Chapter 53

There were tests. There were papers, too, and lab reports, and projects for nearly every class. If Aleda had thought that the weeks before Thanksgiving and Winter Break had been busy, they were nothing compared to the work she had in those last few weeks in April and May.

School was ending.

Aleda had no college acceptance letters, no prospects, and no ideas, but she was strangely at peace. Over a week’s worth of cramming and final exams had no effect on her calm demeanor, even when she was midway through and in the thick of all of it.

A large part of that, admittedly, had to do with the man she was currently using as a pillow while she completely failed to study for her French exam. He had long ago mastered the art of jumping precisely to her bedroom window, and although her parents undoubtedly knew he was upstairs with her, they did nothing to stop him and he preferred as always to keep things simple. Aleda’s books, once strewn across the entirety of her bedroom floor, had been shoved aside to make walkways between her bed, closet, desk, and door. The books for her French class—a textbook, workbook, and small dictionary—were on top of one heap where they’d been unceremoniously tossed half an hour before.

For now, she preferred to snuggle up in Ryan’s arms and forget all about real life and growing up.

“They’ve been asking about you at school,” she told him idly.

He looked down at her, using the hand tucked under his head to prop himself up a bit. “Oh yeah? Who has?”

“Val, Mara, all the girls,” she said. She leaned back her head to smirk at him. “Mara thinks I’m using you to make Nate jealous.” Ryan snorted. “And Val still hasn’t decided whether I’m just making you up.”

“What did you tell them, anyway?”

“You’re a senior in college, and we met while you were visiting your sister, who I knew as a little girl.”

He nodded approvingly. “Good,” he said. “Always stick as close as possible to what’s real. Makes it harder to screw up.”

“I haven’t told you what your major is yet.”

“…Do I want to know?”

“History,” she said smugly. “You’re studying history, with a focus on the Vietnam era.”

He chuckled. “Nice. I like it.”

“I thought you might.”

They fell silent for a few minutes. Aleda stretched and re-situated herself against Ryan with a contented sigh, and he ran his fingers through her hair, brushing it away from her face. Her feet, having long since kicked off her shoes, buried under the blanket at the foot of the bed in an effort to get warm.

“By the way,” Ryan said after a little while. “I talked to Zak last night. Dear cousin Mike Connor is going to Bolivia.”

“The cousin from La Paz?” Aleda asked, her interest piqued.

Ryan nodded. “The Organizer there put a call through Records and asked specifically for Mike to lend a hand, after Zak talked to him.” He grinned. “He couldn’t resist.”

“When are they going to do the switch?”

“Soon, I think. There are enough cousins in the country to keep an eye on things until Mike gets down there, as soon as the Organizer says the word. Zak got him to say the situation was ‘extremely urgent’.”

“Good,” Aleda said. She snuggled back up against him. “The sooner his voice gets out of Papá’s ear, the better. He’s still driving me completely nuts.”

“He’ll be gone soon enough, don’t worry.”

“I’ve got enough to worry about already.”

He glanced over the girl curled on top of him at the books strewn across the carpet. “What about all that, then?” he asked. “Are you actually going to do any more studying?”

Aleda sighed. “I should. But I don’t want to. I don’t think my brain can take any more.”

“What do you have left?”

“Just the French,” she said. “There’s no exam for Chorus and I already finished my art project.”

“You’ll do fine.”

“Yeah, probably. I don’t even care anymore.”

“So… what do you want to do?”

She craned her neck back to look at him again. “…I’m doing it.”

Despite himself he smiled. “Alright. I guess cleaning up all those books is out of the question?” Aleda rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“I’ll deal with all that later,” she said. “I don’t even want to touch books right now.”

“You could do something with them, though,” he pointed out. “Instead of just leaving them all over the place like that.”

“So what?” she protested. “I can still walk around them. There’s not that many.”

“Enough you could trip over them if you’re not careful.” He ran his hand along the arm she had stretched across his chest. “I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

“Hey, I’m not that much of a klutz.”

“Well, no, but you never know. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’m not made of glass, you know,” she said, frowning. She prodded his chest for emphasis. “Just because I’m not called yet.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What, I’m not allowed to worry about you?”

