Someone laughs on my other side, a warm, robust chuckle, and that’s when I realise where I’ve heard that voice before.
‘I did try to warn you,’ Cam says to Bram, and then he turns his attention back to me. ‘Welcome back, buddy!’
I try to reply, but my words stick in my throat. So I don’t ask where Florence is, even though it’s all I can think about. Well, that and the fact that even air passing through my throat makes my insides feel like they’re being sandpapered.
‘It’s ok,’ Cam says in that same steady voice. ‘Speaking might be difficult for a little while. Just try to breathe.’ He pulls up a chair next to the bed and settles down in it. ‘I don’t know how much you remember, but I’ll talk you through it. You were hit by a bus yesterday. People at the scene told the paramedics you stepped out to save an elderly couple from being hit by a cyclist, but the bus was travelling too close behind the bike and it clipped you as it passed.’
I actually do remember the couple and my panic as I saw them step right into the path of the bike. I try to speak, to ask Cam about them, but he holds up a hand to stop me.
‘They’re fine,’ he says. ‘A little shaken up, andveryconcerned about you, but you got them out of the way just in time. You were less lucky. You took an impact to the hip, and to the back of your head. When you were taken to hospital, they discovered a relatively small brain bleed, but quite significant swelling, and it was decided at that point to put you in a medically induced coma to protect your brain from further damage.’
I nod. The beeping has slowed back down to a steady pace, and I belatedly realise that it’s my heart rate. It seems obvious now.
‘Here’s where it gets interesting,’ Cam says, his face pulling into a grin. ‘By this morning the pressure in your brain was almost back to normal, and a follow-up scan this morning told us that the bleeding has completely resolved.’ He pushes his wire-framed glasses up his nose with a knuckle. ‘At that point I had to intervene and have you transferred to a private facility before anyone asked any difficult questions.’
Bram huffs a laugh. ‘You can thank Elias for this fancy private room. Cam was going to hide you in the basement.’
‘The lower ground floor has perfectly adequate beds,’ Cam says, with an unrepentant shrug. ‘But this roomispretty flash.’
I glance around the room as much as my aching body will allow me to, and I can’t argue with them. If it weren’t for the abundance of medical equipment it’d look like an upmarket hotel room.
‘Anyway,’ Cam continues, labouring the word even as his grin returns, ‘since you were transferred here early this morning, we’ve been doing a number of tests on you, and it seems that the change in your blood that we’ve been monitoring has had somewhat of a protective effect on your brain. The speed at which the damage has resolved itself is beyond the limits of what we would expect in a human.’
I open my mouth to speak, but Cam cuts me off again.
‘It’s not immortality,’ he says, before I have the time to even think it. ‘The protection seems to be limited to your brain at the moment, but it probably saved your life yesterday. It was touch and go back there for a while.’
A cold shiver ripples down my spine. I can’t imagine how that would have felt for Florence, watching yet another human she loved circling the drain. She must have?—
Fuck.
That was her dealbreaker, her one condition. And she’s not here now. There’s a small piece of my brain clinging to a floating scrap of hope, but a much bigger piece is drowning in the churning waters of my realisation.
She’s gone.
‘Florence,’ I manage to scratch out, and they exchange a look that makes my heart hit the floor.
‘I’m sorry, man,’ Bram says, his hand back on my forearm. ‘She’s not here.’
* * *
I sulk for much of the day.
Bram assumes it’s because I’m tired and traumatised and strung-out on all the drugs still in my system, and of course that’s true. I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus, because, well, you know. But I’m also definitely sulking. Apparently, they told Florence about the accident and then she bolted and no one’s seen or heard from her since.
The worst part is that I can’t even blame her. She spelled it out. More than once. She said she didn’t date humans. She said she couldn’t handle losing anyone else. She told me over and over and over again, and I naively thought… what? That I was different?
So yeah, I’m sulking. I really want to scream and break things and sob until my throat is raw, but I very recently awoke from a medically induced coma, so I’m settling for pretending to nap while my heart breaks silently into a thousand pieces in my chest.
Bram is stubbornly refusing to leave my side, and Cam is popping in every half hour or so to do obs on me, and I suspect that neither one of them believes I’m actually sleeping, but to their credit, they’ve gone along with it.
That is, until Cam walks in and instead of checking my vitals, pulls a chair up next to the bed and plops into it.
‘Quinn, stop pretending to sleep,’ he says, his voice even more animated than usual. ‘I’ve got an update that might be of interest to you.’
I open one eye. ‘I’m listening,’ I croak. It’s a little easier to speak now. I’m hoarse, but that’s probably to be expected, all things considered. But I can’t deny that an interesting update has piqued my interest. Am I hoping it’ll be about Florence?
Obviously.