The Nothing: A Book of the Between (3 page)

The deputy paced the length of the store, stopping in front of the dream door and rapping on it sharply with his baton. “Seems solid.”

“It is.”

“So, what I saw last time we were here, when Vivian was...shifting. Is she...”

Weston didn’t answer, just waited, and after a long silence, it was the deputy who admitted defeat. “I guess you’ll have to do. Something is happening that I don’t understand.”

“Can you tell me what?”

“I’d rather let you draw your own conclusions.”

Weston had a premonition that whatever he did here was going to have echoes rolling on down through eternity. On the other hand, maybe it was time he paid a little something back to society. He shrugged. “All right.”

The deputy’s eyes narrowed as the raven fluttered onto Weston’s shoulder.

“That thing coming with you?”

“Unfortunately.”

Serious misgivings hit him the instant the car door slammed shut and he found himself buckled into the back seat of the patrol car. No inside handles, everything locked. Smooth plastic, no upholstery, easy clean, and nothing anybody could hurt themselves with. At least he wasn’t wearing handcuffs. And he could make a door from pretty much anywhere if he needed to, even jail. Besides, it was unlikely he’d be prosecuted on a charge of crimes committed eighty years long gone, so he sat quietly, watching the town go by.

The patrol car pulled into the parking lot of Krebston Memorial Hospital, bypassing empty parking spaces in favor of the ambulance bay, just outside the emergency room doors. An ambulance had just pulled in, and the crew lifted a stretcher out of the back and rolled it through the automatic doors, moving fast, faces intent.

Weston’s hip cramped as he squeezed himself out of the car, his lower back wrenched by a muscle spasm. He caught himself thinking wistfully that a nice retirement home might be a good idea, sitting warm and safe in front of a TV and letting people serve him meals…

The raven landed on his head, clutching at his hair and spreading its wings for balance. Retirement homes didn’t allow for ravens, he was pretty sure. Hospitals frowned on them as well.

“You can’t bring that bird,” Flynne said as the doors opened for them.

“Tell him that.” Weston shoved at the bird with one hand. “Get off.”

Claws dug into his scalp and the bird squawked reproachfully.

“Roxie will have my hide,” Flynne muttered, stalking off through the automatic doors.

Weston hung back, reluctant to enter. In all of his hundred and some years, he’d never set foot in a hospital. Besides the dragon spiking, he himself had never been injured or sick beyond something minor like a cold. His family had all been dead long before modern hospitals sprouted up, and he didn’t have any friends. The doctor had come out to the house a time or two in his childhood, and he had vague memories of a black bag and bitter medicines. So, although he knew what this was, in a general sort of a way, he came to a halt just inside the doors to assess the situation.

An unfamiliar smell, sweetish but sharp, stung his nostrils. The fluorescent lights overhead were too bright. The linoleum under his feet was scuffed and stained. Somebody not too far away groaned, a sound of misery and pain. Weston stood right at the boundary of outside and in, cold air and snow flowing in around him.

A small woman, blonde hair making a fluffy halo around a small, narrow face, pounced on the deputy at once.

“Did you find Vivian?”

“Afraid not. This is Weston. He can do whatever she does. Except for the medical part…” Flynne scrubbed a hand through his hair, his voice trailing away.

The nurse put both hands on her hips and looked Weston over from top to toe, not missing the raven perched on his head. “I don’t believe this. We need her. Do you know where she is?” Weston had faced blades less dangerous than the expression in her pale blue eyes.

“I have a general idea. But I can’t get to her right now.”

“Look, Roxie—” Flynne began.

She flung both hands up in disgust. “Don’t even talk to me. If you think you can help, come this way. Otherwise, don’t even bother to waste my time.”

Weston opened his mouth to say that he didn’t see how he could be of any possible use in a hospital, caught the expression on Flynne’s face, and thought better of it. “If there’s aught I can do to help, ma’am, I’ll be glad to do so.”

“Fine. But that bird has to go out. If the health department sees him here, we’re toast on a stick.”

The raven stretched his wings and then flew up to perch on the top of the exit sign, where he took to preening his feathers.

“You have a way to get him out, make yourself free with it,” Weston said.

“But he’s your bird.”

“And that’s where you’d be mistaken.”

