* * *
The drive to the private hospital just outside of Scarborough takes a little under thirty minutes, but even that feels like a lifetime. Nervous energy thrums through me the whole time, throbbing in my ears and my fingertips like a pulse.
Luckily, I have Cam’s driving to distract me.
Given that I am both immortal and impervious to motion sickness, it shouldn’t get to me the way it does, but even before we’re out of Whitby, my knuckles have whitened with the pressure of my grip. I’m half expecting to be ejected straight through a window, such is the force of some of his turns.
I’m unspeakably glad when we pull into a parking space and he cuts the engine. He turns to say something but barks out a laugh at the sight of my face before he can. Wordlessly, he reaches over and opens the glove compartment to reveal six full vials of blood nestled between his service book and a neatly looped cable.
‘Lucky dip,’ he chirps, and despite my not-insignificant suspicions about where he’s getting all this blood, I reach in and take the one that looks like it contains the most.
‘I have ethical concerns about this,’ I say, screwing off the top, ‘but my current need is too great to turn it down.’
I down it in one and then clamber out of the car.
I’ve worked in too many different clinics and hospitals to count, and usually the sights and sounds and smells of a medical facility feel safe and familiar. They are the old friends that help me fit in with another new role, or another new home. But today they don’t feel safe or familiar at all.
I was initially buoyed by Cam’s revelation that Quinn was talking, but uncertainty has crept in since. I need to see him to reassure myself that he’s still Quinn.
MyQuinn, I think, but I don’t dare dwell on that. I need to see that he’s still my Quinn after I ran away. I hope it’s enough that I came back.
His room is at the end of a corridor on the fourth floor, the furthest possible distance from the entrance. I wonder if that’s by design, to keep him away from prying eyes. We reach the door and I have to take a moment to gather myself, to prepare myself for what might await me on the other side.
Cam stops as I do, his eyes flicking to mine. His pause is a question he doesn’t need to verbalise, shorthand we’ve developed over the last couple of hundred years. I nod at him when I’m ready and follow him through the door.
Quinn is the first thing I see. In fact, for a good ten seconds, he’s theonlything I see.
He’s sitting up in bed, propped up against a fortress of pillows, the crisply starched hospital sheets pooled at his waist. On the face of it, he doesn’t look all too different from the last time I saw him, though perhaps a little paler, with deep shadows cutting under his eyes and the shadow of a bruise edging around the side of his neck.
When our eyes meet, I feel it as tangibly as an axe forced into my chest. It registers as pain, first, a slice of it clean across my sternum that brings a lump to my throat and the sting of tears to my eyes.He needed me, I think,and I wasn’t here.
Guilt is hot on pain’s heels, pulling at the pit of my stomach.
Then comes longing.
I want to run to him, to fling myself into his arms and breathe in that complex scent of his, and to tell him how sorry I am. But I do nothing. I just stand there, paralysed by the depth of my feelings, watching his eyes as he moves through his own spectrum of emotions.
At least, I think it’s a spectrum, but the only one I can identity is shock. He clearly wasn’t expecting me.
‘Quinn?’
There’s a woman standing at the foot of Quinn’s bed, her fingers adorned with bright pink nail varnish and wrapped tightly around the bed rail. She’s saying his name with a familiarity that makes me want to throw up, even though that’s a reflex of mine which is long gone.
I suppose this is the ex.
‘Quinn,’ she says again, a razor edge to her tone now that’s totally at odds with the way she looks. She’s pretty,that’s for sure, but in a quiet sort of way. Her mousy-brown hair is pulled back from her face and plaited down her back. Her oversized hoodie and leggings combination might have tricked me into thinking she was a teenager, even though from the strength of her aura I can tell she’s easily into her third century.
‘Sorry,’ he says, tearing his eyes away from me and smiling sheepishly at her. Jealousy rumbles back through me, sharp and bitter. Rationally I know he needs to keep her onside because he wants something from her, but that doesn’t make me hate it any less. It kills me that I can’t give him that.
‘This isher, then, is it?’ She almost spits it, like the question is acid on her tongue.
Quinn hesitates for a moment– just a split second, but it’s enough to make me well up again. ‘Yes,’ he says eventually, not meeting my eyes as he does.
My heart cracks clean down the middle, but I mask it as best I can when she turns to weigh me up. I stand firm, schooling my expression into something neutral and non-threatening. I can’t be the one who blows this chance for him.
She gives me one more long look, nothing but disdain in those cold blue eyes, and then she turns back to Quinn. ‘So you… what?’ she asks, hands propped on her hips. ‘Want me to help you ride off into the sunset with her?’ She rolls her eyes so hard that, as a medical professional, I’m concerned she might pull something. ‘Youfinallyget your shit together and you expected me to be… what? Impressed? Happy for you?’
His brows twitch a little– the slightest hint of a frown– and I see him gather all his strength before he speaks.