Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Token of Darkness

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.

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.

“It couldn’t be out of the goodness of my heart?” she replied sweetly, batting her eyelashes. He didn’t deign to respond, and at last she glared at him instead. “I’m not one of le Coire’s lapdogs, but I respect him. He’s going to blame me for this mess, as usual. I don’t want him to have to clean it up.”

Brent hadn’t thought that Delilah worried about anyone’s opinion.

Then again, she was captain of the cheerleading squad, house director for the drama department, and practiced sorcery in her spare time. That drive for success had to come from somewhere.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’m pretty sure I can summon Samantha. According to Ryan she’s not very strong, and I think she’ll be even weaker now that she’s condensed herself in order to occupy a relatively normal human body—no offense, Brent. That’s kind of like saying she’s a relatively weak hurricane, though. I can get her here, but I’m not going to be able to control her if she fights us.”

“Is it just me, or did she react a little too strongly to the idea of taking Margaret’s body?” Brent asked, recalling the strange scene.

“Maybe she didn’t like the idea of going from an immortal power to a wheelchair,” Delilah suggested.

Cooper shook his head. “Do you know how many times she told me over the last few months that all she wanted was to be alive? When I first woke up, the doctors weren’t sure if I would ever be able to walk. It was Samantha who convinced me that my life wasn’t any less valid just because I couldn’t do everything I used to be able to do. I don’t think the possibility of a disability would have kept her from accepting a chance to live, and even if it did, that wouldn’t explain how strongly she reacted.”

“Maybe your connection to Samantha is actually kind of coincidental.” Delilah paced the room as she spoke. “Does anyone remember a fire around here? Ryan said a whole family was killed. I don’t remember it, but I don’t watch the news a lot.”