He examined the barrier entrapping him, hoping Beatrix’s earlier experiment made small inroads with it, but he saw no cracks in the dragon’s hide.
The pressure began as a light touch at first, tentative and brief. Then it returned, ratcheting upward. He gritted his teeth against the suffocating impression of being pressed at from all sides and did the only thing he could think of to fulfill his promise to her: He pictured attacking his prison in exacting detail. He imagined one, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand cracks. But no pinpoints of light broke through the awful darkness.
Eventually the pressure made it impossible to do much of anything at all. Disjointed thoughts:Shouldn’t have asked—can’t take this—stop?—
That was when he saw it: tiny, the size and color of a nickel. He stared at this possible breach with desperate hope, willing it to grow with what little ability he had left to focus. But it didn’t. There was nothing but agony, a harsh sound and the vast blackness around the little gray splotch, until even the splotch began to fade. The worst of the torment was in his lungs. He couldn’t breathe.
This was it—the end.
Beatrix’s voice filtered through, far off and crackling with fear over what he suddenly realized was the frenzied beeping of medical equipment. “Fight, Peter!Fight!”
With a soundless howl, he put all he had left into a last-ditch attempt to sit up and pull oxygen into his burning lungs.
A flash-bangof disorienting noise and brightness exploded around him. He heard voices without knowing what they said.
Then the overwhelming light receded and he could see.
Doctors and nurses surrounded him, eyes wide, mouths open, their shock not one-tenth of his. He was half-sitting, half-slumped on the bed, his lungs more or less working.
“Beatrix?” he said, or tried to say—more croak than word.
“Wizard Blackwell,” a doctor stammered, “can you hear us?”
“Yes.” He still sounded nothing like himself. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Yes, I can.”
The people around him stopped staring and rushed to prop him up with pillows, take his blood pressure and do a flurry of other things to him.
“Beatrix?” he said again, looking around, not seeing her.
“Miss Harper is just outside,” one of the nurses said in a soothing voice. “We told her to wait in the hall.”
“For God’s sake, let her in,” he cried.
The gaggle of people hesitated, but one of them did as he asked. She came haltingly, looking at him without blinking, as if she were afraid the scene before her eyes would disappear if she closed them for even an instant.
“Peter?” she said. She sounded afraid, and he realized what she had to be thinking—that he was alive but irrevocably damaged.
“I’m all right,” he murmured, and took her hand. “You saved me.”
Beatrix, who had such control dayside that he’d never seen her tear up in public, broke into racking, heaving sobs.
“Really, miss,” a doctor said in a patronizing tone that strongly suggested “compose yourself” and “we have work to do here” would follow.
“Give us ten minutes,” Peter said, staring the man down.
“Sir, we need to?—”
“I’ll stay right outside the door in case he needs immediate attention,” said the older nurse with the sweet face who’d fetched Beatrix. “There’s no danger in it, doctor.”
“Very well,” the man grumbled, and everyone—everyone except Beatrix—cleared out.
He held on to her hand, trying to put into words something that would convey what he owed her and how he felt about her, his heart pounding in his chest.
“You’re really,reallyall right?” she asked.
“Yes, I seem to be. Beatrix?—”
She kissed him. The speed and ferocity of it would have erased any doubt that she’d meant what she’d said, had the thought occurred to him while trapped in the coma. She loved him. Of her own free will she loved him. He put a shaking hand on her cheek and leaned in to their first dayside kiss initiated by her, hardly believing it was really happening.
