“He listed you,” she said.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes, is that…? You look surprised.”
“We didn’t know he was conscious,” Mirella said.
“They try to get next-of-kin as soon as they can. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.”
She read off the room number and provided us with directions to get there. The directions were stupidly complicated, and involved following colored stripes painted on the floor. This was not improving my perspective on hospitals.
We followed the appropriate stripe to the elevator. On the way up, I took note of the knife in Mirella’s hand.
“Trouble?” I asked.
“Not yet. But we should expect a trap, and the place to expect it is at the room, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You think they had less trouble figuring out which room he was in than we did? Sis?”
“I’m less inclined to trust bureaucracy to rescue us than you appear to be.”
“Well that, and they probably followed the wrong floor stripe.”
The doors opened on a corridor that wasn’t full of hitmen, which is always a nice surprise. Instead we faced another nurse’s desk. From there, we received additional instruction on how to find his room, which included a different-colored stripe, and a buzzer to get through a locked door. I half-expected to come across a minotaur before we found Thelonius.
(Note: I’m kidding; minotaurs aren’t real.)
This path took us across half the building, it seemed, to another gathering of nurses. Blessedly, that station was the last test we had to pass before getting to Thelonius’s room, which was just on the other side of the desk. The attending nurse walked us to him.
“You can only stay for a short time,” she said, on the way there. “Visiting hours end at 8.”
“We would like to speak to his doctor,” Mirella said, which I was glad about, because until she asked it didn’t occur to me that the doctor wouldn’t be standing in the room with Thelonius.
“I can have the attending swing by,” the nurse said.
“Not the attending doctor. Our…father would have been seen by a specialist. We’d like to speak to that person.”
The nurse crinkled her nose, which came off as a mildly repressed expression of displeasure.
“I’ll see if he’s available,” she said.
We went in. Thelonius was awake and alone in a room with two beds. He looked to be in good spirits, but that was his default mode.
“There you are, my friends!” he said, a touch too loudly. The room smelled, oddly, of peppermint.
I closed the door. I didn’t know if I was supposed to—all the other doors on this part of the floor appeared to be open—but he sounded like a loud drunk, and a drunk imp could say anything.
“Son and daughter, according to the hospital,” I said, “not just friends.”
He laughed, a little too long.
His shoulder was in a heavy bandage, and he had an arm lashed to the bed to prevent the IV needle from getting yanked. He was also attached to a monitor registering his heart rate. I knew nothing about what a normal heart rate was, but his seemed slow. Perhaps imp heart rates were just slower.
Mirella sniffed the bandage and checked the IV.
“Mint,” she said. “How interesting.”
“Yes! It’s wonderful!” Thelonius said. “Peppermint! I love peppermint!”
There was a light knock on the door, and then a satyr in a doctor’s white coat let himself in.
I’ve always found satyrs to be impossible to mistake for anything else. Every time I come across one mingling among humans and passing himself off as one, I wonder how I could be the only one to notice.
Satyrs are almost all over six-foot-three and really hairy, which can pass as human okay, but they also have ankles that are higher up their legs than human ankles. They tend to walk stiffly upright and wear baggy pants around mixed company, so nobody can see the bend. The gait causes a lot of lifelong back problems.
I took this one to be younger than most, but I was basing that on his beard. Most adult satyrs had big heavy beards they only trimmed reluctantly, while the doctor only had stubble. On the other hand, a big heavy beard was perhaps unprofessionally non-sanitary.
“Hello?” he said. “I’m doctor Ignacius. I understand you were expressing…”
He stopped when he saw the two of us.
“You are not the son and daughter I was told to expect,” he said.
“What gave it away?” I asked.
“You could perhaps be. You appear human, and it’s possible this man could sire a human child. But not the goblin.”
“She could be adopted,” I said.
He ignored the suggestion.
“Why are you here? And why does the goblin have a knife in her hand?”
“Mirella, put it away,” I said.
Mirella held onto it for a beat and then slid it into whatever sleeve in which it lived.
I’ve seen very few interactions between goblin and satyr, but I didn’t recall any historical animosity between the species. They were different kinds of warriors, certainly. I’d take a satyr over a goblin if the battle were to take place in a forest; otherwise, a goblin would probably be a better bet.
“Thank you,” he said, to Mirella.
Under his clipboard, he had what I thought at first was a pen, but which turned out to be a wooden shiv of some sort. The satyros of the Athenian wood used to prohibit the use of metal for any tool, including weaponry. This little knife of his marked him as someone clinging to at least a portion of his people’s traditions. It was probably only symbolic, given the metal stethoscope around his neck and the metal clip on the wooden board he was holding. I’m sure as a medical doctor, he had to learn to live with metal needles and scalpels and what-not as well.
Once Mirella had sheathed her knife, he did the same, albeit less dramatically. He had a leather sleeve for it on his belt.
