“I don’t know,” she yelled into the receiver. “He’s having a seizure and there’s white stuff coming out of his mouth. He’s going to fucking die!”
If I’d been scared before, it was nothing compared to what I felt right then. Fuck. No. No, I wouldn’t let him. I reached for the phone, jerking it out of Jenna’s hands. “What the hell do I do to save him?” I roared.
Still calm and collected, the woman on the other end quickly walked me through what to do. I couldn’t honestly remember what happened over the next three minutes, as I fought Harris’s convulsing body to keep him alive while the EMTs got there. When two men appeared in the doorway with a stretcher and their medical gear, I let them take over.
As I moved out of their way, shock started to set in and I began to shake. I felt cold and hot all at once as tears burned my eyes and my throat filled with a lump the size of a baseball. I saw one of the EMTs pull out a syringe and stab it into Harris’s still convulsing body. He went almost instantly slack.
“What the fuck was that?” Jenna demanded, tears flowing freely down her face.
“Something to pull him back to zero from the overdose, miss,” the EMT told her in a cool, professional tone. “We need to get him to the hospital. Now. Can one of you come with us?”
“I’ll come,” Jenna told them before I could even open my mouth. I wanted to go too, but when I stepped forward to follow them, the second EMT stopped me. “Only room for one. You can meet us there.”
Unable to talk through the lump still clogging my throat, I could only nod. Right. I’d follow. I needed to call Natalie back, too. Needed to tell Kin where I was going so she wouldn’t wake up and worry about me. I moved on autopilot as I rushed back down to my apartment.
I didn’t understand how Harris could have OD’d. He wasn’t into drugs. He’d worked his ass off to get Jenna into a rehab and—
Tessa!
I paused halfway across my living room as realization hit me. Where the fuck was Tessa?
Without even knowing what had happened, I knew instinctively that Tessa was behind what was going on with Harris. She had done this to him. He had nearly died. In. My. Fucking Arms.
Because of her.
Clenching my jaw, I pulled out my phone as I walked into my bedroom. Natalie picked up immediately. “I thought you would’ve called sooner,” she scolded with a small laugh. “How is he?”
The tears threatened to spill then. Hearing his stepmom and the worry in her soft voice, it gutted me to have to tell her. “He’s on his way to the hospital, Nat. He… He OD’d.”
There was a long pause on the other end. Then she exploded. “What the fuck are you talking about?” she raged. “No. No way. Not Harris. He’s a good boy. He wouldn’t do that.”
I closed my eyes. “I know that, Nat. I do. It wasn’t his fault. Hell, I don’t know what happened, but he started OD’ing when I got up there. I took care of him until the paramedics could get there. Jenna went with him.”
“Jenna…” She muttered her sister’s name, then cursed. “What hospital?”
I told her which one the EMTs had told me, and she hung up on me as soon as she had what she needed. Clenching my hand around the phone, I lowered my hand and dropped down on the edge of the bed. I was still feeling the after effects of taking care of my best friend while he’d been so fucking close to death.
“Jace?” Kin’s sleepy voice pulled me out of the hell that my mind had gotten trapped in and I looked down at her with tears still fresh in my eyes.
Seeing them even in the dim lighting coming from the open bedroom door, she jerked upright. “What’s wrong?” She reached for me. “What happened?”
A sob threatened to choke me if I didn’t release it and I buried my face in her hair as I pulled her against me hard. “Harris…” I managed around the sobs. I had never been so torn up in my life, but seeing someone almost die—not someone, my best fucking friend—had destroyed me. “He’s sick.”
Soft fingers stroked through my hair and down my neck, making my shaking only increase. “Shh, shh,” she whispered, rocking with me. “It’s going to be okay,” she promised. “He’s okay, we just saw him.”
I couldn’t explain it to her right then. I didn’t know what had happened to Harris, but I did know Tessa had to have been a part of it. I needed to tell Jenna and Natalie what I suspected.
Needed to find that fucking bitch and make her pay for what she’d done to Harris.
Kin
Jace was still trembling when we got to the hospital.
He hadn’t spoken much since he’d gotten back to the apartment, so I had no idea what was going on. The scene we walked in to at the ER surprised the hell out of me, though. When Jace had said Harris was sick, I’d assumed he meant he was running a fever and maybe had some kind of quick-onset virus or flu.
Finding Natalie Cutter and her sister standing outside an exam room talking with a doctor in sweat-drenched scrubs had me pausing as I listened to what he had to tell them.
Natalie stared up at the doctor. Her beautiful face was pale as death, but her eyes were wild as she clenched and unclenched her hands at her sides. Beside her, Jenna was pacing back and forth, her eyes going from the door to the exam room, to the doctor, to her older sister. She looked nervous but I had no idea if it was because of what was going on with Harris or something else entirely.