I don’t know how much time passed. It may have been an hour. It may have been more. I was dreaming about the car accident that killed my father, the sound of brakes screeching, the crunch of impact, the way my body flew. I saw my father lying on the ground, bleeding, his eyes closed, and that paramedic, that damn paramedic with the sandy-blond hair and green eyes, meeting my eye . . .

A hand touched my shoulder.

“Mickey?”

My blood went cold. I jerked awake. I was back in Spoon’s hospital room. It was dark. He was asleep. The hand was still on my shoulder. I turned in my chair and looked up at the silhouette of the nurse. Except of course it wasn’t a nurse. I knew that the moment I heard her voice.

It was the Bat Lady.

CHAPTER 16

I had a million questions to ask her.

Bat Lady kept her hand on my shoulder. The hand was bony with liver spots and thick veins. I knew that she had to be well into her eighties by now. She looked it. And I knew that I should stop thinking of her as Bat Lady. Her real name was Elizabeth “Lizzy” Sobek. Her whole family died during the Holocaust, but young Lizzy had saved a group of children from certain death in a Polish concentration camp. After that, the famous teen became a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation.

No one heard from her again.

Most history books believe that she’d been killed during World War II.

Most history books are wrong.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

The last time I was in her house, the sandy-haired man with the green eyes burned it to the ground. I had not seen her since.

“I’m fine,” she said.

She loomed over me, looking larger and stronger than she had in the past. Maybe that was because she had traded in her tattered, long white nightgown for hospital scrubs. The gray hair that normally flowed down past her shoulders was tied into a bun.

She made her way toward the front of Spoon’s bed and checked his chart. Her face looked grim.

“Can’t you do something?” I asked. “He can’t walk.”

“I’m not a doctor, Mickey.”

“But can’t you . . . ?”

“No,” she said. She moved toward Spoon’s head. She reached down and smoothed back his hair. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It never is.”

“It’s our fault,” I said.

“Perhaps.” She turned toward me. “We save many, but there is always a cost.”

I gestured toward the bed. “He shouldn’t be the one to pay for it.”

She almost smiled. “Do you want to lecture me about how life isn’t fair, Mickey?”

“No, ma’am.” I shifted in the chair. “Where have you been?”

“That’s not important.” She looked down at Spoon. “He’s meant for great things, you know.”