“You’re having a send-off without telling anyone what it is?”
“Just do it,” she practically ordered me.
I slapped my hands into the comforter and forced myself up. By the time we got downstairs to the main room of the hall, it was filled with at least ten other people from around campus. They all came to see Annette for her birthday and to make sure she had a proper good time.
The concept of pre-drinking confused me when I first arrived in Scotland. It wasn’t something that I typically saw in Dallas. Mostly because driving was required to get from club to club. In the UK, it was something people did regularly. And after receiving the tab from my first night of clubbing out with Annette I suddenly understood why. The city was walkable and the drinks were expensive.
I stood on the stairs and watched as Annette walked down and greeted all the friends she managed to make just with being here six months. She was a social butterfly to the core. I learned from her and didn’t want to let her go. So I watched her slam a few shots and tried to reason with myself that watching her back tonight was the best birthday gift I could give to her.
She forced a couple shots down me before an hour was up and everyone was ready to head out to the club. I walked by her as she stumbled out onto the sidewalk outside our hall. There sat an expensive black Bentley. I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Who else are you friends with?” I asked her as Emily and Caitlyn took the front seats.
Annette smiled as she swept her chocolate brown hair back behind her head, making it look voluminous in a way that would entice every guy at the club to run his fingers through it. “Don’t worry about it. Just get in.”
I sighed and followed her into the backseat while others decided to walk or order a cab. It was her night. I would do as she asked.
Within minutes we were at her favorite club and arriving in style. We crawled out and I followed Annette into the club after we showed our identification to the men outside. Annette took my arm in hers and we walked in. Her expression looked determined to make sure that I let loose and had a good time.
I let out a heavy breath and surrendered to the conclusion that I wouldn’t be getting to bed before dawn so I might as well enjoy it.
“How about that drink you owe me? With the possibility of a snack later. That medicine you had me get you wasn’t cheap.”
She laughed as if I was exaggerating and dragged me over to the bar. Easy for her to do given her parents were loaded. They sent her $2,000 every month just for play money.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Whatever you’re getting.”
After squeezing our way to the bar and loading up on some fancy drink I couldn’t even recognize I followed her onto the dance floor. It was only a matter of minutes before I felt completely overwhelmed. The air inside the club smelled like a strange combination of artificial smoke from machines trying to make the club look more atmospheric and old beer stains all over the sticky floor.
Annette’s numerous friends from around campus filed in and started dancing. Within minutes I had random men trying to grab my hand to get me to dance. Or if they were bold enough they would just grab my hips and sway in front of me like we were already dancing. I brushed them aside and instantly got a mental image of how Professor Connelly swept his leg up against mine not once, but twice. A chill ran through my spine. I did the best I could to get the thought out of my mind and danced alongside Annette, trying to make it look like I belonged when I actually felt completely out of place.
The music was so loud that after twenty minutes every song sounded the same. A series of heavy beats with too low a base that was always accompanied by a heavy stinging in my ears. I was sweating in no time with all the bodies crammed into the underground vaulted club.
Annette took both my hands in hers and raised them above our heads as she danced. It was her way of telling me to let loose and enjoy myself. She rarely failed in making me do so. Annette forcing me into clubbing was a bit like drowning. Halfway tranquil once I accepted my fate and stopped struggling.
The next two hours were spent bobbing between the bar and the dance floor. Annette would want another drink and I’d insist on coming with her. By the time it was 1 am she had far more drinks that I knew my body capable of holding in without puking. But then again, she had a stomach made of steel. I’d seen her consume far more. Only this time it didn’t appear to agree with her.
Annette reached both her hands out and let them rest on my shoulders. Her head came down and before I knew it, she was relying on me to hold up her body weight.
“Woah, woah, woah!” I held onto her and tried to prop her head up. “Are you gonna puke?”
She rested her head on my shoulder. I lightly pushed her away, fearing she might projectile vomit down my back.
“They’ll kick us out if you vomit all over the place,” I hollered in her ear over the music. Only when I pushed her back and got a look at her face, she looked dazed and confused. Almost like she didn’t even know where she was.
‘Oh my god. Did someone rufie her?’
No! I had been watching her like a hawk the whole night. Not to mention that I always made her get her own drinks so a guy couldn’t have the opportunity to do something like that.
“Annette?” I shook her shoulders.
She blinked her eyes a few times then cradled her head in her hand. “I can’t breathe in here.”
“Let’s get you outside.”
I flagged down Emily and Caitlyn a few feet away and they followed me outside with Annette leaning on me. I reached for her arm and draped it over my back to steady her.
“Is it the smoke?” Emily cried out over the music as she grabbed her jacket from just outside the main dance hall.
“I’m not sure,” I shouted back. “She just lost her balance all of a sudden.”
Caitlyn brought out my jacket along with Annette’s and placed it over her back before we got outside.
“Look out!” one of the bouncers hollered as we walked out. “She’s gonna vomit!”
“Pipe down!” I shouted at him. The temptation to get in his face was building inside me but I had more pressing things to attend to. Annette was nearly placing all her body weight on me and I couldn’t handle it much longer.