“Papá worries about me enough for the whole world,” she said distastefully. “I don’t need you starting in on it, too. I’m getting tired of people treating me like I’m some fragile princess that ought to be locked up in a tower.”

“Since when have I ever treated you like that?”

“Plenty!” she exclaimed, pulling herself up to her elbows. “Between you and Papá I might as well lock myself in the tower and save you the trouble!”

“Hey!” he protested. “That’s your da who won’t let ye out o’ his sight! Ye’d best get your story straight!”

“You don’t even trust me to walk across the room by myself!”

Ryan gripped her arms, though not tight enough to hurt, and pulled her up and over him until they were inches apart. “I’m thinkin’ y’d best get your story straight, little girl. I’m no’ your da!”

“Well, I’m not a little girl!” she exclaimed, scowling into his face.

“As ye say,” he rumbled. His hands slid lower to balance her. “But I’ll still call ye what I like.”

“Fine!” she shifted her weight so her other knee was on the bed instead of digging into his leg. “…Just keep using that accent,” she added, as her head dipped down.

His hands went all the way to the back of her thighs, holding her steady before using the leverage to flip them both over.

“Aye, lass,” he murmured against her neck. “Whate’er ye say.”

His right hand traveled to the edge of her shirt as he spoke. It made it no further than her waist on its journey back before he paused, raising his head and listening.

Footsteps on the stairs.

“D****t,” Aleda muttered.

Ryan quickly pulled himself to his feet and looked at her regretfully. “I’d better get out of here,” he whispered. “I’ll see you on Friday.” He looked back at her one more time and grinned.

“What?” she whispered, smiling back although she didn’t know why.

“…You said ‘yet’,” he said, before slipping out the window and into the night.

Just as he disappeared, Mom knocked lightly and opened the door.

“Hi, honey” she said. “I just came to see how you were doing. Are you ready for your test tomorrow?”

Aleda slid quickly off the bed and tried not to look disheveled. “Er, yeah. Yeah, I guess so. It’s just French, after all.”

“Ok, well you’d better go to bed. It’s getting late.”

“Sure Mom, yeah.”

“And do something about all these books, will you please? It’s a mess in here!”

Sheesh.

 

 

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The French final exam was about what Aleda had expected. The only really hard part was all the stuff about the culture and movies that they’d discussed in class. If she ever wanted to travel to France, or Haiti, it might be useful. And she did remember a lot of it… just not as well as the language itself, which was close enough to Spanish that she could learn it in her sleep. Which, admittedly, she often did.

The point was, she took the exam, and did pretty well on the exam, and left the exam feeling quite certain that she had passed. She found Mara coming out of her German exam and they walked down to the nearby gas station for slushies. They talked about Prom, mostly, and graduation and the exams they’d taken. Aleda tried to avoid talking about future plans as much as possible.

She had told her friends that she was taking a year off before going to university in Spain. It saved all the questions about where she was going and what major she would pursue. The truth was she still had no idea what she would do after graduating from high school. Taking a year off might not be a bad idea at all.

Mara asked her all about Ryan, of course. Nobody from school had met him yet, and Aleda liked it better that way. It was strange to think of him and her friends from school as being part of the same world, not even counting how uncomfortable he would be around a flock of gossiping teenaged girls. Besides, she kind of liked having him all to herself. She didn’t want to have to share.

Well, at least Mara actually believed her when Aleda told her about him. Like she had told Ryan, Val refused to believe in his existence until she saw solid proof with her own eyes. The most frustrating part, really, was the fact that both girls, as well as the other girls that hung out with Val, still persistently believed that Aleda was hung up on Nate. Either she was using this new guy to make him jealous or she was making him up to make herself feel better about the breakup. As if she’d been the one to be dumped!

But she played along anyway.

Soon enough she got Mara back on the topic of prom dresses and they were away from all awkward topics. Aleda had gone out with her Mom as soon as Ryan had agreed to go with her, and they had found a nice enough dress at the mall. It wasn’t the fanciest, or the most stylish—especially because they went so soon before Prom—but it was pretty, and it looked great on her. Aleda had called Talia afterward, and shown her the dress rather than Ryan; she trusted Talia to make sure he ended up wearing something that matched more than she trusted him to remember.

