Consumed (Firefighters #1)(17)

“You could never be weak, Anne.”

Moose shooed away the medical staff, and then wheeled her into the elevator while she held her IV pole like it was the leash of a dog with biting history. They went up four floors, and then they were going down a hall with signage she couldn’t seem to read and foot traffic that had only two speeds: fast and distracted or slow and somber.

“How bad is he?” she asked as they went along close to the wall. “Do you know?”

“Bad.”

“Is he paralyzed?”

“They haven’t even gotten to the part where they worry about whether he can walk.”

As they came up to the nursing station, Anne was aware of the staff stopping whatever they were doing and staring at her, but she kept her eyes straight ahead as Moose did the talking—and they must have gotten clearance to proceed because they started forward again.

Passing by a number of glassed-in rooms, she saw patients swaddled in blankets, like caterpillars cocooned. On this floor, there were few visitors, and no one was coming and going with flowers or balloons. Death was what paced these halls, playing “eeny, meeny, miny, mo” with its bony finger, picking and choosing, at random or perhaps with a plan, who it would play with next.

Moose stopped them about halfway to the end and went around to open the glass door for her. “You want to go in alone?”

“Yes.”

With resolve to get on her feet, Anne went to put both her hands down on the armrests, but as a bolt of pain lightninged up her arm, she gasped. No hand there. Only that raw open wound that had bandages for flesh.

Blinking back the agony, she thought, I can’t deal with this. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

Who am I going to be?

Pushing all that aside, she struggled out of the wheelchair and went to enter the room—

“Hold up. Don’t forget this.”

As she glanced at Moose in confusion, he moved the IV pole forward. “Oh,” she mumbled. “Right, thanks—”

He didn’t release it from his hold. “I need you to know that I tried to— I mean, we all wanted to get to him sooner. We worked as hard as we could to free him. But . . . oh, shit, Anne, he was under these beams that were so fucking heavy they’d crush a car and . . .”

She hugged the man when he couldn’t continue, and it was a sad relief to be with someone who also felt guilt. “No one could have done a better job rescuing him.”

“This is my fault, I should have—”

Anne pushed him back. “Stop it. How could you have gotten to him any earlier? And you didn’t put him there. I did. You and the boys are heroes.”

“What if he doesn’t make it?” Moose eased back and dragged a hand through his hair. “I can’t breathe every time I think about it. He’s my best friend.”

As she stared into his tortured eyes, she knew they were all crazy. Every one of them who got into turnouts, and took their bodies and their minds into open flames for little money and lots of risk, for strangers, for animals they didn’t own, for houses they didn’t own, for people they weren’t related to . . . they were all insane. Because this was the other side of the adrenaline rush, the savior complex, the fight.

Tragedy was but a moment. Responsibility for it was forever.

And eventually, the latter turned you dark on the inside, molding over your emotions, making you toxic and uncleanable even as you looked the same on the outside. For every firefighter she knew who’d been hurt or died on the job, she knew even more who were corpses in their own skin.

They didn’t tell you about it when you were in the academy.

Good thing, too.

“Don’t blame yourself,” she said roughly. “You didn’t let him down, and you’re going to be there for him as he heals. And he will. He’s Danny Maguire, for godsakes. He’s unkillable.”

“You haven’t seen him yet, Anne. You need to prepare yourself.”

She looked into the room. So many machines and wires and tubes—a reminder that the human body was an incredible miracle, its countless autonomic functions a gift when they were operating as intended, and a cumbersome nightmare to have to approximate when they were not.

Taking her IV pole, she entered the sterile space and the sound of the whrrrring and the beeping got her truly frightened. And then she actually looked at Danny’s face.

Anne gasped. “Dear . . . God.”

There were stitches all down one side, as if part of his cheek and half of his forehead had been stripped off. Everything was swollen and purple and red, the features distorted to the point where if she hadn’t known it was him, she wouldn’t have recognized him.

And then there were his legs. Both in casts, one elevated like the third side of a trigonometry problem. Also, his arm and shoulder were wrapped . . . and he’d been intubated at some point, a bandage at the soft juncture in the front of his throat between his collar bones.

She went over and sat on the edge of the bed because the floor was suddenly going whitecap storm surge on her. She tried to breathe. Failed.

Now she cried again, and fuck it. Danny wasn’t going to know.

Taking his battered hand, she dropped her head and let the tears fall from her eyes to wherever they landed.

She had done this to him.

The loss of her hand she could live with as payment for her impulsive decision and rash behavior on scene. But this? This . . . catastrophic . . . injury to him? Even if he came through, she was never going to forgive herself and he was never going to be the same.