The Fighter (Book 1)

Chapter 5

I woke with a start, looking around the room. I was in a large bed with fluffy, white sheets, and Zack was in a chair next to the bed with one of my hands clasped in one of his. He was leaned back lazily, flipping through the tainted-yellow pages of well-liked book. His thumb ran over my knuckles, and all I could do was stare at him.

“Don’t try and move,” Zack’s eyes flashed to mine before skirting back to his book. “You’re temporarily paralyzed from the waist-down.” Despite his warning, I still tried to wiggle my toes, not feeling a damned thing. “One of these days you won’t question my warnings.”

“Today is not that day,” I mumbled, looking down at the IV in my arm. “What’s that?”

“Salt water drip,” he smiled proudly at his book. “Damn well saved your life with how intuitive I am.”

“Thanks.”

“You need like a salt water pump since you always forget,” he smiled, marking his page and closing his book. After setting it down on a small wooden table, he climbed onto the bed next to me, still holding me hand. “I thought you were gonna die.”

I nodded grimly. The way I saw it I should’ve been dead. Easily. Dehydration didn’t take much to set in, and it also didn’t take much time to leave you a corpse either. I knew that. And I knew I should be dead right now. “Zack, how am I alive?”

“What do you mean?” he chuckled.

“I mean, there’s no way you could get enough salt water in my system before I died of dehydration,” I stared at him, and he stared at the wall in front of us. I watched him think for a long time. Long enough that Sam had come in to check on me, and we were both still sitting, pondering.

Zack was yanked out of his thoughts, and Sam sat in the chair at my bedside, frowning. “Gabriel wants to talk to you…He’s the main angel, and the leader of Heaven at the moment.”

“Why are you making that face?” I laughed softly.

“I’m just nervous,” he shrugged his shoulders. “The head angel wants to talk to my cousin about some secretive matter, and I don’t know…There have been rumors.”

“About me?!” I almost sat up, but still couldn’t feel anything below my waist. Sam nodded and I could feel my heart rate speed up. Zack patted my knee, and the only reason I knew that was because I watched him. Some part of me imagined that I could feel it, but it still wasn’t real.

“You’ll be okay,” he lied down, curling into my side. “Do you want my sword?” there was a small smile playing on his lips, and it calmed me down tremendously. “Should I go with you? They can’t deny a personal body guard.”

“Zack, I’ll be fine,” I rolled my eyes with a chuckle. “Actually, I’m just going off the idea that they need the body count.”

“Probably not too far off,” he shrugged his shoulders, pressing a kiss into my neck. “We could get Tay to go with you. He’s probably not as much protection as I am, but he’s our best bet.”

“We could at least get him to walk her there. They can’t expect her to know where it is yet,” Sam chimed in. He and Zack carried on back and forth about how they could get someone to keep me safe, and it grated on my nerves.

“Okay!” I yelled, silencing them. “First of all, I’m still paralyzed, so I can’t exactly go anywhere for the moment! Secondly, I told you very clearly that I would be fine, did I not?!”

“You did,” Zack said haughtily. “But it doesn’t really matter.”

“Then I hope they take my damned head off,” I huffed, shoving Zack off of me. Well, trying to. He latched onto my waist, and what was my strength compared to his? Equivalent to a box of crayons.