Claire was seriously surprised about that. She was the one that should have been saying sorry to her, not the other way around. Cass never apologized unless she had to. She had accepted the fact that she would be hated by her sister for as long as they both lived. Maybe it was a result of the feedback, or maybe it was just Cassandra finally giving up on her rage, but she meant what she was saying.
She still loved her sister.
“It’s my fault...” Claire whispered, as she scrunched her eyes together. “I turned you, I did this...oh, God Cass, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for making you like this.”
Cass managed to hold still for a second, to see the emotions flaring in Claire’s eyes.
“Are you gonna kill me?” she whispered.
“No, no...we’re gonna make you better, you’re gonna be fine,” Claire said, before looking around at Sophinia and seeing no protest.
“Save Jerry...save him...” she said, before passing out.
That’s exactly what they were planning to do...if they could.
St. Cloud Hospital - Minnesota
Joe and the others were disturbed when Officer Adams came into the room suddenly. He didn’t say anything, he just signaled Joe to come outside.
He walked out and closed the door behind him.
“We got a problem,” Adams said immediately. “I just got a call from one of my units. A couple of Black Forest troops just arrived at St. Cloud VA and are searching the place.”
“This is St. Cloud General,” Joe shrugged.
“Yeah, but it probably means they are checking every hospital in the area. Sooner or later they’ll come here,” he said.
“Damn it! We gotta move Jerry now!”
“My partner is trying to set that up now, but the doc thinks he’s not well enough to travel. We’re trying to arrange for a chopper to fly him to Sophinia’s, but that won’t happen until tonight.”
“So what the hell are we supposed to do now?!”
Adams shook his head and sighed. “Just gotta try and keep him safe until then. I’m having some more of my men posted around the hospital and I’m heading down to the security station. We’ll use the cameras and hopefully see them coming.”
“Alright, I’ll tell them, then head down with you,” Joe nodded. It wasn’t much of a plan and he wasn’t sure how effective the cops would be against vampires, but at least they knew what they were dealing with.
Sophinia had every cop on her payroll helping out at the moment.
After Joe informed Goose and the others about Black Forest, they split up and took different parts of the hospital to watch. They’d act as sentries and guard Jerry’s room with the others. Rachel and Joe walked downstairs and entered the security station.
Adams and Benchley were already there. They seemed to have commandeered the room and were now watching the dozen or so TV screens that were showing the various CCTV feeds from around the hospital. They also had images of the parking lot and service entrances. Other than the light from the screens and the tiny LED’s on the computer systems and hard drives, the room was dark.
“How is watching these gonna help Jerry?” Joe asked, after looking over the screens for a few seconds. “Sophinia said that they’d been recruiting. They got guys that nobody recognizes.”
“You ever shine a flashlight into a vampires eyes?” Benchley asked.
“Err, no.”
“They’ve got an extra lens inside their eyes. It’s what lets them see in the dark and stuff, but it also reflects light kinda like a cat’s eyes. Occasionally, it shows up on camera, like a lens flare.”
“Oh, gotcha.”
“Yeah, it won’t change the fact that they’re here, but it’ll at least give us a heads up.”
Joe nodded and took a seat by the cameras.
“Got any popcorn?” Rachel asked in a bored tone.
After about an hour of staring at the screens, Joe's eyes were starting to get tired. It must have been exhausting to be on a stake out, or whatever these cops did when they weren’t working for Sophinia.
“How long until this damn chopper’s ready?” Joe asked, rubbing the sleepiness from his eyes.
“They said around seven-ish. They were transporting a car crash victim to -”
He stopped talking and everyone’s eyes went wide as every single screen in the security station suddenly turned to static. Every camera in the entire hospital was offline!
“Son of bitch!” Adams yelped and grabbed his radio off his belt. “All units, report in!”
“Jerry!” Joe yelled and burst out of the station.
He didn’t bother going for the lifts and just charged up the fire stairs.
“Joe, what’s going on?” Steve gulped, as Joe ran past him.
Joe didn’t answer and just followed him up the stairs back on to the floor that Jerry was being kept on. Goose was at the end of the corridor and he saw the panic in Joe’s eyes as he bolted towards Jerry’s room. He pulled his gun out and rushed towards the door as fast as he could.
The stopped in shock as soon as they burst into the room.
Jerry was fine. There was nobody there.
Goose and Steve breathed a sigh of relief, but Joe hadn’t dropped his guard yet. Sarah rushed into the room a second later.
“What the hell was that about?” Steve asked, a little out of breath.
