Page 145 of Death is Familiar

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

One glance at my body revealed, wires protruding from the neckline of my antiseptic blue hospital gown. No, no, no.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

No! I tore off the sheets, yanked off the wires. I needed out. I’d gotten out.

And now I was right back where I started. Connected to medical equipment and hallucinating Imaginary Todd, in the possession of the Seal.

I had to move. Get out. It was fluke enough that I’d regained consciousness at all. Madame had promised to keep me under if I caused trouble, and in the eyes of the Seal escaping was the greatest sort of trouble I could have concocted. She as sure as hell wouldn’t allow this slip-up to happen again.

This was my only chance, and I couldn’t afford to mess it up.

If I did, I was as good as gone. I’d never see Jack and the real Todd again. I’d never solve the vamp case. I’d never avenge Lawrence.

If I didn’t get out now, what I saw, heard, felt, didn’t matter. What I wanted didn’t matter. Because if I didn’t escape, these would be my last waking moments alive.

Grabbing a fistful of IV tubes, I was about to rip, when the raven-haired Imaginary Todd took hold of my wrists—sabotaging my last-ditch effort to escape.

“Let me go!” Not coalescing to my will, the phantom grip on my wrists tightened. “You’re not real!”

I was damaged. I knew that. I’d spent months underground in captivity imagining my best friend as he slowly became more real, for godssake, but having a figment of my imagination stymie my last chance for survival was not a twist I expected.

“You’re not real!”

He’d left at my request before, so why wasn’t it working now? My only remaining semi-rational thought was to headbutt Imaginary Todd out of existence. But before I could wind back, he released me.

Just like that.

“What did you just say?”

“I said…” Wait. Behind Imaginary Todd was a window. The rising sun crested over a smattering of rooftops. I wasn’t being kept underground, I had blankets, I— “Wait.” I studied the tower of a man in front of me. The thistles at the side of his neck. The thick brows, and the new bruising under his eyes, the result of too little sleep. “Wait, wait.”

He cocked a brow. There was no blurring or phasing in and out. The person before me was remarkably solid—confirmed with a tentative poke to his chest—which could only mean one thing.

“You really did it.” Relief I didn’t know I was capable of melted away the edges I so carefully sharpened. Warm toffee seeped out of my chest, flooding my arms, my legs, my throat, as I said the only words I knew how to say after the ordeal I managed to survive, “You… really grew your hair.”

“You are very fixated on that,” the very real, and definitely not imaginary, Todd replied.

“Because it’s different.”

“A lot is different.” His eyes didn’t move, but my urge to grab ahold of Todd and never let go made me acutely aware that there was a passenger-sized elephant in the room hiding under my hospital gown.

“It looks good.”

“You sure?” He smiled. “Because before you called me pretty.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Shut up.”

“Technically, I’m not talking.”

“Shut up,” I repeated, casually taking hold of the blanket I’d thrown, pulling it to cover my mid-section. “You are too.”

“Everything alright in here?” A woman in a white lab coat, followed by another woman in cat-print scrubs, entered the room. “Looks like Ms. Baker got disconnected from the, oh you’re up. How are you feeling, Ms. Baker?”