The Seraphim Project

Chapter Thirteen

I don’t even know how many stitches they had to put in Hawk’s back. Too many to count. He sat silently the whole time, but I knew him well enough to see the pain in his face, and he held my hands in a death grip the whole time. They had to bring in a vet to look at his wings. She managed to patch them up, but she said it was a pretty serious injury.

“But he’ll get better, right?” I asked her. “He’ll be able to fly again?”

She gave me a sad look. “I don’t know. If he were a bird, I’d say that he’d never be quite right again, but he would fly again. I don’t know about this, though. I’ve never treated anything like him.”

By the time they were done, it was around seven in the morning. Thoroughly exhausted, we all fell asleep in chairs gathered around Hawk’s bed.

When we woke up, it was well into the afternoon. We all had a late lunch—and discovered the horrors of hospital food—before I told everyone else to go back to school.

“No way!” Russ protested. “You want to separate us again?”

I sighed. “We can’t all stay here. You can come back first thing tomorrow, I promise. Just go home.”

We all sat in shock of the word I’d just used. Home. It had been too long since we’d had a place I could call that. Without another word, they all filed out, Falcon last. He gave me a long look before he slipped through the door and disappeared.

“What’s with you and Falcon?” Hawk asked. He lay on his side facing me, and I was thankful. He was wrapped in bandages, so I wouldn’t have been able to see his wounds, but I was glad that I couldn’t see the bandages wrapped around the bases of both wings. It only reminded me that he may not be able to fly again, and even if he did, he may never be the same again.

I sighed. “It’s nothing. Things have just been a little… tense, lately.”

“You’ve been fighting since I left. He didn’t want to come after me.” I winced. I’d forgotten how well he knew me.

“Yeah. He said it was dangerous.”

“How did you change his mind?”

I hung my head. “I may have told them all that I was going and that if they didn’t want to come, they could stay with Falcon.”

He laughed. I couldn’t help but grin with him, shaking my head. “How’d he take it?” he asked.

I laughed. “Not well. He seemed to have expected me to back down when he told me that it was dangerous.” I rolled my eyes. “As if.”

“He doesn’t know you very well then. I never doubted that you would try, only that you wound succeed.” We fell silent, and that was the end of that conversation.

The rest of the weekend passed in a blur. On Monday morning, I said goodbye to Hawk and flew to school for the day. I wished I could say that school passed in a blur, too. It didn’t. It dragged, especially since I knew that as soon as it was over, I could go back to see Hawk. He’s supposed to get out of the hospital tonight, and I was glad. They were surprised at the rate of his recovery, but I wasn’t. He was genetically engineered to be an angel. It was to be expected that he would heal fast.

By the time lunch came around, I was thankful. I grabbed a trey and sat at the same table as Friday, easily ignoring the eyes on me. There weren’t as many as the week before, but they didn’t bother me. Either I was getting used to it, or I was just too preoccupied with thoughts of the afternoon that I didn’t notice them.

When Jason dropped his trey across from me, I nearly jumped out of my chair. “You scared me!” I shook my head to clear it and went back to eating.