I woke up at 1 PM, which I took as a sign that I really needed the fucking sleep.
I did also normally wake up at 1 PM when I wasn’t working, so it wasn’t the best sign, but I was gonna interpret it how I fucking liked.
The ghosts weren’t too mad about me oversleeping. I actually think they were sleeping too because when I woke up, they were all flopped about on the ground like sparkling piles of ethereal goop. Only Blair had been up before me.
“I wanna visit Noah,” she said, the moment she saw me.
“Well jeez, Blair, give me a minute to brush my teeth.” God, she’d barely known the kid a few hours. Technically she didn’t know him at all, she was just passingly aware that he existed. But she did feel responsible for his potential death, which was something I knew a lot about, so I humored her. “Give me half an hour to get my body into a form that somewhat resembles alive—” I cringed at my poor choice of words but kept going “—and then we can make our way to the hospital. Sound like a deal?”
“Can we get breakfast first?” Christopher asked, peeling himself from the floor.
“Does that even need to be asked?” I tossed him a grin. “This place is super fancy. I bet their breakfast is swanky as hell.”
“Please, just nothing crazy.” Joni pulled her head out of the couch she’d been curled up in. If I wasn’t much mistaken, her form was looking a bit better. A bit regenerated. They were all looking a little better, like they were reconstructing their bodies a bit. Not coming back to life, but less car crash victim, more minor injury victim. Like they fell down a staircase instead.
“All right. For you Joni, nothing crazy.” But I was excited to see what this place’s breakfast was like. If your average, run of the mill, motel spot had a semi decent free breakfast, this place was going to blow it out of the park.
–
After the most disappointing breakfast this side of the river, the four of us piled out of the hotel.
“I can’t believe they didn’t have waffles.” Blair looked almost as upset as she had sobbing over Noah’s body. “No waffles.”
“I just can’t believe they charged you for fresh fruit,” Christopher said. “Like, where the hell are we supposed to get our nutrients and all?”
“Technically the fruit was free.” Joni’s lips twisted in an angry smirk, something really only she could pull off. “It was a slicing fee.”
“Yeah, you just can’t, like, eat an unsliced pineapple. You should have magicked them, Sammi.” Christopher had been pissy about the pineapple the whole breakfast, as I’d munched on a box of coco crunch, ignoring their grumblings. Yes, I could have lied about it. But I didn’t want to start a whole fuss. I knew any second, someone was gonna realize that I wasn’t actually supposed to be there, find out I wasn’t actually a guest, and think I snuck in. I didn’t want to be mid convoluted-lie-about-pineapple only to have a bunch of people run in and start shouting at me about breaking in.
I just didn’t have the energy. Or I did but I was saving it. Cause I was about to hit up a hospital, and we were doing it better this time.
We were doing it right.
–
“And if they ask who you are to him?”
“His sister.”
“And if they say that’s not immediate enough family, you are?”
“His older sister, AKA, legal guardian.”
“And if they ask for ID?”
“I already showed it to you.”
Joni nodded as she paced in front of me in the single use, all gender restroom in the hospital lobby.
“Okay, one last time, what are you not going to say?”
I took a deep breath. You got this Sammi. “I am not a doctor, nurse, surgeon, or any other medical staff.” The last thing we needed was for someone to ask me to do a medical procedure or ask my opinion. Knowing how easily I panic, I’d probably try to oblige them.
Joni nodded. “Okay. Don’t get involved in any legal muckery either. If someone is like ‘oh yeah, I heard he was in the middle of a drug deal’ or some shit, you just let it happen. We can deal with potentially getting him out of legal shit once we know whether he’s even alive.”
My stomach did a flip flop at the tone of her voice, and I had to remind myself that, all this nonsense aside, there was a very good chance Noah was dead. Kid got a hole punched in his brain after all. I’m no doctor, but I think you need most of that.
I looked to Christopher to steady me. He gave me a steadying nod, and I took a steadying breath.
Okay. Steadied.