She stood surveying him for long enough to make a rivulet of sweat find its way down the center of his back. The raven croaked down at her and she spun on her heel and turned her back. “I don’t have the time for this.”

Small as she was, she moved at a speed that made Weston stretch his legs to keep up. “Five more of them tonight. Four last night. Spokane won’t take them anymore, said they have enough of their own. Nobody has a cure, anyway. Nothing but supportive care. So, we’ve just been sending them all upstairs. They’re not even being treated. Just watched.”

Halfway down the wide hallway, she stopped and slid open a glass door. “Bringing nonmedical personnel in here is such a total HIPAA violation. I’m gonna lose my job and probably go to jail.” She led the way into a curtained room beyond. “But what else am I going to do?”

Behind a screening curtain was a square room with a counter, a sink, and a bunch of machinery Weston didn’t know the point and purpose of. A small girl knelt on the floor in front of a chair, using it as a table for paper and crayons. She glanced up briefly when they came in, then went back to her project without a pause. On a narrow bed in the middle of the room lay a big man, tall and heavyset. Tattoos sleeved both arms from wrist to shoulder, where they vanished beneath the sleeves of a blue gown. His eyes were closed, his jaw slack, his chest rising and falling as though he were asleep. A thin plastic tube traveled from a bag on a hook through a ticking machine and into the skin of the arm.

“Shit,” Flynne said.

“I told you.” The nurse checked the tubes and screens.

The deputy approached the bed. He placed his hand on the man’s shoulder and shook it. “Max! Hey. Wake up!”

Not so much as a flicker of the eyelids from the man on the bed. The deputy moved to the foot of the bed. Squeezed a bare toe, smacked the bottoms of the feet. “Max.”

“He won’t wake up,” the little girl said, not looking up from her drawing. “The Nothing got him.”

“Lyssa called 911,” Roxie said, her forehead creasing as she looked at the little girl. “She was drawing when the ambulance got to the house, hasn’t stopped since she got there.”

For the first time, Weston noticed the stack of papers on the floor beside the little girl. She was using a black crayon, its brightly colored mates tumbled in a neglected pile. Oblivious to the three pairs of watching eyes, she turned the crayon on its side and scrubbed it across the paper, obliterating her drawing, but not before Weston caught a glimpse of something that chilled his blood.

“Well, hot shot,” the nurse’s voice lashed at him from behind, “are you going to do something?”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“What good are you, then? Brett Flynne, why did you bring him here?” The anger in her voice was undercut by grief, and Weston felt a distant sadness that he couldn’t help her, but all of his focus was on the child.

Silently cursing the stiffness in his knees, he knelt on the floor beside her. “Can I see?”

She shrugged, then glanced up at him from under her tangle of curls with a pair of knowing blue-green eyes, unsettling in a face that had yet to shed all of its baby fat. Lifting her hands, she let him see the page. Whatever had once been in the drawing was wiped out by the black scribbling.

“The Nothing,” she explained helpfully. “It eats up everything.”

“I see.” He ducked as something large whistled over his head and then crashed down onto the chair, widespread wings just managing to keep it from skidding right across the slick surface and onto the floor.

The raven regained its balance and smoothed its feathers. Tilting its head sideways, it fixed the little girl with a bright black gaze.

“Hello,” she said solemnly. No grabbing, no sudden moves. She didn’t even register any surprise.

“Hey,” Roxie barked. “I’m over here. Max is over here. I need you to figure out what’s wrong with him.”

“I keep telling them,” the little girl said, reaching for a fresh sheet of paper. “It’s the Nothing.”

One of the papers she’d already filled with drawings fluttered to the floor, and he bent to retrieve it.

“What’s going on,” Roxie said, “is an epidemic. People go to sleep at night and don’t wake up. Perfectly healthy people. Everything tests out normal with blood work and CT scans and MRIs. So, we were thinking maybe….there was that weird thing with Flynne, here, where he was freezing to death for no reason and Vivian knew something about that…”

The flood of words registered, but Weston couldn’t take his eyes from the picture he held. “Did she ever meet Vivian?”

“What?” Roxie’s white face registered confusion. “She who?”

“This child.”

“Lyssa,” the little girl said.

“I don’t know. What does that have to do with anything?”

