by Jenn Stark
He stopped.
The universe bowed out around him, allowing him to circle, to see, to use the gift and the curse that was his own to bear. He turned his gaze back to Earth, and so much of it was what he had seen before. The pain, the devastation, the fire and the flood. The breaking of the faithful—and not merely those who believed in God, but those who believed in anything, who strove to lift themselves and their loved ones to the next plane of existence. Their lot was bleak, and getting bleaker. The tides of despair crashing over the earth, wave upon wave. Darkness everywhere, thickening, growing, spreading…
Except where it didn’t. There was one and then another burst of brightness, tiny stars that gleamed forth, determinedly pushing back the shadows, burning in the murk. They could never overtake the dark, it seemed impossible, and yet…these stars hadn’t been there when he’d first gazed down upon the earth all those millennia ago. He hadn’t put them there. God hadn’t put them there.
Humans had made these lights to guide themselves by, mortals who believed they might find their way. Even when all was lost. Even when they had no reason for…
Hope.
Could he—would he—surely he couldn’t turn his back on heaven, not now. Not when it was there for him to grasp, to hold, to add his light to in a shining beacon of glory.
Surely he…
He spun around, his arms flung out, stretching for the impossible truth of what he felt, when something different brushed against him. Something soft, almost ephemeral.
A human hand.
“Dana!” Finn gasped in the language of the stars, recognizing the long, slim, graceful fingers, the wide strength of the palm, the gleaming golden cuff. He gazed at it with soft amazement, his mouth working with utter disbelief…and also joy.
And also…hope.
“You are my angel, my precious child.” The resonant words of all creation swirled around Finn, filled him up, made him whole. “Ask, and it will be given.”
His heart swelling full enough to burst…Finn reached for Dana’s hand.
The moment their fingers touched, he roared in agony. Electricity fired through him like a wasting fire, exploding what was left of his body from within, with far more devastation than anything he could have sustained from without. And it was pulling him, bringing him up through fire and smoke and currents and pain, his head tilting back in anguish even as his body reformed around itself, his skin regenerating, his brain refusing. As the spiraling light erupted within himself once again, the new kind of madness took hold, spreading out through his body and fusing with the world around him.
He burst into consciousness in a horrific rush, the wind in a vicious gale around him again, the fire only in his mind. Darkness coursed around him, leaving nothing but his own screams and the quickly fading memory of a glory so true, so huge, so incredible that it had crowded out all else. He thought—he thought he saw Dana, impossibly brilliant, but he couldn’t focus, couldn’t see. The universe writhed and twisted around him, taking new form to accommodate him, both the demon he was and the Fallen he could become, but it was too much…too much!
Fire consumed him.
Chapter Thirty-One
St. Vincent Charity Hospital
Cleveland, Ohio
9:10 a.m., Dec. 25
Dana opened her eyes with a painful flicker, then screwed them shut, the bright light harsh against her eyes. She drew in a rough, crackling breath and gagged, her mouth viciously dry.
She reached up to touch it, startled when her hand felt heavy, unwieldy. What…what was wrong with her hands?
“I wouldn’t do that, Dana,” The voice brushed over her softly, but she struggled against it, its lulling tones forcing her back into the numbing sleep that could not happen. Not now, not when she had to escape—escape.
“Hush, Dana,” Franks said with greater urgency. “Don’t make them think they need to put you under again. The sooner you can get yourself together, the sooner we can get out of here.”
She stilled, suddenly aware of more than the heaviness in her hands. They were wrapped in bulky bandages, and the entire room smelled like sunburned antiseptic. But she was here. She was…safe.
Although her mind couldn’t quite acknowledge that reality, her eyes began to sting, the salt of her tears apparently abrading whatever was left of the soft tissue around her lids. She opened her eyes, her stomach pitching a bit as she heard the clicking noise of her lids lifting over her corneas.
