Actually, she did, but she knew that sort of response wouldn’t earn her any points. She’d only just met him, but those coolly assessing gray eyes had already given her the impression that Detective Phillips wasn’t the sort of guy who messed around. Instead, she responded, “Here?” as she gave a dubious glance around the crowded E.R.
His stern mouth relaxed ever so slightly. “Let me take you to the cafeteria, get you a cup of coffee.”
“Sounds great.” In all honesty, it really didn’t, since she tried to avoid caffeine so late in the evening. This particular evening, though, having some coffee was probably a good idea. She had a feeling it was going to be a very long night.
She picked up her purse from her lap and slung it over her shoulder, then followed the detective as he led her away from the emergency room and down a hallway to the cafeteria. At that hour, they weren’t serving food anymore, but the vending machines worked 24/7.
“How do you take it?” Detective Phillips asked as he fished some change out of his trousers pocket.
“Black is fine,” she replied. She shuddered to think what that vending machine used for milk or cream.
Without responding, he got two cups of coffee — both black — and then guided her over to a table off in one corner. The cafeteria wasn’t entirely empty, but no one else sat in that part of the room.
He slid one of the cups of coffee across the table to her and said, “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
Rosemary picked up the coffee and took a very small sip. It was too hot and too bitter, but it did do a good job of sending a much-needed jolt along her nerve endings. “Will and I went to the house — ”
“The house at 1830 Las Flores Drive,” Detective Phillips interjected, pulling out a notepad from his pocket. Irrelevantly, she wondered how much random stuff he kept in there.
She nodded and said, “Yes. It belongs to a…friend of a friend.” Close enough. After all, she was friends with Michael Covenant, and he’d been friends with Colin Turner, so the connection wasn’t a complete fabrication. “The owner passed away recently, and we were checking on it to help out the owner’s sister.” Again, not a total lie; now that she knew about the house’s existence, Colin’s sister Emma Weston would have to figure out what she wanted to do with the place, whether that was to sell it or continue renting it. “When we were inside, we were attacked by an intruder.”
“Description?”
“Sorry, I don’t really know,” Rosemary replied, hoping she looked properly apologetic. “We were just about to turn on the lights in the hallway when he came at us, so it was pretty dark.”
The detective scribbled something on his notepad. “But you’re certain it was a man.”
That seemed like a safe enough piece of information to pass along, so she nodded. “I think so. He was a little shorter than Will, but still tall. I couldn’t see his face. His build seemed pretty athletic, though.”
“Clothing?”
She shrugged. “Jeans. Some kind of dark shirt, I think, but I don’t know whether it was a T-shirt or a button-up.”
“Collar?”
Again, all she could do was lift her shoulders.
“Did he say anything?”
Oh, Caleb had said a lot — most of it, things she really hadn’t wanted to hear. However, since she couldn’t repeat any of what the part-demon had said during that frightening encounter in the Las Flores Drive house, she replied, “No. He just came at us. I think that’s why he got the drop on Will — we were both totally taken by surprise.”
The detective made a few notes, although Rosemary saw the way his mouth tightened and guessed he wasn’t very happy about the complete lack of any useful information in her report. “Anything missing?”
“What?” she asked, not sure what he meant.
“Anything stolen from the house?” Detective Phillips said, his tone so even that she knew he was probably starting to get annoyed with her and doing his best to keep the irritation out of his voice.
She shook her head. “No. That is, the house was empty — the previous tenants moved out a while ago. There wasn’t really anything to take.”
Nothing except a hard drive crammed full of footage that had incontrovertible evidence of demons really existing. Colin had hidden the hard drive in the crawlspace of the house, figuring it would be safe there. And it had been — until Caleb followed her to Las Flores Drive and realized the previously undiscovered house would have made the perfect hiding place for the footage. How he’d figured out the hard drive had been secreted in the crawlspace, she didn’t know. Maybe, being part-demon, he’d been able to sniff it out. Or maybe he’d simply used his powers of deduction and realized there weren’t a lot of places to hide something in an otherwise empty house.
“Any vandalism?”
“Not that I noticed. But we weren’t in the house for very long before we were attacked.”
A few more notes, and then Detective Phillips replaced his notepad in his inner breast pocket. “We’ll want to take a look at the property.”
“Sure,” she said automatically, although she wasn’t quite sure how to manage that. She assumed the police would want her there, but she wasn’t leaving the hospital until she knew Will was all right. The nurse had made it sound as though he was doing okay, and yet, if they were performing an MRI, that must mean his injury was serious enough to warrant a thorough examination.
The detective must have noticed something stricken in her expression, because he said, “Sometime tomorrow is fine. We’ll have a car go by the house a few times tonight, just to make sure everything is still quiet over there, but I think the assailant is long gone.”
Oh, he was gone, all right. To where, Rosemary wasn’t really sure. Probably not back to the rented house in Eagle Rock where he’d been staying, though. He’d told her he was from Indiana, but she figured that had to be a lie. Or maybe not. She tried to remember where the Underhill trust — set up by Belial in his disguise as Jeffrey Whitcomb all those years ago — and its demon trustees had been located. Somewhere in the Midwest, she thought, but she couldn’t recall for sure. So maybe Caleb really had gone to Indiana.
