“My friend. Mark Alvarez. He was with me in the mountains. Where is he? Is he here? Is he in another room?”
She kept her eyes on the blood pressure cuff. “You’re at a medical facility in Albuquerque. You’ve had a significant fall?—”
“I know I had a fall. I wastherefor the fall. What I need to know is what happened to my friend, because there was some kind ofcreaturethat looked like it crawled out of a geometry textbook’s nightmare, and I understand how that sounds but I am telling you what I saw.”
The nurse’s smile held, but her eyes did the thing a medical professional’s eyes do when they’re recalculating how much sedative is in the cabinet.
“I’m not crazy,” I added, despite suspecting that was exactly what a crazy person would say.
“No one is suggesting that. You sustained a traumatic brain injury, and it’s very normal for memories to be?—”
“Scrambled? Unreliable? Sure. Except I remember everything with the kind of clarity that makes me wish Iwereconfused, because confused would be a lot more comfortable right now.”
She finished with the blood pressure cuff and set it aside. “There are some people here who’d like to speak with you. A detective and a forest ranger. They’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”
“Great. Send them in.”
She hesitated, probably weighing whether I was too agitated for visitors right now, but I must have looked stable enough, because she left and returned two minutes later with company.
The cop was exactly the kind of man central casting would send if you requested “detective, white, mid-forties, seen some things.” He had a rumpled suit, thinning hair, and eyes with a permanent squint. He carried a small notebook with the air of a man who had already decided this conversation would not produce useful information but was going to go through the motions anyway.
The woman beside him was more interesting. She was dressed in the green-and-khaki uniform of someone who spent more time in the field than behind a desk. Late twenties, maybe early thirties. Her dark hair hung in a loose braid, and she had bronze skin and sharp cheekbones.
“Miss Gregory,” the detective said. “I’m Detective Cole. This is Ranger Yazzie.”
“Is Mark alive?”
Cole’s expression tightened just a fraction and Ranger Yazzie’s gaze dropped to her hands for a beat before returning to my face.
“Why don’t you start by telling us what you remember,” Cole said, which was not an answer.
So I told them. All of it. Mark’s weird behavior, the buttoned collar, the flat eyes. The drive into the Jemez, his robot-walk through the trees, the wrong smell that clung to everything. The creature with its jagged angles and void eyes. I watched their faces while I talked and I watched them exchange The Look. The one that saidThis poor girl bumped her head and doesn’t know what’s real.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said when I’d finished. “And I’m telling you, I wasn’t hallucinating.”
Cole shifted his weight. Yazzie was very still.
“Miss Gregory,” Cole said, “We have some difficult information to share with you.” He glanced at Yazzie. She gave him a nearly imperceptible nod. “Your friend Mark Alvarez was found dead outside your apartment complex on Canyon Road. Forensics indicates he was killed the nightbeforeyou went up to those mountains.”
The room went very quiet. Even the monitors seemed to hold their breath.
“His injuries were consistent with a large animal attack of some type,” Yazzie said softly. “His body was discovered by another resident early that morning.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I understand this is?—”
“No, he knocked on my door at six forty-five in the morning. He was standing in my hallway wearing that stupid buttoned-up flannel, and he asked me to go hiking. I drove to the Jemez with him. I sat in his truck for an hour and forty minutes.”
They exchanged The Look again. Yazzie’s version of it lingered a beat longer than Cole’s, but then it transformed into something more sympathetic.
“Your friend Mark was never in the mountains with you,” Cole said gently. “But you did have someone with you. A man brought you into this hospital and said he’d been hiking with you when you fell. He’s been here almost constantly since.”
“What man?”
“Silas…” he paused, giving Yazzie a ‘don’t leave me hanging here’ expression.
“Black,” she finished for him.
