The Misadventures of Anna Cabbot

Pulse

There was an elephant nesting in Anna's strained ribcage and it was annoying as shit.

She hated to be flat on her back, but she couldn't move herself and the cardiac ICU staff weren't about to prop her up on her side — not with everything in her front feeling as structurally sound as a kindergarten string craft.

The compression boots on her feet and calves inflated again, the sound startlingly loud in anotherwise silent room. None of the machines she was plugged into beeped above her; all her stats and readouts were on a single scrolling screen mounted above the nurses' station.

Medical technology progress had come so far, though it hadn't yet been able to take care of that damn painfully tight blood pressure cuff. She sighed.

She could do that now, since her breathing tube was gone.

That process had been a fucking nightmare.

Anna swallowed heavily, her mouth uncomfortably dry. For a moment she thought her ears were ringing. She lifted her head as far as she dared — there was something stuck in her neck, and, with what felt like half her hair glued to it, pulled on her skin if she moved wrong — and everything was still fine except she wouldn't hear the dull, random pinging she'd become accustomed to.

Faintly, as though from several yards away down the hallway, came the low sound of a cello.

She shivered.

Something tiptoed on the edge of her witchsense.

With a melody she couldn't place, the cello grew louder, accompanied by the creak of old, old wood.

Her heart thudded hard in her chest. She breathed shallowly.

"Anna?" Tracy, her ICU nurse, appeared in the doorway. "Are you in pain or having shortness of breath?"

She raised her right arm, IV lines taped to the inside of her elbow, and gestured toward her ear. "There's...can you hear it? The cello?"

Tracy came fully into the room. Behind her, Anna saw something flicker, warm like a candle glow.

The cello grew louder still.

Dully, as though from a great distance away, a set of monitors went off with a shriek.

Nurses and other ICU personnel piled into her tiny room. Anna's breath hitched in her chest, her eyes fixed on the lantern light as it swung back and forth on the wall and floor by the nurses' station. Whoever held it — whoever was responsible for the cello — remained well out of sight. The creak of old wood came again.

"Anna! Anna, I need you to stay awake!" Tracy pinched the back of her hand hard. "Keep your eyes on me!"

Anna didn't look away from the doorway. A lantern swung wildly. Blackness rolled from the edges of her vision inward, a smooth, unstoppable tide. Stinging pain, like someone had pressed a live wire to her skin, erupted in her chest, and she arched.

There was something there, and she pushed at her witchsense. Whatever it was pushed back.

For several long seconds, time itself seemed to stop. And with it, so did Anna's recently repaired heart.