Page 9

Chapter 9

Caspian

I woke floating on a hazy silver cloud of . . .

Ow.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t as perfect as I’d first thought. My back hurt. Breathing was a sharp, stabbing pain. My arm ached.

The pain was mostly distant, like I was aware of it, but maybe someone else was feeling it, but . . . well, I’d been on enough drugs in my life to recognize that feeling for what it was. Morphine, probably.

I let my eyes open, as annoying as that was in a bright, loud hospital room. How did the machines beeping get louder because I opened my eyes? That didn’t seem right.

I’d woken in a hospital room more times than I cared to remember, so I was far too familiar with that. What I wasn’t so familiar with was . . . people. Frost, Ember, and Kit were all there in the room with me.

Kit looked to be asleep, but part of me doubted the man ever slept in his life. Frost was quiet, just sitting in the closest chair to me, one hand on my arm. Ember was . . . well, she was annoyed.

“You don’t think he’s going to get away with that, do you?” Her voice was hushed, like she was trying to keep her volume down, but I was a little worried for whoever “he” was, because she looked spitting mad.

“Ge’ ’way with what?” I asked, then cringed at how slurred my speech was.

Yep, morphine, almost certainly.

They turned to look at me. Well, Kit didn’t turn to look at me, but the other two did.

He was the one who actually spoke up, though, without so much as twitching an eyelid. “The man who was attempting to kill you. Ember is concerned that he’s going to get away with it because he’s claiming his car was out of control.”

Kill me?

It all came rushing back, how we had ended up in the hospital. Driving. The accident. Everything going black.

I hoped I hadn’t thrown up on Frost.

Come to think of it, I was a little tempted to throw up right then, my stomach roiling and queasy.

Kit sighed and finally moved, opening his eyes, sliding forward in his chair, grabbing a little silver dish, and holding it out to me in one sinuous movement.

It took a moment to get my body back under control, but after that, I felt much better. Odd, how that seemed to work. Throwing up was the worst, but somehow it helped, even when what was making you feel sick wasn’t in your stomach.

“Morphine,” I mumbled, shaking my head, trying to clear it and instead giving myself a stabbing pain with the motion. I accepted the water Frost was holding out, taking it with shaky hands, swishing and spitting out the first drink, then downing the rest like a man who’d just found his way out of the desert. “It always makes me sick.”

“Maybe you should stop taking it,” Kit suggested, the tone sharp and knowing, but in this case, he was actually wrong.

I shook my head, then had to hold very still for a moment when the movement made everything spin. “Not that. Hospital. Whenever . . . whenever I’m injured, I end up on morphine, and my body doesn’t like it too much. Dunno why the hospitals don’t stop giving it to me. Maybe they just don’t think the reaction is bad enough to worry about.”

Frost frowned at that, sliding even closer and taking my hand back up. “Just how often do you end up in the hospital?”

Suddenly they were all looking at me, concern in their eyes. Even Kit.

“Not . . . not that often. Just sometimes.”

Bullshit , Mella scoffed in my head. You’re the most often hurt human I’ve ever met .

I sighed and gave what I hoped was a casual shrug, but movement was hard, and calculated movement was even harder. “Okay, so maybe I’m a little clumsy. Or, or maybe I just end up in bad situations.” When they all continued staring, I went on. “A guy almost hit me with his car last year. I jumped out of the way, ended up with a broken ankle. Falling statue at an old temple site a few years back. Mugged a couple times. I just . . . shit happens.”

“How long has this been going on?” Kit asked, and he looked angry again. What, now it was my fault bad shit happened?

I looked between them all, but they just kept staring. “Always? Like I said, things just . . . things just happen.”

Frost’s mouth fell open, and he was pale. It somehow looked worse on him than it did on people with naturally pale skin. He looked positively ashen.

“You don’t have to worry,” I promised. “The people around me don’t usually get hurt. Though I suppose the guy who’s saying his car went out of control probably did?—”

Kit glared at me, somehow even more unimpressed than when he’d thought I was a morphine addict. “His car didn’t go out of control, Caspian. He and his accomplice in the car ahead of us were trying to cause an accident. You know that better than anyone, since you were driving. And since no one is after Ember, and hardly anyone even knew Frost and I were with you, it only stands to reason that you were the target.”

“If this isn’t an isolated incident, it proves his point,” Ember added. “Not only did someone try to kill you, but they’ve been trying to kill you for a while, and this attempt probably would have succeeded if Frost hadn’t been there. We might all be dead without him.”

I blinked, thinking back to the accident, and turned to look up into his silvery eyes. “You . . . you stopped time. I thought only the Moonstriker himself could do that.”

That brought the gorgeous flush back to Frost’s cheeks, and he looked away. “It’s not really stopping time. Not like Uncle Cove or Mother. I can stop time in a small area. It’s usually a smaller area than a whole car and all the people in it, but desperate times and all that.”

Kit snorted at that. “And you’re going to have the migraine from hell tonight to answer for it, I’m sure. But you saved all our lives, so well done little brother.”

Frost didn’t say anything, but he was clearly pleased with the praise. I couldn’t blame him, but even more importantly—“That’s incredible, Frost. Thank you. All of you. I’ve, um, never woken up in the hospital with people waiting on me before. It’s kind of nice.”

For some reason, the room went silent at that.