I cruised on out of the bathroom, my swanky clothes from the night before in almost pristine condition. I was gonna be the coolest big sister Noah ever had.
“Hi there. I’m wondering where I can find Noah Cesair?” I tossed the hospital receptionist a bright smile.
She smiled back. Off to a good start. “All right dearie, I can look him up. Do you know what department he’s in?”
I chewed my lip for a moment, thinking. ER? OR? Morgue? Could be any, and if I got it wrong, she’d never be able to find him. “Mmm, no.”
“Not a problem.” The older lady began typing spidery fingers on the keyboard. “And when was he admitted?”
My face perked up at this. I knew this one. “Last night,” I said, a confident smile on my face.
She nodded again. “So was this a scheduled visit or an ER admittance.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“ER I think,” I said, smile not faltering. “He got shot last night.”
Her smile immediately froze into a grimace. “Oh. Oh I’m so sorry. I–well I–yes, okay, please give me a moment.”
My smile was also frozen on my face, no matter how much I wanted to drop it. This was not how big sisters were supposed to react to their brothers being shot. But if I suddenly dropped my smile to a glum, somber expression, that would look weirder, right?
“Right, and are you direct family?” The woman’s lips had, very naturally, gone from cheery smile to alarmed grimace to concerned old granny in a very short period of time, while I still bared my most confident grin at her.
“Yes. I’m his sister.” I could hear Joni hiss ‘just a yes would have worked’ but I tuned her out. Every part of me wanted to say ‘my reaction is totally normal by the way’ just so I didn’t feel so weird, but I was going easy on the lies here. Just the necessary ones.
“All right. He’s in ICU room four. Just a moment.” She tapped a bit more at her computer before handing me a badge and a printed slip. “Just show them this.”
I nodded stiffly.
“Ask her if any of his other family members have shown,” Christopher said, as I started turning away. “That would be a real bummer to run into them while pretending to be his sister.”
Good point. “Did any of his–our–mine, uh, my family stop by yet to visit?” I asked, tripping over my words as elegantly as a waterfall.
The old woman looked back at me. “I don’t have any visitors registered for him. And this would be the first visiting hours he’s here for, so I think you’re the first one.”
Phew. “Okay good to know. Thank you.”
And I walked towards the elevator.
Christopher was celebrating on the way up. “That was sick, Sammi. You really sold it. Or, you didn’t, you looked wigging as fuck, but you didn’t blow it, which is literally just like selling it.”
“Okay, can we actually focus on the good news?” Joni asked.
I fidgeted with my airpods as the elevator loaded and gave the woman next to me a loaded glance. Something that I hoped said ‘oh boy, gotta take a phone call’.
“Yeah?” I asked. “What’s the good news? No one else is there? Cause I didn’t wanna try to sell that one.”
“You’d have to have pulled the whole, like, unfaithful parent thing.” Christopher shook his head. “Which would be an extra hard sell cause you don’t look anything like Noah.”
I had a brief flash of me waltzing into the ICU–5’9” made taller with my chunky boots, pale as the ghosts I chilled with, jet black hair cut in a banged fringe around my round face that everyone swore I pulled off–and trying to convince the parents of a kid with nut brown skin, fluffy brown hair, who barely crossed five feet, that we were related.
The mental image was funny. I could sell it with a few lies for sure, lies that would herald a soap opera’s worth of accusations and drama and probably tear the family apart in the process.
Then again, I might have destroyed the family already by getting their son shot.
Joni’s sigh dripped with exasperation. “ICU. Not morgue. Noah’s alive. We didn’t know that, remember? God.”
We stepped off the elevator and followed signs for ICU until we finally made our way to a very very hospitally looking section of the hospital. Like it was all hospitally looking but this part was like, doctor show levels. Patients hooked up to IVs, tons of tubes coming in and out of people, beeping and all manner of stuff.
Noah was in room four, which was thankfully very easy to find. Inside, we found that Noah did in fact, have a visitor. It just wasn’t one the receptionist would have noticed.
“Blair!” Joni shouted, loud enough for me to jump. “What the fuck are you doing up here?”
