Rose looked surprisingly upbeat when Jenna visited her later that day. She explained that she didn't want kids before she turned 30 in the first place, and that's still six years away, and even though the doctors and medical sorcerers said there is no way to heal her now, scientists are coming up with a new miracle every day, right? And six years is a lot of time, so why give up right away? Everything is going to be alright in the end. 

Jenna nodded along, added a "sure" or "of course" every now and then, and pretended that she believed in what Rose said. Even if she was certain that Rose herself didn't believe it. But Jenna knew that denial was the first stage of grief, and Rose was mourning, there was no doubt about that. Jenna figured that the best she can do is letting things happen in their natural course. Or more precisely, she didn’t have a better idea.

'Anyway, enough about me,' said Rose, and changed her position in the bed with a painful grimace. 'Anything about the Goddess?'

Jenna shook her head. She just got off the phone before she came to Rose. Marcus, as he foresaw it, was ordered by the MAGE to continue his task. That didn’t necessarily mean that they all had to be on duty, but the only person asked to be left alone was Vittorio, who had some serious mental healing to do.   

‘We have no idea where to start,’ Jenna shrugged. ‘Benjamin and Martin talked to Kovach but it was a dead end. Ayana is trying to fix the statue, because turns out its magic is broken. Also, the Goddess had to get a new body and the Priest never took off his mask, so we don't even know what they look like. There is not much for us to do at the moment.'

'But someone has to notice if a person is missing, right? If the Goddess had to take a new body.' pointed out Rose. 'That's our lead.'

'My thought exactly,' nodded Jenna, 'turns out more than 150 people are disappearing every bloody day in London. This city is a fucking nightmare. And since Lord Montgomery's bill about sorcerer registration isn't a thing yet, we don't know how many of them are sorcerers.' 

The lord had that idiotic idea about tracking every sorcerer and telling them who was allowed to practice magic and who wasn't. It was an attempt to limit magic-wielders from poor families and from other countries, but fortunately so far the bill got rejected every time Lord Montgomery proposed it.  

‘So that’s it then?’ asked Rose. ‘We are gonna just sit and wait until something happens?’

‘I don’t like it either,’ shrugged Jenna. ‘But we need time anyway. Vittorio cannot fight anymore, you should stay in bed and Robert… He is also out for now. We need a plan, we need backup, and once we have all that, we can talk about finding them.’

Jenna tried to sound confident but as Rose couldn't fool her before, now she was unable to do the same.  

‘Don’t worry, sweetie, we got this. It was only round one, right?’ Rose said, with an encouraging little smile. 

Jenna nodded and she felt her eyes stinging again. The room felt very small all of a sudden so she said a quick goodbye with a promise that she will be back later, then basically ran out. Once she was in the corridor, she put her back against the ugly green wall and tried to force herself to breathe slowly and deeply. It didn't work, and she started to pant, trying to get enough air but didn't matter how hard she tried, it just wasn't enough.

Her body was trembling and the creeping fear, the thought of how she was a total failure came and struck her down hard. It was her fault, everything was her fault, and now Robert is going to die because she wasn't good enough, because she needed to be saved. And Rose never going to be a mother, and Vittorio will be a human ruin, and they will all see that it was all her fault at the end. Because she was weak again. Nothing but a fraud.

The pain in her palms made Jenna open her eyes. She raised her hands and saw that there were little, half-moon shaped wounds, filled with tiny drops of blood. She clenched her fists so hard that her fingernails pierced her skin. But the pain helped her focus somehow. Robert was still alive. Nothing was lost just yet. 

Jenna shook her head. What just happened was sourly familiar. First, it appeared after her mother died: back in those days Jenna had one of these freakouts every evening when she tried to sleep. Then as the years went by, they became rarer and rarer. She didn't have any in like three or four years. And she knew that she couldn't afford them right now either.  

Jenna pushed herself away from the wall and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She didn’t even remember when was the last time she put on any makeup but that was okay. At least she didn’t have to deal with fixing that after a good old mental breakdown.

When she got back to Robert’s room, Jenna found a woman in it. She was sickly thin, with tidy blond hair. Jenna tipped her in her fifties. The woman wore an elegant pale blue costume what looked handmade. She was sitting in the armchair Jenna already thought of her own and looked up when the younger woman stopped in the doorway. She was very pale with two red smears on her cheeks and had the same beautiful blue eyes as Robert, only hers were sunken and somehow blunt. 

‘I'm sorry,' said Jenna. 'I can come back later.' She already turned away but the lady called after her: 'Don't be silly, my child. Are you Robert's girlfriend?'