If so, maybe she didn’t have as much to worry about as she’d feared. On the other hand, if he really was hiding half a continent away, he could be up to all sorts of mischief.
Well, wherever he was and whatever he was doing, that would have to wait. “Tomorrow should be okay,” she said.
“I’ll give you a call in the morning,” the detective said, and got a card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I can meet you at the Las Flores house.”
Rosemary glanced at the card before slipping it into her purse. The next day was Sunday, but she guessed that didn’t make a difference. Detective Phillips was on duty on a Saturday night, which told her he wasn’t working the regular nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday shift. “Okay,” she responded, since she really didn’t know what else to say.
He offered her a reassuring smile, drained the last of his coffee, and then got up from the table, pausing to drop the empty cup in the trash before he left the cafeteria.
No more coffee for her, though. Rosemary had only drunk about half the cup, but the caffeine was already singing along her nerve endings, and she knew she’d hit her limit. A glance up at the clock on the far wall told her it was now almost nine o’clock, which meant Will had been admitted more than a half hour earlier. How long did an MRI test take? She had no idea because she’d never had any need to have one; her last physical injury had been a sprained ankle more than five years earlier, and that had only required simple X-rays to make sure she hadn’t broken any bones.
Still, a half hour seemed enough time for something to have happened, so she went back down the hallway to the E.R. and approached the desk. “Any updates on Will Gordon?” she asked.
The woman checked the computer and nodded. “Yes, it looks like he’s been transferred to a room on the fifth floor. Just go up and ask at the nurses�
�� station there.”
“Thank you,” Rosemary replied, relief washing through her. Yes, he had been sent to a room instead of being released, but it must have been just a regular hospital room, since the nurse hadn’t said anything about him being in the ICU.
After offering the woman a grateful smile, she went to the elevators and headed upstairs. A quick inquiry at the nurses’ station provided the information that Will Gordon was in Room 522.
“I just checked on him a few minutes ago,” the nurse offered with a smile. She was pretty and blonde and probably in her early thirties, closer to Will’s age than Rosemary herself. No wedding ring, either.
And that was probably just about the most ridiculous thing to be thinking about right then. Maybe the nurse wasn’t wearing a wedding ring because it got in the way while she worked. Allowing even the faintest feelings of jealousy to pop up when Will was lying in bed with a concussion was crazy.
“Thank you so much,” Rosemary said, and hurried herself away from the nurses’ station before she could do or say anything too foolish.
His room was down the hall to the left. She paused at the open doorway and made herself take a steadying breath. It scared her more than she wanted to admit how much she’d already come to care about this man, even though they’d only shared one kiss, even though she hardly knew anything about him. When she’d seen him lying on the floor at the Glendale house, barely breathing, the fear that had nearly overwhelmed her was unlike anything she’d experienced before.
She’d been so afraid of losing him, even though she had to acknowledge he wasn’t really hers. Not yet, anyway. Maybe someday, if she was really lucky….
Another steadying breath, and then she entered the room. The lights were dim, and the TV had been turned on, although the sound was turned way, way down.
“Thank God,” Will said, shifting slightly in his hospital bed as she approached.
“You’re all right?” she asked, and took a few more steps toward him.
He looked all right. Of course, he had a bandage wrapped around his head and a gauze pad on the left side of his forehead, and he wore a hospital gown with some sort of old-fashioned foulard print on it, like something you might see on one of your grandfather’s ties, but his color was good, and his extraordinary gray eyes focused on her easily enough. If he’d gotten bruised by his fall to the wood floor in the hallway at Colin’s house, those bruises hadn’t yet begun to surface.
“I’m fine,” he said, and gave her a deprecating grin. “That is, my head hurts like hell, but I don’t think I suffered any lasting damage.” The smile faded, and he went on, “And you — you’re all right? What happened?”
Rosemary reached over and took his hand. His fingers felt warm and strong. Surely if something was really wrong with him, they would have felt cool and clammy or otherwise not quite right?
A quick glance at the door told her that the nurses were out of earshot, and didn’t seem inclined to interrupt their conversation…at least, not at that particular moment. Still, she thought it was probably better to be circumspect. “Maybe we should talk about that later.”
He seemed to understand the reason for her reticence; although he didn’t nod, his mouth compressed slightly. “But he didn’t — ”
“No, I’m good,” she said, hoping he would get the point.
Will’s mouth parted, but whatever he’d been about to say was interrupted by the arrival of the doctor, a man who looked to be in his middle or late fifties, balding and with a sharp beak of a nose. He glanced over at Rosemary, who wondered if she should excuse herself. After all, she and Will had kissed, but their relationship still was woefully undefined. Maybe he wouldn’t want her around while the doctor discussed personal medical issues with him.
However, those doubts were immediately dispelled by Will saying, “I hope you have good news, doctor.”