Her eyes ached with the brightness of the room, the affront of Father Franks standing hunched over her bed, his hands shaking as he smoothed the hair out of her face with gentle hands. She felt her lips tighten into a moderately painful smile. She could practically feel her pupils dilating against the bright sunlight, and she tried to speak, her voice rough and raspy as her lips stung with the movement. “Hi,” she managed.
“Hello, my dear, sweet child,” Father Franks said softly, his scowl deepening the lines on his face that she’d never really seen before. She’d never considered him old before. She’d never considered him anything but—there. Solid, secure, protected by God. But his dark eyes were sunken as he watched her, tears leaking out at the corners. “We didn’t know when you would be back with us. Thank you for beating our expectations.”
With shaking hands, he lifted a water bottle toward her face, angling the straw between her lips. She drank as deeply as she could, but swallowing was more difficult than she had realized, and she winced as he dabbed a fine linen handkerchief at her mouth. Her skin felt tight, stretched too thin over her face, and her hands…
She stared down in horror at the mummified bandages encasing her fingers. “Where am I?” she asked. She remained blessedly numb, but all the information her fear was holding off pressed against her, clamoring to be known. “What happened to me?”
“St. Vincent’s,” Father Franks said. “Your mother is safe. She’s heavily sedated and will be for days, I’m afraid, but she’s doing well.” He cleared his throat. “And you were admitted with burns to your hands, and some heat damage to your skin, nothing more. You started out…horribly burned. Your clothes disintegrated, nothing but a gold cuff on you. Which I have.”
He shuddered, clenching and unclenching his own hands. “By the time we brought you here, however, you were remarkably recovered. We were able to say it was a boiler accident.”
“The church?”
“There was nothing,” Franks said, though she couldn’t really follow what he was saying. “No fire, no pit, no nothing that you and I both saw with our own eyes. It was as if last night never happened. None of the congregation reported seeing anything but a particularly beautiful starlit sky.” He drew in a heavy breath. “The Possessed and demons—all of them disappeared the moment the fire vanished. Just…poof. Bartholomew too. Lester, I’m afraid, isn’t doing so well.”
She frowned at him, his words still an incomprehensible cascade. “Lester?”
And it all came rushing back.
She jolted upright in her bed, her eyes going wild as the machines around her went crazy and her arms strained against the tubes keeping her in place.
“What is this shit?” she growled.
“Pain medication only, Dana. Your hands were badly burned, but they’re healing. Dammit, Dana, they’re going to come—”
A nurse slammed into the room. “What’s going on in here?”
“Call the doctor, Nurse Tilly,” Franks said. “It appears our patient is awake.”
“Miss Griffin, you can’t be out of bed, you’ll hurt yourself—stop!”
Dana threw her legs over the bed, her head spinning. She lost the rest of the conversation between Franks and the nurse, the unendurable need to retch overcoming her. She coughed heavily but didn’t throw up, though she spit into her hand, her mind slewing sideways at the thick, wet sludge that came out of her mouth, as if she’d directly inhaled exhaust fumes for the past three days straight.
“Jesus,” she muttered,
grabbing a towel off the table before anyone else could see it. Her body had started shaking uncontrollably, the combination of the cool refrigerated air on her skin and her own adrenaline jacking her recovery process into overdrive. She looked down at herself even as Franks hustled the nurse out of the room, demanding for a Dr. Milton to be sent for right away even as the woman called for orderlies to come to the room.
She looked…remarkably whole, she thought.
Her hands were bandaged heavily, the thick gauze covered with loose gloves of some breathable fabric, giving her a seal hard enough to tap through. She peeked under one of the edges of the fabric and shuddered. Not quite healed yet.
She closed her eyes with an audible click and stiffened.
Eyelids weren’t supposed to click.
Dana stood and unsteadily moved over to the bathroom, her feet unnaturally heavy on the cold floor. She shuffled into the bathroom, looking down at her bandaged hands for a moment until she glanced up at her face.