“Help me out,” I said to Caitlyn. She helped me lean Annette into a nearby brick wall. “Annette, can you hear me?”
Her eyes shifted from side to side as if she wasn’t sure where she was.
“Are you gonna be sick?” Caitlyn asked. “We can get you home if you had too much.”
Emily reached behind Annette’s head and pulled her hair back. “How many did she have?”
“Three shots and two beers,” I said. “I’ve seen her drink much more than that and not get this hammered.”
Annette’s head rolled to the side.
Emily took her head into her hand and propped it upright so she wouldn’t barf all over her dress. “If she drank the wrong combination of liquors it might not matter.”
Annette’s lips moved but only a soft groan came out.
My mind went over all the drinks she ordered. There were enough to knock me out for days but not enough for Annette. Our first week in Edinburgh she took me on a pub crawl that lasted half the night. By the time it was over she had more than ten drinks averaging two an hour. She was the one that got us home that night. Not me. She left me a note taped to our small refrigerator in our hall letting me know there was good hangover food inside. It was addressed, “For Kayla, you beautiful mess.” I barely remembered anything from that night after 11 pm.
“I think I have ten minutes,” Annette croaked through a fog of barely audible words.
I leaned in closer to hear her properly, knowing I was risking a potential upchuck of whatever was left in her stomach from dinner. “What’s that?”
“Ten minutes. I have ten minutes.”
I leaned away, understanding her full meaning without missing a beat. “Emily,
pull the car around. We have a ten-minute window before she passes out. We have to get her back to the hall.”
Emily didn’t say a word. She ran toward the car parked in the distance and pulled it around for us while I helped get the sleeves of my coat over her arms. She let me wrestle her into it without a fight.
Caitlyn took her left side while I took her right, propping her up while men walked by laughing. I’d seen plenty of Scotsman wander home drunk after all the nights Annette dragged me out to go pub hopping with her. They knew as well as I did that they had no room to judge. Especially given I had a sneaky suspicion that this wasn’t a matter of too much to drink. I wanted to know what that prescription was Annette had me pick up from that silly holistic pharmacy. The next morning I would beat down their door until they answered, regardless of whether they were open or not.
A stiff breeze flowed through my coat and sent goosebumps all over my backside. It wasn’t the icy Scottish wind or the chill of spring making me shake. It was the sort of feeling I got when someone was watching me.
I peered down the lane to the opposite end of the street. A man was trying to stay hidden in the shadows. The second our eyes met he looked away, making it obvious that he was watching me. I squinted harder to get a look at him. Was he just another asshole staring at the foreigners that couldn’t hold their liquor?
No.
He stood by the side of the stone building opposite the club, keeping to the shadows enveloping the street. Even with the darkness looming over him I could make out a few of his features. He was tall and wore a thin pair of glasses. He slowly brought his eyes back up to meet mine. A crease formed just above the bridge of his nose between his eyes. He wore a simple black suit jacket with a matching black tie. I could tell from his appearance alone that he didn’t want to be seen. He wanted to blend. And yet, he was there to watch me. I could sense it.
‘Creep!’
The car screeched to a halt and we managed to get Annette safely inside. Caitlyn took the front seat while I shoved myself in beside Annette, doing everything I could to comfort her while Emily drove us out of there.
The car came to a halt. I barely caught Annette as she slumped forward.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” Emily grunted.
“What is it?”
“Construction,” Caitlyn said beside her.
I was too busy reaching for Annette’s seatbelt to make sure she didn’t go flying into the front car seat to look.
“Okay, just find another route.”
“It goes all the way down the lane. We’re gonna have to go around and onto the motorway.”
“We don’t have that kind of time,” I complained. “Annette is sick. Maybe we should just take her to urgent care.”
“So they can do a blood test and charge her for potentially being over the drinking limit?”
“It’s Scotland,” Emily said. “I’m not sure they have a drinking limit.”
I rolled my eyes. “Just do what you have to. Break a few traffic laws for all I care.”
Flashing lights from the construction site blinded me once I looked up, leaving me wondering whose genius idea it was to do that much work in the middle of the freaking night.
Emily did her best to weave in and out of the streets, finding the best route she could to get Annette back before she got too sick. We were on the motorway in a matter of minutes and trying to find a way out that didn’t involve taking so many back streets that Annette would get motion sickness.
I returned my attention to Annette. She was foaming at the mouth.
“Oh my god!” I muttered under my breath.
“What is it?” Caitlyn looked back at the two of us. “Oh, holy shit!”
“Emily, the plan has changed. Take us to urgent care. We need to get her to a hospital right away.”
Emily looked through the rearview mirror trying to see what was going on with us in the back seat. “Why? What’s happened?”
“I think it’s a drug she took before the pre-drinking started.”
