Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, & Magic

by SM Reine

  What happened next took only seconds. I jumped to my feet and screamed Lony’s name. In the glare of the single headlight, both faces stood frozen like deer. Matt and I ran over the rocky ground toward them as fast as our legs could move. Cane snapped to attention first and ran off the tracks. When he noticed Lony wasn’t following, he turned back yelling her name and reaching out for her arm. Lony snapped out of her shock and tried to run, but the heel of her sandal caught the edge of the wood rail, sending her sprawling to the ground. In the same instant, a power surge flashed through my body, twenty yards away, flinging me onto my back. The world faded to black.

  Chapter 6

  My hearing came back first. An annoying rhythmic beep plucked on my nerves like harp strings. I thought it was my alarm clock, and I was late for school. I tried to shut it off, but my arm felt as if it were pinned at my side by a tangle of snakes.

  I cracked my eyes open to see a strange room with dingy, white wallpaper and a TV mounted from the ceiling. Where am I? I struggled to call out, my vocal cords burned and something was jammed in my mouth. Although I could breathe fine, the fat tube down my throat sent me into a claustrophobic panic. My hands fumbled like they were wearing thick mittens, but I managed to rip the IV tube out of my arm. The annoying beeps escalated, sending a nurse dashing into the room to stop me just as I began wrestling with the tube in my mouth.

  “Relax, Honey,” the nurse murmured as she pinned my arms to my sides. “Be still. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  My arm leaked crimson dots onto the crisp sheet from the IV hole. I tried slowing my breathing down to suppress the panic urges. The nurse brushed a sweaty lock of hair back from my face and checked me over carefully. She smelled like vanilla and hand sanitizer. A plastic nametag on her shirt told me her name was Jenny.

  “It’s okay…you’re going to be okay. Just relax,” Jenny whispered as she pressed a call button for the nurse’s station and asked for a doctor to be paged. My eyes watered with fear, and I bit down on the tube tightly. She swiftly cleaned up my bloody arm and re-inserted the fat IV needle. A doctor in a navy blue scrubs hurried in and began asking the nurse all kinds of questions. Their voices seemed too loud, and I closed my eyes to fend off a headache.

  “Open your eyes if you can hear me?” a deep voice asked.

  I opened my eyes again to see the doctor leaning over me. He had shadowy stubble on his face, and his breath smelled like stale coffee.

  “My name is Dr. Gibler. I’m going to ask you a few questions so I can examine you,” the doctor explained. “There’s a tube in your mouth which is helping you breathe. As long as the tube is in, you will not be able to speak. I’ll get it out in a moment. Until then, you can answer my questions with blinking your eyes, okay? One blink for ‘yes,’ two blinks for ‘no.’ Do you understand me?”

  I tried to nod, but my throat burned with the motion. Now, I understood the blinking thing. I blinked once to let the doctor know I understood him.

  He crossed to a sink along the wall and washed his hands.

  “Do you know where you are?” he asked.

  Duh, a hospital. One blink.

  He dried his hands on a paper towel. “Do you remember what happened? Why you are here?”

  I tried to remember, but I couldn’t focus my hazy thoughts. Two blinks.

  “Okay. I’m going to remove you from the ventilator. This may be uncomfortable and your throat will ache for a while. On the count of three, I want you to take a deep breath and blow it out through your mouth. Are you ready?”

  One blink.

  Dr. Gibler deflated the cuff and counted to three. When I blew out, he pulled the plastic tube from my throat in one swift motion. Even though the flesh inside felt enflamed, I sputtered and coughed. Nurse Jenny handed me a Dixie cup of ice chips and popped a couple into my mouth. The cold liquid felt blissfully refreshing on my dry, gluey tongue. While she took my vitals and noted them in my chart, the doctor began asking me questions.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “H-H-Hospital?” My voice came out all hoarse and shaky.

  “Good. Can you tell me your name?”

  “Arcadia Marie Day. Cady.”

  “Very good, Cady. Now, can you tell me what year this is?”