“All the cameras went down,” Joe said, moving around the medical units in Jerry’s recovery room. He checked under the bed and inside wardrobe, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
A moment later, Rachel rushed up panting. “They’re back on...they think it was a glitch,” she said.
Joe was relieved, but more than that, he was angry. How long could they keep this up? Every single tiny little thing that people would normally be able to ignore or brush off was now enough to terrify him. Every bump in the night would keep him awake wondering if it was something else.
It was no wonder that half the people who encountered the supernatural world ended up with straightjackets on after being diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics.
“Okay, crisis over, let’s get back to work,” Goose said, trying to calm his heartbeat down.
“Wait,” Rachel said, looking directly at Jerry.
She walked over to his comatose body and laid her hand on his forehead. For a second she just stayed there with her eyes closed, searching through his mind before finally opening them again. When she turned back to the others, she was in shock.
“Somebody’s been here!”
“What?!”
“His mind’s been tampered with! There’s a block that wasn’t there before!”
“A block? What the hell does that mean?” Steve asked.
“A section of his mind has been blocked off by a barrier that I can’t penetrate,” she explained quickly.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, nobody came in here okay. I’ve been twenty feet away from the door the whole time,” Goose said.
“I’m telling you, someone has been here and put something in his head!” Rachel said, gritting her teeth. “Something I can’t get to!”
“Wait, I thought you were like the most powerful psychic in the world or something?” Joe asked, looking concerned.
“No, whoever did this is the most powerful psychic in the world!” she put her hand back on his forehead and closed her eyes again. Her face scrunched up as she tried to push her way further in, but couldn’t. “This block’s like a fortress. I can’t even get close to it.”
“What could do that?” Steve asked.
“Nothing I’ve ever heard of,” she was sounding very worried.
“What the hell is going on?” Goose growled.
“I don’t know. But whatever did this, blacked out every camera in the building, got in and out in less than ten seconds without being spotted and left the most powerful psychic barrier in his head I’ve ever seen,” she summed up, making them all go pale. “There is no way Black Forest could swing something like this.”
/> “You’re saying that after all the vampire crap we’ve been through we’ve now got a new player in town?” Goose asked in frustration.
“A player with abilities way beyond me!”
“Terrific!” Goose snarled. “Just freakin’ fantastic!”
“What do we do?” Joe asked worriedly.
“Get him another CAT scan, see if there is any new damage to his head, then -”
Alarms blurted out all over the hospital as Jerry suddenly started convulsing in his bed. He was coughing hard against the tube in his mouth. His heart rate was going berserk and his body temperature was rising fast.
They rushed over to try and hold him down.
“HELP! SOMEBODY HELP!”
Doctors flooded the room a few moments later. They shoved Joe and the others aside and began looking over Jerry.
“BP is one seventy over ninety and climbing fast!” one of the doctors said. “Heart rate; one eighty and climbing!”
Joe was shaking all over as he watched them move around his nephew. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t move.
“Body temperature is one twelve, also climbing,” another doctor said.
“What’s happening to him?!” Sarah screamed.
“You need to leave now!” a doctor shouted at them, before getting back to work. None of them budged.
The beeps on the monitor were going so fast that there was barely a gap between them.
“Heart rate; two ten!”
“BT; one thirty!”
“BP; two hundred over one hundred!”
“Pull his tube!”
They extracted the long plastic tube from his throat which ended up being much longer than any of his friends had expected, but it didn’t seem to help. Jerry was still jolting about as if he was being electrocuted.
“Heart rate; two sixty!”
“Christ, he’s gonna blow his own heart out!” one of the doctors gasped. “Get him to the OR now!”
“Come on...please!” Goose breathed, watching in horror as his best friend slipped away.
“JERRY!” Joe cried out, loud enough to snap everybody’s attention away. “Whatever knocks you down don’t let it keep you there!”
What made that enter his mind at that particular moment, he didn’t know. He didn’t even realize he’d said until he had. The doctors unclamped the wheels of Jerry’s bed and started to move him and the monitors towards the door.
“Wait!” one of the doctors shouted. “Heart rate’s dropping!”
“BP is coming down too, so is body temperature,” another doctor confirmed. They watched the monitors for a few moments as the vitals changed. The beeps on the monitors slowed down as well, but neither Joe nor any of the others dared to breathe a sigh of relief.
“It’s slowing...”
“He’s normalizing,” the doctors gasped in amazement. “BP one seventy over ninety and holding. Temperature one hundred and holding...I don’t believe it.”
“What the hell just happened?!” Goose whispered.