She wondered, while she pulled it on that Friday night, whether he would bring her a corsage. On the one hand, it would be nice to get the flowers, and part of her liked the idea of following tradition. On the other hand, she would also be disappointed if the Ryan she knew succumbed to such a blatant example of herd mentality in action. At least she had made it easy on him, she mused.

She heard the knock on the front door when she was only halfway finished with her makeup, and Papá opened the door, exchanging a few pleasantries. He must have been trying to look foreboding, she imagined, but nobody could win that contest against Ryan. She hurried up and finished before Papá had too much chance to harass him.

 

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His breath caught in his throat when he saw her, descending those last few steps into the family room. Scarlet cloth flowed against her skin and down to her feet, clinging to all the right curves and setting off the mahogany highlights in her hair. Thank heaven he had gone ahead and bought that rose. Her mother spotted her, too, and immediately hurried towards her, the weight of pregnancy making her movements slightly awkward.

“Oh, honey, you look lovely!” she cried, looking her daughter over. “Alejandro, where’s the camera?”

“It is on the table, mi amor,” he reminded her. “Where you put it ten minutes ago.”

“Oh, silly me. Of course!” She quickly grabbed the camera and herded the two of them to one side of the living room. “Stand there, it looks the nicest,” she said, waving them into place.

Ryan leaned over to whisper in Aleda’s ear. “She spent all day finding this exact spot, didn’t she?” he said quietly.

Aleda rolled her eyes at him. “No,” she said. “… Just an hour or two.”

Ryan laughed and tried to look respectable for the camera.

Before they could leave, Papá pulled both of them aside.

“I want you to have a wonderful time, my little angel,” he told Aleda. “Your mother was never able to have her high school prom.”

“I will, Papá.”

“Now,” he continued more sternly, to Ryan. “You will bring my daughter back home before eleven o’clock.”—Aleda made a noise of protest—“I am trusting you with my car and my only daughter tonight, so you will want to make sure they both come back to me unharmed. But heaven help you if anything at all should happen to her.”

“Don’t worry about it, Alejandro,” Ryan said. “She can take care of herself these days.”

Papá shook his head. “Perhaps. But I will not risk that. Eleven o’clock!”

Aleda groaned, nodding, and pushed open the front door.

“Do you see what I mean about him driving me nuts?” she asked when they were out the door.

“Don’t worry,” Ryan said. “For all we know, Mike has already left for South America.”

“Yeah, well, I’m starting to wonder if he’s just going to be like this anyway.”

He considered this. “Well, at least he let me borrow his car,” he pointed out.

“I hope Talia wasn’t too offended that we didn’t ask her,” Aleda said. Ryan opened the door for her and ushered her into the passenger’s seat.

“She just laughed and wished me luck when I told her I was asking Alejandro,” he told her, climbing into the driver’s side. He took a few moments to adjust the seat to his much greater height.

“I did offer to get a short dress and we could have taken your motorcycle,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But a car’s better.”

“And here I thought you of all people would jump at the chance to completely defy convention for this sort of thing,” she teased.

Ryan grinned. “It did cross my mind,” he admitted. He looked over at her, admiring the way the long dress fell across her legs. “But I am very glad you got to wear that dress.”

“And I’m glad Talia managed to make you dress to match me. How did that ‘discussion’ go?” she asked with a grin, knowing full well his sister’s methods of persuasion.

“I’m perfectly able to dress myself,” he defended himself.

“She dragged you out shopping, didn’t she?”

He sighed and looked over at her ruefully. “…Wasn’t the first time.”

Aleda laughed.

Prom was being held in Newark, of course, in the top floor of some hotel. It had made the tickets a little pricey, but the senior class president insisted that the view would be great. Fortunately, it wasn’t too far from Keeney, so the drive was short.

Sirens, when they were nearly there, made Aleda peer out the window curiously. Red and white lights flashed brightly not far down the road, and as they got closer she could see the police cars and ambulance huddled around the wreckage of a car, now flipped upside down.

“Geez,” she muttered, when she saw it. “That sucks. Hey, wait a…Ryan, stop!”

“What?”

“Stop the car, quick!”

He quickly put on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road, several yards away from the wreck. Before he could ask her what was going on she had gotten out of the car and taken off towards the flashing lights in a full run, heedless of her high heeled shoes.

