Chapter Seven: Coma

"Hey, Zel. Where's Infinity?" Salem approached me just before assembly. "Manfred and Asa aren't here either? Why are you by yourself?"

I frowned. I had expected Infinity to be back by now. She didn't exactly tell me what she was going to do, but I assumed it wouldn't take her very long. "I don't know where any of them went. Infinity had to run and do something before assembly and I haven't seen or talked to Manfred or Asa since last Friday." I looked around. Maybe they were here already. I went to ask Salem if he could see them anywhere because he was a good bit taller than me, but when I turned to look at him all the color had drained from his face. His eyes widened like a deer in headlights. "Salem, what's wrong?"

"Something's wrong." He turned and ran in the other direction as fast as he could.

"Wait!" I called after him and followed behind. I was hit with a burst of adrenaline that allowed me to almost keep up with Salem as he booked it down the corridor towards the Drama Department Staff Offices.

He was about thirty feet ahead of me when he took a quick left turn and I heard him yell "Call an ambulance! NOW." I felt a large knot form in my stomach and I expected the worst. When I turned the corner just a few seconds after he yelled, what I saw made me sick. Infinity was sprawled out on her back, her eyes wide open and her usually tan skin was deathly gray. She had a bruise under her cheek, blood leaking from her nose and a choke bruise around her neck.

"Oh my god. Is she dead?" I dropped to the floor next to him and tried to find a pulse. Her skin was warm and her heart was beating, albeit faintly.

"No. But look at her eyes." I noticed that they were incredibly bloodshot.

"Petechial hemorrhaging. Are you sure she isn't dead? She was strangled. Look at the bruises."

"She's still breathing faintly. And I'm not talking about the broken blood vessels. Look how empty her eyes are. She was hypnotized after she was beat. This is the worst case of hypnosis I have ever seen in my life. Manfred wanted her brain dead. This doesn't even hold a candle to what he did to Lyell Bone."

"Manfred did this?" I couldn't believe it. He hadn't said a word about Infinity for several days. I figured that his little hatred that he had for her just stopped. She hadn't done anything against him that I knew of. "Why?"

"I don't know." Salem stood up. "You stay here with Infinity. You have a better medical background than I do because of your father. I'll go find help." He ran back towards the auditorium where assembly would just be beginning. I was grateful that it was me that stayed behind with Infinity when she began seizing. Salem wouldn't have known what to do. I quickly turned her to her side and even though it probably lasted only a few seconds, it felt like eternity. Her whole body jerked in the most uncomfortable way. I thought she was going to end up dislocating all of her joints before she would stop. I used my finger to help clear the saliva and vomit from her mouth and help arrived. Dr. Bloor looked horrified and instructed all of the staff to go back to assembly and not to let any of the children leave for any reason.

"You're telling me that Manfred did this?" Dr. Bloor looked over at Salem. "I can't protect him if he gets charged with murder. We can't cover this one up. Anyone could have seen something, and the staff have already seen her in this condition."

"Why the hell would you want to cover this up?" Salem yelled. "An ambulance will be here in about ten minutes. I don't understand why this happened. She didn't do anything wrong!"

"Go find your brother and Asa Pike and bring them to me now." Dr. Bloor knelt on the floor next to me and opened Infinity's eye because they had closed when her seizure ended. "She has broken blood vessels. What the fuck did he do to her? He didn't even tell me that she was a student of interest to watch over or that they had any other problems besides the disagreement on her first day." He tapped her cheek and checked for a pulse once again. "If that ambulance doesn't hurry up, she's going to die."

We sat with her and kept her comfortable until the ambulance took her away. I then followed Dr. Bloor to the west wing where Salem had Asa and Manfred in the sitting room. Manfred's one eye was nearly swollen shut and Asa had his shoe off. His toes were obviously broken. I scoffed at them. "It serves you right."

"Whose side are you on, you snarky bitch?" Manfred spat at me, holding an ice pack to his eye. Dr. Bloor grabbed him by his shirt and yanked him up off the couch.

"What is wrong with you?" He bellowed. "If you had a problem it could have been dealt with discreetly!"

"She was about to figure out where Lyell was. Grizelda told me that she heard the two of them talking and she was trying to experiment with her magic and help Charlie find memories of his father. Who's to say that she doesn't figure it out next time and we lose everything that our family worked hard for?" He pried Dr. Bloor's fingers from his shirt.

"Salem could have dealt with that. Now we're going to have the police snooping around here and you're going to get arrested. And I don't think I'm going to stop them or bail you out, either." He turned his attention to Asa. "And you-"

"I didn't know he was gonna almost kill her!" Asa threw his hands up. "We were just supposed to scare her! It just got a little out of control. She broke my toes and tried to run. She even broke through a zip tie restraint!"

"What?" Dr. Bloor narrowed his eyes. "That is not your job, nor is it your call to make! You idiots screwed this up. How the hell did she end up almost dead?"

"She shouldn't have tried to run. I didn't completely lose my temper until she slugged me. She hits really fucking hard for her size." Manfred put the ice pack back up to his eye. "And we can fix it. Zelda's father is the dean of medicine at Mercy, where they took her. They can just fudge up the report a little to say it's not assault. Right, Zel?"

