Slim to none, I was betting. And since we were already in the hospital, if I freaked out this time, they’d probably put me on the express gurney to the mental-health ward. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
I was not going back there.
My hand clenched Nash’s, and he stroked my fingers with his thumb. “If you feel it starting, just squeeze my hand and I’ll get you out.” I started to shake my head, and he ran the fingers of his free hand down the side of my face, staring into my eyes. “I promise.”
I sighed. “Okay.” He’d already helped me through two panic attacks—I couldn’t stop thinking of them as such—and I had no doubt he could do it again. And, anyway, I didn’t really have any choice. I couldn’t help the next victim of an untimely death without finding Tod-the-reaper, and I couldn’t find Tod without checking all his favorite haunts.
The elevator dinged, and the door slid open with a soft shhh sound. I glanced at Nash, bolstering my courage as I straightened my spine. “Let’s get this over with.”
The third floor stretched out to either side of us, and one long, sterile white hall opened up directly across from the elevator doors, where a man and a woman in matching blue scrubs sat behind a big circular nurses’ station. The man looked up when my shoes squeaked on the floor, but the woman didn’t notice us.
Nash nodded toward the left-hand hallway, and we headed that way, walking slowly, pretending to read the names written on disposable nameplates outside each door. We were just two kids hoping to pay respects to our grandfather one last time. Except that we didn’t “find” him on the chosen hallway, or anywhere else on the third floor, which was almost a letdown after my initial fear of entering the ICU. Fortunately, Arlington wasn’t that big of a town, and only three of the beds in Intensive Care were actually occupied. And none of those occupants was in any immediate danger of meeting a reaper.
Tod was also absent from the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, at least as far as we could tell. The only places left to look were the surgical tower, the emergency room on the first floor, and the maternity ward, on two.
I did not want to find a grim reaper—even if he didn’t carry a scythe—in the maternity ward, and we would definitely be noticed in the surgical tower. So we checked the ER first.
During my one previous trip to Arlington Memorial, my aunt and uncle had called ahead, and the mental-health ward had been expecting us, which meant we didn’t have to stop in the ER. So I’d never seen one in person until Nash and I crossed the front lobby and pushed through the double doors into the emergency waiting area. I have, however, spent plenty of time in the psychiatric unit, which is no trip to Disneyland. It’s populated with nurses who look at you with either pity or contempt, and patients in slippers who either won’t meet your eyes or won’t look away. But the ER holds its own special brand of misery.
Far from the energetic rush of adrenaline I’d expected based on certain television hospital dramas, the actual emergency room was quiet and somber. Patients waited in thinly cushioned chairs lining the walls and grouped in the middle of the long room, their faces twisted into grimaces of pain, fear, or impatience.
One old woman languished in a wheelchair beneath a threadbare blanket, and several feverish children shivered in their mothers’ arms. Men in work clothes pressed crusted gauze bandages to wounds seeping blood, or ice packs to purple lumps on their heads. At the far end of the room near the triage desk, a teenager moaned and clutched one arm to her chest as her mother thumbed through an old tabloid, blatantly ignoring her.
Every few minutes, employees in scrubs entered through one end of the room, crossed the faded, dingy vinyl tile, and pushed through a set of double doors on the other end. Those alone read from charts or stared straight ahead, while those in pairs broke the grim near-silence with incongruous snatches of casual conversation. Regardless, the employees went out of their way to avoid eye contact with the people waiting, while the patients eyed them in hope so transparent it was uncomfortable for me to watch.
“Do you see him?” I whispered to Nash, skipping over the sick women and children to scan the faces of the men.
“No, and we won’t until he’s ready to be seen.”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets, physically resisting the urge to take his hand for comfort, just because the ER creeped me out. If I couldn’t handle the huddled masses staring into space like zombies, how could I hope to face the Grim Reaper? Or even a grim reaper? “So how are we supposed to find him?”
“The plan was for him to find us,” he whispered back. “Two bean sidhes walking around while he’s trying to work should have drawn him out pretty quickly, if for no other reason than to run us off.”
“Then I’m guessing he’s decided not to show.”
“Looks that way.” Nash’s gaze settled on a sign on the wall, which pointed the way to the gift shop, the cafeteria, and the radiology lab. “You thirsty?”
“Not really.” I’d polished off a thirty-two-ounce soda in the car, and would have to find a bathroom soon as it was.
“Then come sit with me. If we make it clear we have all night to wait, he’ll probably show up to hurry us along.”
“But we don’t have all—”
“Shh.” Smiling, he slid one arm around my waist and whispered into my ear. “Don’t tip our hand.” Pleasant chills rushed down my neck and throughout my body, originating where his breath brushed my earlobe.
We followed the signs down the hall, around the corner, and into the cafeteria, which was still serving dinner at seven-thirty in the evening. Nash bought a huge slice of chocolate cake and a school-size carton of milk. I got a Coke. Then we chose a small square table in one corner of the nearly empty room.
Nash sat with his back to the wall, eating as if nothing were wrong. As if he went looking for an agent of death every evening. But I couldn’t sit still. My gaze roamed the room, skimming over a custodian emptying a trash can and a woman in a hairnet inspecting the salad bar for wilted lettuce. My feet bounced on the floor, my knees hitting the underside of the table over and over. Nash’s milk sloshed with each impact, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He was halfway through his cake—minus the bite or two I’d found room for—when a shadow fell across our table. I looked up to find a young man standing in front of the empty chair on my right. He wore faded, baggy jeans and a short-sleeved white tee with no sign of a coat, in spite of the temperature outside. And his fierce expression did nothing to harden cherubic lips and bright blue eyes, crowned by a mop of blond curls.
Nash didn’t even look up.
I glanced at the blond guy, then followed his gaze to the disposable salt-and-pepper shakers in the center of the table. Assuming he wanted to borrow them, I was reaching for the salt when he pulled the empty chair out and dropped into it, crossing bare forearms on the table in front of him.
“What do you want?” he growled in a pitch so low and gravelly I would have sworn it could never have come from such an angelic face.
Nash took his time chewing, then finally swallowed and pushed his plate back. “Answers.”
I frowned, gaping at the blond in disbelief. “You’re the grim reaper?”
Tod glanced at me for the first time, his frown practically etched into place. “You were expecting someone older? Taller? Maybe kind of gaunt and skeletal?” Contempt dripped from his words like acid, and his focus snapped back to Nash in annoyance. “See? That’s the problem with the old title. I should start calling myself a ‘collections agent’ or something like that.”
“Then they’d just make you wear a suit and tie,” I said, amused by the mental image.
The corner of Nash’s mouth twitched.
“Who’s the sidekick?” Tod tossed his head my way, but his attention—and irritation—remained focused on Nash.