I’d never been in the hospital before. I mean, I’d been in a hospital, but usually only when I was due for a vaccine. I’m not known for being the most coordinated person, but I’ve never broken a bone before and I don’t get sick often. When I do, it’s usually something that can be treated at home.

Most of what I know about hospitals comes from TV or movies. Like how when the main character suddenly finds themselves waking unexpectedly in a hospital room and immediately starts tearing out IVs and breathing tubes and whatnot until alarms start blaring and a whole host of doctors and nurses come flying into the room to sedate them.

But when I woke up in a hospital bed, I didn’t panic. I’m not really sure I would have been able to—there were so many drugs running through me that my body hardly felt like my own. It felt heavy, numb, and filled with a cloying heat that caused droplets of sweat to bead on my brow and pool in all of the most uncomfortable areas possible.

The light overhead was blinding. I winced as it tried to permeate my closed eyes. A whimper came unbidden from the back of my throat, alerting me to just how dry my mouth was, and how fat my tongue felt.

“Looks like someone’s awake,” said an all-too-cheery voice beside me.

I turned my head toward the voice as much as I could manage and squinted through the glaring lights of the room. Through the haze, I made out a pleasantly plump nurse in lavender scrubs sitting beside me in a large room, the edges of which were fuzzy beige blobs with little multicolor blobs moving around inside. I didn’t seem to be the only one in the room. Other beds were filled with other patients sleeping or chatting quietly with nurses sitting in attendance.

By the time I realized where I was, the nurse at my bedside had busied themselves with looking over a series of IVs stabbing into my arm and punching information into a tablet.

“How are you feeling, hon?” they asked.

I opened my mouth to respond, but all that came out was a croak. The nurse grabbed a cup of water with a straw from a small table beside the bed. I started to lift my hand, but before I could they were already pressing the straw to my lips. I accepted the drink with slow, awkward sips. Even at my sickest, no one had ever fed me from a cup like this.

The cool water washed down my throat—chilling and soothing and painful all at once.

“There you go, hon,” the nurse said with a warm smile. “How’s the pain?”

“Pain?” I rasped.

“In your arm.”

I looked down, confused. There was a cast on my left arm, which confused me even more. I’d never had a cast before. I’d never broken a bone before. Why was there a cast on my arm?

I was about to start begging the nurse for answers when I remembered: the fall, the snap, the pain…

The fire.

“My mom—” I began when a fit of coughing hacked my sentence to pieces.

“Easy now, hon. Easy,” the nurse soothed. “You’ve had some bad smoke inhalation and your throat may still be sore from the anesthetic. You just rest your voice while I check you over, okay?”

I licked my lips, tongue dry and rough over the cracked surface, and forced a nod. The nurse began their work, and I closed my eyes again.

***

Time felt…strange.

I wasn’t sure what was happening from one moment to the next, only that one moment I was one place, and the next moment I was somewhere else. It was like I was jumping between key points in time and skipping whatever lay between.

I wondered if this was what video game characters felt like when you kept loading one save file and then the next trying to find the one you left off on.

In one moment, I was in the recovery room and in the next I was in a small room next to a large window. The world around me blurred in and out of focus as I woke slowly, clawing my way toward consciousness with what little strength I had left.

The drugs and pain didn’t make it any easier. Whatever they were pumping into my veins certainly did its job of making me sleepy, but did little for the ache that had wormed it’s way into each of my joints, or my throat which had been scoured raw as someone had taken steel wool to it in an effort to remove a particularly stubborn stain.

Not so fun fact about redheads: our brains process pain a little differently, so many pain killers don’t work as well on us as on others (if at all).

Warm sunlight penetrated the glass, alighting on my skin, hair, and blankets like a mother’s kiss. Reflexively, I began to inhale and open myself up to the healing light, but the rush of air through my chaffed esophagus caused my lungs and throat to seize and sent me into a fit of painful coughing. It lasted for what felt like eons, every time I thought it was done, another fit would wrack my body, forcing it to curl into an awkward ball.

When at last the coughing stopped, I lay curled up with the blankets up around my shoulders despite the sweat beading on my forehead. My heart was hammering, begging for oxygen, but I forced myself to take slow, shallow breaths to avoid another coughing fit.

Honestly, it was a miracle I hadn’t thrown up in all that time.

I moved to wipe my brow, and that was when I noticed the cast.