"No. Not right!" I fumed. "I'm not going to ask my father to risk his job because you can't control your temper. Actually, I'm not going to do anything for you ever again." I looked over at Salem. "Go ahead. Wipe my memories. I refuse to assist your family any longer. You went too far and I don't want any part of it."

"Oh? This was too far? You didn't seem to mind the Ruin Game." Manfred snapped back.

"No, I did mind. This was a long time coming." I yelled. "Salem, please!"

Salem shrugged. "You got it. I'm not going to try and talk you out of it." And in a blink of an eye, all the burden I had been carrying for the Bloor family was lifted off of my shoulders.

When I got home from the academy on Friday, I asked my mother to drive me to Mercy hospital so I could go visit Infinity. I told her that I would get a ride home with my father and she left. She had been moved from the CCU to the ICU since she had been admitted and it was strange to see her hooked up to all of those machines. I stood at the foot of her bed. The last update that I had been given on her was that she was comatose and they didn't see her waking up any time soon. There was a chance that if she did wake up, she would stay in a vegetative state for the rest of her natural life.

"I found something interesting in her medical records." My father's voice made me jump. I turned around to look at him. I was surprised that he was hanging around the ICU. "Did you know that Infinity Jones is adopted?"

"I might have at one point." I said. "I asked Salem to wipe my memories of the Bloor Family secrets. I don't want anything to do with them anymore. I broke it off with Manfred."

"It was Manfred that did this, wasn't it?" He sighed. "As sad as it is that this happened to this young lady, I'm happy that it wasn't you." He picked up the chart at the end of her bed and flipped through it. "Infinity was born in this very hospital and adopted out the same day. She's Lyell and Amy Bone's biological daughter."

"What?" I lifted Infinity's hand from the bed and looked at her finger nails. They were chipped. I sat down in the chair next to her and took the nail polish out of my purse and began to repaint them for her. "Why did they put her up for adoption?" I finally asked.

"Because I was young and stupid." A soft voice came from the doorway. A very tired looking Amy Bone stood in the doorway. "I was only seventeen when I had her. Lyell and I weren't married yet. I thought that we wouldn't have been able to give her the kind of life she deserved so I signed her over to my sister and her husband who were unable to have children. I didn't know that they ignored and neglected her. I would have signed her over to my mother instead." She buried her face in her hands and began to sob. "You can't tell her. She'll hate me. We were young and scared and stupid. I regret it every single day." She sniffled and wiped her eyes with a tissue. "None of us knew Lillian would just take her and leave. I wanted to get guardianship of her when she got a little older but Lillian took that away from us. So we decided to have Charlie. This was supposed to be my second chance to make a good life for Infinity. I have custody of her again...but it looks like there's nothing I can do from here."

"It's okay, Mrs. Bone. Don't make yourself even more upset." My father patted her on the shoulder and looked at me. "Zelda, why don't we give Mrs. Bone a few minutes alone? We can have dinner in the cafeteria."

I recapped my nail polish and silently stood up. I slipped the polish into Amy's hands for her to finish and she smiled gratefully. Downstairs in the cafeteria, my father ordered our dinner of roast, mashed potatoes and corn. I wasn't hungry but it had been a long time since I was able to sit down and have dinner with my father so I tried to eat it anyway. He worked long hours at the hospital and barely ever came home.

"I know you're upset now, but what you did was the right thing." He reached across the table and put his hand over mine. "You'll be out of this town soon enough and you'll never have to worry about Manfred Bloor or his family ever again."

"His temper just flared up so suddenly, it seems. He didn't plan on almost killing her. You should see what she did to Asa and Manfred before he took her down. She broke all the toes in Asa's left foot and gave Manfred a shiner. Fight or flight kicked in, and she chose fight." I spooned some potatoes into my mouth. "If he did that to her, imagine what he could have done to me in a fit of anger. His family has killed people, Manfred has left people in a near vegetative state because they did something that he didn't approve of, he broke every single finger in his mother's hand when he was eight years old because he didn't want her to leave. He's a time bomb. He's going to kill someone someday, and I really hope it isn't her."

"I really don't know, Zelda. He cut off the oxygen to her brain and caused a lot of trauma through the hypnosis. Her esophagus almost completely collapsed. His father already paid off the authorities and threatened her family if they pressed charges. They expect me to just sweep this under the rug and I have no choice but to do that because if I don't, then something bad will happen to you. They came to me already, telling me that they would tie you up and torture you if I didn't do whatever I could to make this go away." He ran his hand through his hair and sighed, "She very well may die and her murder will never be brought to justice because of the corruption of this town. You never know who they are in alliance with." His pager suddenly went off and he looked down. "Today might be that day." He jumped up. "She's coding. You need to stay here. You can't be in the room with me." He ran towards the elevator and managed to slip in just before the doors closed. I went upstairs to the ICU waiting room and made myself comfortable. There was no way I could leave the hospital tonight. I didn't want her to pass away without me being there to try and make her as comfortable as possible. If there was a chance she even had one second of lucidity, I wanted to apologize and tell her that I got away from them and that she had at least two friends willing to do anything for her.