“You must be the other two,” he said.
“Other two what?” I asked.
“Eyewitnesses said three people were fired upon. You were the other two.”
“Yes, we were there. I was the target. But we aren’t here to talk about that.”
He raised a bushy eyebrow. Satyrs have real non-verbal cue problems; an eyebrow raise is practically a scream. I had to wonder what his bedside manner was like.
“You were,” he said. “Why is that? Are you important?”
“That really depends on who you ask. We wanted to talk to you about a different medical problem. In addition to checking on our friend.”
“Why does Thelonius smell like peppermint?” Mirella asked.
“Is that the question?”
“No, I just want to know.”
“Mint is an opiate for imps. Actual opiates are quite ineffectual.”
“That explains a lot about Santa Claus,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Never mind. It’s a good thing you were here when he was brought in.”
The doctor laughed.
“Someone was shot with an arrow in the middle of downtown Chicago. The local news might not know what to make of such a thing, but I certainly did.”
“Do most hospitals have someone like you on staff?”
“Usually, yes. Doubly the case here. This is a teaching hospital, with a long tradition of non-human research. These are surely not the questions you needed answering.”
“They’re here because these are my friends!” Thelonius declared—again, too loudly. Thankfully, the doctor had left the door closed behind him.
“How is he doing?” I asked.
“The prognosis is good, but I don’t recommend moving him for a few days, if you mean to check him out early. His stitches need attending.”
“I feel glorious!”
“Yes, Thelonius, thank you,” I said. “Doctor, if I describe some symptoms to you, could you tell me if it was something you’d seen before?”
“In anyone, human or otherwise.”
“Well, I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
I gave him as detailed a description as I could of the melting disease (for want of a better term,) and watched as his expression went from generic-helpful-doctor to inscrutable-satyr. Honestly, there was hardly a difference, but I’m well-versed in satyr facial expressions, such as they are. I took the change to mean he was familiar with the condition.
“Do you know someone who has this?” he asked.
Then he looked at Mirella. I was about to say, no, not her, other people, when she rolled up her sleeve to show the patch. It had grown since I last looked at it.
“Yes, put that away,” he said. “You should be in quarantine.”
“Quarantine where?” she asked. “Here?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere.”
He’d taken two steps backwards. Now, again, I don’t know a lot about doctors and don’t deal with them all that often, but backpedaling from a sick person was sort of the opposite of what I was expecting.
“You’ve seen it before,” I said. “But you don’t know anything about it. You don’t even know how it’s transmitted, do you?”
“Nobody knows,” he said. “We’re all trying to work that out.”
“All who?”
He took a hard look at me.
“What are you?” he asked.
“Just an interested human party. It’s not impossible for one of my kind to know about your kind.”
“No. No, just rare. Outside of the occasional human medical doctor, you might be the first I’ve met.”
If he was an adherent of a certain Dionysian mystery cult, I could have given him a better answer, but that wasn’t the sort of thing one just threw around anywhere. The cult was nearly as big a secret as my immortality. Plus, the fewer people in this local other-species community who knew an immortal was kicking around town at the same time there was a bounty on the head of an immortal man, the better.
Besides, if I was the only human he’d met who knew about satyrs, he probably wasn’t a member of the mysteries.
“When I say all,” he said, returning to my question, “I mean, the medical community. Our medical community. We don’t know what this is yet, but we believe it’s approaching epidemic proportions.”
“But that’s good. It’s being worked on. You can find an antidote or whatever.”
He was already shaking his head.
“No. Yes, of course, eventually, but no, we’re a good distance away from working that part out. We barely understand it, and it adheres to no historical standard.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The cross-species aspect. It’s not at all impossible for disease to jump species, but for a number of reasons it shouldn’t have the same effect in all cases.”
I considered mentioning Lenny, the demon, who dissolved within minutes of being exposed, but that information probably wouldn’t be helpful, since you can also kill a demon with a head cold.
“How lethal is it?” I asked. “Like, how many have beaten it? In your experience.”
“I’ve not heard of anyone surviving it.” He said this to Mirella. “And as I said, it manifests the same. Aside from humans, who appear immune. All it would take was for one non-human species to show a resistance, and we would be much further along in establishing the parameters of a cure.”
“I know a human who had it,” I said.
“Really! Well that’s…who is it, is he still alive?”
“Yes. Last I heard she’d recovered.”
His eyebrows screamed.
“Can you tell me how to get in touch with her?” he asked. “Was there a hospital at which she was treated? If I could speak to her or her doctor…”
“It’s not possible,” I said.
“Even if it’s a good distance, there are people I can call.”
“No, I mean, I don’t know how to find her, and you can’t call the hospital.”
His face fell.
“Maybe I can take your number,” I said. “And have someone reach out to you.”