Thick plaster covered my right arm from knuckles to elbow. Inside, my arm was a bloated, red thing I hardly recognized, swollen as it recovered from whatever surgery I’d undergone. It made the cast fit snugly, and even a bit painful.

I shut my eyes against the soreness in my arm, my throat, my chest, and tried to focus on my breathing. Slow, shallow breaths in…and out…

As my heart found its way back to an ordinary rhythm, memories flashed through my mind—the magic that raced through my blood before grandma hid me away in her closet, and the dream of Mary and her Grimoire.

The Grimoire that was now in my head.

Grandma put it there to hide it from whoever came to the house, I supposed. Whatever secret the Grimoire had—or, has?—must be a doozy. But Mary wasn’t exactly forthcoming with what it is, so…what is it?

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

My thoughts were sluggish as I tried to puzzle out the meaning of it all. All I succeeded in doing was making myself tired. Well, more tired.

Distantly, as if it were being shouted to me from across a gapping chasm, it occurred to me that none of what had happened in my dream—memory?—about Mary had frightened me. And I should be frightened. Shouldn’t I? Or, at least angry? Worried?

The medicine is making me numb, I decided, and resisted the urge to rip the tube from my arm like in the movies. To be honest, though, I wasn’t sure I could have done it even if I wasn’t resisting that urge. I knew I needed to get up, to get moving, to find my mom and grandma, and start answering the myriad questions I had about what the heck had just happened. But it was a herculean feat just to stay awake. The sunlight was so warm, soothing its way across my skin, making my limbs feel heavy and sluggish.

Maybe just a quick nap…

***

Something tickled its way across my cast, sending gentle vibrations through the plaster that made it feel like a colony of ants had taken up residence in the cracks between my bones. I felt a groan leave me and tried to shift my arm, but it was useless. Whatever was messing with my cast was also holding it in place.

“Gerroff,” I slurred through a haze of sleep. My mouth felt as if it had been filled with cotton balls that had been set near some very smelly garbage. I ran a dry tongue over my dryer palate and lips. My mouth twisted into a grimace as a flavor I can only describe as YUCK crawled over my tongue some kind of furry mold.

“Well, well, well,” came a dulcet voice, “look who finally woke up.”

Blearily, I opened my eyes. The room was dark now, the only light coming from the fluorescent overhead LEDs—the kind that somehow seemed made specifically to give people headaches and for no other reason. Leaning over me, phoenix eyes pinched from a crooked grin, was Ben.

“Hey,” I croaked, voice still raw.

“Hey back,” he said. He leaned back a bit and capped a black Sharpie, then asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Like I fell out of a two story burning building.”

He snorted a laugh through his nose. I tried to do the same, but it only resulted in another of those coughing fits. Ben pat my back with the flat of his palm, chiding, “Dumbass,” under his breath. When the coughing finally stopped and I was able to breathe again, he handed me a cup of cool water from the side of my hospital bed. I slurped it up through a straw, the icy water burning its way down my throat.

“Okay, real talk,” Ben said, his tone leaving no room for levity. “How are you feeling?”

I licked my lips, taking my time to respond. How did I feel? How in the world was I supposed to put what seemed like an impossible experience into words? I worried at my chapped bottom lip with my teeth, but that didn’t help me come up with a response either. Eventually, I settled on, “Tired. Scared. Have you heard anything about my mom? My grandma?”

It was Ben’s turn to worry at his lower lip. His brows creased as he considered how to tell me whatever he needed to say. Anxiety skulked up from my gut and sat heavily on my chest—as if it wasn’t already hard enough for me to breathe. His hesitation couldn’t have lasted more than a second, but in that time an eternity of worry wound its way through my guts, turning them as cold as the ice water on my bedside. Did they not make it out? Or could their injuries have been so bad that they succumbed to them in the hospital while I slept—while I slept instead of doing something?

I opened my mouth to plead with him, to tell me what happened and put me out of the misery of guesswork, but I needn’t have bothered.

“You mom is in the ER,” Ben explained slowly, as if choosing his words carefully. “I don’t know much about her condition because the doctors and nurses would only tell me so much. I even put the ol’ Ben Hoang charm on them, and got nothing! It sounds like she’ll be okay, but they’re waiting to talk to you about it all directly, I think.”

