He took it and slowly sipped. “What happened?”

I took the cup back when he finished. “You don’t remember?”

“I remember . . .” His brow furrowed, wincing with the movement. “I remember Mickey getting in the car and . . . nothing. That’s all.”

“The pizza sauce, you remember. A bad-ass tossing our car around like a Frisbee, that you forget.” I slid down in the chair a few inches and rubbed tired eyes. “Oshossi. He picked up the car and flipped it. You were thrown out through the back window. I still had my seat belt on. He shot at us with a bow that could’ve taken down a rhino, and I shot him with my BB gun.” It may as well have been for all the good it did. “Hit him at least five times, and he strolled off into the storm like nothing had happened.”

“Then?”

The word prompted me into realizing I’d gone silent. “Then? Oh. You were . . . hurt.” I rubbed my eyes harder. “You were thrown through the back window. Someone heard the crash and called the cops and an ambulance. I barely had time to get rid of our weapons. I don’t know what the hell the cops made of the giant goddamn arrow shish-kebabbing the car.”

Bracing himself on the rails, he sat up a little farther. I could see him taking stock. “Just my head, then.”

“Trust me, it was enough.” Enough blood, enough worry, enough of the whole damn ball of wax. I looked away at the window. More snow. The city was down for the count . . . buried. “But you’re okay now,” I said. It sounded kind of belligerent, maybe, but there you go. I resolutely kept my eyes off him and on the window. “And I’m not holding your hand in some sort of made-for-TV brotherly death-scene crap, all right? So stay okay. Don’t die.”

The sheets rustled again. “I won’t,” came the grave assurance, as if it were a perfectly reasonable request, and, hell, it was.

This time I looked at him. “Promise, you bastard?”

“I promise.”

“Good.” I picked up the remote and started clicking through the channels again. “Glad that’s settled. Can I have your Jell-O?”

There was no Jell-O. Only clear liquids and painkillers for the concussion victim. Nik passed on the meds, although by the lines bracketing his mouth, he could’ve used them. I’d given up on TV and had gone back to the tried-and-true elbows on my knees, hands on back of neck. I kept the rocking in my mind and almost dozed off in that position. The adrenaline of the past five hours had sucked me dry, and trying to keep from a total sensory meltdown in this place wasn’t helping either.

“Cal.”

I blinked. “What?” I ran back his words in my mind that I’d only half heard in my fog. Promise. He’d asked about Promise. “Yeah. I called her. Told her you were okay. She and Cherish can’t get here until tomorrow. The city’s shut down.” Although a vampire could probably walk the miles and miles through the flying wall of snow. I’d managed to convince her not to give it a try. “Maybe you should call her. She’s worried.” I patted my scrub top for a few seconds before I realized I wasn’t wearing my jacket. Reaching down, I picked it up off the floor and pulled my cell phone out of the pocket to hand to him.

He took it. “I will, but I want you to go lie down. I’m safe now. I have this watch.”

Concussed, but he had this watch. And truthfully, concussed or not, he probably had a better handle on it now than I did. “You’re okay?” I persisted. “Because you . . .” Because he hadn’t been. He’d bled like a stuck pig and had been barely responsive. He hadn’t known who I was. Was asking for a fourteen-year-old version of me. He hadn’t been okay at all. “You’re all right?”

“Cal.” He pointed at the empty other bed. “One hour and I’ll wake you. Go.”

I gave in. Nik was Nik again, and he knew what he was capable of. I got out of the chair, took off my sneakers, and climbed onto the other bed on top of the blanket and sheets. God help me if I messed up Nurse Panties in a Bunch’s clean bed. My head hit the pillow, and the sharp smell of industrial-strength bleach sent a spike of pain like an ice pick through my brain. I didn’t mind. The pain faded, and all I could still smell was bleach. No death or rot or creeping decay. It was such an utter relief that I slept instantly and slept hard, dreaming of sheets hung out to dry in the sun, of a thousand hungry rats tearing them down, of a living statue with blazing gold eyes, and of red snow.

It was everywhere. Bloody flakes falling from the sky. Piling so high you could drown in it.

And I dreamed of being watched. Of someone standing beside the bed, looking down at me. Someone who didn’t belong.

I might sleep hard and it might take me a while to get up to full speed in the morning, but if the situation calls for it, I can wake up instantly and razor sharp. In this case all it took was the shuffle of a rubber sole. I was awake, across the room, and in the chair just as the Nurse Bitch on Wheels walked in the room. She did have a real name printed nice and neat on her name tag. I’d read it and forgotten it instantly. It hadn’t said Satan’s Bedpan Pusher of Despair, so it was wrong anyway. No point in committing it to memory.

She eyed the slightly wrinkled empty bed, narrowed that gaze at me, but checked Niko’s vitals without comment and told him he might be discharged tomorrow. Maybe. If he stayed alert, there were no setbacks, the follow-up CT scan was good, the neuro doc agreed, and the planets all fell into alignment . . . it could happen.

When she left, Niko looked at me. “Exactly how shut-down are the roads?”

I checked the window again and shook my head. “Unless we can rent skis in the gift shop, it’s not happening.”

He studied me, weighing the pros and cons. I had to look like shit; I knew that. There’s only so much overload you can handle before you shut down, but I wasn’t leaving Nik alone either. No way, no how. “All right,” he said. “Take us back to Rafferty’s.” He didn’t want to ask, I knew. Hated it, in fact, to have me do what he’d rather I never did again. Didn’t want to put me in that situation, but he also knew the situation I was in now wasn’t much better.

I could’ve stood and went to the small closet to get the clear plastic bag that held his clothes, shoes, phone, and wallet. Could’ve scooped up my jacket from the floor, cradling it and the bag under one arm and placing a hand on Niko’s shoulder. I could’ve taken us out of here in a heartbeat.

I didn’t.

I sat, unmoving, in the chair. The hell with my situation. He was in one of his own. “Yeah, right. Traveling when you’re perfectly healthy has Robin puking and you five shades of green. It used to have blood coming out of me like a faucet. We’re not risking it with you having practically cracked your skull open. We wait for the doctor and the scan. By then the roads will be clear and your brain won’t be oozing out your ears from me dragging you through a gate. Hell, that’s probably on your discharge instructions. No traveling through rips in space for at least a week. The hospital cannot be held responsible for unnatural horrors of the supernatural world.” I saw the pain pills in a small paper cup on the table beside him. “So take your pills, and in the morning we’ll be out of here.”

In the end, after a lot of squabbling—that would be bitching on my side and calm, forceful logic on his—we compromised. He took one of the pills and I took the pillowcase from the next bed, wadded it into a ball and took a deep whiff whenever the other smells, smells straight out of a slaughterhouse, got to be too much. Niko finally slept after making sure I was hanging in there, and I think I ended up slightly buzzed from the bleach.

It definitely kept me awake and alert, which was good because when Niko woke up at about seven a.m., he wanted every detail I could dredge up about Oshossi and the battle. Other than almost killing my brother, I hadn’t been concentrating on those little personal details that make monsters so gosh-darn interesting. Like acid spitting, leeches for intestines, liquefying your internal organs and drinking them like Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup—fun stuff like that. When it came to Oshossi, I’d been preoccupied with my brother sprawled and bleeding in the snow, so I didn’t pick up much new from what I’d noticed at the car lot.