“Ask mahmen’s doggen.”
“Will do.” Bella gave his hand a squeeze that he couldn’t feel and left his room.
When he was alone, he went over to the bed and took out his cell phone. Ehlena never had texted him the night before, and as he retrieved the clinic’s number from his address book, he tried not to worry. Maybe she had done the overday shift. God, he hoped she had.
Chances were small something bad had happened. Very small.
But he was calling her next.
“Hello, clinic,” came the voice in the Old Language.
“This is Rehvenge, son of Rempoon. My mother has just passed, and I need to make arrangements for her body to be preserved.”
The female on the other end gasped. None of the nurses liked him, but they had all adored his mother. Everyone did-
Everyone had, that was.
He rubbed his mohawk. “Is there any way Havers could come out to the house at nightfall?”
“Yes, absolutely, and may I say on behalf of all of us, we are deeply aggrieved at her passing and wish her safe passage unto the Fade.”
“Thank you.”
“Hold a moment.” When the female came back on, she said, “The doctor will come immediately after sundown. With your permission, he will bring someone to assist-”
“Who.” He wasn’t sure how he’d feel about it being Ehlena. He didn’t want her to have to deal with another body so soon, and the fact that it was his mother’s might make it even harder on her. “Ehlena?”
The nurse hesitated. “Ah, no, not Ehlena.”
He frowned, his symphath instincts triggered by the female’s tone. “Did Ehlena make it in last night?” Another pause. “Did she?”
“I’m sorry, I cannot discuss-”
His voice dropped to a growl. “Did she come in or not. Simple question. Did she. Or not.”
The nurse became flustered. “Yes, yes, she came in-”
“And?”
“Nothing. She-”
“So what’s the problem?”
“There isn’t one.” The exasperation in that voice told him it was happy interactions like this that were part of what made them all dislike him so much.
He tried to make his voice more even. “Clearly there is a problem, and you’re going to tell me what’s doing or I’m going to keep calling back until someone talks to me. And if no one will, I’m going to show up at your front desk and drive every single one of you insane until a member of the staff cracks and talks to me.”
There was a pause that vibrated with you-are-such-an-asshole. “Fine. She doesn’t work here anymore.”
Rehv’s breath sucked in on a hiss and his hand shot to the plastic Baggie full of penicillin he’d been keeping in his suit’s breast pocket. “Why?”
“That I will not disclose to you no matter what you do.”
There was a click as she hung up on him.
Ehlena sat upstairs at the crappy kitchen table, her father’s manuscript in front of her. She’d read it twice at his desk, then put him to bed and come up here, where she’d gone through it again.
The title was In the Rain Forest of the Monkey Mind.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, if she’d thought she had sympathy for the male before, now she had empathy for him. The three hundred handwritten pages were a guided tour through his mental illness, a vivid, walk-a-mile-in-his-shoes study of when the disease had started and where it had taken him.
She glanced over at the aluminum foil that covered the windows. The voices in his mind that tortured him came from a variety of sources, and one way was through radio waves beamed down from satellites orbiting the earth.
She knew all this.
But in the book, her father described the Reynolds Wrap as a tangible representation of the psychosis: Both the foil and the schizophrenia kept the real world away, both insulated him…and with both in place he was safer than if they weren’t around. The truth was, he loved his illness as much as he feared it.
Many, many years ago, after family had double-crossed him in business and ruined him in the eyes of the glymera, he no longer trusted his ability to read the intentions and motivations of others. He had put his faith in the wrong people and…it had cost him his shellan.
The thing was, Ehlena had figured her mother’s death wrong. Right after the great fall, her mother had turned to laudanum to help her cope, and the temporary relief had bloomed into a crutch as life as she’d known it had crumbled…money, position, homes, possessions leaving her like lovely doves scattering from a field, going somewhere safer.
And then Ehlena’s engagement had failed, the male distancing himself before publicly declaring that he was ending the relationship-because Ehlena had seduced him into her bed and taken advantage of him.