But it was still the child Weston spoke to. “Lyssa. Where did you see this?”

He held a near-perfect drawing of Vivian’s pendant—a penguin caught in a dream web.

“It’s in all the dreams. With the Nothing.”

“She’s been drawing those pictures for a week,” Roxie said. “Max was worried about her. Made an appointment with a counselor.”

“Because she was drawing pictures?”

“Because she papered her room with pictures of that penguin thing. She’d started putting them in his room, too. He kept taking them down, he said, but she’d put them back.”

“Tell me about the pendant,” Weston said, touching the child’s shoulder.

“He wouldn’t listen,” she said, her hand moving over the page. “What do I know? I’m just a kid.”

It had been a long time since Weston had dealt with a child. He remembered Grace saying something similar, her small, freckled face set in lines of defiance. “Just because I’m a kid doesn’t mean I don’t know anything.”

‘“I think you know plenty,” he said now. “What’s the pendant for?”

“It stops the Nothing. But I don’t have one, so I thought maybe if I drew enough of them…” Her lip trembled. “It didn’t work.”

“Maybe it did. You’re still here.”

The raven hopped onto the paper and pecked experimentally at the crayon. Lyssa touched his head lightly with one finger, and the bird closed its eyes and rubbed against her hand.

“The infernal creature likes you.” Weston kept his voice calm, but the way she’d said “the Nothing” brought goose bumps up on his skin. “What is this Nothing? Can you tell me?”

She turned full on him then, eyes judging. “You should know already. Vivian would know. Probably you’re not as smart as she is.”

“Lyssa!” Roxie reprimanded.

Weston ignored her. “You’re right. I’m not as smart as she is. You’ll have to tell me.”

The little girl sighed exaggeratedly, then sifted through the pile of papers and picked out a drawing. As she turned to show him, a sharp alarm went off beside the sleeping man.

“Shit,” Roxie hissed. “Max!” There was a note of panic in her voice. “He’s gone flatline. Flynne, get me some help in here!”

Amidst the blaring and beeping of alarms, the nurse climbed up onto the exam table and started CPR. Well-organized chaos followed. Medical professionals scrambled into the room, one of them pushing a cart on wheels. Flynne grabbed Weston’s arm. “You’re in the way. Bring the little one, would you?”

Only too happy to comply, Weston picked up Lyssa. She still clutched the paper in one chubby fist, the crayon in the other. “My drawings!” she wailed, struggling in his grasp.

“I’ve got them, I’ve got them.” He stooped and grabbed the stack, abandoning the crayons to their fate. The raven fluttered to his shoulder. For just an instant, he used his dream senses to reach out toward the man at the center of the storm of activity. He met a black hole of emptiness that nearly sucked him in. Reeling, he clutched child and papers more tightly and fled the room.

“You can wait here,” someone said, leading him down the hall and into a small sitting room. He settled into an armchair, the little girl still in his arms. She buried her face in his chest, sobbing, and he put a hand on the back of her head.

“Shhh, little one. The doctors will fix him.”

“Doctors don’t know about the Nothing.” She pulled away a little, looking up into his face. “Can’t you stop it?”

“I might be able to help.” Not soon enough to help her father, though. A sick certainty had come over him, a realization of what exactly was going on. He needed to get to Vivian, make sure she’d grasped what the dying dreamspheres would mean to people in Wakeworld. A series of uncontrollable shivers shook him as he remembered the spheres gone dark in the cave, how many had been still dying.

“Curse you, Aidan,” he muttered under his breath.

Lyssa, tear-stained and frightened as she was, looked up at him again, curiosity stopping her tears. “Who’s Aidan?”

“An evil dragon queen,” he answered without stopping to think.

She nodded solemnly, as if this came as no surprise. “And Vivian will have to fight her.”

God. He was so out of his depth with this child. Despite his limited experience with kids, he was pretty sure she was something other than the norm. But she seemed distracted for the moment, and his heart threatened to burst at the thought of witnessing her being told her father was dead.

So, he shifted her to a more comfortable position on his lap, tucking her head under his chin. “Vivian or maybe Zee. He’s the dragon slayer.”

“Does he carry a sword?”

“Indeed. Just like a knight in a storybook. He’s very brave. He’ll help her with the Nothing. And so will Poe.”