Christopher scowled. “Have you just been up here since…” He trailed off. “Shit you really dipped the second we got here, didn’t you?”
Blair smiled serenely. “I wanted to check in on him. You were taking a long time interrogating Sammi in the bathroom so I just hopped up here. Read through his charts. He’s stable but–” She squinted at the chart, as if willing the page to turn. “And that’s all I got. I need your fingers.”
“I don’t really know if we’re gonna like, get super involved in his medical stuff here,” I said. “I mean, he’s alive.” I chanced a glance at the bed. Noah was alive according to the beeping machines, but with his face wrapped up by enough gauze to make a mummy, I couldn’t tell much else about his condition. Not that I’d be able to if he was unwrapped. It was probably for the best that he wasn’t. “That’s what we came here to find out. We can go now, right?”
Blair pouted at this, but my heart was racing a lil uncomfortably in this ICU. Hospitals squicked me out. Too sterile and clean and filled with doctors always treating you like you were after something. At least, in my limited experience that’s how it seemed to play out.
“Look,” I said, teeth grit. “I can’t fix him. I don’t have healing powers. And if I want to get more powers, I need to level up, which means doing schemes, not wringing my hands over the comatose body of a guy I don’t know whose coma-ness is only slightly my fault.”
“Definitely more than slightly,” Joni said. “But she’s got a point otherwise. Noah’s best bet isn’t gonna be us hovering around, feeling bad about him.” She sounded a little flat on empathy here, which I kinda understood. We didn’t know this kid. I wasn’t gonna be able to see through every single person negatively impacted by my godly shenanigans. Blair, underneath her spoiled rave girl persona, was just a big softie.
“Girls are right, Blair.” Christopher tapped his forehead intellectually. “Only way he gets better is if the doctors fix him up or we level Sammi up.”
I scowled at the notion of ‘we level Sammi up.’ But Blair was coming round to the idea, so I didn’t object. Just kinda made a mental note to find a way to throw this back at Christopher if I ever managed to level myself up on my own merit.
“So what now?” Joni asked. “Gotta come up with a new scheme, right?”
Honestly, if you think about it, I was the one leveling them up.
“Well Sammi also kinda needs a real pad to settle down in,” Christopher said. “Like, stoner vibes aside, I don’t really think van life is the life for her.”
Besides, they were my familiars! Not the other way around. They weren’t using me for power, I was using them to pull off my schemes!
“Yeah fair, but that’s not a scheme. Or it is, but a low level thing.” Joni huffed a tendril of hair out of her face. “Self schemes and all.”
Christopher nodded, tapping his chin contemplatively. “Okay, so we work the Cara angle first. See if we can’t bust her out of whatever potential trouble she’s in. Breaking someone out of jail is like a scheme, right?”
“Wait, why do we care more about schemes than finding me a place to live?” I asked, snapping out of my internal grumbling.
“Cause schemes are the only way we can level up, duh?” Joni rolled her eyes. “You owe us, remember?”
“Okay, but like, I don’t have to just level you all up in the first week of being a God!” This was getting a bit out of hand. “Besides, I thought I owed you, like, a trip to the Grand Canyon. Not magical spells.”
Christopher shook his head. “That was before we learned you could give us spells. Now you’re gonna have to fork over both.”
I opened my mouth, all ready to contest the rapidly shifting terms of this whole God thing, when Blair finally stopped her sniffling long enough to fix me with wide, baleful eyes.
“Joni’s right. You do owe us. It’s your fault we’re dead after all.”
After a moment of gawking furiously, I snapped my jaw shut. “All right, fine. We poke the Cara thread, see if she’s in need of any help that’ll trigger a Source quest. If there is, then we chase down that whole fucking rabbit hole until I level up and someone gets more ghost shit. Then we’re finding me a place to live. Everyone okay with that?”
I was rewarded with various levels of smug satisfaction from the ghosts, before I wheeled on my heels and tromped out of the ICU, proverbial steam coming out of my ears.
Maybe I was the familiar after all.