Her own face stared back at her, the skin red and tight, but intact. Only her eyes had changed. They…they almost seemed to glow, a little.
Dana gripped the sides of the sink, her body giving over to tremors as the memories she’d been holding off crashed down around her. The fall into the hellish pit, the farther fall into what could have been heaven but, so much more likely, was the den of evil that spelled the end of all mankind. Finn, dropping beside her, plunging to her rescue, pulling her back and pushing her up, sacrificing everything he had to save her, to make her live. He would want her to be strong. She knew it, even as her arms buckled over the cold porcelain sink, as tears tracked down over skin that was far too tight for comfort, but at least not covered in gauze.
But she didn’t want to be strong.
She was here, and he was gone.
All she could recall was that she had reached for him, begging for him to look up, though his face and body were a nightmarish fright and his eyes were harsh with a light that seemed to burn from within him. He was still Finn, and she couldn’t imagine life without him.
She couldn’t imagine life at all.
She pulled away from the sink, her hand going up to touch the skin around her eyes. They looked out at her from the mirror, haunted. Angrily, she turned her arm over, her heavily bandaged hand jabbing at the skin of her right arm. It was unbroken. Whatever doctor Franks had allowed to treat her, they hadn’t taken the chip. The Children were safe, and now they could be found again.
If the list hadn’t melted inside her.
She shook her head, turning away from the sink. Max would know what to—
She stopped cold. “Max,” she murmured, and her fear mounted inside her again. She came out of the bathroom even as Franks came back in.
“I’ve brought you a change of clothes, Dana,” he said. “You’ll be released after another review of your progress, and you can visit your mother. She won’t be going home yet, but you won’t have to spend Christmas here.”
“Where’s Max?” she demanded, and Franks blanched.
“We haven’t heard from him,” he said. “But that could simply mean that he’s—”
“No, he’d die before he didn’t check in,” Dana said, wincing at her unintentional meaning. “We have to find him, Father. He’s out there. I have to go.” She looked at her hands, and the specter of her last visit to the hospital overtook her. “What did they do to me?” she demanded, her voice cracking.
“Nothing. You’re safe.” Father Franks grasped her shoulders, holding her tight. “Your hands were damaged because, apparently, you held on to the equivalent of a live wire. It’s going to take time for those to heal, more time than the rest of you. Your face is already nearly healed and we left your eyes,” he swallowed, “untreated, to keep the curious from lifting your bandages before we can get you the hell out of here.”
She looked at him, not comprehending. “You let them touch me?”
“Yes, I let them touch you. My God, Dana if you had any idea what you looked like when you crawled back over the edge of the roof. By the time I reached you, there was no one left, Possessed or otherwise, but the entire place looked like a bomb had gone off on it, the church was surrounded by fire, and then—” He shook his head. “And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. It was all back to normal. You and your mother—”
“Lester,” Dana cut him off. “What happened to him?”
Father Franks sighed heavily. “He was admitted as well,” he said hesitantly. “The psych ward, for the moment. They say it’s only precautionary, but… I don’t know how far he’s gone.”
“Pretty damn far, Father,” Dana said coldly. The ache in her chest yawned wide again, her body shaking. “I want out of here.” She turned away from Franks’s kind eyes, staring blindly at the side of the room. “I just want…” She blinked. “What the hell is that?”
An enormous planter of poinsettias festooned the side table, threatening to collapse it. Franks sighed behind her. “I know, Dana. I know. They were delivered this morning,” he said, and she turned back to him sharply, her heart swelling at the emotion in his voice. “No name, no card.”
Dad.
“But…how?’
The priest shook his head, as mystified as she was, though his eyes were overbright, tears threatening at the edges. “That…I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever know, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. We need to get you someplace more private, however. The police don’t know you’re here yet, but that’s not going to last for long.”
Dana struggled to focus, not to lose herself in the cocoon of despair. Father Franks was right. She had work to do. They all did. She tapped her wrist with a heavily bandaged hand. “This is a chip full of data we need to dig out of me, like right now. How are we going to do that?” she asked. She scowled down at her forearm, palpating the skin. There was definitely still something there.