Jenna felt that question way more complicated than it should have been but just shook her head as she went in, keeping Robert's bed between herself and the woman.

'No, we are… Colleagues, kind of.'

Lady Elizabeth Montgomery stood up. She was almost as tall as his son. 

'Then you must be Jenna Carano,' she said.

The girl nodded. She was expecting anger, shouting, even deadly curses. What she was not ready for was the warm, kind smile she got.

'I'm Robert's mother, Elizabeth Montgomery. Call me Liz, please. Robert speaks very highly of you.'

It was a shock that Montgomery talked about her with his mother, and Jenna didn't know what to say. Luckily she didn't have to respond, as the lady continued: 'I'm so happy that you two could put aside all the unfortunate incidents our families had in the past.'

It was a very polite way to address all the fights and the pain the two families caused to one another, but Jenna just nodded once again, unsure about what else to do. Then a horrible thing came to her mind.

'Is Lord Montgomery here as well?'

The smile on Lady Elizabeth's face faded for a second.

'No, my husband has… Another important business to attend to.'

'I see,' said Jenna and tried not to look too relieved. The older woman sat back into the armchair so Jenna settled down on the edge of Robert's bed. She looked at the man's face and the Lady did the same for a while. It was heartbreaking, even for Jenna, to see him like this, with a pipe in his mouth and bandage around his head, and she could only imagine how his mother felt. 

'His doctor just left a minute before you came, my dear,' Lady Elizabeth said. 'There is no change. He could wake up tomorrow or in a week or…' she didn't finish but she didn't have to. As the woman spoke, Jenna could smell the alcohol in her breath. She didn't blame her. In fact, Jenna wanted to drink too, badly, but didn't have the courage to leave Robert alone for a long time.

Lady Montgomery looked around the room, checked out Jenna's books on the floor next to the chair, the blanket the girl put on the headrest of it, her backpack in the open wardrobe. 

'You don't plan on leaving, do you, dear?' 

'Not until he is up. He… Saved my life. That's the least I can do. Is that… Is that okay, right?' 

The lady assured her that it was all right, and she told her about an article she read on comatic patients. According to that, they could hear them even when they were deep in, and she suggested that Jenna should read the books to Robert.

'He loves to read, and I can see you have the ones he is particularly fond of. You never know, it might help him to find his way back.'

Not long ago Jenna would find the idea ridiculous, if not idiotic, but now as she looked at the man, she had a thoughtful expression on her face. Might as well, it couldn't hurt, right? So she said she will try. After that, they didn't really talk much, and about an hour later Lady Elizabeth stood up and went home.

Jenna didn't know how to feel about the whole encounter, but she started to get used to that: these days there were a lot of things she had no idea how to handle. 

The following days were mostly the same. Jenna wouldn't go home even if a psychotic ex wasn't about to watch her sleep (or whatever creepy things they usually did), but with that going on she thought the best she can do is to nestle in Robert's room. That caused some problems at first. The nurses mentioned rules and visiting hours and such, and while Jenna agreed on the validity of those things in general, failed to obey. She always went wherever she wanted, whenever she pleased in her whole life, and had no plans whatsoever to change that now. Once the staff of the hospital understood that they stopped bothering her, mostly because they had better things to do. 

So Jenna stayed with Robert. She ate in the canteen of the hospital or across the road in one of the restaurants and slept in the big armchair or at Teodore's place who lived basically next door. Jenna didn't tell him about Magda, but the boy understood that she wanted to stay close to the hospital and wasn't the kind who asked too many questions anyway. 

Visitors appeared every day: Benjamin and Martin, for instance. They both went back to their normal daily jobs already because there was nothing to do Goddess-wise. Marcus came as much as he could, and Rose spent a lot of time there too, once the doctors let her out of bed. As she was getting stronger, she became restless: even though it still caused her some inconvenience to walk from her room to Robert’s, she already wanted to get out of the hospital. And not just in general, no: Rose couldn’t wait to go and hunt down the people who hurt her and her friends.  

Lady Montgomery visited one more time, but there was no sign of the lord. Mr George popped in before his journey: he had enough of London for a while so he decided to pack up his bonsai trees and rent a house at the beach. Before he left, he gave a long, sad look to Robert, and even if he didn’t say out loud that “I told you, you heroic moron”, Jenna could see it on the old man’s face nevertheless.