“I have no idea...he just stabilized himself...his vitals are good,” the doctor said, looking as if he’d just found the Holy Grail.
For a moment everyone just stood there in stunned silence, before one of the doctors reached over and carefully pulled off the bandage on his neck about half way.
“What the hell?!” the doctor gasped in utter shock.
The wound was still there, but it looked like it had had a week to heal. The deep puncture marks were gone and the stitches had snapped or fallen out. Now it was just a nasty looking gash, not a near fatal wound.
Jerry had just come back to life.
The doctors began speaking very quickly about how this could not be possible and which tests they now needed to run. They ordered Joe and the others to stay with him while they prepared to move him to a different ward to begin trying to figure out what had just happened, but Jerry wouldn’t be staying that long. Now that he was stable, he could be moved.
They rushed out to inform other doctors of the miracle they’d witnessed and Joe turned to Rachel. She just nodded with a smile, confirming that Jerry’s consciousness had returned.
“He’s confused and distant and doesn’t really know what’s going on, but he’s definitely there,” she said delighted. “Look, he’s dreaming.”
They turned and saw Jerry’s eyelids flickering slightly.
“Can you talk to him?”
“I don’t wanna startle him. Let’s let him rest for a while,” she said. “He needs to get his bearings”
Joe walked over and held his nephews hand so tight that he ran the risk of hurting him. “You did it kid, you did it,” he whispered in his ear, tears of joy streaming from his eyes.
“He can hear you...” she said, causing Joe to look both amazed and sad at the same time. “I’m gonna call Sophinia,” Rachel said. “You guys guard this hospital like Fort Knox, understood?”
She marched passed them and headed towards the nearest exit to use her cell. Joe, Goose and Steve slowly went back to their set guard positions, but not before Joe spent a few more seconds squeezing Jerry’s hand, praying that doing this would somehow let Jerry know that he was there. He didn’t want to leave, but his recent attempt at acting like a human shield for his nephew had failed miserably, and the military man inside him told him to use surveillance to track the enemy instead.
Besides, the unknown visitor had made it pretty clear that they were way more than the normal sort of customer they’d been dealing with.
Eventually, he did leave, and went back to the security station. This time however, Adams decided it would be best to hand out radios to the unofficial staff on Jerry’s protection detail. Goose, Steve and Joe got a radio each.
After what had just happened, Steve decided to keep Sarah very close and the two of them started patrolling the fire stairs together. Goose kept up his guard duty of the corridor outside Jerry’s room, but was now joined by Benchley, who took the other end.
They were all on edge after what had just happened. The adrenaline rush was a lot more effective than coffee, but they all stayed caffeinated just in case. Whoever this new player was, they were incredible powerful, and that scared them.
The only solace came from the fact that whoever it was, they could have easily killed or taken Jerry if they wanted, but they hadn’t. If fact, they had healed him. They had pulled him out of his coma and made the bite on his neck look like nothing more than an ugly cut. It was unclear what they’d done to his head, but at that moment, it didn’t seem to be anything harmful.
They wouldn’t know what had happened until Jerry woke up. If he woke up. The doctor’s words kept repeating in Joe's mind, and they still hurt. But only because he was completely unaware of what had just happened.
A few floors above, Jerry had opened his eyes.
CHAPTER 20 – WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS
St. Cloud Hospital - Minnesota
“You said that Jerry was immune to magic,” Joe repeated to Rachel, as they sat in the security station.
“To what we call arcane magic, he is. To other types such as elemental, voodoo, dark magic, he might still be susceptible, we don't know,” she countered.
“Come on Rachel,” Adams said, sitting in the chair next to the screens. “We both know that Elementalists can only heal themselves and dark magic can’t do this!”
“I wasn’t disputing that.”
“Wait, you’re saying that Jerry could be an elemental-spirit-thingy?” Joe asked.
“No way, that’s not something you learn, it’s something you’re born into. He would have shown signs years ago,” Rachel informed.
“What kind of signs?”
“Like accidentally setting shit on fire, or flooding the house, or talking to ghosts,” she snapped.
“So if he’s not one of those, then what the hell could break him out of a coma and heal him in ten seconds flat?”
“I don’t know! Why do you keep asking me?” she whined, showing that
she did still actually have just a tiny bit of child left in her. “I’m psychic, I’m not omniscient!”
Four floors above, Benchley walked down the corridor for the fifth time and approached Jerry’s room. Goose flanked him about thirty feet down the corridor, doing the exact same routine of walking up and down and spying into the rooms he past.
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