Another of those glances, but then the man gave the slightest lift of his shoulders. “I do…mostly. I’m Doctor Littleton, and I’ve just been reviewing your MRI. You do have a concussion, but it’s not a serious one, so it doesn’t look as though any other tests are warranted for the moment.”
“I can go home?” Will asked, face eager.
“We’d prefer that you stay in the hospital overnight for observation,” Doctor Littleton replied.
For just the faintest moment, Will frowned. But then his expression smoothed itself, and he said, “But if you ‘prefer’ me to stay, that’s just a recommendation, correct?”
The doctor hesitated. “Yes. I can discharge you, as long as you have someone to drive you home and that you also have someone who can watch you tonight and wake you up regularly.”
“I can do that,” Rosemary said, and then sent a quick, apologetic glance over at Will. “That is, if you want me to.”
“I’d really appreciate it if you could,” he told her, his eyes warming with gratitude. “You drove my car over here, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “So, it really makes the most sense. I can take you home and keep an eye on you all night.”
“Well, then,” Doctor Littleton said, then shifted, directing his next words to her. “I’ll send you home with a list of instructions, but the most important is to make sure to wake him up every hour or so. Will, if you experience nausea or vomiting, or blurred vision or ringing in your ears, then call an ambulance right away.”
“I will,” he replied, although his expression had grown a little grimmer. Maybe he was mentally calculating whether his insurance would cover something like that, and whether it might not be better to just have Rosemary drive him back to the hospital. She couldn’t begin to guess, since she had no idea what kind of health insurance a minister might have. It had always been a joke with Rosemary and her sisters that they’d either drive each other to the hospital or call an Uber if there was ever a problem, since their own modest health plans that they’d bought through the business were bare-bones at best.
Not that it mattered. If things went downhill fast with Will for whatever reason, Rosemary knew she’d pay for the damn ambulance out of her own pocket before she’d let anything happen to him.
“I’ll start your discharge paperwork, then,” the doctor said. “It’ll be a half hour or so.”
He left the room, and Rosemary and Will looked at each other.
“You’re sure about this?” he asked.
“Of course,” she responded, taking his hand once again. “You think I’d be able to sleep a wink if I had someone else looking after you?”
The corners of his mouth lifted slightly. “You wouldn’t?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said severely. “Besides, it’s partly my fault you got that concussion in the first place. It wouldn’t feel right to have anyone but me keeping watch tonight.”
His eyes held hers. “And that’s the only reason?”
In answer, she bent down and kissed him lightly on the mouth. Be brave, she told herself.
Not looking away, making sure not to break their contact, she said, “You know it isn’t.”
And to her relief, he smiled.
Chapter 2
In reality, it was nearly an hour before all the paperwork was managed and Will was able to climb back into his clothes and have a nurse push his wheelchair over to the hospital’s main entrance. From there, Rosemary took over, rolling him out to the spot where she’d left the Challenger. He wanted to shake his head at what he viewed as overly cautious behavior, although he knew it was just hospital policy that prevented him from walking out to the car under his own power.
And honestly, even though he didn’t want to admit such a thing to Rosemary, he could tell how shaky his legs felt as he climbed out of the wheelchair and into the car’s passenger seat. In fact, as he sat down again and leaned over to buckle his seatbelt, he experienced a slight moment of dizziness, although he brushed it off and tried to tell himself that it wasn’t so bad.
Rosemary told him she’d be back in a moment, and then rolled the w
heelchair to the lobby before returning to the car. As she settled herself in the driver’s seat, she looked over and sent him an encouraging smile.
“Still doing okay over there?”
“Okay” might have been stretching the truth a bit, but he didn’t want to admit that maybe going home this evening rather than spending the night in the hospital might not have been the best idea. Still, they’d committed to this course of action, and Will told himself that he’d feel much better once he was back at his own house. He disliked hospitals, had spent far too many hours at the bedsides of ill and dying parishioners to ever feel comfortable in one.
“Great,” he said, and although she lifted an eyebrow, she didn’t question his assertion, only put the key in the ignition and cautiously backed the Challenger out of its parking space. From the way she drove — like the proverbial little old lady from Pasadena — he could tell she was intimidated by the vintage muscle car. Not so surprising, since her own Fiat compact probably didn’t have even a third of the horses his ’70 Dodge hid under its hood.
Once they were on the freeway and headed east, Rosemary said, “You’ll need to tell me where we’re going. I’ve never been to your house.”
Right. He should have realized that. His place actually wasn’t all that far from Michael’s big Craftsman house, where Rosemary had been housesitting for the past few months. “Get off at Lake,” he told her. “Then you’ll head north and turn right on Mountain. After that it’s a left on Wilson.”
She nodded. “Sounds like you and Michael were practically neighbors.”
Will smiled. “Almost. It’s about a half mile from his place to mine.”
He almost added, And his house is a lot more impressive, but he didn’t want to come off as overly deprecating. Michael’s house was a showplace, true, but Will was proud of his own home, a small sanctuary he’d created for himself in a city thousands of miles from the town where he’d been born. It had also been a fixer-upper, or he would never have been able to afford the house on his modest salary.
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