Just as they had come up to the scene of the accident, Aleda had seen the person on the gurney, and the girl looking on nearby.

Lizzy… and Nate.

“What happened?” Aleda demanded. Lizzy shook her head, one hand clutching her other arm. The girl was covered in scrapes. Aleda grumbled her impatience and tried to get closer to the ambulance.

“Miss, I have to ask you to leave,” one of the paramedics told her, trying to shoo her away.

“I know him!” she protested. “Is he alright?”

Behind her, Ryan had caught up and was looking at the wreckage of the car in shock.

“He’s been badly injured, miss,” the paramedic said. “We have to take him to the hospital.”

“But you can’t…! I mean he’ll be fine if we can…” She stopped herself. The paramedic sighed, and helped Lizzy into the ambulance behind Nate.

“Look, miss, if you want you can follow us to the hospital, but he’s going to be taken straight to the emergency room. Call his family, if you want.”

The man climbed into the back of the ambulance himself and shut the doors behind him. Within moments the ambulance had come to life and pulled away. She groaned and ran back to the car.

“Come on!” she yelled back to Ryan. “We’ve got to follow him!”

He looked at her oddly, but jogged back to the car and did as she asked.

“I thought you didn’t care about him anymore,” he said coldly, while they chased the ambulance to the city hospital.

“I don’t!” she said. “But… well, he’s kind of family. I have to do something.” Her expression begged him to understand. Even if she didn’t care about him anymore, in any kind of romantic sense, she still hated the thought of him that badly hurt and in the hospital. He really was family, of a sort, and that same family could have him as good as new on a moment’s notice without any need for surgery or medicine… if she could just get him out of that hospital.

The nurses in the waiting room were not impressed by her pleas, even when she said she was a cousin.

“Look, sweetie,” the hassled woman repeated. “I know you want to see your cousin, but he’s in surgery right now. Nobody’s seeing him except the doctors, until they’re through. You’ll just have to wait.”

Aleda grumbled angrily and paced across the room. Ryan found a chair and sat in it quietly, whether from annoyance or indifference she couldn’t tell. There was a phone on one wall; she walked to it and found a quarter in her purse. She was pretty sure she still remembered Nate’s phone number. The least she could do was to call his parents and let them know what had happened.

But there was no answer. His parents must be out of the house, and as far as she knew they had no cell phone. She hung up and heard the clink of the quarter inside the machine as it dropped to the bottom.

There was one other phone number she knew:  his uncle, Mike Connor.

She fished the quarter out of the coin return and shoved it back through the slot. This time, a man’s voice came clear over the phone line. But it wasn’t Mike. She panicked briefly. Had she gotten the number wrong? Her parents had made her memorize it as soon as they moved to Delaware, but she never used it and it was possible she had remembered it wrong.

“Hello?” the voice asked again.

She would just have to take the chance. “Cousin, I need your help,” she said, like her parents had taught her to. “My name is Aleda Solana.”

“Ah!” the man said. He had a strange accent. “You must be Alejandro’s daughter. I am Simón Ramirez. What can I do for you?”

Aleda almost collapsed in relief.

“A hunterborn, Nate Burns, is in the hospital. There was a car accident and now he’s in surgery, and I can’t get find his parents.”

There was a pause as Simón shuffled through some files. “Ah, yes,” he confirmed. “Nathaniel Burns, son of our cousins Matthew and Laurel Burns. There is only one phone number listed here for them.”

“Yeah, their home phone, and I already tried it,” she said impatiently.

Simón cleared his throat. “Well, we must get him out of the hospital. It would be too easy for the doctors to do something that would make him not heal properly.”

“Okay. How?”

“First I will send someone to check his parents’ house. They must be reached.”

“Yes, but what about Nate?” she persisted.

“Hm…” He considered. “It will take me an hour or more to gather the necessary materials. I will send one of our cousins to the hospital. Now, which hospital are you in, exactly?”

Aleda gave him all the rest of the information that he needed and hung up. She walked back over to Ryan and sat down next to him.

“So…” she said. “The new Organizer’s here.”

Ryan nodded. “What did he say?”

