Bright light. Bright fucking light. Shit, I died. The grogginess of sleep distorted Jackie’s perception for a moment as consciousness finally took a hold of her body. The sticky crust around her eyes gave way at last, however, and she blinked at the streaming rays of sunshine coming in through a hospital window. A chrome pipe rose above her next to the bed, dangling a clear bag of fluid. Okay, it sure as hell was not heaven.
Looking down at the sterile baby-blue blanket covering her body, Jackie noticed a sleeping figure in a green overstuffed chair. Nick’s head leaned back against the top, lolling to one side, snoring softly. A glance to the other side of the room revealed that she was in a single room. What the hell had happened? Did it matter? She was actually warm. How long had he been sitting there?
“Nick…” Her voice cracked, mouth dry and parched as bone.
His head snapped up, wide awake in an instant. His eyes were puffy and dark. A single Band-Aid bridged the gap between them. “Jackie! You’re awake.”
“Yeah,” she said. God, it hurt to talk. “Water?”
He leaped to his feet. “No problem. Be right back.”
Nick bolted out the door, which Jackie found amusing until she heard him shout, “Nurse! She’s awake. She’s goddamned awake.”
Before she had time to really ponder the ramifications of his excitement over her just waking up, a pair of nurses and a doctor came hustling into the room. The next two hours went downhill from there. God, she hated the fucking hospital. At least they had brought water. By then, half the crew from headquarters had come by to see her, hardly able to move as she was and with tubes running into her arm. A parade of doctors and nurses had stormed in and out, poking and prodding, and the whole time, Nick had sat there in his chair, elbows on his knees and chin resting on his hands, watching her intently. Occasionally, a bemused smirk would cross his face when she would finally get frustrated at the hospital staff and tell them to leave her the fuck alone. The sun no longer beamed through the window when quiet made its blessed descent on the room.
“Thanks for the water, Nick,” she said, trying in vain to find a comfortable position in which to lie. She settled on her right side, the left arm laying down her side. The pink, welted line of the wound at her elbow smiled back at her, remarkably healed.
She should have died, they said, flatlined for three minutes before being brought back. Nobody had provided any worthwhile information, least of all Nick, who had remained more or less silent the entire time other than greeting those who came to visit. Belgerman had said nothing, other than stating that he was thankful she was alive and would be fired if he saw her in the office within a month. “Don’t come back until you are ready,” he had said. Ready. Was one ever ready to go back to work after something like this? She just wanted some answers.
“Sorry,” Nick replied. “I was just… very pleased to see you awake again.”
“Has it really been five days?”
He nodded. “Seven, counting our time on the other side.”
“But… how?”
“I don’t know.” Nick gave her a nonchalant little shrug. “Time doesn’t work the same over there, I guess.”
Yeah, whatever. Nothing would be the same after that place. “Drake’s dead though, right? I mean, really and truly dead?”
“Yes. When we came back, he was so full of holes even his power couldn’t save him.” Nick absently flexed his right hand. “Don’t worry, we made sure.”
Jackie thought better of getting any clarification on that one. “Good. That fucker needed to die.”
Nick smiled. “Yes, he did indeed.”
“I guess I owe you one now.”
“No. No, Jackie you don’t. I’m just glad we got you back. It was more Laurel than me anyway.”
Laur. Jackie had hardly thought about her since waking up. Fresh tears stung her eyes. More than anything, she wished her friend was with her now. “I’m going to miss her.”
Nick got to his feet and picked up the tissue box sitting on the side table next to the chair. He set it down on the serving table next to her bed. “I don’t think she’s gone, not yet anyway.”
Jackie pulled out a tissue and wiped at the tears running down onto the pillow. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” he agreed. “And I’m truly sorry.”
Jackie knew he did not speak of her death. She wadded up the tissue and threw it at him. “You couldn’t have stopped us, Nick. You really think you could have done anything to keep us away?”
He walked back over and sat down, sagging back in the chair. “No, probably not.”
“No probably about it, Sheriff. Not everything in this world is your fault.”
“Okay, okay. Relax, please. You’re right, just a bad habit.”
“Not bad,” she said, letting her head fall back into the pillow. The small effort had sapped what strength she had regained. “Just wrong.” They were silent for several seconds. She didn’t want to argue with him. He had saved her life, after all, and here he was, just sitting in her hospital room, and had been for, what? Hours? Days?
“Have you been sitting here the whole time, just watching me?”
“Off and on,” he said. “I felt it was important that someone was here when you came around.”
“It could have been weeks, for all you knew.”
He smiled that oddly reassuring, law-enforcement smile that said he knew better. “No. I knew it would be soon.”
“What, you can see into my head or something? One of your little vampire tricks?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll bet all the girls love that.”
Nick sighed. “It’s not something I generally do with anyone.”
“Because you’re too good for that, I suppose?” The look he gave her made Jackie flinch. “Sorry. I’m tired and bitchy.”
“There has to be a connection of some kind for it to work.”
