The guest room on the living floor had been converted into something that looked like a hospital room. White sheets, an IV stand, a heart monitor beeping at a steady rhythm, and the faint smell of medicine that never fully went away no matter how many times someone opened the window. Alicia Winters lay in the center of it all, her dark skin ashen against the white sheets, her body smaller than Zoey remembered. A scar ran across her throat, healed but permanent.
The live-in nurse, a woman named Gloria brought over by the Sinclair family to monitor Alicia around the clock, was sitting in a chair near the bed reading something on her phone when the door opened. She looked up expecting Everett or Bruce. She got Everett, a bleeding young woman she barely recognized as his sister, and a strange man she'd never seen before who was carrying said bleeding young woman.
Gloria shot to her feet. "What in the... Zoey?! What happened to you?!"
"I'm fine." Zoey said this while leaving a trail of blood on the hardwood floor. "Put me down."
Jamie set her down as gently as he could near the bed. Zoey's legs wobbled but held. She was running on something deeper than physical strength now. Something that had nothing to do with stats or skills or magji gates. Just the sight of her mother's face, even unconscious, even scarred, was enough to keep her upright for a few more minutes.
"You are not fine! You need a hospital!" Gloria was already reaching for her phone.
"No hospital. No ambulance. No calls." Zoey's voice was quiet but carried the kind of seriousness that made Gloria's hand stop moving. "I need everyone to be quiet and let me do something."
"Do what? Zoey, you're bleeding everywhere. You need..."
"Gloria. Please."
Something in the way Zoey said "please" shut the nurse up.
Zoey opened the cracked box.
Gloria saw what was inside and her face went through several stages of confusion, horror, and disbelief in rapid succession. "What the hell is that?!"
"It's medicine." Zoey lifted the Rebirth Fetus out of the box with both hands. It pulsed in her palms, warm and wet and alive in a way that made Gloria take two steps back and Jamie squeak in terror.
Everett stood in the doorway. He didn't move. He didn't speak. He just watched his sister, broken and bleeding, holding something that looked like a nightmare, and trusted her.
Zoey placed the Rebirth Fetus on Alicia's chest.
The moment it touched her body, it began to dissolve. The blood-red surface of the fetus lost its shape and spread outward across Alicia's chest like water soaking into fabric. It seeped through her hospital gown and into her skin, the red fading to a soft glow that pulsed in time with the heart monitor's beeping. The glow spread from her chest to her shoulders, down her arms, up her neck, across her face.
"What is happening?!" Gloria's back was against the wall.
"Oh my God," Jamie whispered from behind Zoey. He'd seen a lot of things today. A human meteor landing in a park. A famous boxer covered in blood. What he thought was a miscarriage. But a glowing red fetus dissolving into an unconscious woman's body was apparently where his brain decided to stop trying to make sense of things. He just stood there with his mouth open and his phone forgotten in his pocket.
The glow intensified. The heart monitor's beeping changed. Faster. Stronger. The IV drip that had been feeding Alicia nutrients for months suddenly seemed unnecessary as color began returning to her skin. The ashen grey that had made her look like a faded photograph was being replaced, inch by inch, with the deep brown warmth that Zoey remembered from every morning of her childhood when her mom would stand in the kitchen with her hands on her hips and her eyes daring anyone to start the day wrong.
The scar on Alicia's throat began to shrink. Baxter had said the Rebirth Fetus rebuilt the person, but the angry raised tissue softened and flattened until it was nothing more than a thin line.
Zoey sat down on the edge of the bed because her legs finally gave out. She didn't care. She could see her mother's chest rising and falling with real breaths now.
"Her vitals are..." Gloria had crept back toward the monitors, her professional training dragging her toward the data despite everything she'd just witnessed. "Her vitals are perfect. Better than perfect. Her blood pressure, her heart rate, her oxygen levels... these are the readings of a healthy thirty-something, not a woman who's been in a coma for months."
Twenty minutes passed. The glow faded. The monitors settled into a steady, strong rhythm. Alicia's face had changed. She looked like herself again. The version of herself that Zoey had been afraid she'd never see again.
Zoey held her mother's hand. She could feel the warmth in it. She squeezed gently and felt something she hadn't felt in months.
Alicia squeezed back.
Zoey's breath caught.
"Mom?"
Alicia's eyes opened.
They shot open. Dark brown eyes that immediately squinted against the light, then blinked, then focused on the ceiling with the specific expression of a person who was trying to figure out where the hell they were and why the hell they were there.
"... What..." Alicia's voice was hoarse. Months of disuse had stripped it down to almost nothing. But it was there. It was hers.
"Mom." Zoey's voice cracked on the single syllable.
Alicia's eyes moved from the ceiling to the face beside her. She stared at Zoey for a long moment. Taking in the blood, the bruises, the dirt in her braids, the tears that Zoey didn't realize were on her face until right now because she could have sworn she wasn't crying but apparently her body had decided to do whatever the fuck it wanted right now.
"Why..." Alicia swallowed. Tried again. "Why do you look like that?"
