The cool sound of beeping monitors echoed against white drywalls. These belonged to both Hawk and, horrifyingly, the Shadow, who lay unconsious in the bed beside hers. The monitors stringing off from his body were more plentiful, and reminded Hawk unpleasantly of the multitude of tenticled eyes in his alternate form. But he was mostly human now, his hands, feet, eyes and hair notwithstanding. He’d been stripped down to the skin, his borrowed robes and chain-mail garment long gone.

  Distressed, Hawk tried to get out of bed…and failed. The agony that shot up her side left her panting in the medical bed. She decided to try again. She eventually wound up sitting up, legs over the side, but the effort left her gasping for breath. Funny, she thought. In the movies they always just shrug this off.

  And then, to her horror, a voice echoed through the room. A voice that, prior to this very second, she thought she would have ignored. It was the worst possible voice that one could hear in this situation.

  “Haven Centered West, you get back in that bed this instant.”

  It was her mother.

  “Mom,” She began, and looked up hopelessly as the woman herself, April Rayne, popped out of a guest chair as if she’d been sleeping in it. Evidence suggested she had been; there was the big, fluffy blanket she never traveled without. There was the elaborate bag that held the Hobby of the Day, which looked suspiciously like quilting. Oh, God, she was going on a quilting kick again? They’d only just gotten rid of the last batch of fabric. And then Hawk was embraced, and April sobbed on her daughter’s shoulder, even as she pushed, ever so gently, for her child to lay back down.

  “Mom. What are you doing here?” She croaked. Her throat was dry.

  “Oh, Darling. Let me help you,” she said. She began pouring water into a small cup. “You know the military called me, as soon as you were down. Something about broken ribs and a possible concussion, and how Alex was out of commission too—hurt worse than you, they implied—and they needed someone for next-of-kin.”

  And Alex and I both put you down because, flake or not, you’d always show up. Hawk smothered her next groan. It wasn’t that she disliked her mother. It was the chaos that hung around her, that would go off like cosmic popcorn if she weren’t watched constantly.

  “So they called you and you came?” She managed.

  “Baby, of course I did. You’re my little girl, no matter what. I know we don’t talk as often as we could…and that I keep sending you things you don’t want, and don’t you lie to me, Haven West. I know you better than you think I do. But my universe is better with you in it, even if you’re not in it with me.” A pause. “Not that you’re not with me. I’m just saying if we were estranged.”

  The babbling was starting to make sense. “You’ve been talking to Baylor again,” she groaned. Every so often Alex’s dad and her mom seemed to find each other and then all hell would break loose, personally speaking. Baylor might be Alex’s daddy, but he was very much Not Good.

  “Well…he was a bit worried. He hadn’t heard from Alex in a week, and it’s not like him to miss the call.”

  What? “Alex and Baylor have been talking?”

  “Once I week is what I gathered. Apparently he found Jesus in jail,” a roll of her eyes, for all that she’d named Hawk during April’s own bout with religious fever. “And it seems to have stuck. So he called me to check in and…well, I tried checking in with you and I never got an answer. And then your house burned down.” She said this last as lightly and gleeful as one would say, you got a new car. “Baylor’s been calling me daily to see if I’ve found out anything. I told him I wouldn’t be able to say when I did get word, because you don’t like it when he and I get to talking, and we both understand that. He’s not a good man. But he seems to really want to be one, this time. Either that, or he’s trying to get my pension again. But yes, they’ve been talking. And he knew something terrible had happened, didn’t he? Because he was right. Here you are in the middle of ruined Boston, in a hospital room, and I bet you didn’t even think to call.” She allowed Hawk one guilt stricken groan. “But it’s alright. You’ve got the world on your shoulders. That’s what the soldier told me, that Captain Spectre. He’s handsome, Hawk. If I robbed the cradle…”

  “They said I’ve got the world on my shoulders,” she redirected with desperation.

  “Well, you do, from what they told me. So I’m not here to cry about how you never call.” A pause. “That Mattias man is probably more my type. Such a yummy dish to be hiding under all that fabric.”

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The prone man on the bed made a sound that was suspiciously like laughter. Hawk tossed him a glare. How long have you been awake, listening to me flounder, you absolute son of a bitch. A pause. That bitch being Baylor West. Which maybe the man didn’t deserve quite so much, if he’d been respecting boundaries. April was right, either he was trying to run a new con…or he’d changed.

  I won’t hold my breath, she thought. “Mom, do you think you can give me and…” she trailed off. She didn’t want to call the Shadow “Alex”. It’d be like trying to cram him into a shoebox or a too-small sweater. But explaining who and what he was, now, to April…god, did she even have the time for that?

