But I can see the sky.
Open sky.
No cage.
No bars.
Rex's arms tighten.
Phoenix's hand cradles the back of my skull.
Raf's forehead presses against mine, his breath warm on my lips.
My eyelids are suddenly impossibly heavy.
The moon blurs and everything goes dark.
CHAPTER 39
PHOENIX
The heart monitor keeps a steady count.
Seventy-two beats per minute. Seventy-three. Seventy-one. I've been watching the green line trace its peaks and valleys for so long the rhythm has synced with my own pulse, my own breathing, the slow blink of my eyes in the fluorescent wash of the ICU.
Bells is small in the hospital bed.
That's the thing that keeps gutting me. On stage she's fifty feet tall and made of lightning. In Rex's hoodie on the couch, she's compact but dense with presence, a gravity well that pulls every person in the room into her orbit whether they consent to it or not.
Here, under a thin hospital blanket with an oxygen cannula in her nose and IV lines running from both arms, she looks like what she actually is.
Bruised jaw, split lip, raw red welts circling both wrists from zip ties. The leather collar is gone—the nurses removed it—and the crescent scar on her throat is exposed for the first time.
It's angry. Inflamed. The tissue is swollen and hot to the touch, the edges raised and weeping clear fluid where the incomplete bond tore itself apart when Stephen died.
The doctors don't know what to make of it. They've never seen a failed mark sever like this. They're treating it like a burn, which feels both wrong and right.
Her white hair fans across the pillow, singed at the ends. Soot in the roots. A smudge of dried blood on her temple that the nurses missed.
Her chest rises and falls and I count each time.
I haven't moved from this chair in four hours.
Rex is in surgery.
A team of surgeons is digging a bullet out of him while I sit here counting Bells's heartbeats, because if I stop counting, I'm going to think about Rex on that table too, and I'm going to come apart in a way this hospital is not equipped to handle.
They told me because Rex made me his emergency contact. He must have done it recently.
It was Nash, before.
I press my palms into my eye sockets until I see sparks.
The door opens.
Raf slips in. His bronze skin is ashen with exhaustion. Even the kraken tattoo on his forearm looks tired, somehow.
"How is she?" he asks, his voice scraped to nothing.