Page 88 of Ghost’s Awakening

UMC.

For five months that ring had meant one thing. The phone lighting up in the middle of a shift, in the middle of taping my hands, and my whole body gone cold before I'd even read the screen, because a hospital doesn't call you with good news. A number gone the wrong way, or a word like transfer. I'd learned to answer it before the second ring.

I sat there and let it ring twice. My hand wouldn't go to it. The towel was cold and wet against my thighs and the water ran behind the door, and I looked at that name on the screen, in through the nose, hold, and I couldn't get to four.

I picked it up.

"Mr. Rossi." I knew the voice. The desk nurse, twenty years on that floor. "Now, don't drop the phone." A breath on the line.

"Your brother's awake."

Nothing came out of me.

"We've been walking the sedation down a step a day, and he came up faster than anybody on this floor expected. Opened his eyes a half hour ago, and the first thing he did was mouth your name." A breath. "He's tired, honey, and he's awake, and you can come up any time you want."

The room had gone away, and I could not find one word. My eyes went hot. The phone shook against my ear and it was my hand doing it.

"Mr. Rossi? Caleb? Are you there?" Her voice came in closer.

"Uh. Yes. Yes. YES, I'm coming!" It came out of me too loud and all at once, and my voice broke in the middle of it. "Oh fuck—I mean. Sorry. Sorry, yes. I'm coming. I'll be there. Tell him I'm⁠—"

"I'll tell him." Her voice had gone soft. "Drive safe."

The bathroom door opened. Ghost came out with a towel around his hips and steam rolling out behind him, drying his hair with one hand, and he stopped when he saw my face.

"Everything okay?" The towel in his hand went still.

"Liam." My voice barely made it. "He's awake."

Neither of us moved.

We looked at each other for three full seconds. I counted them. His mouth had come open. Then, without either of us saying a word, we moved at the same time.

I came off the bed and went for my jeans. He was gone, the bathroom door still swinging, and I hadn't seen him go, which was the whole reason they'd hung that nickname on him. I got the jeans up, fought my way into the hoodie, and when my head came through, he was hopping out of the bathroom on one foot with a sock half on the other.

"Put on—ouch, dammit—put on a jacket, I'm going to ride so fast you're going to freeze." He got the sock on.

"I don't have one here." I looked around the room. "It's fine, let's just⁠—"

He went to the closet and stopped.

His hand was on the door. He stood there with it, half a second, then a whole one, his back to me and his shoulders up, and I saw him breathe in and let it go. Then he opened the door and reached past his cut to the back of it and came out with a leather jacket held in both hands, and he turned around with it, and he didn't hold it out. He looked at it, and then at me, his thumb moving on the collar, and his ears had gone red before he'd spoken a word.

"Damn it." He held it out with both hands. "I wanted to give you this a different way. This is fine too. Take it. Put it on."

I took it. Black and heavy, the leather soft and cold, smelling new, and cut for me, I could tell that from the weight across my palms. I turned it in my hands, and a piece of his name showed on the back, white on black. I held it out by the shoulders and read the whole thing.

PROPERTY OF GHOST.

White letters stitched across the shoulders. And under them, across the whole back of it, a phoenix coming up out of stitched flames, red on the black, the same bird that hung framed on the wall at Church and rode on the back of every cut in that yard.

I'd seen Kai in his. I'd seen Tyler walk across the yard with Tank's name across his back, and I'd never asked what it meant.

"Woah." I looked up at him, and my voice came out wrong. "What is⁠—"

He'd gone red. Ears and neck, all of it, and he shoved his arms into his own scuffed jacket while trying to look like he hadn't.

"Nothing important." He got one arm in. "I mean. It's a way of… telling everyone you're under protection. Mine. It's a thing we do at the Phoenixes, Reaper did it, Tank did it, Irish did it, everybody's done it, and you don't have to wear it. If you don't like it, or if it makes you feel weird, I'm not trying to possess you, that isn't what—Hawk knows, I asked him, I asked him three weeks ago and I've had it in that closet ever since waiting for the right⁠—"