We didn’t keep the shotgun. I was in favor of holding onto it—because I didn’t want to find myself in a situation in the future where I had to say, boy, I wish I had a shotgun right about now—but we decided trying to get it across town was going to end up being more trouble than it was worth.
After discarding the idea of just sliding the gun back in the sleeve Rick stored it in (in a crack in the wall) we dismantled it and scattered the pieces in the Dumpster. Someone could dive in and reassemble it if they knew to do so, but they’d have to swim through a lot of rotten kung-pao first.
“Holitix,” Mirella repeated, as we headed back to the L.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what the man said. I’ve never heard of them.”
“I think I may have.”
“I think I have as well,” Thelonius said. “I believe they are quite large.”
“It should be simple enough to look them up online,” I said. “Do we have anything with the Internet on it?”
I appreciate that this sounds like a naïve question, but the truth was we weren’t traveling with a computer, and the two phones I had—the flip phone provided by Han, and the one I used to contact Grundle on the island—were both of the dumb variety. Unless someone else had a smart phone or some other kind of device, we were going to have to find another solution.
“I don’t,” Thelonius said.
“I don’t either,” Mirella said. “A library, if we can find one.”
“Or an Internet café?” I said. “Are those still a thing?”
Mirella grabbed me by the arm with a sort of urgency that indicated bad news was coming.
“They’ve found us,” she muttered.
Looking around was pointless, but I tried looking around anyway. We had just reached the street we’d need to cross to get under the tracks for the L. There were a hundred people and dozens of cars in view; I had no idea what was setting off her alarms.
“Where?” I asked.
“Be ready.”
There was a whistling sound. It was manifestly different from the one the pixie made a few minutes earlier. I knew what this one was, but it was probably the first time I’d heard it while standing on a street corner in a modern city.
It was the sound of arrows in flight.
Mirella took out the arrow that would have otherwise landed in my head, with her sword, at the same time pulling us to the ground. We landed hard on the pavement behind a parked car that was sporting a recently-added arrow that was embedded in its hood. It was impossible to tell if that arrow was fired at the same time as the one that nearly hit me, or not, because everything was happening at once.
“Are you hit?” she asked.
“What? Where are they?”
“There’s only one, above. Are you hit?”
“Above? The tracks?”
“Adam.”
“No, I’m not hit. Are you?”
“I’m not. Where’s the imp?”
“I’m all right,” Thelonius shouted, from behind another parked car. I rolled over to get a better look at him, while trying to keep all of my body parts behind the car.
Thelonius was examining an arrow that was stuck in his shoulder, with a sort of dispassionate indifference that strongly indicated he was in shock.
“I’m sure it missed all the important parts,” he said. “You two run ahead; I’ll catch up.”
Part II
The Road to Hell
11
It’s not every day a man is hit by an arrow at rush hour in the middle of an American city. Or, I imagine, any city these days.
That being the case, Thelonius made the evening news.
They didn’t identify him by name, thankfully. I think if they had, a lot more people would know about it, because Thelonius D’Artagnan is one of those names that ends up being popular on the Internet. But no, they had him down as local man, which was untrue twice over. He was neither a man, nor—so far as I knew—a native Chicagoan. (Not that I knew where he was from.)
We learned of our imp’s newfound fame from the television in the seedy hotel room at the seedy hotel. This was a couple of hours after leaving the scene ourselves.
According to Mirella, the assassin had been on the elevated track. After his initial volley, he (or she) disappeared, which was wise, because there were police only a couple of blocks away, and their response time was excellent. We barely escaped the scene ourselves before they dropped a cordon on the whole area.
“Goblin, I assume,” I said, as the news went from weird assault with medieval weaponry to the weather.
“Yes,” Mirella confirmed. She was in the bathroom, checking for wounds, or so she said. I think she was actually looking for sticky spots. In the days since she’d revealed that she was stricken with the disease, I’d had very few opportunities to glimpse her in anything other than a fully concealing outfit, so I was pretty sure it was getting worse and she just didn’t want to talk about it. Not that there was anything I could do.
“Bad shot, for one of you. I’m surprised he missed.”
“If you think so, you misunderstand what happened. He fired only twice, but let loose three arrows in the first volley, and one in the second, which struck the car we were behind. If you and I had been standing where we were supposed to be for the initial round, he’d have hit all of us.”
“But he only hit Thelonius because…”
“I could only save one of you, yes. If he lives, I’ll have to apologize.”
“I wonder why all three, if the contract is only on my head.”
“I was wondering the same.”
She emerged from the bathroom in a towel, shaking her head before I even got a word out.
“I feel fine,” she said.
“Wasn’t going to ask.”
She nodded at the TV.
“Should we retrieve him from the hospital?” she asked. “He knows more than he should.”
“Do you think someone looking for us will grab him and torture him until he tells them how to find us?”
“It’s not an impossible notion.”
