Emblems

Chapter 28: Change

Chapter 28: Change

"HERE," FELIX SAID. "AS YOU can see, she's in bad shape." Behind the glass window of the med bay there was a team of medics working on a prone form on a bed. One of them had flames running up and down his arms and as he touched her flesh they sunk into her skin. But all of a sudden those flames were sputtering out, and the medic swayed and tipped forward, he would’ve hit his forehead on the edge of the bed had another medic not caught him. He was carried away and placed on another bed with almost terrifying efficiency. “Another one succumbing to lack of magic,” Leone murmured worriedly.

“Some of them are pushing themselves too hard,” Felix agreed. “Not much we can say about it though.” He turned back to him and Calida. “I repeat, we’re doing our best. But the first diagnosis when we got her back here was that she has a severe concussion. It’ll take her at least a week to recover from that, and that’s not even including the other damage it might’ve done. She might have a case of amnesia, or her coordination might be affected permanently. But we won’t know till she wakes up.” They nodded.

Calida cast a look at Amber’s supine form. There was a look in her eyes that he couldn’t read. Maybe Nicholas’s disappearance had sobered her up enough not to say anything about how she had it coming. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’m going to go back to training. Tell me when she wakes up, okay?” She looked to him and he nodded.

Felix also went away, and just before Leone left she laid a hand on his shoulder, drawing him in and giving him a hug. It was warm, and he felt a little better after that. “There’s a chair next to the door,” she told him softly. “You can use it when they’re done with her.”

There was a clock on the wall at the far end of the room and he watched the minutes tick by till he lost count of how long he’d been there after the medics pronounced her stable. She had an IV drip in her arm, but apart from that there was no heart monitor, or any beeping machines. They didn’t need that kind of technology here. All they needed was skill and magic, and the latter was getting harder and harder to get now.

She looked okay, to him, that is. He’d seen too many things (a kid trying to stop his own guts from spilling out of a gash in his abdomen) in the Camp med bay that not much could shake him. The medics had done the best they could without passing out like the guy they’d seen, but her bruises hadn’t been fully healed, just faded out a little. He wanted to reach out and touch her hand, maybe wake her up, but his own hands were simply met with bandages, the tips of her fingers just poking out, nails chipped and the skin broken. There were bandages all over her head too – so many that he itched to take them off and see how bad the damage was. A slash stretching from her right ear to her chin had cut deep – the wound had required stitches, and he thought it would leave a scar.

Time passed and when her fingers twitched he was almost half-asleep. Daniel shot up, eyes wide, catching the up and down movement of her chest quicken and then her eyeslids fluttered open. “What happened to me?” was the first thing she asked, in a voice as rough as sandpaper.

He got up, cramped limbs creaking, and helped her sit up, supporting her shoulders and stuffing pillows behind her. Then he poured a glass of water for her from the jug on the bedside table. “I don’t know,” he replied as he passed the water to her. The glass shook slightly in her grip, till she stared at her hands and seemingly forced them to stop trembling. She took a sip, grey eyes trained on him. “Our best guess is that you got attacked by a literal horde of Demons. Then you changed into a Demon yourself and fought them all off. The medics were saying that you shouldn’t have survived. Somehow you did, but I think at least three of your ribs are cracked, and that’s only one part of your body.”