Both boys saw the nurses and security rushing in and out of the hospital room. Pulses quickened at the same time; breathing got a lot harder. Eric took off running towards the room and Ryan wasn't far behind. There was blood on the floor, some on the sheets, some on the wall, where it had spattered, where whoever had been bleeding had fallen. Eric could almost feel Calleigh gasp for breath, even with the help from the oxygen. Mari was showing off her lungs in grand style, not sure what was going on, but knowing that everyone around her was scared. Without thinking, Ryan moved to where Lina was rocking back and forth on the bed, holding her before he realized there was blood on her gown.
Eric didn't bother asking if they were all right; nothing about the entire situation was all right. "What happened?"
Throughout the cancer with Marisol, Calleigh's near misses, and his own health issues, Eric had learned some of the nurses by name. Debbie, one of his favorites, spoke up, seeing that the girls couldn't at the moment. "The ladies witnessed Lieutenant Caine being shot. Dr. Moretti and Ms. Boa Vista went to him when he fell. That's how Dr. Moretti got blood on her gown." The ultimate goal for the time being was to calm Angelina down before worrying about changing her gown. "Ms. Boa Vista went with him." Natalia had refused to let him leave her sight, as if she were afraid he would die if she couldn't see him. "Calleigh became upset and her breathing worsened again. We've already called Dr. Woods and Detective Tripp." Alexx had a standing request that if any of the CSIs were brought in, that she be called as soon as possible, although she had just left for bed two hours before.
"I'm all right," Calleigh finally whispered when she was able to take off the oxygen mask. She tried to get up but her body had been through enough trauma in the last twelve hours that it just wasn't possible.
Her appearance, how weak and pale she looked, frightened Eric. "You're staying here right now, Cal." He whispered.
"I need to go check on Horatio. Natalia." She remembered far too well how she'd felt when Eric was shot, each time more helpless, more frightened, than the last.
"H's in surgery right now," Eric told her softly, holding her close. "And Natalia will be all right. We'll check on her when you feel better. When you feel up to it. Right now's not it." It scared him even more when she didn't argue.
Calleigh couldn't picture the world without Horatio, just as she couldn't picture the world without any of her family. She knew one day it would happen, but as a child, Calleigh had longed for a voice of reason, of experience, of a real parent. Horatio had always been that for her, through mistakes in her professional and personal life, through parenting her own father, then the craziness that had surrounded her pregnancy and Mari's birth. She wasn't ready to let go yet.
Eric looked at Ryan and realized that his friend couldn't leave Lina any more than he could leave Calleigh. Ryan rocked Angelina in his arms, whispering to her, trying to calm her down. She had finally started crying and he was grateful, as it seemed to mean she was coming out of her state of shock.
"Do we need to call Kyle?" She whispered to him, asking about her half-brother.
"Let's wait until we know something." He whispered, hoping he was making the right decision. It could take over sixteen hours of just flight time for Kyle to come home, that wasn't counting the hoops they would have to jump through with the Army. He also knew that there was nothing Kyle could do from there, nothing any of them could do. That was what was hurting Lina so badly; there was nothing anyone could do to fix this.
Lina thought about being twelve years old, the night her world had changed. She'd always been proud of her mom being a CSI, her dad being a homicide detective. They helped people, protected them from the 'nightmares in the closet' as her mom used to phrase it. The only time her parents weren't there to protect, sometimes overprotect, her, was when her dad had gone undercover. She never thought it possible that she could lose one of them. Yet she remembered that night far too well. Her dad had been the one to tell her of her mom's shooting; it was the only time she remembered him crying. When her beloved grandma, her dad's mom, had died a few months later, she remembered thinking that her dad was all she had left in the world. That feeling intensified a year later when her dad had been stabbed and they'd moved all the way from Brooklyn to Miami, what felt like a completely different world. They had their fights, like most father/daughter relationships, but she remembered that feeling: he was the only family she had left.