The hand that had been clenching my heart loosened its grip a fraction. Mom was alive. She was hurt, maybe badly, but she was alive. She’d made it out of the house.

“Grandma?” I asked, voice already growing sore from use. Ben hesitated again, filling the silence by taking my uninjured hand in his. He met my eyes mirthlessly, soberly. Anxiety began to give way to panic, the emotion thundering through my veins. I could feel my pulse in my throat. My lungs didn’t want to expand. I was breathless. Paralyzed.

O Gods, O Gods—

“No one seems to know,” he finally said, voice coming out in an infuriatingly calm. “I haven’t heard of them finding anyone else—no…no body or anything.” He said ‘body’ like it left a bad taste in his mouth. “I mean, they’re still looking,” he added quickly, “but they just haven’t been able to find her. Yet.”

Missing. Hazel Perkins was missing.

But how? If she’d made it out of the house, then she’d have come to the hospital. She’d be with mom or me. If she hadn’t—No. I turned away from the thought before it could finish forming in my mind. I couldn’t consider that possibility any further than I already had. They would have found her by now. They would have had to have found her by now.

Those people…the ones who broke in…could they have taken her? Are they the ones who started the fire?

I hadn’t seen their faces. Even if I had the chance to speak with the police, there was nothing I could give them to go off of. Three people wearing black? That could be anyone.

Memories flashed through my head, fragmented and sharp. Ancestors who had been attacked by people just like the ones I saw, some in suits like they were the MIB, others dressed like plague doctors, or other likewise ridiculous costumes. With the memories comes a name—a knowing.

Witch Hunters.

A very real, very primal fear prickles across my scalp. The hairs all over my body stand on end with the alertness of all prey when faced with their main predator—the thing that could spell their demise in an instant.

But the sensation is snapped short like the breaking of a bough in a windstorm. The recall feels like being struck by lightning and pain sears into the hollows of my eyes. I wince and reach up to pinch my brow with my wounded hand on reflex—which did nothing to help the pain I was in, of course. Before my fingers could make contact, I caught sight of a doddle marking the otherwise white plaster—a little cartoonish cat face with a wide kitty grin and a little pointed hat. I can’t help the little smile that flits across my lips. The drawing is cute, and so very much like Ben that I can’t help it. Even in the midst of what feels like the weirdest and absolutely worst day of my life, he somehow manages to find a way to make me smile—to make me feel sane and whole and cared for.

He catches my expression, and another crooked grin slides into place on his face. “If you like that, you’ll love this,” he says and reaches for something on the floor. He comes up holding an open back pack and holds it up so the maw of the bag is facing me. Out of the bag pops furry, little black head with two very large very yellow eyes.

“Kismet!” I cry, voice cracking with emotion as much as disuse.

The sleek black cat leaps from the bag and into my outstretched arms, curling into my neck and nuzzling. I stroke her dark fur and hug her close, not even bother to fight back tears.

Kismet, our obligatory witches’ black cat, was okay.

In truth, I hadn’t thought to worry about her. Kismet is an indoor/outdoor cat and likes to hunt at odd hours. All this time, I’d assumed she’d been off doing her little cat things while the hunters had broken in, and, naturally, she stayed away during the fire and everything that came after.

Even so; even without having feared for her all this time, seeing her safe and sound, being able to hold her next to me like this fills me with such relief that it’s like I can suddenly breathe normally again—I can’t, but you get what I mean.

“Where did you find her?” I practically blubber.

“She found me,” Ben says, scratching Kismet behind one ear. “After you were admitted there wasn’t a whole lot I could do. They sent me home, and I figured I could try to sneak into your place while no one was looking and grab some of your things, but there were too many firefighters and cops. Anyway, while I was looking for an opening, I heard her basically yelling at me and I looked down to see her ready to climb up my pant leg. I figured, even if I couldn’t bring you any of your books or a picture, I could bring you your cat.”

Gratitude swelled in my chest. Gods, I don’t know what I did to deserve a friend like Ben, but I sure am glad I did it. I reach out with my good hand and squeeze the one he isn’t using to pet Kismet.

“You’re a good guy, Ben Hoang,” I tell him in my croaky little rabbit voice. Normally, Ben would scrunch up his nose at a comment like that and maybe mess up my hair. Instead, he just smiles a soft kind of smile and says, “Don’t go spreading that around, okay? I have a reputation to uphold.”