interfere with Agent Hayes.”

“Thank you.”

“If she has family, I think it would be best to call them in. As soon as possible.”

“Thank you,” Miranda repeated. Then, as he began to turn away, she said, “Doctor? When her heart stopped, you had to shock her.”

He nodded, then said simply, “Agent Hayes never let go of her hand, and he never even flinched. One day I’d like very much to talk to you about that. Because I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“It might be best,” Brooke said, “if you went to the hospital on this side. To be near…”

“My body?” Diana heard a slightly brittle laugh escape her, a sound given an eerie cadence by the hollow almost-echo of the gray time. “What’s the point, when I can’t get back to it?” She was sitting on a cold bench on a hauntingly silent and empty gray time Main Street in Serenade, where she had been since her second attempt to connect with Quentin had shown her something she very much wished she had never seen.

She had no idea how much time had passed in the living world.

Was she already dead? If she was able to bring herself at least partway back so she could see something of the living world, even if only for a split second, would she see her terribly wounded body laid out on a slab in some cold and sterile morgue?

Or had she been sitting, frozen, on this bench for long enough that she would see her own funeral?

Jesus .

“You’re still holding on to the connection with Quentin,” Brooke observed serenely.

“It’s more like he’s holding on to it. On to me.”

“Well, he’s a stubborn man.”

“Yes,” Diana murmured.

“And he had a…jolt or two of power that helped him hold on. Helped make the connection stronger. He’s determined to hold you, no matter what. Even to pull you back.”

Diana could feel that, faintly, a steady pull with an occasional more-urgent tug she was powerless to obey. “For all the good it’ll do. I’ve tried to reach out for him, but… I can’t. Not this time.”

And she had tried. Desperately.

Why didn’t I reach when I had the chance? Really reach, really connect with Quentin the way he wanted .

The way I wanted .

Too late. Dammit, too late now .

The anguish of that was more painful than anything she had ever known.

“Don’t give up, Diana.”

“Yeah, right.” She shivered, unable to stop the memories that washed over her. Herself as only a toddler, being led by her father down a long hospital corridor lined with rooms filled with people even her baffled, frightened child’s mind had known were more dead than living. People who lay silent and still in their beds, machines beeping and hushing as they recorded heartbeats and “assisted” the bodies to draw air into their lungs.

And, finally, being led into one of the rooms. Held up by her father so she could see… her mother. Or what was left of her. A still body, its heartbeats recorded by a beeping machine, another machine forcing it to breathe.

Just a body.

Diana had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that her mother was no longer there. And that she was never coming back.

What she knew now was that her mother, in a desperate attempt to locate her lost daughter, had pushed her psychic gifts beyond limits she could control, severing the tie that bound her spirit to her physical self. It had been only a matter of time before her body, kept alive by machines, finally ceased to function.

Diana had blocked those memories for a long, long time, because terror and grief had threatened to overwhelm her and because, barely a year ago, she discovered that she shared her mother’s gifts—and the risks involved in using them.

Only it hadn’t been a case of her pushing her gifts, as her mother had, but a sniper’s bullet that had fatally wounded her body and severed her spirit’s connection to it.

“Not severed. Not completely, at least. It doesn’t have to end that way, Diana.”

“Doesn’t it? Hasn’t it already?” Hard as she tried, Diana couldn’t hold her voice steady.

Matter-of-fact, Brooke said, “You would have moved on by now. Mediums almost never linger here.”

“Almost never.”

“Because they understand death far better than most people. They understand it’s a change but not an ending. So they tend to be ready to move on, to take the next step in their journey. But you haven’t. You’re still here. Which means there might be something you can do to change things for yourself.”