“What drug? What did she take?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me what it-”
I never finished my sentence. My entire body was thrown back. I was so busy making sure that Annette was alright that I never bothered to fasten my seat belt. My head smashed into the side window. I slammed into the driver’s seat in front of me, smashing my right shoulder to bits. Then my body went in the opposite direction, hitting the backseat and crushing my other shoulder. The top of my head hit the roof of the car. That was when I realized what had happened. Emily was looking back at Annette and not paying attention to the road. I wasn’t sure if she hit something or if someone hit her. Either way, it didn’t matter. The car rolled several times before coming to a stop. And when it did, it wasn’t because the car lost momentum. It was hit by another car on the opposite side of the motorway and ricocheted in the other direction.
I tried to force my head up to see what was going on. Emily, Caitlyn, and Annette all had their arms dangling over their heads as the car slid over the concrete, sending sparks flying everywhere. I was flat on my stomach, watching through the back window of the car as we went rushing in the opposite direction. I blinked twice and experienced everything as if it was all happening in slow motion. There was a huge concrete block ahead of us. The car was still moving at least sixty miles per hour. And when we hit that block, my head would go crashing into it.
I was going to die. The others were probably already dead. Only lucky for them, they probably didn’t have time to think about it like I did.
‘Mom, forgive me.’
Flaming red lights flickered just under my eyelashes. I could feel my lashes fluttering over my skin and making the space just under my eyes tickle. Something hot hit my skin. It was sparks.
Was the car still moving?
I shut my eyes and squeezed them, trying to ignore the burn from light invading my senses. When I tried opening them again, I could see with only a little more clarity. That was enough.
The sparks weren’t from the car sliding over the motorway anymore. They were from metal grinding against metal. An enormous and sharp rotary blade was invading the car, cutting it wide open.
It was rescue workers. They were breaking open the car to extract us from the demolished vehicle.
I tried rolling my head to the side. Nothing but agony greeted me. Both my shoulders were shattered. Blood dripped down the back of my neck from my head smashing into the window. I wasn’t even sure how I was conscious. All I knew was, I didn’t want to watch. I shut my eyes and let darkness enfold me inside its harsh embrace. I could still hear things going on. There was yelling, more flashing lights, impossibly loud sirens, then the feeling of being lifted up toward the sky and ascending into heaven. Or so I hoped. Something hard hit my back. It was a gurney.
My eyes flickered open. A haze of fog rolled over my vision. There was nothing but the silhouette of a woman with her hair pulled tight behind her head.
“I think she’s coming around,” the woman said in a thick Scottish accent. “Get her inside.”
I was lifted once more. Only this time I knew I wasn’t crossing over. I was being pushed into an ambulance. Something inside my gut ruptured. I could feel the slow tearing of my insides after the back of the gurney bumped against the front end of the ambulance. Blood came gushing out of my mouth like a geyser piercing through the earth and flooding everything in sight. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to choke on my own blood.
More darkness. More yelling. Then a chill. They cut away my clothes with sharp scissors. I was in nothing but my underwear. Were they assessing the damage? One of them lifted my eyelids and swept a flashlight over them. My eyelids fell once more. A sharp needle pierced through the skin on my right arm. A brace was placed over my head. There could only be one reason for that. They suspected a broken neck.
Was I paralyzed? Would I ever wake up again if I let the darkness take complete control over me?
>
“Stay with us!” A man shouted into my ear. “Stay awake! You have to stay awake.”
I hit my head so hard against the glass that even in my half-aware state I knew why he was telling me to fight off the urge to sleep. If the concussion was bad enough, I might never wake up.
A tear fell down my face. I felt the hot liquid plummet over the side of my head.
The ambulance took off into the distance. I didn’t know how long I was in there. I didn’t even realize I was moving when they carted me out and wheeled me into urgent care. The next thing I knew a woman placed a mask over my bloody face. I had to struggle to keep my eyes open when one of the doctors moved the overarching light directly over my head. There were several men and women in medical masks hanging over me with metal instruments in their hands, ready to stitch me back together. But the larger question remained. Would I even want to live after they were done? Did I want to be saved? Would I even be able to move my pinkie finger once I woke up?
“Get her under right now!” A man shouted. “She’s going fast.”
I no longer had to fight off impending sleep. It came naturally. Someone was pumping me full of anesthesia. I was going straight into emergency surgery.
4
What happened next felt like a dream. The sort of reality that feels real while it’s happening. It’s only after waking up that it becomes obvious that something was off. Only it didn’t take any extra effort for me to realize that what was happening was real. Excruciatingly, harshly, and viscerally real.
One second I was drifting into a drug-induced trance that swept me into an impossibly deep sleep as the surgeons wheeled me into the operating room. The next I was standing outside my body, watching them as they worked on my lifeless form. I could hear the beeping of the machines as they monitored my vitals. My heartbeat was slowing, my blood pressure was fading, and my skin went from deathly pale to a strange shade of gray. I was dying. And I had the awful privilege of watching it.
I inched closer and peeked over the lead surgeon’s shoulder. One of the monitors began screeching. He looked up at it. All I could see of his reflection on the metal stand holding his instruments was the way his brows lifted.
Shadow Mage: (Witchling Wars: Luxra Echelon, Book 1) Page 3