JIM BUTCHER: SMALL FAVOR

“Thanks.”

He put a hand on my arm for a second, then turned, hunched his shoulders, bowed his head so that his hair fell to hide most of his face, and walked quickly away.

I went on into the intensive care ward and found the waiting area.

Molly was sitting inside, next to Charity. Mother and daughter sat side by side, holding hands. They looked strained and weary. Charity was wearing jeans and one of Michael’s flannel shirts. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she didn’t have any makeup on. She’d been pulled from her bed in the middle of the night to rush to the hospital. Her eyes were focused into the distance and blank.

Small wonder. This was her greatest nightmare come to life.

They looked up as I came in, and their expressions were exactly the same: neutral, distant, numb.

“Harry,” Molly said, her voice hollow, ghostly.

“Hey, kid,” I said.

It took Charity a moment to react to my arrival. She focused her eyes on the far wall, blinked them a couple of times, and then focused them on me. She nodded and didn’t speak.

“I, uh,” I said quietly.

Molly raised her hand to stop me from speaking. I shut up.

“Okay,” she said. “Uh, let me think.” She closed her eyes, frowning in concentration, and started ticking off one finger with each sentence. “Luccio says that the Archive is stable but unconscious. She’s at Murphy’s house and needs to talk to you. Murphy says to tell you her face will be fine. Sanya says that he needs to talk to you alone, and as soon as possible, at St. Mary’s.”

I waved a hand at all of that. “I’ll take care of it later. How’s your dad?”

“Severe trauma to his liver,” Charity said, her voice toneless. “One of his kidneys was damaged too badly to be saved. One of his lungs collapsed. There’s damage to his spine. One of his ribs was fractured into multiple pieces. His pelvis was broken in two places. His jaw was shattered. Subdural hematoma. There was trauma all through one ocular cavity. They aren’t sure if he’ll lose the eye or not. There might also be brain damage. They don’t know yet.” Her eyes overflowed and focused into the distance again. “There was trauma to his heart. Fragments of broken bone in it. From his ribs.” She shuddered and closed her eyes. “His heart. They hurt his heart.”

Molly sat back down beside her mother and put her arm around Charity’s shoulders. Charity leaned against her, eyes still spilling tears, but she never made a sound.

I’m not a Knight.

I’m not a hero, either.

Heroes keep their promises.

“Molly,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

She looked up at me, and her lip started quivering. She shook her head and said, “Oh, Harry.”

“I’ll go,” I said.

Charity’s face snapped up and she said, her voice suddenly very clear and distinct, “No.”

Molly blinked at her mother.

Charity stood up, her face blotched with tears, creased with strain, her eyes sunken with fatigue and worry. She stared at me for a long moment and then said, “Families stay, Harry.” She lifted her chin, sudden and fierce pride briefly driving out the grief in her eyes. “He would stay for you.”

My vision got a little blurry, and I sat down in the nearest chair. Probably just a reaction to all the strain of the past couple of days.

“Yeah,” I said, my throat thick. “He would.”

I called everyone on the list Molly had quoted me and told them they could wait to see me until we knew about Michael. Except for Murph, they all got upset about that. I told them they could go to hell and hung up on them.

Then I settled in with Molly and Charity and waited.

Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, doesn’t make them any less hideous. They’re always just a little bit too cold. It always smells just a little bit too sharp and clean. It’s always quiet, so quiet that you can hear the fluorescent lights-another constant, those lights-humming. Pretty much everyone else there is in the same bad predicament you are, and there isn’t much in the way of cheerful conversation.

And there’s always a clock in sight. The clock has superpowers. It always seems to move too slowly. Look up at it and it will tell you the time. Look up an hour and a half later, and it will tell you two minutes have gone by. Yet it somehow simultaneously has the ability to remind you of how short life is, to make you acutely aware of how little time someone you love might have remaining to them.

The day crawled by. A doctor came to see Charity twice, to tell her that things were still bad, and that they were still working. The second visit came around suppertime, and the doc suggested that she get some food if she could, that they should know something more definite after the next procedure, in three or four hours.

He asked if Charity knew whether or not Michael had agreed to be an organ donor. Just in case, he said. They hadn’t been able to find his driver’s license. I could tell that Charity wanted to tell the doctor where he could shove his question and just how far it could go, but she told him what Michael would have told him-yes, of course he had. The doctor thanked her and left.

I walked down the cafeteria with Charity and Molly, but I didn’t feel like eating or having food urged upon me. I figured that Charity probably had a critical back pressure of mothering built up after this much time away from her kids. On the way, I claimed that I needed to stretch my legs, which was the truth. Sometimes when there’s too much going on in my head, it helps to walk around a bit.

So I walked down hallways, going nowhere in particular, just being careful not to pass too near any equipment that might be busy keeping someone alive at the moment.

I wound up sitting down in the hospital chapel.

It was the usual for such a place; quiet, subdued colors and lights, bench seating with an aisle in the middle, and a podium up at the front-the standard layout for the services of any number of faiths. Maybe it leaned a little harder toward Catholicism than most, but that might have been only natural. The Jesuits actually had a chaplaincy in residence, and held Mass there regularly.

It was quiet, which was the important thing. I sank onto a pew, aching, and closed my eyes.

Lots of details chased their way around my head. Michael had come in with gunshot wounds. The cops were going to ask lots of questions about that. Depending on the circumstances of the helicopter’s return to Chicago, that could get really complicated, really fast. On the other hand, given the depth of Marcone’s involvement, the problems might just vanish. He had his fingers in so many pies in Chicago’s city government that he could probably have any inquiry quashed if he really wanted it done.

Given what he’d been saved from, it would be consistent with his character for Marcone to repay the people who bailed him out with whatever aid he could render in turn. It irked me that Marcone could ever be in a position to offer significant aid to Michael, regardless of the circumstances.

Of course, for that to happen, Michael would first need to survive.

My thoughts kept coming full circle back to that.

Would he be in danger right now if I hadn’t insisted that he put on that harness? If I hadn’t shoved him onto that rope ahead of me, would he still be up there under the knife, dying? Could I really have been that arrogant to assume, based on one glance at Gard’s face, that I not only knew the future, but had the wisdom and the right to decide what that future should be?

Maybe it should be me up there. I didn’t have a wife and a family waiting for me to come home.

I’d expected Charity to scream and throw things at me. Maybe I’d even wanted that. Because while I intellectually understood that I’d had no way of knowing what was going to happen, and that I’d only been trying to protect my friend, a big part of me couldn’t help but feel that I deserved Charity’s fury. After all, it reasoned, I had gotten her husband killed as surely as if I’d murdered him myself.