Page 25 of Reverie

“Ow,” I grumble. A second later, the low hum of a machine starts, and coldness runs up my arm from the bend of my elbow.

I crack open one lid.

“Hunter? Where is Hunter?” I ask, gasping as a cold feeling settles in my chest.

The room I’m in is white, but gratefully, it's dim in here except for the lights over the counters and one glowing from somewhere behind my head. Rolling my eye to take in the room, I note the three walls surrounding me and the tan curtain hanging over the entrance I used to come in here. Two nurses move around the medical suite.

As if someone stabbed me, everything rushes back with a wave of potent anxiety.

The raid.

The safe room.

Veronica and Ella.

Rio.

Blair.

And then….

“August,” I rasp. The nurse closest to me fiddles with a bag of IV fluids hooked up to a pump.

I try again. “August. Where is August?”

She looks down at me after she gets all her IV lines sorted. A mask covers the bottom half of her face, and when she doesn’t respond to my question, alarm shoots through me.

I look at the IV site and begin to sit up. Fuck this.

“Whoa, ma’am,” a voice to my right calls. It’s another nurse. Her mask hangs off her ear, and her warm smile greets me, but I’m still on guard.

“Where thefuckis my…” I bite my lip, dropping my head back onto the pillow that’s way too plush to be a plastic hospital one. “Where’s August,” I say, looking up at the ceiling. In a rush, my eyes start to feel heavy. Even though it takes much effort, I turn to look at the nurse to my left, near the IV poles.

“Did you drug me?” I slur. She taps the IV container.

“Winter, you are safe here.” I whip my head to my right, and I’m irritated that my movements are slow and don’t match the intensity I want to give off. “We’re not giving you anything that could hurt you. Just something to help you relax,” the smiling nurse says. She steps up to the bedside and pats my hand.

Despite the meds sent through my IV to relax me, panic surges anyway. Confusion edges in as the smiley nurse begins to sign to her colleague, her fingers a rapid show of language.

“Marta is hard of hearing,” the other nurse says, signing as she speaks. I feel my body release some tension, and the masked nurse nods. The corner of her eyes crinkle a bit.

A smile.

Maybe the nurse doesn’t plan on harming me.

But then my brain shakes as I try to tilt my head, and a renewed sense of sharp hyperawareness rushes up anyway.

“I’m pregnant,” I blurt out. “I…can’t…have…drugs.” When I attempt to open my eyes, everything spins.

“Why the hell did you drug me? I didn’t consent to being drugged!” Forming words is hard. “I just have a scratch, and it doesn’t even hurt that bad!”

I shrug my injured shoulder but force myself to bite back the groan of pain I want to release.

Okay, maybe it hurts more than a little.

The smiley nurse pats my hand. “We know about the pregnancy. You were pretty amped up when you got here, and we were afraid you were going to harm yourself with how your panic attack took over. Do you not remember?”

I search for any recollection of the events the nurse talks about, but I come up with a big blank box of nothing.