Midnight Promises Read Free Page A

but came to immediately when a sneakered foot crushed her hand. The pain woke her before she could slump to the ground. Grateful that it had been a sneaker and not a stiletto, she rose on one knee, then the other, then rose up on her feet, trembling and weak.
    Someone else bumped into her from behind. You don’t stand still in a stream of panicking people. Stumbling forward, she tried to scan for her attacker but there was darkness at the edge of her vision.
    Stumbling and bleeding, she made her way through without attracting attention. People were fighting to get away, their eyes straight ahead. No one noticed a young woman, even if she was bleeding and half-dead on her feet. Panic was excellent camouflage.
    The alarm was still whooping and now a thousand people were outside the airport, blinking in the snow, children crying, men shouting. Some had been injured in the stampede and Felicity could see a woman cradling her arm, but it didn’t look broken. She hated the thought of causing injuries but she’d had no choice.
    Her attacker was at the other end of the sidewalk, head turning, pushing people out of his way. He was heading toward her, systematically checking faces. Felicity ducked behind a big planter. Moving as fast as she could despite the searing pain in her side she turned and made her way to the far end where ambulances were driving up, sirens wailing. Soldiers with machine guns were trying to establish order, funneling people out toward the parking lots.
    Felicity staggered when she got to the first ambulance, stopping a medic with a bloodstained hand.
    “Ma’am?” he said, frowning, looking at her hand then down her side. She pulled back her coat, lifted the blanket from the wound and looked at him. She didn’t have to playact anything.
    “I need help.” She wanted to spin a story about how she’d fallen and cut herself but she didn’t have the strength. She could barely stand and only those stark words came out in a whisper.
    “Right,” the medic said, signaling the driver. A gloved hand probed the wound. She gasped in pain, then bit her lips. No crying out, no calling attention to herself. She’d lost track of her attacker but he was out there somewhere.
    “Let’s get you into the van and start a saline and plasma drip right away,” the medic said.
    It got hazy after that. The sounds of a gurney being unfolded, gentle but strong hands helping her onto it, the gurney being loaded into the back of the ambulance, the probing as the medic found a vein and started an IV line of something…
    She drifted in and out of consciousness, the siren wailing, the IV bag swaying, the medic holding her wrist, a finger on the pulse. The radio on the dashboard would crackle and someone at a central dispatch imparted orders but none of the words made any kind of sense. She lost all sense of time and even of where she was. Her consciousness was reduced to a pinprick of awareness, no past and no future, just an endless now with pain and noise.
    The ambulance went up a ramp, fast, and braked to a halt.
    The medic and driver were smooth and efficient. She was out of the ambulance and into the ER as fast as possible, the medic giving the nurses a rundown of her condition so quickly she couldn’t follow. Maybe it was better that way.
    “…the airport?” one of the nurses asked and the medic shook his head.
    “Lots of confusion, we should be ready for minor injuries. Lucky that bomb didn’t go off.”
    “Yet. Though they are saying that maybe it was a false alarm,” the nurse said. The nurse was standing at the top of the gurney so Felicity couldn’t see her face. The nurse came around, probed at the wound, and Felicity blacked out again, just for a second. It was as if her life was being conducted under strobe lights, at every pulse of light she was in a different position, something else going on. The nurse injected something into the IV bag. A painkiller.
    The lancing pain—almost electric in its