  “2012. How long have I been here?” I asked, tilting the cup to my lips for more ice chips. I knew he was just checking my mental status, but his questions annoyed me.

  “Three and a half days,” Dr. Gibler answered. “You were admitted on Saturday night and it is now shortly before noon on Wednesday.”

  “Wow….” It was strange and confusing to think that I had lost three days of my life.

  “Are you in any pain?” Dr. Gibler asked.

  I ran through my body parts mentally. “Um…headache. Not bad though. I think it’s just from that constant beeping.”

  The doctor’s brow wrinkled in confusion before he recalled the heart monitor. He reached up and flipped the volume off.

  I tried a weak smile, “Thanks.”

  “Cady, do you remember what happened before you lost consciousness?”

  I concentrated hard. I remembered having a vivid nightmare about getting run over by a train, but I couldn’t remember being in any kind of accident.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” Dr. Gibler inquired. “What do you remember?”

  “A dream. I remember having a dream. It was weird.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It was so real! I got hit by a train. Only it wasn’t me really. I was my sister…or maybe I was inside my sister’s body. I could feel every pain and sensation as if it were really happening to me. I could taste the blood in my mouth… Seriously, I’ve never felt so much pain in my life. I didn’t know dreams could do that.”

  An odd expression clouded over Dr. Gibler’s face, a mixture of confusion and sorrow. “You felt it? Like physically?”

  I pressed my eyes closed and tried to block out the horrifying images from my dream. “Yes, I felt it. I felt legs being severed by the wheels of a train. I felt my temperature drop as my blood drained from my body.” I shook my head to clear away the images. My belly roiled with nausea. “I can remember every detail of the dream, but I can’t remember the accident that landed me in here.”

  “Accident?” the doctor asked, casting a glance at Jenny. “Cady, you weren’t in an accident. In fact, there’s not a scratch on you.” He turned to the nurse. “Page her parents, please.”

  Jenny draped her stethoscope around her neck and stepped out of the room.

  “What’s happened?” I asked. “Am I dying?”

  “No, you’re going to be fine.” The doctor fiddled with my chart, staring at it, but not really reading it. Stalling.

  “Tell me. What happened?” I pleaded.

  “Let’s wait for your parents. Your father is just down in the cafeteria.”

  “No,” I insisted. “Tell me now!” I attempted to sit up, but my head spun and I slumped back down.

  “Okay, Cady,” he said as he pulled a chair alongside the bed and leaned with his forearms balanced on the metal guardrail. “I have some rather disturbing news.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “It’s your sister, Avalon. She was in an accident. She was struck by a train and killed Saturday night. I’m so sorry.”

  The doctor paused to gauge my reaction. My face remained frozen, but my mind wheeled about in a dozen different directions.

  “What you remember was not a dream. In fact, you’ve been in a coma, which means you were so deeply unconscious that your brain did not go through the normal sleep cycles. You couldn’t have had any dreams.”

  Spontaneous tears welled in my eyes, but I blinked them away. He must be wrong. Lony can’t be gone. I wanted to argue with him, to tell him he must be wrong. “W-w-w…?” I sputtered.

  “Your father is downstairs in the cafeteria. Nurse Jenny just went to get him, and she’ll phone your mother. Your parents have been taking turns staying at the h
ospital with you.”

  “But…what about me?” I asked, still confused. “What happened to me? Why am I…you know…here?”

  The doctor pursed his lips as if in deep thought. “Honestly, we’re not quite sure what happened to you. We were hoping you could fill us in. When you were first brought to the ER, we assumed you had been hit also, but there were no injuries. Then, we figured you passed out from the emotional shock of it all, but then your blood pressure dropped dangerously low and your breathing became irregular. It was clear that this was no ordinary swoon.”

  It was all too much to process. To say that my heart was breaking over the loss of my twin was an understatement. My hands trembled with emotion that needed to escape but had nowhere to go. Ordinary tears were not enough of an outlet. Suddenly, I felt naked and adrift in the clouds. I never realized how tightly my life was bound to my sister’s until the comfortable weight of her was gone.

