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Chapter 11

Cash

“Stop looking at me like that,” I snapped at Finn and his sad eyes. I couldn’t take this. The waiting.

The not knowing. He may have been an absentee asshole most of my life, but that didn’t change the fact that he was my dad. And he was somewhere in this hospital, alive, dead, dying, afraid. I didn’t know. I shoved my fingers into my hair and pulled at the long spikes until my scalp throbbed. I tapped my foot to keep from kicking something. Destroying something.

“I just…” Finn averted his gaze to the scuffed linoleum floor and watched a nurse’s shoes scurry by.

I didn’t really see the nurse. I was too busy watching the rotten little shadow demon that had followed me here. It crawled in creepy little circles around me, filling up my nostrils with its disgusting scent. I finally managed to break my attention away from it to realize Finn hadn’t finished.

“You just what?”

“I don’t want you to get your hopes up.” Hesitantly, he met my gaze. “She was there for—”

“For me. She was there for me,” I said. “You said it yourself.”

Finn watched an old man on a stretcher roll by. Eerily silent. Dead white. A shadow hovered at the foot of his bed, waiting. So…they didn’t spend all their time harassing just me, then.

Finn kept staring even after he’d been pushed out of sight. “I was wrong.”

“Stop saying that!”

Emma and her mom rushed down the hall toward us and I jerked my hands out of my hair and bit my tongue. My dad was not dead. He wasn’t. He couldn’t be. I’d seen the man win impossible cases.

Survive the hell my mom had left him in for eleven years. Dad was built from steel. It was going to take more than a freaking heart attack to bring him down. And he wouldn’t leave me alone. Not like this.

“Cash?” Emma touched my shoulder and I shook my head, realizing from everyone’s worried expressions that they’d probably said my name more than once.

“He’s gonna be fine, Em,” I said, feeling my voice catch around the uncertain fine that fell out of my mouth.

Emma looked at Finn then back to me, nodding. “Right. He’s going to be fine.”

My gaze drifted down to the shadow circling Emma’s ankles. Flicking its dripping tongue out to get a taste of the denim that covered her calf. Without even thinking, I shoved her away and knelt down in front of it. Noah had grabbed one. If we were so much alike, wouldn’t I be able to do the same? And right now, choking one of these little bastards sounded too damn good to pass up. I flexed my fingers, watching it rise up within an inch of my hand, then reached out to grab it. Pain exploded across my hand like I’d dipped it into a flame and the shadow demon passed through my hand like smoke.

“Mother fu—” I stood up, wiping my burning hand on my jeans, and stomped on the thing. I stomped until I couldn’t breathe. Until I was sure I’d smashed it to bits tiny enough to be blown away by the sickly sweet smell coming through the hospital vents. I stomped until two hands wrapped around my shoulders and jerked me back.

I looked up at Emma, breathing hard, and realized Finn had two fistfuls of my T-shirt. Everyone was silent, looking at me like I was that crazy guy who stood on the corner of Fifth and Elm and threw sticks at people’s cars.

“There was…” I stared down at the floor where the shadow should have been. Nothing. Just some off-white waiting room tile with a questionable stain.

“Mr. Cooper?” a hesitant voice said from behind me. Finn squeezed my shoulders once and let me go. I turned, not ready to hear what Finn already knew.

“That’s me.”

The doctor’s dark brown hair was plastered to his head with sweat. His glasses kept slipping down his nose. I stared at the blue scrub cap that was protruding between his clenched fingers. I couldn’t look at his eyes when he told me this. It was too much. If I saw the truth in his eyes, I wouldn’t be able to pretend this wasn’t real.

“Is he…?”

“Your father had a massive heart attack. I don’t think we could have helped him even if he’d been here on a gurney when it happened. We did everything we could. I’m so sorry.”

I nodded. I felt…empty. Hollow. Where was the pain? My dad was dead. Gone. There should have been pain, right?

“We have grief counselors you could speak with,” the doctor said. I held up my hand, shaking my head mechanically, and he stopped.

“Cash?” Emma’s voice. It sounded muffled. Off.

Nothing. How was it possible to feel this much nothing?

“Cash, answer me.” Emma again.

“Stop it. Just give him some room. Let him breathe,” Finn said. Breathe? Was that even possible? I felt like I was suffocating.

“Cash!”

Something inside me snapped at the sound of Emma’s voice. It was the sound. That same rawness

I’d heard in her voice the day her dad had died. I’d never understood what that sound meant. But hearing it now, in this place, forced me to.

Everything came rushing into me all at once. The wall I’d built up around myself after Mom left, decimated. The wound that would forever replace my father, ripped wide open. And it…hurt. Oh, God did it hurt. Just a stinging at first. But before too long it was throbbing. Burning with things I should have said. Things I should have done. I shouldn’t have shut him out. I shouldn’t have been such a moody little prick to him all the time. I couldn’t even remember what the last thing I said to him was.

Shit! What did I say? What was it?

“It’s gonna be okay,” Emma whispered against my neck. “I promise.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head against her shoulder. I couldn’t catch my breath. Couldn’t stop shaking. “I said…we’re out of bread.”

“What?” Emma pulled back, her blue eyes full of questions. I stared over her shoulder at the wall and swallowed the lump in my throat.

“That was the last thing I said to him,” I said. “We’re out of bread.”

Emma opened her mouth but stopped when Finn crouched down beside us and stared at the blank spot on the wall with me.

“He won’t remember that,” he said. “He’ll remember the good parts. Where he went…the good parts are all that exist.”

I nodded and closed my eyes. He was someplace better. That should count for something, right?

“Um…Cash, sweetheart,” Emma’s mom, Rachel, stepped up behind me and touched my shoulder.

“Is there anyone we can call? Any family? Someone you could stay with?”

I shook my head. The only living family who still talked to us was Aunt Sara, and she lived in

Germany on a military base. No way was she making it back. No way was I moving there.

“What about your mom?” she asked, hesitantly. I shot her a look that could’ve cut through steel, and she winced. The mom I hadn’t spoken to since I was six? The mom who hadn’t even bothered to send a birthday card in eleven years? The mom who had made damn sure I’d never find her? Hell, I didn’t even have her phone number.

“He’s staying with us,” Emma spoke up. “He can stay in the guest room.”

“Emma, honey, I’d have to talk to Parker—”

Emma stood up and pinned her mom with the stare that had shut me up more than once. “He’s staying.”

Rachel looked at me like I was a dog in the pound about to be euthanized. “You’re right. Emma, take him home to grab some of his things. I’ll get the guest room set up for him.”

Funny how she talked to Emma like I wasn’t even there. I wondered if that’s how I looked. Vacant.

It’s how I felt. Like part of me had checked out. Gone south for the winter. Emma grabbed one of my arms, Finn grabbed the other, and they pulled me to my feet. But I didn’t want to be on my feet. I wanted to be on the floor with the shadows. In that empty moment…I wanted to let them have me. I watched one of them, a black silhouette of death, slither from one side of the hall to the other. Never stopping. Never taking the hollow holes that were its eyes off of me. Its shape changed as it moved.

Sprouting wings, tentacles, arms and legs. It melted into the dark shape of a man, reached its dripping hand out to me, and I felt my grip start to slip from Emma’s.

“Come, ” it hissed. That hiss melted through me, burrowing deep. Somewhere in the back of my mind, someone was saying, It would be so much easier just to go…

Emma jerked on my arm and forced me to look at her. “What is it?” she asked.

“They’re here for me.” I swallowed the broken sound down my throat and took a shaky step forward.

“Don’t even think about it,” she whispered, tightening her grip on me. “I’m not letting you go.”