“Connection? Can you ever directly answer anything I ask you, Nick?”
He chuckled. “Fine. There has to be an emotional bond, some trust, for it to work.”
“So we have a bond then?”
“Apparently, we do.” He got up and picked up the water pitcher from her bedside table. “Get some rest, Jackie. You need it. You’ll be out of here by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Know that for a fact, do you?” A bond. What did one make of a bond to an 180-year-old vampire sheriff?
“You’ll be out of here the second you’re able, and not a second later.” He grinned and set the water pitcher back down. “Back in a minute.”
Jackie watched his solid, bruised figure leave. Damnit, there was a bond. She closed her eyes, pushing his image out of her mind. What the hell was she going to do about this? With everything? Her job was fucked. Her best friend was dead. She had almost died. Where did you go from there? The question faded into the oblivion of sleep before Nick returned.
The following afternoon, she was more than ready to leave. If one more person marveled at her recovery, she was going to deck them. Shelby, at least, had come along, exhibiting her usual charm. Then the doctors fell all over themselves to get things signed off. When they finally cleared Jackie, she sent Nick off to bring the car around front.
“He really likes you, you know,” Shelby said after the hospital-room door closed behind him. “You couldn’t have paid me to sleep in that fucking chair for five days. No offense.”
Jackie stopped packing her overnight bag that someone had brought in with a change of clothes. “He was here the whole time?”
“Yep. Our sheriff is about as loyal a dog as they come. I had to make him go home and take a shower after the first two.” She laughed at Jackie. “Don’t look so surprised. You guys have been through a lot.”
She tried to imagine sitting there in that green hotel-lobby chair for five straight days. Would I have been that dedicated? For Laurel. She would have done it for Laurel because Jackie had loved her more than anyone. God. Not even possible that was why Nick had done it for her. It was just the circumstances.
“He just wanted to make sure someone was around when I woke up, someone who knew what happened.”
Shelby patted her arm. “Guess that’s why he never asked me to take the chair for a while.”
Jackie pulled a Northwestern sweatshirt over her head and zipped the bag. “Can we not discuss this right now?”
“Sure thing, hon. Just saying is all, and I know Nick. There’s something there.”
Jackie shouldered the bag. “Can we go?”
They stopped at the gift shop on the way out, and Shelby bought a bouquet of flowers. Jackie thought for a moment she might be giving them to her, but Shelby said nothing, just smiling with those perfect, brilliantly red lips. Nick waited with the car doors open when they stepped out of the hospital side entrance.
“Get in,” he said, pulling the bag from Jackie’s shoulder. “We move fast, they won’t even notice we’ve left.”
Jackie looked around but saw nobody out of the ordinary. “They who?”
“There’s more than a few folks around interested in how you vanished from the basement of a burning funeral home and reappeared two days later,” Shelby replied. “You can go around front and conduct an interview or ten if you want.”
Jackie quickly ducked into the backseat of the car and hunkered down. What a nightmare that would be. She had not even considered that possibility. “Let’s go.”
They wound through the city’s streets, still wet from an early morning rain. It was cool and breezy, a typical early fall day in Chicago. Nothing, however, felt typical anymore. Jackie had seen things no living person had any business seeing. She was getting a ride home from a couple vampires, one of whom she could not decide what to think of. The man, a good-looking one at that, had saved her life. By itself, that had some potential right there. A couple weeks ago, it would have made for a rollicking, drunken night of sex, and then it would have been back to work the next day, out of sight and out of mind. But now?
Life had shifted in a very peculiar direction, and Jackie could not decide what to make of it. Begrudgingly, she had to admit there was something there with Nick, and it could easily be chalked up to the intensity of circumstance, but there was something more. Yet was it really there, or just because she wanted it to be there, needed it to be there? She could not go back to her old life and ways. That Jackie no longer existed, the one who had bled out into the mouth of the man sitting in the front seat. What was left? Did it matter?
Jackie stared at the bouquet in the seat next to her, bright and summery in color, an overabundance of daisies packed into its tightly wound band.
“What are the flowers for?”
Shelby looked back with a sympathetic smile. “Laurel.”
Before she could wonder why, Nick turned his car into the driveway of the Montrose Cemetery. She stared out the window, row after row of marble stones filing past. They made their way to the back of the property, where it butted up against the edge of the LaBagh Woods. In a few more weeks it would be a beautiful setting with the trees changing into their fall dress. When Nick stopped the car, Jackie could plainly see their destination a few meters off into the manicured lawn, where a mound of flowers still adorned a fresh grave.
For a long minute, Jackie could only stare out the window at it. The finality of everything, of what had happened to them, the unheeded warning to leave all this alone, grew out of the ground before her in an absurdly mocking pile of cheerful color. She began to cry.
“Go,” Shelby said.