“It’s not, but it isn’t like Jacques had any luck getting information from him in Paris.”
“Jacques is human. We have no guarantee the next inquisitor will be.”
“Then maybe we should.”
“Except they would expect us to.”
“Then maybe we shouldn’t,” I said. “I’m not sure what the right answer is. I’m not even sure what we’re supposed to be doing next. Do you have any ideas?”
I’m not saying my lack of creativity and increased aggravation had nothing to do with the fact that our cheap hotel room didn’t come with a stocked mini fridge, but it was a factor. A good stiff drink was needed.
“Holitix,” Mirella said. “That’s what Rick said. That’s our next step.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never heard of them.”
She sighed, and pulled a cellphone from one of our pieces of luggage, throwing it on the bed.
“I don’t like you when you’re this grouchy. Call Grundle; I’m taking a shower.”
“Talk to your people,” I said.
“What?”
“That was one of the other things Rick said, along with genocide. He looked at you and said to talk to your people. Is that a thing? Do goblins have some sort of party line?”
“No. I don’t think that’s what he meant by my people. Goblins, yes, partly. But he meant all of us.”
“Us.”
“Non-humans. We have…Adam, you know how many of us there are, don’t you? Across the species, we number in the millions, surely.”
“Nobody’s managed to conduct a census, but sure.”
“I ask because when I told you about the island, you had no idea how extensive the underground network of other-species really was.”
“Sure, but it was a secret island.”
“We have our own doctors, too. And dentists, and morticians, and insurance salesmen, and, you get my point.”
“Doct
ors.”
“As I said.”
“Like Doc Cambridge?”
She hissed, because she didn’t care for him.
“Yes, I suppose. Although his medical prowess ventures into superstition, where a general practitioner might remain fixed on known medical solutions to known medical problems.”
“I think we should talk to one.”
“Adam, I’m fine.”
“No, no. I mean, yes, for Baal’s sake, see a doctor already, but no, that’s not what I mean. Just go over what we know: there’s a disease nobody ever saw before; Eve has it; the last person we can connect to her seems to know what we’re talking about and uses the word genocide, mentions a company I’ve never heard of and tell you to go ask a doctor for details. So maybe we’d better ask one of your special practitioners if they’ve seen it before, and what they’re doing about it. Do these secret underground medical networks have symposiums or something? Or peer reviewed journals?”
“I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.”
“All right, well how do we find one?”
“They’re by referral only. We would have to find a goblin and gain his…”
She trailed off, staring at the television. The news story related to sports, so I didn’t think that was what had her so transfixed.
“What” I asked.
“We already know where to go to find a doctor.”
“Thelonius? Will they call one for him?”
“It’s a process, but yes. Every hospital has one or two specialists. He’ll have had one assigned by now.”
“So we have to go the hospital.”
“Yes.”
“Where they’ll expect us to show up.”
“Yes.”
“Cool,” I said. “It’s a plan. Take your shower. I’m going to head to the bar, and make that phone call.”
I was on my third glass of extremely bottom-shelf bourbon by the time I called up Grundle. I’d like to say I needed to be in the proper headspace to hear that Eve still couldn’t remember anything, but it was more likely the case that alcohol was, at that moment, more important than an update.
So I was surprised to hear that I’d missed a few things.
“Say that again,” I said, a little too loudly. I was at a table in the back of a space that doubled as a bar and the hotel lobby. I was the only patron, so my volume probably didn’t matter too terribly much.
“She disappeared,” Grundle said. “Eight days ago. I tried calling, but the line wouldn’t open.”
“Eight days? I was on a plane eight days ago, I think. You should have tried again.”
“Yes, I apologize. I expected a call at some point, and here you are. I didn’t think it would have mattered, you knowing. You can’t question her if she’s not here any longer.”
“Grundle…” I held back a few curse words, even though he was right about all of that. I was basically back in the same place I was for a few millennia: knowing she existed, but not knowing how to find her. “Did she say anything? Before she disappeared?”
“I’ll ask Lew. But it is good news yes? She recovered from the disease.”
“Yes, fine, it’s good news.”
I was incredibly aggravated, actually, because at least a part of me felt as if I was doing all of this to rescue her specifically. Considering my girlfriend was now dealing with the same disease, this was a sort of awful thing to realize about myself, but there it was.
“As for the other thing,” Grundle said, “I’m afraid I have nothing for you.”
“The contract?”
“Yes. I don’t think I’ll be able to get what you need without going through Dimitri. Are you sure you want to keep this from him?”
“All right, bring him in. Only…try not to make too much noise.”
I hung up, and wondered if I’d just made a big mistake. I could probably trust Dimitri, but every person he spoke to had to be equally trustworthy, and I didn’t know enough about his organization to feel comfortable about that.
“You look no happier,” Mirella said, as she approached the table. She looked geared up and ready to go. “Is it the alcohol?”
