Chapter 41
June
“Idon’t need a doctor,” I say for the tenth time.
Archer is too distracted trying to flag down a doctor to hear me. Callum is grabbing a clipboard from the front desk for me to fill out my medical history. And Torin has gone from actively avoiding me to glaring away anyone who wanders too far in my direction, which might explain why Archer is failing in his task.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting in a hard plastic chair in the ER waiting room, and hating every damn minute of being here. If I’d known this was where they were bringing me, I wouldn’t have gotten out of the car. By the time I saw where we were, it was too late to fight them on it. And I was in shock, so I couldn’t even run away. My legs refused to support me.
Torin carried me inside, blind to my struggles to get free.
“Let me see your neck again,” Torin says after he’s glared off the last unfortunate person who wandered to this part of the waiting room.
“My neck is fine,” I say.
“It was bleeding before.” He dips his head to see. I don’t know what he thinks has changed in the ten seconds since he last looked at it.
“Well, it’s stopped now.” I nudge him back into his hard plastic chair when he leans closer. “He just poked me with the needle a bit. He didn’t inject it into me.”
Torin frowns down at me, and from his puckered forehead, it’s clear he doesn’t believe me. “Let me see.”
“No.”
One unexpected benefit of Torin’s smothering is that it’s distracting me from being in a hospital. At least a little.
My nose hasn’t stopped twitching from the sharp bite of antiseptic since Torin carried me into the hospital’s ER waiting room. I don’t like hospitals, and it isn’t even because of all the coughing or the smell or even the people holding towels and bandages to bleeding wounds.
I didn’t mind hospitals before. Now, I actively dislike them. They remind me of how I felt after the bond breaking. Lost and lonely and full of grief. Only Garrison visited me. Not my parents, not my sister, who could be dead for all I know. Not a single person in my life visited me even once.
“I’m going home,” I say, pushing up from the chair. My legs have other ideas, and I immediately topple over.
Torin catches me, sets me down, and drops into a crouch in front of me, his eyes filled with concern. “You need a doctor, Juniper. You had a needle practically in your neck. We need to know you’re okay.”
I open my mouth to complain, but he’s not done yet.
“And you don’t know what was in that needle. It’s a quick checkup, and then we’ll take you home.Please.”
I want to argue, but how do you argue against common sense?
“Okay, fine,” I mutter, settling back into my seat.
Callum returns with the clipboard, which I struggle to fill out. Maybe it’s shock, but trying to remember my medical history makes my head hurt. Archer finally succeeds in flagging down adoctor while Torin is determined to help me fill in my medical history, which he knows nothing about.
“A man was trying to inject her with something,” Archer tells the doctor.
“With what?” he asks, frowning down at me.
“We don’t know,” Archer says. “It’s why we’re here.”
Turns out that when you tell a doctor someone nearly injected you with an unknown drug they said would kill you—and you have the red needle mark on your neck to prove it—doctors like to goheavywith the tests, peeing in cups, and pointing bright flashlights into your eye, blinding you.
The backless, pale blue hospital gowns that tie at the neck and let in every tiny gust of air to every sensitive place aren’t fun either.
Five hours later, I’ve been tested to within an inch of my life. Is it weird to say I feel five pounds lighter with all the blood they took from me?
As I sit on the paper-covered leather bed in one of the ER’s examination rooms, my results slowly trickle in.
My temperature isn’t anything to worry about. My heart rate is fine, but my blood pressure is a little high. Dr. Porter said that likely has more to do with nearly dying from being injected with a mystery drug than because something is wrong with me.