“One thing at a time.” Franks looked up as the door opened, looking no doubt at the doctor who was going to check her hands.
“It’s about damned time,” Franks said, but Dana didn’t turn around.
“I don’t want him touching me,” she said, not bothering to look up.
She heard another deep sigh—not Franks, this time. “I am sorry, Dana,” Finn whispered in a rasping voice, and she froze. “I never wanted you to be harmed.”
“Finn!” Dana’s head came up, and she spun around, careening into Finn as he met her halfway, her arms wrapping around him despite the awkward bandages, though his skin also felt too warm beneath her touch. But the pain was nothing against the roar of emotions welling up inside her, racking her with sobs. She couldn’t believe it, he couldn’t be here.
“It’s all right, Dana, you’ll be all right. I tried to protect you, tried to—but there was so much—”
“You’re here!” she gasped, pulling back from him, trying to read his eyes. They glowed an almost incandescent blue. “But, how? I thought you couldn’t stay. I thought you wouldn’t—”
“I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.” Finn nodded, giving her a rueful smile that healed her more than any doctor could. “But then I met you.”
“I lost your note to me,” she said, miserable with the sudden memory. “It—it burned. Everything burned, I couldn’t save it.”
He frowned at her. “My note?” he asked, then his eyes widened. “Oh, the—”
“Coming through, coming through!”
The clatter in the hallway had them both turning, and Dana blinked, straightening in alarm as a woman of truly Amazonian proportions strode into the room. She was easily six foot four, dressed in a starched white nurse’s uniform straight out of the 1950s, complete with crisp white cap over her dark brown bobbed hair. The uniform fit the woman’s impressive proportions as if it’d been custom-tailored for her, down to the white stockings and—
Dana stared. Did they make platform nursing clogs?
The nurse tapped the oversized clipboard she
held as another woman rolled a wheelchair in. The second female was also tall, though nowhere near as tall as the nurse, and dressed in the more standard white medical coat and black slacks. She had keen eyes, a face that betrayed no secrets, and her light brown hair was cut short and businesslike. And given the disapproving frown on her face, she looked like she meant business too.
“Good morning, Dana,” she said, her gaze flicking to Dana’s hands, then her position against Finn. “I’m Dr. Sells. You should be in bed.”
Father Franks stepped forward. “I’m sorry, when were you assigned? I’ve met Dana’s doctors.”
The woman turned to him, while the statuesque nurse tapped her clipboard. “Father Franks, Catholic priest, exorcist. Not a Dawn Child, not a Connected in the traditional sense, but definitely somebody to pay attention to going forward, especially now that we’ve gone all Day of the Demon,” she said. “Props to you, Padre. You rocked it in the cemetery, from all accounts.”
Dana’s eyes popped wide as Franks turned on the woman. “Excuse me?”
“Sorry, I know introductions are in order, but we don’t have a lot of time.” She held out her hand. “Nikki Dawes. An absolute pleasure. Really. I’m a huge fan.”
The priest reached out, and Nikki pumped his hand enthusiastically, her grin going broader. “Yup, definitely something going on we need to study more, Padre.” She turned to the doctor. “This is Dr. Margaret Sells. She has a clinic for people whose needs go a little beyond your typical Doc in a Box. And we should probably be getting you to said clinic, stat, Dana. Especially since you’ve apparently got Genealogy.com, the Dawn Children edition, stuck in your arm.”
Sells strode forward to Dana, gently peeled her left hand away from where she held Finn in an ungainly hug. “Have you scanned it since last night? Is the data intact?”
A pang of fear arrowed through Dana. “I haven’t,” she said. “It may be destroyed.”
“If it is, we’ll recover it. We’re good at that,” Sells said reassuringly. She pointed to the wheelchair. “But we do need to get you someplace you can heal more satisfactorily.”