Skulduggery Pleasant: Raising Cain

Chapter 117 - She's awake!

Chapter 117

Nadia woke up still curled up in the hospital bed some hours later and looked around the ward, seeing one of the other patients were gone. For a moment, she made herself feel happy for the person since they were able to go home before she thought back over the previous day and clenched her eyes shut.

Someone had put her bag by her feet, and Nadia reached in and grabbed a pain leaf she had put in there from Valkyrie's room to help her scratched arm and sore, aching muscles, before grabbing her phone.

Her mother had sent her texts. They were all the same, as her letters were, asking where she was, what she was doing, when she would be home. Nadia deleted the one-sided conversation entirely so she wouldn't have to see it and put it away.

To ease her heart, she went over to Valkyrie's bed and took her hand in her own. She couldn't bring herself to tell her what had happened. She just said that Fletcher saved Solomon, and then she felt numb guilt once more and carefully laid down in the bed with Valkyrie, shuffling down so she wouldn't pull any of the things attached to Valkyrie, and put her head on Valkyrie's stomach.

She fell back to sleep.

.*****.

Valkyrie's seventh day in a coma

Anton had woken back up. It wasn't new news, but it had happened.

Nadia was living out of her bag at the hospital to stay with Valkyrie and Doctor Kenspeckle hadn't said anything except to tell her how Valkyrie was doing whenever he came to check on her or when he'd come in to take Anton off of medication which would allow him to wake up. She'd been the one to text Tanith.

That had happened two days previously, and now Anton was asking to go home, or more likely, get in on the task of hunting down Skulduggery which no one had spoken to her about but she had overheard. She didn't deserve to be in on missions or tasks after what she had done, but it still stung a little.

To distract herself from the Dead Men and her own guilt, she focused on Valkyrie. Civet, one of the assistants, was incredibly nice and was teaching her some things in his spare time so she might be able to help Valkyrie during her recovery.

She hadn't known they expected a recovery period until he'd brought it up. It had been gut-wrenching and eye-opening to imagine that Valkyrie might not be herself the moment she opened her eyes. Civet had said they were all hoping for the very best but had also explained to her some important things about brain injuries that were frightening to Nadia. After helping her calm down, he'd gone through some of the things Doctor Kenspeckle was concerned might be a problem once Valkyrie woke up based on where she'd been struck on the head by the stairs, and then hit her head on the floor. It was a long list, but the majority of the really bad things had been ranked as very unlikely, so Nadia was able to breathe and move past them, and then Civet had helped her with learning all those good things she might need if any one of those bad things happened.

It was very nice to have something useful to do, other than talk to Valkyrie of course. She spent most of her time just stroking Valkyrie hair, or rubbing her thumb over her hand as she read the medical books.

But truly, a girl in a coma made for awful conversation. She tried when she could, but she had no news, no good thoughts. So she sat with her and gave her touch instead, hoping that one day she might respond to that, something Civet had indicated was a good thing anyway. Regardless of if it was, Nadia had run out of things to say. She felt sort of bad, but if she said anything else it would have to be made up because she couldn't think of a single other thing and didn't want to frighten Valkyrie with the medical stuff just in case she could hear her.