Of all the things her mother could have said. Of all the possible first words after months in a coma. After having her throat slit. After nearly dying. Her first words to Zoey were why do you look like that. She woke up from a coma and immediately started asking questions that nobody wanted to answer.
Zoey laughed. It came out wet and broken and mixed with something that might have been a sob.
"I missed you, Mom."
"That's not an answer." Alicia's eyes narrowed. Even horizontal, even hoarse, even fresh out of a coma, that look could still make Zoey's soul shiver. "Everett. Why does your sister look like she got hit by a bus?"
Everett was crying. Full tears streaming down his face, his shoulders shaking, his hand over his mouth trying to hold it together and failing completely. He'd thought he was going to raise his child without his mother's help. He'd thought about that every single day for months. About his kid never knowing their grandmother's voice, never getting that look when they did something wrong, never being fed too much food at family dinners because grandma didn't believe in small portions.
"Everett Winters, I asked you a question." Alicia tried to sit up. Gloria rushed forward to help her, adjusting the bed's incline so she could see the room properly.
Alicia looked around. She saw Gloria, a stranger in nurse's scrubs who she'd never met. She saw Jamie, another stranger standing near the door with an expression that suggested his brain had left the building several minutes ago. She saw Everett, her baby boy, crying like he was five years old again. She saw Zoey, her baby girl, covered in blood and holding her hand and looking at her with an expression that Alicia had never seen on her daughter's face before.
"How long?" Alicia asked. Her voice was getting stronger with each word. "How long was I out?"
"Months, Mom," Everett managed between breaths.
"Months." Alicia repeated the word like she was tasting something unfamiliar. She looked down at herself. At the hospital gown. At the IV in her arm. At the monitors beeping beside her. Then she touched her throat. Her fingers found the thin line of the scar and traced it slowly.
"I remember," she said quietly. "I remember the... the monster. And then it was dark."
Zoey's grip on her mother's hand tightened.
"And then I was here." Alicia looked at the room. At the medical equipment. At the converted guest room that had been her world for months without her knowing it. "This is the house?"
"Yeah, Mom. You've been in the guest room."
"Months." She said it again. Understanding. "Everett, come here."
Everett crossed the room in two steps and crumpled next to the bed. Alicia put her hand on his head the way she'd done when he was a child and had a bad dream. He sobbed harder. She didn't tell him to stop. She just held him and looked at the ceiling and let her son fall apart against her because sometimes that was what people needed.
"And who are you two?" Alicia looked at Gloria and Jamie with the directness of a woman who woke up in a room full of strangers and wanted answers now.
"I'm Gloria, ma'am. I'm your nurse. I've been monitoring you since..."
"Since I was in a coma. Got it. Thank you." Alicia's eyes moved to Jamie. "And you?"
Jamie opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I'm... Jamie. I'm a fan of your daughter's. I, uh, drove her here. She was... she needed a ride."
Alicia looked at Jamie. Then at Zoey. Then at the blood on the floor, on the bed, on Zoey's clothes, on Jamie's shirt where he'd been carrying her.
"A fan drove my daughter home looking like this and nobody called an ambulance?"
"I told them not to." Zoey said quickly.
"I wasn't asking you. I was asking them why they listened." Alicia's eyebrow rose.
"Ma'am, your daughter is very scary when she's bleeding," Jamie said, and immediately looked like he wished he could take the words back.
The front door opened and closed. Heavy footsteps in the hallway. Bruce appeared in the doorway of the guest room, still in his work clothes, keys in one hand and a bag of takeout in the other. He'd clearly come home expecting a normal evening. Check on Alicia, eat dinner with Everett, maybe watch something on television.
He saw Alicia sitting up. Eyes open. Talking. Alive in a way she hadn't been alive in months.
The takeout bag hit the floor. Bruce didn't make a sound. He just stood there, his long and thin frame filling the doorway, his eyes locked on his wife's face.
"Hey, baby," Alicia said softly. The tough voice, the demanding questions, the no-nonsense attitude, all of it melted for exactly one person in the room.
Bruce crossed the room and wrapped his arms around her. Carefully, like she might break. But she didn't break. She put her arms around him and held on and for a moment the room was just the two of them. A man who'd chosen a woman with two big-ass kids and a woman who'd chosen a man willing to love them as his own.
Zoey watched them. The guilt in her chest, the guilt that had been sitting there since the night Poison's claw crossed her mother's throat, loosened. Not disappeared. She didn't think it would ever fully disappear. But it loosened enough that she could breathe around it.
Her mother was awake. Her mother was alive. Her mother was already interrogating strangers and making her son cry and calling out her daughter for looking like a mess.
Everything was going to be okay.
"Zoey Winters." Alicia's voice cut through the moment like a knife through butter. She was looking at her daughter over Bruce's shoulder with the eyes of a woman who had just woken up from a coma and was already done with the emotional portion of the evening. "When your brother stops crying and your father stops squeezing me, you are going to explain to me why you look like you crawled out of a grave. And you are going to tell me the truth. The whole truth. Do you understand me?"
Zoey smiled. Even though it hurt her face because her face was broken in several places but she didn't care.
"Yes, Mom."