Post by StoryGirl83 on Nov 10, 2011 23:10:51 GMT -5
Chapter Eight – Good-Night, Sweetheart, Good-Night
5:30 AM
Wyatt’s eyes drooped down as he walked into the break room. The coffee and the adrenaline were both starting to wear off. The room was empty, so when a hand sat down gently on his shoulder, it caused Wyatt to jump. He whirled around wide eyed. “You startled me, Dr. Nicolae.”
“You’re dead on your feet, Wyatt,” Dr. Ava Nicolae informed him. She didn’t exactly look any better than him. “Go home.”
He shook his head. “You need the help. I’m here to help.” He focused in on her and realized she looked bedraggled rather than tired, so maybe she actually had slept at some point.
“Wyatt, you need sleep,” she countered. “I know you’re a volunteer, so we don’t pay you to be here, but I’m still a doctor here. Go home, Wyatt. I don’t want to see you again until you have slept at least seven hours straight, preferable nine or ten or more. I’ve been trying to calculate it. I don’t think you’ve been home since this hit San Francisco.”
“No,” Wyatt admitted reluctantly. “Not exactly.”
“I didn’t think so,” she pulled something out of her pocket and handed it to him. “Brian made this. His great-niece, MacKenzie, is fairly good with potions and such. It’s not much more than a glorified protein bar, but would I be wrong if I guessed that you hadn’t eaten or drank anything more than cup after cup of coffee?”
Wyatt grimaced.
“I thought not.”
Wyatt took the protein bar from her and unwrapped it. His stomach growled at him as he bit off a big chunk and started chewing.
“Go home, Wyatt,” she repeated. “And don’t bother driving. The streets may be clearer than they have been in your lifetime, but I don’t trust someone who hasn’t slept in three days behind the wheel of a car.”
His eyes began drooping, again. “I feel funny,” he mumbled.
“Orb home, now, or I’m calling your aunt,” she ordered him.
“Did you drug that?”
“No,” she declared. “That would be MacKenzie. It’s how they got me to sleep yesterday.”
Wyatt began to wobble from side to side.
Ava sighed. She should have known the additional time without sleep would make it work faster, she helped him down to the ground and pulled out her cell phone as he slumped over, sound asleep from the sleeping draught in the protein bar. “Paige,” she directed the phone. When Paige answered, she said, “Paige, it’s Ava. I, um, gave your nephew a sleeping potion. I need you to come pick him up, please.”
“You drugged me nephew?” Paige asked, surprised.
“He hasn’t slept in three days,” Ava informed her. “The kids did it to me yesterday when I stopped in to feed them.” She chuckled. “I found Brian’s brothers over and his great-niece, MacKenzie, had cooked dinner. Dinner put me to sleep until about an hour ago. Can you come get him?”
“Yeah, just let me give the phone to someone,” Paige told her.
A moment later Paige orbed in. She looked down at Wyatt. He was curled up in a ball on the ground. The sleeping potion had done its job well. “Thanks, Ava. I had to send Hank and Hope to bed and Chris is passed out on the couch in the manor attic. I love these kids, but they are pushing themselves too hard.”
“We all feel the pressure,” Ava reminded her. “Why do you think my kids felt the need to use this on me?”
Paige chuckled. “So far I’ve managed to be the one giving the orders rather than taking them. Of course I’m the only one whose family is intact. Prue’s on a death watch more or less for her husband. Piper won’t leave Leo’s side and he’s still in relatively good condition, considering. And we still have no idea where Phoebe and Coop are. Since Henry and I are both here and still healthy, that leaves us. Hank spent the last couple of days looking through the Book of Shadows. Leo already told us that this rings no bells for him.”
“I just wish we knew what was causing it,” Ava commented. “If we knew the cause maybe we could cure it.”
“We managed to confirm that it has happened before,” Paige informed her, “but we still don’t know much about it.”
“It’s happened before?” Ava repeated surprised. “Wouldn’t an epidemic as bad as this have been recorded in history?”
Paige shook her head. “From the sound of it, someone appears to have erased info from our Book of Shadows. And if they did that, why not other history books? Also, we were told that it wasn’t anywhere near this bad the last time, probably because they had info from the time before that. Someone’s directing this and when last time didn’t go the way they wanted, they changed the rules. They found a way to erase written records of what happened.” She bent down and put her hand on Wyatt’s shoulder. “I better get him out of her, so I can get back to the other kids. I think we might actually be getting somewhere.”
“I hope you find something and soon,” Ava told her. “Too many people have died all ready.”
Paige nodded and orbed both herself and Wyatt out of the hospital break room. When she reappeared in Wyatt’s bedroom, she faced the problem of figuring out how to get him into his bed. He was a bit bigger than she was, so this was going to be tricky.
She looked down at him and considered her options. She considered trying to orb him onto the bed, but the only way she could see that working was to climb on his bed herself and orbing him to her. She’d leave that as a last resort.
The first thing she did was peel back his covers. Next she propped him up so that he was at least sitting. A sound followed by a yawn led her to believe he wasn’t totally asleep yet. “Wyatt, I need you to work with he here.”
There was a mumble sound and his head leaned over. His eyes remained closed.
When Paige moved to try and get under his shoulder he accommodated her. She was able to get him standing with her help and then sitting on the bed. Once he was on the bed it was a simple matter to divest him of his shoes and socks. She pushed him down so that his head lay on the pillow and then she attempted to put his feet on the bed. This proved interesting when one leg sprang out and kicked her.
“Watch it, Mister,” she scolded her sleeping nephew.
When she tried, again, she managed to get his legs up on the bed. She pulled the sheets up and tucked him in.
“Sleep well,” Paige whispered before she orbed out. Wyatt needed his sleep, but she was needed in the attic hopefully finding some way to put a stop to this magical disaster without killing seventy million people to do it.