ACHE (Naked, Book 5) by Kelly Favor Page B

growled.
    Now Caelyn could see the nurse as she approached and glared at Elijah. “You shouldn’t even be standing up right now. I’ve heard all about your case—you’re the gunshot wound, and you crashed your car.”
    Elijah’s attention was turned fully on Caelyn. He licked his cracked lips. His face was shades of purple and blue and black from the bruising and swelling.
    She tried to give him a sign, to try and tell him she knew what he was doing on her behalf, but it was impossible. Her eyes wandered, totally out of her control. Finally, her eyes rolled back in her head and everything went black once more.
    She could still hear, though.
    “Look at her,” Elijah said.
    “You need to leave, Sir. Right now.”
    “Look at her eyes. She needs help! She needs help!”
    Do I?
    Maybe she did need help. Her own inner voice was beginning to fade, fade, fade.
    And she was starting to move further away from Elijah, although she resisted the pull. It seemed as if an invisible current was pulling her through the darkness, and Elijah was fading away along with everything else.
    The other stuff she didn’t care about. Only him. Only…only…
    Don’t go…

    Don’t…

    Elijah.

    ***
    She had begun to dream. The strange thing was, she knew she was dreaming.
    And unlike normal dreams she’d had most of her life, these dreams made total and utter sense.
    They pooled into the darkness, swirls of color that sprouted into existence. The swirls of color started to form shapes and then the shapes began to form images. Trees.
    Beautiful trees, with different colored fall leaves, as bright as any trees she’d ever seen.
    Caelyn couldn’t believe the vividness of those colors. And the smells. She could smell the leaves, and the grass, and even the air, as a gust of wind blew.
    She was looking at her parents’ house.
    Her mother and father and Deena were hurrying into her dad’s car. The three of them looked pained, with puffy, tear-streaked faces.
    Deena, however, seemed to be milking it for all it was worth. She sobbed into her mother’s coat, as they made their way to the car. “It’s okay Dee Dee,” her mother said.
    “It’s going to be okay.”
    “No,” Deena wailed. “She’s going to die, I know it.” More sobbing.
    “She’s going to live. She’ll fight—Caelyn’s always been a fighter, God knows.”
    They got in the car.
    And then, as if she’d changed the channel, Caelyn was watching a new scene altogether.
    A doctor was talking to her parents in a hospital waiting area. The doctor was a tall, thin woman with grayish blond hair and brittle hands. “Caelyn came in with a very serious head injury from her car accident, but we thought we had the swelling under control,” the doctor explained.
    “And then what happened? Why was she in surgery?” Caelyn’s mother asked.
    “She suddenly spiked a fever, and when we gave her another scan, we found that her brain had begun swelling and there was a blood clot that had formed. We had to go in and take out the clot, which we did.”
    “So she’s okay,” her dad said, his voice shaking.
    The doctor sighed. “She’s in stable but critical condition. We’ve had to place her in a medically induced coma while we wait for her temperature and swelling to subside.”
    “So is she going to live?” her father asked. “What are her chances?”
    “I’m not going to give you a definitive answer, Mr. Murphy. I simply don’t know. What I do know is that we’ve given Caelyn a great chance. We removed the clot, we addressed the swelling, and now we’re hoping she’ll do the rest and recover. We have to wait and see, I’m afraid.”
    Her father shook his head.
    The scene appeared to break apart, and the colors swirled for a long time. When the colors reformed shapes, they showed Caelyn a different hospital room.
    Elijah was lying in bed, a curtain around him. There was a short police officer talking to him, while Elijah drank Ginger Ale from a straw.
    “So you