Nobody had mentioned the funeral or that she had missed it. The tears would not stop. While she still had any nerve left to get out of the car, Jackie picked up the bouquet from the seat and stepped out. The air had become oddly still and silent. At the foot of the grave, Jackie stopped, holding the flowers limply in one hand. Such a trifling thing to bring them here, a wholly inadequate gesture to someone who had been so much more than just her friend. She wiped at the tears with the back of her other hand, throat too constricted to force out any words. Not that any words could convey her feelings at that moment.
“They’re pretty,” Laurel said. “Daisies are my favorite flower.”
Jackie knelt down and set them at the edge of the others, managing at last to force out a single, choked word. “Hi.”
“It was a lovely funeral,” Laurel said. “Pernetti even cried like a baby.”
Jackie’s clipped laugh came out more as a sob. “Sorry I missed it.”
“It’s okay,” Laurel said. “Better this way anyway.”
Probably so. They might have carted her off if she had begun to have a conversation with the dead. “I’m so lost now, Laur. It’s like I’m treading water out in the middle of the ocean. I don’t know where to go from here.”
“I know. I wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t.”
“You always had the answers.”
Laurel gave her a sad, sympathetic smile. “Even if I had them, I can’t give them anymore, hon. You have to find your own way, leave all that old stuff behind, and start fresh. You’ve got a second chance at life now. Don’t be afraid.”
Afraid. None of the old terrors compared to this. “Do I deserve another chance?” She had not thought to ask the question, but it came out before she realized.
“Don’t,” Laurel snapped back, pointing an accusatory finger. “I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t, so stop. You deserve it as much as anyone I’ve ever known. I wouldn’t have loved you if you didn’t deserve the best life has to give.”
Jackie sniffled and wiped the tears away again. “Okay, fine. I deserve it. So what happens now?”
“I don’t know. How about you go home and have a bath? Give Bickers some love. He misses you.”
“God, I totally forgot about him. He’s probably peed in every corner of my apartment.”
Laurel laughed. “He’s fine. You’ll be fine. Do something that will make you happy.”
Happiness was the furthest thing from Jackie’s mind at that moment. “I don’t see that happening any time soon.”
“There’s a little bit of it waiting right back there in the car.”
“What? Nick? I… I don’t really know what to think of that man.”
“Then don’t. Just do. He’s looking for the same things you are.”
“And what is that?”
“Hon, quit being dense, and quit being afraid of liking him. You’d be good for each other.”
It struck Jackie then that Nick was the first guy Laurel had ever said that about. “He freaks me out. He’s so fucking intense, and there’s that whole… blood thing.”
“And your point is?”
What was her point? She had none. The thought of something real with someone freaked her out more than anything else. “Fine, I’ll think about it.”
“No. Didn’t I say to stop thinking about it?”
“All right! Christ. Casper, you aren’t.”
Laurel grinned. “Feeling better though, aren’t you?”
The morose black veil that had been covering Jackie had lifted, though it still hovered at the fringes, ready to fall. “I suppose. Thanks, Laur. I just wish you were still here. I still feel so…” She shrugged. Guilty did not even come close.
“If I forgive you every day, will that help?”
Jackie snorted. “Yeah, it would.”
“Okay, then. I forgive you. It wasn’t your fault, and you weren’t to blame, and I still love you.”
Tears welled up again. “Better. I love you, too.”
“Now go. Cemeteries depress you. I’ll see you again soon.”
Laurel faded into the ground, but Jackie stood there a while longer staring down at the grave. Her friend’s body was buried down there, but she was not truly gone. How could you really say good-bye? It wasn’t right. Still, the pain of Laurel’s missing presence was there, and Jackie knew it would be for a long time to come. It just had to be dealt with. She had to move on.
Back in the car, Jackie closed the door. “You can take me home now.”
“You okay?” Shelby reached her hand over the back of the seat, an open offer of comfort there for the taking, if Jackie wanted it.
Jackie smiled at her, grateful for the gesture, took her hand, and squeezed briefly before letting go. “Thanks. Yeah, I think I’m good for now.”
Shelby nodded and turned back around. “Good. Let’s get out of here.”
Jackie stared out the window, watching the mound of flowers until they had faded from view. Move on. Don’t think about it, just do. “Nick?”
He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Yeah?”
“What’re you doing Saturday night?”
“Huh?”
“Saturday. Are you available on Saturday night?”
“Available? What do you mean?”
Shelby’s fist flashed across the seat and struck him on the shoulder.
“Ow! What the hell?”
“I swear you’re an idiot sometimes,” Shelby scolded. “Just say yes, for fuck’s sake.”
They stopped at an intersection, and he turned to look back at Jackie, those faintly glowing eyes studying her with disarming intensity. She managed to hold his gaze, forcing herself not to look away. He turned back and set the car in motion once again.
“How’s seven o’clock?”
“Seven’s fine.” She took a deep breath and let it out to calm the butterflies. It was a step forward, and that was the only direction she could look now.
Jackie Rutledge has come to realize how thin a line separates the living and the dead, and her view of the world will never be the same again.
Follow her further adventures in the next book of the DEADWORLD series, a Kensington paperback on sale October 2011.
Turn the page for a special preview!