I groaned, my eyelids fluttering, lying prone on my side.
Footsteps.
Coming closer.
I flopped onto my back.
Mistake.
I groaned louder as a wave of sickly pain sloshed around inside my skull, crashing against my temples.
Donovan crouched next to me, his outline rimmed by a glaring light.
‘What happened?’ I mumbled.
My mouth was filled with cotton.
‘The sink,’ he said. ‘You hit your head on the sink.’
He touched gloved fingers to the back of my skull and I braced against a spike of pain.
‘Here.’
Cupping a hand under my neck, he lifted my head, then reached out to his side and a moment later set my head down on something soft that I guessed was a towel.
I seemed to be sinking into the ground.
Melting.
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
His voice sounded cold, echoing.
‘Two?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said grimly, as if I’d got it wrong, and then he took my left hand, rolling up my sleeve.
A sharp scratch on the inside of my elbow and a few seconds later he slipped something into the inside pocket of his coat that caught the light briefly.
He then removed a glove, took hold of my wrist and checked my pulse, timing it against his wristwatch.
Doctor, I thought. He is some kind of doctor.
Heat flushed through me. I was sweating terribly, shaky, spent.
Donovan hazed in and out of my vision, his features becoming blurred and indistinct, and then, in a clutch of panic, he seemed to morph into another man in another bathroom again.
No.
I tried to push myself up, but the pain sloshed against my temples and I sank back down as he pressed firmly on my shoulder.
His features gradually realigned, coalesced. His expression was sober. A concerned and contemplative look.
‘Don’t try to get up.’
A lost moment.
A pulse of swirling darkness.
When I jolted awake – perhaps a second or so later – Donovan released my wrist and rubbed his thumb against his lips, thinking.
Another lost moment.
Another pulse of black.
Time must have stalled or slipped or stopped for a second – an incomprehensible blip – because the next thing I knew he was standing above me, looking behind him over his shoulder, his body tense and alert as if he’d heard something from downstairs.
‘Stay here,’ he told me.
‘What—? Where are you going?’
A roar of white noise filled my head.
I groaned again as Donovan leaned forwards into my field of vision, looming above me, his face a pinkish smear.
‘Just wait,’ he said, and then he was gone.