“He’s going to send someone to help us get Nate out of the hospital. It’ll be a while, though.”

“Do you want to go to the dance?”

“Well…” She hesitated. A large part of her wanted to go to the dance. Wanted to show off her dress and her date and just have fun with her friends for the next few hours. But… right now, she was the only person that Nate had just then, there in the hospital. Except for Lizzy, who was probably getting bandaged up at that very moment. Aleda was a little surprised that Nate had asked her to the Prom, but he had probably figured her to be a safe choice… considering the stunts she had pulled trying to get him back.

Going to a crowded dance with people she only vaguely didn’t dislike, to listen and dance to music she only vaguely didn’t loathe, seemed downright silly.

“I’m all he’s got,” she finally said.

Ryan looked upset for a second, then annoyed. But then his face softened and he nodded understandingly. “I never thought I’d say this,” he told her, “But I’m glad you said that.”

She looked up at him, surprised. “Really?”

He nodded again. “It’s… how we work. We’re family.”

“Just as long as this doesn’t count as inbreeding,” she joked, gesturing at the two of them. Ryan laughed.

It was almost an hour and a half that they sat there, waiting for some word of Nate or the cousin who would be coming to help them. Aleda snuggled against Ryan on the cheap couch and kicked off her strappy heels, and contented herself with reading the various magazines strewn across the table. Ryan just draped his arm over her and watched. At one point they saw Lizzy come out, glare at the two of them, and leave with what must have been her parents. Aleda felt bad for her—her pretty dress had been torn and bloodied in the accident.

Ryan immediately recognized the cousin, when he finally arrived, and tapped her arm. Aleda stretched and sat up, and Ryan went to greet the man, who was dressed in a suit and white lab coat. She knew she couldn’t possibly be seeing him as clearly as Ryan was, but she thought she could recognize something burning behind his eyes. She slipped her shoes back on and walked over to the two of them.

“Hi, I’m Ashton Wallace,” he said, shaking her hand vigorously. “Though my ID says I’m Dr. Michelson right now, and you must be Aleda. Where’s the boy?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They haven’t said anything about him yet.”

‘Dr. Michelson’ turned towards the desk and hailed the nurse on duty. “Excuse me, I believe a patient of mine has been admitted. Nathaniel Burns. I am his private physician, and I need to see him immediately.”

She was unimpressed. “Identification?” she asked, bored. Ashton handed over several documents, including what must have been a doctored driver’s license, which she inspected carefully. When she was satisfied, she looked through her own files. “Your patient is still in surgery,” she informed him. “You’ll have to wait.”

“I’m afraid I must insist,” he said. “Young Nathaniel has certain… conditions… which must be addressed carefully.”

The nurse sighed. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “You can go watch the surgery if you absolutely must.” She told him which room he was in and he disappeared down the hallway, telling Ryan and Aleda he would be back as soon as possible with the boy.

As soon as possible, however, turned out to be another twenty minutes.

“I am sorry about that,” Ashton said when he returned. He pushed Nate before him in a wheelchair. “It took some convincing to make those silly doctors sew him back up.”

“What did you tell them?”

“The usual. Nate here is extremely susceptible to septicemia and absolutely must be treated at my private clinic. And they still made me wait until the surgery was complete! Fat lot of good it did him.”

Aleda looked down at Nate, who was just barely regaining groggy consciousness after the anesthetic they must have given him. His forehead was bandaged, as was his left arm. His left leg was in a hasty splint.

“It’s a good thing I made them hurry when I did, though,” Ashton continued. “Any longer and those silly drugs of theirs would have been cleaned straightaway out of his system. What a surprise that would have been!”

“Hey, what… what happened?” Nate asked, looking blearily up at them.

“Hush, Nate,” Ashton said. “You have to play dead for a few minutes, alright?”

“Mhm…” he agreed, and slipped back to sleep.

“Don’t worry,” Ashton told the two of them. “He’ll be up and running in a few more minutes, depending how strong he is. But I’d get him home as quickly as possible. I imagine he’ll be in a bit of pain when that stuff wears off.”

He walked the three of them outside, and to the car.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Wallace,” Aleda said gratefully, helping Nate into the back seat.

“It’s what I’m here for!” he said cheerfully, and walked off towards his own car.