  The doctor took a few minutes to examine me and make notes in my chart, but everything he did and said turned into a blur. Flashes of the dream —or were they memories? —roamed about in my head. The more I tried to hold them down, the more real they became. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “Oh, thank God!” my dad cried as he ran through the doorway and fell on me with a tight embrace. Once my face was safely buried in the crook of his shoulder, I breathed in the comforting familiar scent and let the tears loose.

  Dad rocked me in his arms and pressed his lips to the part of my hair. When he finally drew back to look at my face, he appeared ten years older. Huge gray bags hung below his eyes and his skin looked chalky. “The nurse called your mother. She’ll be here in a few minutes. Doc, do you know what happened to her yet? Will she be all right?”

  Dr. Gibler nodded and gestured for my father to take a seat in the chair beside my bed. My father covered his hand in mine, holding on a little too tightly. One, or maybe both of us, was shaking.

  The doctor’s kind eyes were surrounded by deep wrinkles. “I’m so sorry, Cady…about all of this. I can’t explain why you were overcome the way you were. Shock is still an area of the human mind that doctors are unclear on.” He went on to explain that there are two kinds of shock, emotional and physical, and they are the mind’s way of protecting a person from trauma. What I had experienced was an emotional shock, but for some reason, my body had responded to it as if I had been the one physically traumatized. “I’ve consulted with a shock expert at the University of Iowa and he has never seen a case of emotional trauma setting off physical symptoms to this extent. The erratic breathing and heart-rate, the drop in blood pressure, the coma. The only thing we can assume is that it was the extreme circumstances of witnessing the accident which caused it.”

  My father’s face crumpled, and I knew he was thinking about Lony. So was I. She couldn’t be gone. Lony was so beautiful and fun and young—she loved life! And what about me? What is a twin without the other?

  I didn’t have time to ponder it further. My mother burst in the door all tears and loudness. She seemed both overjoyed at my consciousness and deeply scarred from the death of her other daughter. She nudged my father out of the way so she could hug me and sob onto my hospital gown. There was a thick wall of tension between my parents. It was nothing that I could see really, more of an intuition. Something more was going on with them.

  “Doctor,” my father asked, “How soon can we take her home?” Mom raised her head for the answer. For the first time in years, she had left the house without her face made up.

  Dr. Gibler replied, “Well, Cady’s vitals are strong. Her heart rate and blood pressure are back to normal. I suspect the worst is behind her now, but I’d like to keep her overnight for monitoring. We still don’t know what caused her to lose consciousness for so long.”

  My father nodded, but my mother’s lips formed a hard line. “Don’t you think she’ll be more comfortable in her own bed? It’s really inconvenient having her away from home, and she looks fine.”

  Something else was off about my mom, other than her lack of cosmetics. Her gestures were a little too broad, her words slightly slurred. Dad must have noticed it too, because his eyes narrowed in on her face.

  “Besides,” she continued waving her hands around, “We have a funeral to prepare for.”

  Both my father and I flinched at the word funeral. All of a sudden, I felt the anguish my parents were going through with one daughter in the hospital and one in the morgue. My stomach rolled again. I started to gag and the doctor shoved a plastic pan in front of me. Nothing came out, but the heaves strained the muscles of my abdomen.

  “Julia!” my father snapped, darting his eyes toward me. “Not here.”

  My mother set her shoulders back and she stomped out of the room, shoving the door hard. My father gave me an apologetic look before following her out into the hall.

  “It’s going to be fine, Cady,” the doctor assured me. “As you must know, they’re under a lot of stress. This isn’t easy on anyone. Can I get you anything?”

  I shook my head. I just wanted to be alone.

  Chapter 7

  The time between waking from my coma and the funeral was a complete daze. I’d been released from the hospital on Thursday morning only to stay in my bed until I had to get up for my sister’s wake Saturday morning. Bronwyn came over, at my grandmother’s request, to help get me ready. After a couple of lame attempts at conversation, she gave up and went about the motions of getting me ready in silence. I sat on the toilet lid in my robe while she brushed and dried my hair with a feather-light touch. We both knew if she tugged too hard I might shatter.

