Page 129 of The Shadows Beyond
The stars dancing in a cloudless night sky, above a garden bench.A garden bench… a garden bench he could no longer remember the importance of.
The softness of olive-green cotton underneath his fingertips.
Two dimples, their quick flash throwing a blanket of bittersweetness over him.
Three of… something. Something good. Something whole. Three pillars, holding him up. Or was it four?
A fleeting feeling of warmth, of safety, of home.
And then, nothing.
thirty-three
Julien
Rubbing a hand across tired eyes, Julien repositioned himself on the armchair, battling another round of pins and needles from sitting on his legs for too long. Between his sore muscles and the head injury that needed stitches, he could easily be a hundred years old.
Next to him, Cinn’s body lay on the hospital bed as still as it had been the day he’d been brought in, almost a week ago now. Heart-monitor wires criss-crossed his body, and a nasogastric tube slivered serpent-like out of his nose.
Sighing, Julien reached for Cinn’s hand and squeezed, his gaze drifting, as it often did, to the inflamed burn-like mark adorning Cinn’s neck like a choker, the aftermath of the umbraphage’s direct touch.
Elliot and two other gendarmes had come to their aid as quickly as possible, once they’d seen Cinn suspended in the air, but not before the umbraphage had wrapped a black tendril around his neck. Although the gendarmes managed to manipulate lumenmotes quickly enough to save Cinn’s life, he’d fallen to the ground, unconscious.
Julien knew all of this from secondhand information, of course. He’d missed it all, knocked out by something undetermined in the chaos and rendered useless while his best friends were in danger.
The umbraphages were eventually banished thanks to the amount of extra support pouring in from various other moteblessed hubs throughout the world, travelling to Auri as quickly as the Displacement Baths would let them.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a fair number of casualties, however. Forty at least from Auri, so Julien had heard, plus more from their backup support.
Then there was the long list of seriously injured, so lengthy that if they were attacked again today, there wouldn’t be nearly enough gendarmerie.
Rain battered the window of Cinn’s small private room within Auri’s hospital. It had practically become a greenhouse with the amount of flowers Darcy kept bringing. He’d had several visitors, including Eric yesterday, who’d dropped a box of chocolates around for ‘when Cinn woke up’. Elliot immediately started munching away at them in the corner of the room while Julien issued a short apology to Eric for his rudeness towards him in the café, followed by one for how he’d handled it when they’d ended things earlier that year. Eric had shrugged, admitting he shouldered some of the blame for their miscommunication on the terms of their casual arrangement.
“I can see it’s completely different with him though,” Eric said, voice soft, glancing at Cinn’s lifeless form.
“Too bad I fucked it up,” Julien whispered. “I broke his trust.”Ripped it to shreds and then stamped all over it. Permanent damage.
Eric had given him a sad smile. “I think you two will find a way through it. It was clear how upset he was, how much he missed you guys, even though he refused to talk about you.”
They’d had no visitors today—though Darcy was due any minute—but Julien had preferred it. He’d made friends with a nurse, a kindly older lady who now routinely brought him apple juice, and that was serving as enough social interaction for him.
Even though it was only seven p.m., Julien’s eyes drifted shut, and he resigned himself to another night sleeping in the armchair.
His eyes snapped open at a knock at the door, followed by a head poking around it.
Albert Noir. He slid into the room to hover a good few metres from Cinn, nodding once at Julien. He’d not seen Noir since the third day, when he’d briefly popped in, then left again. As always, he was dressed in his dark robe-like coat that, along with his grey beard, always left Julien with the impression of a stereotypical wizard. He was yet to magically cure Cinn.
“I thought that it was Eleanor coming today,” Julien said, jumping up and stretching his aching limbs. “She promised me she’d stop by.”
“She’s otherwise detained. Another umbraphage outbreak. Florida, following on the heels of a hurricane. Lots of our gendarmerie have already been sent.”
A flash of worry for Elliot shot through Julien, before the knowledge that he’d been signed off due to his injuries soothed it smooth.
“How many this time?”
“Three.”
“So Auri still holds the record, then?” There’d been five in total that night, in the end.