  “I can leave for a little bit. Ta-ta, Alex. I’ll talk to you later.” And with a wave and a gathering of stuff—a wave in itself; a tsunami of trinkets—April Rayne breezed out the door, back to a world where Glass Energy didn’t exist, and her own freedom and safety were forever assumed. If there was a poster child for white privilege, April Rayne would probably deny herself the honor gently, because surely they’d rather have some young thing waiting in the wings for her chance.

  “That is a formidable woman,” The Shadow whispered, and attempted to roll onto his side. Only he winced, and a small trail of white fluid leaked from the corner of his mouth. “Oh, dear.”

  “Hold still,” she said, and slid out of her own bed. The pain that fired in her ribs could be ignored, she thought. Just as long as she had someone else’s agony to focus on. “You shouldn’t try to move.”

  “I should just lie here and be grateful I’m alive?” He coughed. “Grateful that I’ve lost another part of myself…oh, don’t look guilty. I give that freely. But my Orb was very nearly shattered, and very quickly after I faced Argon. He knows how to kill me, same as I do him. And he isn’t trying to pull his punches this time.”

  “You killed his brother,” she said.

  “No. You did. And that rumor is starting to spread. Illyris knows it, and she speaks it to every soldier in her coterie, and now it is infecting Argon’s ranks. That a God was killed…by a mortal girl.” His smile and his very sharp teeth—was it just her, or did they look a bit sharper?—did war with each other, a martial delight. Then, slowly, that expression died. “She loves your Alex, you know.”

  Hawk, who knew her mother very well, said, “Yes. She does.”

  The Shadow watched her for a moment, and she tried to think of something else to say. Something life-affirming and thrilling that would make him glad to live. She could come up with nothing. She was wrung out. And then he seemed to have made a choice, because he again began trying to sit up.

  “No,” Hawk said, softly, and gave him a soft push back towards the pillows. Oh, he felt like steel in that moment. He met her eyes solidly, smirked a bit, and allowed himself to be pressed back against the pillows.

  “Can you find what is left of my belongings? I left the robes and mail on the battlefield, but there is something I have been careful not to leave behind.”

  She glanced around, and saw her own things piled on a small table between the lines of unused hospital beds. That was enough for her to go by. She found the Shadow’s own bedside table and began rummaging through it. There was, of course, a Bible in a drawer, which she set to the side with some respect—she might not believe in it, but she could respect the ones who did—and got to rummaging.

  The first thing she found was a single, slender golden ring with the words responsible forever engraved inside the band. Her gut dropped. That was Alex’s wedding ring. Her own had the same words engraved, part of their favorite line from The Little Prince, “You are responsible forever for what you tame.” They had tamed each other, she thought. They had taken the bounds of her skepticism and love for her mother, the wild chaos of Alex’s upbringing, and together they had worn down the rough edges and made a place for their lives to exist, one hand inside the other. She turned to the Shadow with a look of amazement. “You kept the ring?”

  “So it was important. I always thought so.” His eyes shimmered with tears. “But that’s not it. It should be a small bottle, sealed with metal. A vial.”

  She turned back to the drawer and spotted it immediately. She’d dismissed it at first as some sort of misplaced medical waste. But it was a medical vial and it was still sealed tightly. It had a bar-code on it, and a great deal of tiny print. But three words stood out plainly. One of those words was Mentaphen, the usual prescription scrabble-tile name. But the other words written down low on the bottle seemed to loom bigger than any commercial-ready branding.

  The vial read, Alisdair West.

  She turned to him with a frown. She’d never seen that bottle before. Alex hadn’t been on any medications that she’d been aware of. “What’s this?” She said, and held it up to the light.

  He stared at her, disbelieving, for a long time. “You don’t know?” He said.

  She shook her head, dropping the tiny vial into the palm of her hand. “No. Alex wasn’t on anything that I’m aware of…and I’d know about Mentaphen. I’d have googled it for him.” She paused. “That’s a tool we use to look up—”

  “Alex did not have that. Kaiser Willheim gave it to me.”

  She began to feel cold. “He gave this to you?”

  “When I rescued him from Kali’Mar. He said it was his gift for saving his life. That you had known about it from the beginning and were just waiting for a chance for you or him to use it on me. He said I would know what that substance did, very, very soon. That I needed to watch Henry Dyson for my answer.”

  She was ice. She was artic. “What? Shadow, what did he give you?” Her hand had clenched tight around the bottle now.

  “Mentaphen is apparently what he gave to Mattias to fill him up with Henry Dyson. Apparently, that thing in your hand is all that is left of your precious Alex West.”