  I put on the dress that someone set out for me without really looking at it, thankful that I didn’t have to make any decisions for myself. Mom left for the funeral home early with Grandma Nora, so Bronwyn drove my brother and me over in her mother’s minivan. Aaron was dressed in one of our dad’s suits and kept fingering the knot of his tie, trying to loosen it enough for comfort, but not so much that our mother would freak out on him.

  I’d been in Grandview Funeral Home a few years earlier, when my Grandpa Bill passed away, so I thought I knew what to expect. I learned really quickly that an elderly man’s funeral, even one who was respected and loved like my Grandpa, couldn’t compare with that of a popular sixteen-year-old cheerleader. Parked cars lined the avenue on both sides of the street for three blocks. It seemed as if everyone in Dubuque was here.

  “I better drop you guys off at the door,” Bronwyn said. “It’s gonna take me forever to find a parking place, and I don’t want you to be late.” She turned into the lot and pulled up in the fire lane to let us out.

  “Thanks,” Aaron muttered before hopping out of the back.

  My posterior felt glued to the passenger seat.

  Aaron didn’t notice I wasn’t behind him until he turned to hold the funeral home door open for me. His already grim face fell a little further, and he returned to retrieve me from the vehicle.

  “Come on, Cady,” he said, opening the passenger door and unhooking my seatbelt for me. “It sucks, but we have to do this. If it’s too awful, I’ll find a way to take you home early, okay?”

  “Okay,” I replied, my voice dry and crackled. With a hand on his shoulder to steady myself, I slid out of the seat. Leaning on my brother seemed to magnify my sorrow, and I struggled with the heaviness in my chest. It was just the two of us now. The odd feeling vanished as Aaron, seeing that I was steady on my feet, started walking ahead of me toward the building. I flashed a weak wave to Bronwyn as she pulled away from the curb.

  Several people, mostly students from school, stared at us as we made our way inside the building. The pity in their eyes felt strong enough to touch, making me long for the safety of my bed.

  Aaron took a deep breath and let it out with a whoosh. “All right, let’s get this over with.”

  Aunt Tina, our dad’s younger sister who drove in from Chicago, met us right inside the door.

  “There you are!”
she exclaimed, drawing us both into a tight hug, her bleach blond extensions tickling my nose. “The family seating is in the reserved rows up front. They just started the receiving line.”

  Aunt Tina crushed my hand in hers and dragged me through the crowd. Aaron followed behind us. My emotions were all over the map, making me feel like a computer getting ready to short circuit. I’d taken half of a Valium before leaving the house. Not enough to make me sleepy, but just enough to separate my mind from my body with a thick layer of numbness. I could sense tension and sorrow vibrating through me, but at the same time, it was like it was happening to someone else. Even with the medication, the pressure of the crowd triggered claustrophobia, making my chest heave and my palms dampen. Between that and the mass of people making the air thick and stuffy, my stomach tumbled with nausea.

  I was halfway up the aisle before I spotted the white wooden casket, the door hinged open to show the lavender-tinted satin interior. I snapped my gaze away before I could see her. After our Grandpa’s funeral, Lony and I both agreed that viewing the dead was creepy, and we wanted to be cremated. I tried to tell my mother this when she was driving me home from the hospital, but she’d kept her eyes on the road like she was all alone in the car. I probably should’ve let Grandma Nora know, since she was the one making most of the arrangements. Once I’d woken up and Mom didn’t have to worry about me, she had to face Lony’s death, and she slipped into a strange kind of depression, pretty much making her useless for anything other than staying in bed all day.

  Our aunt presented us to our parents like china dolls to be inspected. Mom looked like someone had beaten her with a hammer and superglued her back together. Her navy blue suit, freshly blown out hair and make-up were perfect, but anyone could see all that was only a thin veneer barely holding the pieces of her together. She reached forward mechanically and straightened Aaron’s tie. Her eyes reflected a glassy shine.