“This is really happening isn’t it?” Emma asks.
“Yeah, it is. The end is coming,” Tom answers.
Sitting down on the couch in the entertainment room, I listen upstairs for Ryanne’s movements. The training room is directly above us. I can hear people shuffling around, so I know they are still training. Chris sits down on the couch next to me, and I turn to him.
“So you were the paramedic that helped Ryanne?”
“Yeah, I was the first EMT to arrive on the scene,” he tells me. “The cops cleared the area and gave us access to the vehicle. Her mom died on impact. There was nothing we could do to save her. I thought Ryanne was dead too when I first saw her. She was unconscious and bleeding a lot. If she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, she definitely would have died.” Chris doesn’t seem to like to talk about emergency situations.
“When we were finally able to free her from the car we found out where all the blood was coming from. She had a four inch piece of glass embedded under her ribs from the windshield breaking in. We couldn’t remove it on the spot; we had to stabilize her until we could get her to an emergency room for surgery. She’d already lost so much blood. We almost lost her twice on the way to the ER. She opened her eyes once in the ambulance and stared right at me for a couple seconds before losing consciousness again. To this day, I can’t get the image of her looking at me with so much pain in her eyes out of my mind. Honestly, I’m shocked she made it,” he says. “I tried everything to make sure she didn’t leave us. It’s always hard to loose someone so young. I’ve seen more death than I ever wanted to, but I’ve saved a lot of lives, and I was so happy when I could call her a success story.”
“Well thank you for saving her,” I whisper. I can’t image what everything would be like if she had actually died in that crash. At least now, I’ve gotten to know her. If she died, everything would be a big ‘what if.’ I’d never know for sure. I’d be incomplete…empty.
“I was just doing my job, Colton.” Chris looks at me. He’s a good guy. I already feel like I can trust him completely. We drop the conversation when Ryanne, Natalie, and Colin all walk into the room. Ryanne dramatically plops down on the couch next to me.
“I’m tired now. Goodnight,” she whispers. Chris scoots over to give Ryanne more room. She smiles gratefully at him and curls into my side. Wrapping my arm around her, I pull her to me. She laughs, but lets me move her. “Surprisingly, I’m actually not that tired.”
“I told you unleashing your magic would help. Now you can easily control the thoughts and emotions. The magic is always around you, so you no longer have to suppress anything. Everything should be much easier to manipulate. Come on, let me hear it,” Colin says with a large grin.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ryanne mumbles.
“Just once. I need to hear it.”
Ryanne turns and buries her head in my shoulder. “You wmfh righsh,” she says. Her voice is muffled by my shirt.
“I couldn’t hear you. Could you please repeat that, Gandalf?” Colin asks. He’s literally grinning from ear to ear. Tom starts laughing from across the room.
With a sigh, Ryanne sits up and looks directly at Colin. “Right, Colin, you were. Hmmmm.”
“You sound nothing like Yoda,” Chris says with a laugh.
“I wasn’t trying to sound like Yoda. I was just trying to speak like Yoda,” she retorts. Chris shakes his head.
“I’ll take it,” Colin says.
“That’s probably a good idea, because you won’t get anything better than that,” Bragden says.
Ryanne laughs and turns toward the TV. Without saying anything, she silently gets up and walks over to Colin’s DVD collection. Zeroing in on the movie, she grabs it and turns around. “Can we watch this? I’ll beg if I have to,” she says.
The Avengers.
Turning toward Emma, she says, “Chris Hemsworth.”
“You only like him because of his voice,” Emma replies.
“And everything else,” she mumbles as she looks toward Colin.
“You can watch it. I don’t care.”
Ryanne smiles widely and then quickly hides the smile and glares at everyone, making sure that no one will argue with her. Larkin opens his mouth to say something, but a large ball of water forms in midair and falls down on him.
“Don’t even try it, mister,” Ryanne says.
Larkin spits out water and instantly starts laughing. No one else says anything, but everyone is trying to hide their laughter. I get off the couch and grab the movie from Ryanne. Putting it in the DVD player, I press play and grab Ryanne’s hand, pulling her back to the couch.