Remy came a couple of times too, first two days after the battle, although he was clearly checking on Jenna, as he didn't even know Robert. He volunteered to help with the Goddess and said that he had a friend who might be interested too, but he wanted to ask first. As the search hit a dead-end anyway, Jenna told Remy about Magda. The girl still tried to call her every day and sent a bunch of texts too. They were all very different, from the love letters to the deadly threats. This last one would have been particularly disquieting on its own, let alone when Magda admitted that she was a vampire. Apparently, she thought that if she were to turn Jenna too, they could be together forever ever after. 

'That is bad,' said Remy after he read the last couple of messages. 'So what are we going to do? Shall we call the police?'

Jenna smiled at the boy's loyalty as her problem instantly became "our problem". 

'I don't think there is anything the police could do,' she replied. 'Magda didn't do anything illegal apart from sending some dodgy texts. The Met has bigger problems, especially now.'

Plus Jenna did not trust the Commissioner and his discretion at all. And the last thing she needed was her father complaining about her jeopardising his campaign. No, better to deal with it quietly, she thought. If only she knew how…

'Let's see if I get this straight,' said Remy, 'there are an ancient sorceress and a little less ancient voodoo shaman or whatever on loose. You suppose to stop them, but you don't know how, or details like where they are, what they are about to do or how they look like.'

Jenna nodded.

'Plus you couldn't keep it in your pants and now one of your one night stands wants to kill or marry or bite or eat you.'

'Correct,' said the girl.

'While you are hiding out in a hospital, carefully watching over a guy who also tried to kill you on a couple of occasions.' 

'He wasn't trying to… But yeah, kinda,' lowered her head Jenna.

'You know, after two years of working with you, I don't even know anymore if all that counts as weird or not.'

'Welcome to my world,' smiled Jenna tiredly.  

When they were alone, Jenna moved the armchair right next to Robert's bed, ate his grapes (then bought a new box so Robert can have the freshest ones when he awakes) and read to him from the books she purchased the first day. Sometimes she read all night long until she lost her voice or fell asleep. Robert never gave any reaction, but Jenna always imagined her voice reaching out, like the beacon of a lighthouse in the mist at night, to lead Robert back, as Lady Elizabeth said.

She was reading at the time too when Teodore came to see her. It was five or six days after the big fight, Jenna wasn’t sure anymore. She barely slept ever since, and the days were too similar anyway. 

Teodore stopped in the doorway and was listening to Jenna's voice until she noticed him and looked up. He wore blue scrubs now and looked so much younger in them than in his usual black suit. But given that doctors and even junior doctors like Teodore basically lived in the hospital, this was probably the real usual, Jenna thought. 

'How long have you been there?' asked Jenna.

Teodore walked in.

'Just a minute. I didn't want to interrupt. You looked so much like Luna,' he said in Italian. He was the only one Jenna could still talk in her chosen mother language.

'I wish,' she answered. Luna Carano was a beautiful woman, a fantastic mother and a kind, loving human being. Jenna found herself thinking about her more and more these days. Luna raised Teodore as her own son after his parents died, one of the reasons why Jenna thought of Teodore as her brother instead of just a cousin. 

Teodore glanced at Robert.

'Any change?'

Jenna shook her head. The boy sat down on the armrest of her chair and put his arm around her shoulder. That was as far as showing emotions went with Teodore, and he only ever did something like that when they were alone. 

'Do you think Mom would have liked him?' Jenna bobbed towards Robert. 

Teodore scoffed.

'A Montgomery? I doubt...' then he gave some actual thought of it. 'If you would ask whether or not Luna would have liked Robert if he wasn't a Montgomery… Now that's a very different question.'

'Would you like him if he wasn't a Montgomery?' asked the girl then. 

'No, he is an arrogant asshole. We tend to hate each other.'

Jenna laughed quietly. Ironically, Teodore was right: he and Robert weren't that different.  

‘Do you like him?'

Jenna shrugged. She really missed the simpler times when she had a straight answer for that question. 

'I honestly don't know,' she said.

'Good,' nodded Teodore. 'Your father already asked me if there is something between the two of you.'

'That's none of his business,' burst out Jenna sharply, leaning away so she could look Teodore in the eye. 

‘I know, I know,’ he said soothingly. 'I told him that you are smarter than that, and he seemed to believe me for some mysterious reason even though you never showed any proof supporting my words.'

Jenna poked him at his ribs, almost pushing him onto the floor. A couple of minutes later Teodore got an emergency call and had to run. Jenna picked up her book and continued to read it to Robert. Her quiet voice became one of the small noises of the room, just another sign that Robert Montgomery was still alive.