“Ember, why don’t you go take care of a new car to get us the rest of the way to Verisa?” Kit asked, his voice oddly taut. Somehow, his expression looked even more intense than he always did.

Ember . . . hells, Ember looked like she was about to literally explode, with the top of her head blasting upward and steam pouring out like a cartoon character. Her eyes were wide, the white showing all around, and her jaw was clenched so tight I was afraid her teeth were going to start cracking.

“That sounds like an excellent idea,” Frost agreed. “Do you need a card? If you’re worried about Mother finding out?—”

“I’ll handle it,” she said through clenched teeth, standing so forcefully that the chair under her shoved backward three feet. “And when we find Dane Sunrunner, if he’s alive, I’m going to kick his ass.”

And then she was gone.

I blinked after her in confusion. “Why is she mad at my father?”

“How many times have you woken up in a hospital, Caspian?” Kit asked, and oh shit, we were totally back to the scary assassin man he’d been when I met him. His tone was light, almost sweet, every line of his body casual and loose, and . . . his cold gray eyes promised murder.

For a moment, I tried to think back, but it all muddled together a bit in my head. It might be the concussion, or it might just be that accident prone as I was, I’d been in the hospital more times than I could count. I finally shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know? A . . . a few, I guess. Fifteen or . . . or twenty, maybe.”

Twenty-three since we met , Mella offered, rather unhelpfully, I thought.

Hush. I’m not telling them that. They already seem bothered .

Because they should be , she hissed back. I’m glad someone other than me finally is .

I couldn’t argue with her, because it was actually kind of nice. Being in the hospital always sucked, and having people there who cared about it was a nice change.

Kit nodded. “You want to know how many times I’ve been in the hospital? Me, the professional duelist?”

I glanced over at Frost, who was frowning, then back to Kit. “Um, maybe? Is it, like, a competition? Who’s gotten hurt the most?”

“Twice, Caspian. I’ve been in the hospital twice in my entire life. That’s probably low for being nearly thirty, but it’s a whole lot closer to normal than ‘gee I don’t know because it’s been so many times I’ve lost count.’ I swear, I know people with life-threatening chronic illnesses who’ve spent less time in the hospital than you.”

That seemed unlikely, but next to me, Frost was nodding, and that was . . . well, Frost wasn’t the sort of person who went on feelings. If he was agreeing, then what Kit was saying wasn’t speculation or exaggeration. It was a fact.

Somehow, that was both reassuring and gutting at the same time.

My friends—acquaintances, really—had always joked about how I was the most accident-prone person they knew, but it had been a joke. Lighthearted and fun, not a straight-out condemnation of . . .

Of what, though?

Of how many bad situations I got myself into?

It wasn’t that and I knew it, but even as I knew, my mind shied away from thinking about it.

We don’t have time for that anymore , Mella insisted. Things are happening now. The Gloombringer is dead. The Dawnchaser has been replaced. Your father is missing. Slate is acting up and we need to go calm him before he does something drastic.

Slate? You mean Mount Slate? Acting up? What ?—

I was distracted by a knock at the door. A police officer, looking nervous as hell. “Sir? I’m so sorry to bother you, but we have everyone else’s statements about what happened, and we need yours if you’re up to it.”

We’re going to talk about this later , I said to Mella, even as I smiled at the policewoman. “Of course, officer. I’d be happy to give you my statement.”

For the first time in my life, I gave in to the urge to blame something other than my own clumsiness for one of my “accidents.”

Because maybe it wasn’t about me being clumsy or accident-prone at all. Frost said this wasn’t normal, and he was Frost. He didn’t lie or exaggerate.

Plus, he sat there next to me and held my hand as I explained to the woman about the cars boxing us in, and then one of them swerving into us. She nodded, making notes and asking the obvious questions.

Not once did she ask if I was sure, or if maybe I was being hysterical and irrational.

“He’s insisting it was an accident, of course, but the car he was driving was stolen, and so was the one his accomplice was driving. We haven’t caught him yet, the one in the car in front of you, but it was stolen too. Plus the one we caught had a substantial deposit into his bank account yesterday that he can’t explain. He tried to say he borrowed it from a friend, but he can’t name the friend, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a whole lot of friends with numbered Dawnchaser bank accounts who can loan me ten grand.” She said it so conspiratorially that I couldn’t tell her I suspected I had quite a few friends with bank accounts just like that.

Well, again, acquaintances. I’d realized only here, in the hospital with the Moonstriker family looking after me, that maybe I’d never had real friends before in my life.

I wondered if they had numbered Dawnchaser bank accounts.

Kit did, for sure, if only the one Huxley Dawnchaser had used to pay him when he was working for the head of the Dawnchaser family. Probably not Frost, though. Somehow, I doubted Frost had a single dishonest bone in his whole body.

As though to prove that point, he squeezed my hand and smiled down at me. “It’s okay. Now that the police have at least one of them, they’ll be able to track down who’s been trying to kill you.”

“Who’s been trying?” the cop asked, sliding forward in her seat.

Suddenly I couldn’t meet her eye, but Frost sat there looking at me, expectant. When I just blinked at him, he reached out with his second hand, patting mine, holding it with both hands now. “It’s okay. I know it’s been happening a long time and you won’t remember all the details. Just start with the most recent thing before this one and tell her everything you remember.”

So . . . I did.

Fuck, this was gonna take a while.