I thought there was a decent chance Lew Cambridge would be willing to place such a call, even if he couldn’t tell Dr. Ignacius where he was calling from.
“Thank you, that would be helpful.”
“Who would you call?” Mirella asked. “If it were possible for you to send someone to look in on our friend, who would you call?”
“The research efforts are being spearheaded by a pharmaceutical conglomerate. They’re the only company with enough capital to really attack the problem.”
“You guys have your own pharmaceutical company?” I asked.
“It’s a division of a larger corporation, but yes. If there’s any chance of a medical cure, it will be coming from them.”
“What’s the name of the company?”
“Holitix. Have you heard of them?”
“Yes,” I said, sharing a meaningful glance with Mirella. “But in a different context.”
“Their products are so common, you might have seen them and not realized,” he said. “That IV bag is one of theirs.”
Mirella flipped over the bag so we could both get a look at the symbol on the back.
I’d seen it before, but it took a minute to figure out where: it was the three-bottles-on-a-table symbol I’d seen on the outside of the medical cooler on the island.
“This is Holitix?” Mirella asked, meaning the symbol.
“As I said. If you’ve been to one of our doctors in your life, you likely came in contact with one of their products at one time or another.”
“How might we get in touch with the company?” Mirella asked.
“Or visit them?” I added.
He laughed.
“It’s a shame, you know their only stateside facility used to be just outside of town. But everything above-ground was lost in a fire, and I guess they chose not to rebuild.”
There was a lot to unpack in there.
“A pharmaceutical conglomerate with only one facility in the United States?” I asked.
“Oh, no, they have several, but only a few are devoted to our kind of research. As many of us as there are, compared to the human population as a whole, we’re at most a side project. I doubt the shareholders have an inkling, for instance. That’s why you can’t just reach out to anybody at the company; it has to be a particular someone.”
“Can you give us the number of that particular someone?” Mirella asked.
“It isn’t a confidential number, so I suppose. If you tell them you have a human victim, I’m sure they’ll be interested, even if you no longer know her whereabouts.”
“Why did you say everything above-ground?” I asked.
“There were sub-levels. That was where the research specific to our interests was conducted. I visited myself once, for a symposium, and got a tour. I understand the fire took out the ground level floors and at least three of the basement levels, but there were seven sub-levels, total. I could be wrong, but given they cordoned off the building after the fire and haven’t done anything with it yet, I always got the sense the bottom levels were at least partly intact.”
“Just a sense?”
“Well, no, more than that. It’s the way things work. If there are substances in the basement that are hazardous, moving them constitutes a risk that will have to be addressed. If they are also things not intended to be seen by humans, it complicates matters inordinately. I assume it’s sealed and guarded until such a time as a non-human team of excavators with the appropriate biohazard equipment becomes available, so that they can empty out the labs safely.”
“From hell,” Thelonius muttered.
“Shh,” Mirella said. To the doctor, she asked, “what sort of hazards do you imagine are down there?”
“Hang on,” I said. “Thelonius, what were you saying?”
He seemed not at all lucid, which made what he said that much more in
teresting. He fixed on a spot on the wall somewhere above my head.
“From hell came the fires that burned the White City.”
“He’s babbling,” Mirella said.
“I’m not so sure. Thelonius, is this your first time in Chicago?”
It was conceivable that he was in Chicago for the World’s Fair too. It was a little outside of what I thought was an imp’s life expectancy, but not impossibly so. Given the fair was called the White City, and given most of the buildings were later destroyed in a fire, what he’d just said strongly indicated an earlier visit.
“The infernal cane,” he said, which wasn’t any kind of answer.
“I apologize,” Dr. Ignacius said. “The peppermint can cause this sort of thing. It’s why I insisted on keeping him in a private room.”
“I understand,” Mirella said, leaning closer. “You’re right, he’s not babbling; he’s repeating a prophesy. What about the infernal cane, imp.”
“The infernal cane has found a new home!”
She looked at me.
“Anything?” she asked.
“He lost me after White City,” I admitted.
“I’m sorry, a prophesy?” Ignacius said.
“Long story.”
“What about the new home?” Mirella asked Thelonius.
“The new…oh! Hello, Mirella! What did you want to know? Would you like to hear a story?”
“And he’s back,” I said.
“An imp prophet?” Dr. Ignacius was kind of hung up on this. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“He’s not a prophet. He just spent time with one. Hey, since he can’t leave right now, what would it take to get him moved to another room and under a different name?”
We waited around until Ignacius was able to secure a different room and a new name for Thelonius. (He was now David Smith, and as difficult as this is to admit, he looked a lot more like a Thelonius D’Artagnan than a David Smith.) the doctor also handed over the phone number he had for Holitix.
“It’s a local exchange,” he said, “but I think someone overseas answers. I last called them a few weeks ago, and the man who answered spoke with a heavy Indian accent.”
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