“It’s crap, but that’s not why. Eve’s all better, and she left the island.”
“Where did she go?”
“Where does she ever go?”
Mirella laughed.
“Of course.”
She took a sip from my glass, and grimaced.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to figure out which hospital our imp is in.”
This was no small matter, because Chicago apparently has a lot of hospitals. Mirella’s suggestion was to use the bow and arrow she apparently had in her suitcase—I didn’t know she owned any such thing, but there’s an outside chance every goblin is given one when they turn sixteen or something—and shoot someone downtown, then see where the ambulance took them.
I’m not saying I didn’t consider it. But, summoning up memories from when I spent fifty-odd years in this city, I decided Cook County Hospital was probably the best place to start.
Then we had to get a cab there. The guy at the hotel’s front desk looked deeply perplexed when we asked him to call us a cab, as if this was something nobody did, ever.
“Why don’t you just Uber it?” he asked.
Then I was deeply confused.
I appreciate that technology changes at a certain pace, and sometimes that pace is a lot faster than what I may be accustomed to, and also that the pace has increased over the past couple of decades. But when that technological change involves borrowing words from other languages, it just gives me fits. “Uber” is a German word, and it isn’t even a verb, and since I speak both English and German fluently (along with most of their antecedent languages) what I heard was why don’t you just above it?
I looked to Mirella, in case I either misheard or was in the midst of having a stroke, but she looked equally confused.
Then I wondered if maybe the word “uber” had been adopted recently into English, because that happened all the time, except that really, that’s how this language got the word “over”, so there was no need to adopt is a second time.
The man at the desk waved a cell phone around, as if this explained matters better. It didn’t.
“Um, no, just a cab, thanks,” I said.
He grunted, and performed an excavation of the cluttered desktop until he came across a piece of paper with phone numbers on it.
“Uber would be way faster, but all right,” he muttered.
I don’t really do hospitals. The last one I was in was on the island, but I couldn’t say how long it had been before that. I basically thought of hospitals the same way I thought of doctors and medicine in general, which is to say I had a poor opinion of the entire industry.
Part of it is just that I don’t get sick, and when I’m wounded a medical practitioner is nearly useless; the only painkiller that works on me is hard alcohol, and for some reason people with medical degrees aren’t cool with that. Another part is that I was around at the advent of medicine—which was routinely grisly and horrifying, especially before anesthesia was invented—and therefore the invention of hospitals.
I know hospitals are viewed somewhat positively these days (as are doctors and medicine) but that’s because one expects to come home alive following a visit to a modern hospital. This was certainly not always the case. (Bedlam is a great example, but it was by no means the most extreme.) Hospitals were only occasionally the kind of place one visited in order to recover from whatever ailed you. More often, they served as a secure place to hide all the sick, poor people until they died. A public good to be sure, but less so for the hospitalized than for the people who otherwise stood to pick up the disease from the hospitalized.
They also made for a decent place to study disease, which was another common good that didn’t necessarily roll downhill to the actual sufferers of the condition.
Cook County Hospital used to be one of those places, back when it was bui
lt, but when we pulled up in the cab it became clear rather quickly that it was no longer precisely that kind of place. Probably. I’m basing that on how it looked. In my day, the hospital was located in a big, scary-looking brick building (until it moved, to a newer scary-looking brick building); now it was in something that looked new and welcoming, and a little like an airport terminal. It declared, architecturally, don’t be afraid and come back again soon! The old edifices were more along the lines of, abandon all hope, ye who enter.
We entered—without abandoning hope first—through the emergency room lobby, to the E.R. nurse’s station.
That turned out to be the wrong place to go to find someone who had been admitted earlier with an emergency. It was where one went if one was personally experiencing an emergency at that very moment, which we sort of were, only not the kind that the hospital might recognize.
The emergency desk sent us to the admissions desk.
“Name?” the woman at admissions asked.
“Our name?” I asked.
“The patient’s name,” she said, less-than-patiently.
“Right. Thelonius D’Artagnan.”
She stared at me for an extra couple of beats, because that sounded like a made-up name.
“Really,” I added, in case this helped.
Her eyes went back down to the computer screen and her fingers tapped away.
“Ah,” she said. “Him. Are you family?”
“Are we…”
“Because everyone wants to talk to him, and it’s only family allowed.”
“Who else wants to talk to him?”
“Reporters. They don’t have a name, to them it’s just the guy with the arrow in his shoulder. So, are you family?”
“Yes,” Mirella said. “He’s our father.”
The woman behind the desk looked at the two of us with something that registered as skepticism.
“Different mothers,” I said.
“Your names?”
“Adam, and Mirella.”
She spent so long at her computer that I managed to formulate three distinct plans to find Thelonius without the willing assistance of the hospital. All three included at least one act of violence, so it was a good thing that when she spoke, it was to provide us with useful information.
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