“I know it’s not a coyote. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”
“What I’m saying is that with a traumatic brain injury, it’s common for the mind to?—”
“To what? Invent a brand-new species? With detailed anatomy and a smell so viscerally terrible I can still taste it in the back of my throat? I’m a law student, not H.P. Lovecraft.”
Yazzie hadn’t spoken. I looked at her.
She was staring at the sketch. Not glancing at it the way Cole was, with the wary distance of a man confronted with something he’d already decided to dismiss. She wasstudyingit. Her dark eyes tracked the lines of the creature’s impossible joints, the angular shape of its skull, the jagged ridge of its spine. One hand had drifted to her braid and her fingers worked the end of it slowly.
Something passed across her face. Recognition? Fear? Both? It was there for maybe two seconds and then she shut it down.
“Ranger Yazzie?” Cole’s voice pulled her back. “You have anything?”
She paused before she replied. “No. Nothing.”
But she’d paused, and I had seen it, and she knew I had seen it.
“It’s likely a distortion produced by the head trauma,” Cole continued, clicking his pen with renewed confidence now that his colleague had backed him up. “Memory confabulation after TBI can be remarkably vivid and detailed. It doesn’t mean?—”
I was out of the bed before I finished deciding to be out of the bed. The IV line yanked against the tape on my hand and I ripped it free. The monitor started screaming its flat, indignant alarm, and I was standing barefoot on the cold tile in my hospital gown with blood welling from the back of my hand, trembling with something that felt bigger than anger.
“Mark is dead. Somethingkilledhim. Something that looked exactly like that sketch was in the ravine, and you are standing in my hospital room telling me my brain made it all up?”
Cole raised both hands, the universal gesture oflet’s all stay calm.
“Miss Gregory, please?—”
“I’m not confabulating! I’m not confused, I don’t have amnesia, and I am telling you that something is out there in those mountains that shouldn’t exist, and instead of looking for it you’re standing here clicking your goddamn pen and telling me my memories are broken!”
The nurse was already in the room. I hadn’t heard her come in over the sound of the monitor and my own voice, but she was there with another nurse behind her, and one of them had a syringe.
“Miss Gregory, you need to get back in bed. You’ve just pulled your IV?—”
“I don’t need to get back in bed! I need someone tolistento me!”
“We’re going to give you something to help you relax?—”
“I don’t want to relax! I want?—”
The needle slid into my upper arm, and the drug hit my bloodstream fast. Hospital-grade fast, not the slow creep of over-the-counter drowsiness but a warm, heavy wave that dropped through my body.
My knees buckled. Hands caught me and guided me back to the bed. The ceiling swam and Cole’s face blurred. The monitor was still beeping its alarm. Someone was resetting it. Someone else was reattaching the IV to my other hand. Voices overlapped, going muddy and distant.
Through the cotton haze swallowing my vision, I saw Yazzie.
She was standing by the easel. The sketch of the creature, Chen’s careful rendering of the thing that shouldn’t exist, was in her hand. She glanced toward the door. Cole had turned away, speaking to one of the nurses.
Yazzie folded the sketch, then slipped it into the breast pocket of her uniform shirt, buttoned the flap, and smoothed it flat.
Her eyes flicked to mine. For one suspended moment, through the rapidly narrowing tunnel of my consciousness, we looked at each other. She didn’t smile. She didn’t nod. But something in her expression shifted, a fracture in her professional mask.
Then the sedative pulled me under, and Yazzie and the room and the beeping machines all dissolved into darkness.
* * *
I came up slowly.
Sound came first. I heard monitors beeping and a ventilation system humming. Then footsteps somewhere down the corridor.
