Bob licks my chin in rapid strokes. I must be breathing hard if he can tell how much this is bothering me. Zoey’s eyes are fixed on the screens, but she touches my arm, holding it for a few seconds before pulling back. I wipe at my eyes with my good hand, pretending the tears aren’t there.
“There’s a liquor store between the abandoned hospital and the highway onramp,” Zoey says that afternoon as she boots up her computer in her room. “It’s got a camera. I’m hoping it catches the road.”
I watch her from where I’m propped up on her bed, surrounded by pillows and a fat cow stuffed animal I would’ve never guessed she owned. I was shocked when she offered to let me hang out in here with her for the afternoon, and even more shocked that she let Bob come up on her bed with me.
Zoey pounds back energy drinks, and her focus never wavers as she pulls up camera after camera, rewinding and fast-forwarding through grainy footage of empty roads and the occasional passing car.
I fall in and out of sleep. It’s getting later in the afternoon, and my hand is throbbing under the bandages. As hard as I try to find an angle that makes the pain stop, no such angle exists.
I imagine Nico’s fingers threading through my hair, the way they did when I was drifting off to sleep. I can almost feel it now, the gentle scratch of his nails against my scalp, the weight of his hand cupping the back of my head, the careful way he’d gather my hair between his fingers. I want to be in that hospital bed with him. I should be there when he opens his eyes so the first thing he sees isn’t some sterile room but me, so he knows we made it.
Zoey gasps, and a sudden bout of cursing makes me sit up.
She leans out of the way. “Is this him?”
CHAPTER 52
The daisy wheel (also termed a hexafoil or witch’s mark) has been used for centuries as a protective symbol. Entities perceive the overlapping circles as an infinite loop with no exit point. In field testing, I have found that a well-drawn daisy wheel can retain most entities for up to five minutes before degradation begins.
—Protective Sigils and Wards,a field manual by Donald Dellman
The picture of the man on Zoey’s screen pulls me so far out of the haze of my medication that she might as well have poured a bucket of ice water over my head. I nod.
“I started with the camera at the liquor store,” Zoey says, clicking through dozens of browser tabs. “Scrubbed backward from the hour before you called. Twenty cars drove by, but the resolution was shit. Couldn’t get a plate number clear enough to run.”
She clicks to another tab, scrubbing through footage of a parking lot at night. Cars speed in and out in jerky fast-forward.
“I pulled footage from the gas station you called from,” she continues. “A gold sedan appeared in both that feed and the one from the liquor store at roughly the right times. I pulled the names of every cop in the greater Pittsburgh area who took time off during the four days you were missing. Cross-referenced that with anyone who owns a gold sedan. Came down to three possibilities. This guy?” Zoey taps the screen. “Was out sick forall four days you were missing. His name is David Henley, and he patrols?—”
“The strip mall where Greg and Rafael were dumped,” I say.
Zoey’s head swivels toward me. “Yup. You remember him?”
“Yeah.”
I remember DJ running comms in the van, updating us over our earpieces:
Good ole Officer Henley is still three blocks away.
I know David Henley is not a villain. He’s just as much of a victim as Nico and I were, but looking him in the face is practically impossible.
Zoey video calls DJ in for a team meeting, projecting her on the computer. I can see the ceiling light tiles above DJ’s head as she walks through a hospital hallway. My heart swells with fierce gratitude. She’s there with Nico. I can’t be there with him, but at least he’s not alone.
“Any change?” Griffin asks, bracing one hand on the table and talking loudly into the receiver.
DJ shakes her head, adjusting her ear buds.
“The swelling on his face is going down,” DJ says, holding the mic close to her mouth so she doesn’t have to speak loudly. “I’m getting nervous… but I can’t bring him home until he wakes up. The police will want to talk to him when he does.
I can barely concentrate on what anyone is saying when the meeting starts.
Griffin and Benji head out to start surveillance on David Henley’s house overnight. I want to go with them so badly, but DJ tells me no. I’m not allowed to go into the field properly until I’m out of the wheelchair. I’d probably agree that it’s for the bestif this weren’t the Game Master case, and it hadn’t become so personal.
Zoey offers to let Bob and me stay in her room with her overnight. She even offers us the bed. I want to put up a fight about kicking her out of her own bed, but I’m in too much pain and I don’t want to be alone. She throwsLove Islandup on her computer, which she insists on watching in complete silence, and settles on her bean bag chair with a blanket.
An hour in, Zoey makes a displeased sigh, breaking her silence rule to grumble, “That woman babbles as much as Daisy.”
I guess DJ wasn’t kidding when she said that Zoey doesn’t like her. One of the first things DJ told me was that she doesn’t like being called Daisy.
