by ReGi McClain
Seraph, her head lolling back, eyes fluttering, whispered back with skillful ventriloquism, “You try condensing the mass of a bus into a human body sometime. You should bless me for being able to carry most of my own weight and still look limp.”
The receptionist must have seen through Seraph’s act because they waited forty minutes before a sour-faced, obese nurse with smoker’s gravel in her voice barked out, “Surf?”
The nurse asked routine questions, muttered about fevers being scary but not usually a great concern, and offered various phrases intended for comfort while she strapped on the blood pressure cuff, clamped on the oxygen monitor, and stabbed a thermometer under Seraph’s tongue. The machine beeped. The nurse tapped it with exquisite nails that looked out of place on her overstuffed hands. She re-strapped, re-clamped, and re-stabbed Seraph.
“Try to relax, hun. It’ll be over soon.”
This time the oxygen sensor read ninety-eight percent and the blood pressure cuff offered a whopping one hundred and ninety-six over one hundred and fifty-two. The nurse muttered about Seraph being skinny for such a high blood pressure reading and recommended she make an appointment with a cardiologist as soon as possible. The thermometer refused a reading, beeping its confusion. The nurse cursed the stingy hospital administrators before rolling her chair over to a cupboard to extract an old-fashioned glass thermometer, which she thrust into Seraph’s mouth.
It burst. The nurse croaked a swear word. She cleaned up the glass and silvery liquid with copious apologies before rolling off to get a new one. Seraph broke the second thermometer, too.
The nurse set the back of her hand on Seraph’s head and pulled it back with a squawk. Her skin blanched behind her freckles, except the angry red mark where Seraph’s forehead had burned her wrist. Harsha covered her mouth and pretended to sob to cover her giggles while the nurse waddled away, barking assurances.
A pair of jovial, fresh-out-of-college types appeared with a wheelchair to take Seraph to a room. They rolled her down the hall, joking at the nurse’s expense.
As soon as the cheerful pair shut the door of the room they assigned to Seraph, the redhead jumped off her bed. All three friends crowded around the emergency exit map. “All right. Once they think you’re dead, they take you here.” Harsha tapped the morgue. “Zeeb will follow you at first. I’ll get the car and wait…” she ran her finger along the map until she found an outside door near the morgue, “about here.”
Zeeb studied the map. “What if it’s an emergency exit with an alarm?”
“Then you’ll have to find a different exit. We can’t be sure which way whoever took Jason’s body went. This is just my best guess.”
Harsha peeked into the hall. Several people milled about, but no one paid particular attention to anything around them, so she stepped out of the room. She tried to walk out of the emergency area without looking as hurried as she felt.
The tiny staff parking lot where she waited with the car showed little sign of activity. With her seat tilted back, she riffled through her purse for something to work on to keep her mind alert and focused on the task at hand rather than the anguish trying to worm its way out. In desperation, she ran through the permutations of the numbers on a receipt until a familiar hairy face poked out of the staff door to look around. He caught sight of her and sprinted across the lot, trailed by an unfamiliar woman in orange hospital scrubs. Both wore scowls.
“Start the car.” He buckled himself into the passenger seat.
The woman yanked open the back door and jumped in before Harsha could protest. “Drive.”
Harsha’s first inclination was to stay put, at least until she got answers, but Zeeb’s dark expression convinced her not to hesitate and orange mist in her backseat reassured her about the strange woman.
Seraph completed her transformation to her usual human form before they pulled into Harsha’s driveway. Neither she nor Zeeb volunteered information. Neither volunteered any words at all. Seraph flopped onto the couch as soon as they made it through the door and Zeeb disappeared into the bathroom. Harsha scrunched her brow in confusion when she heard the shower start up. Nice to know her friends felt so at home.
“What did you guys find out?”
Seraph kneaded her temples. “We figured out where Jason and Elaine weren’t.”
Harsha fought back a sob of disappointment. It wasn’t what she hoped for, but it was information. “Great. We can eliminate those places. Where weren’t they?”
“The morgue.”
Cold fingers of apprehension crawled up Harsha’s spine. “You mean, the scent is cold?”
“No. I mean, Jason and Elaine didn’t go to the morgue. Zeeb checked around the rest of the hospital while I played dead. Neither of us smelled Jason or Elaine outside the emergency room. As far as we can tell, they never left the area.”
“But…” Images of Jason’s battered face and his wife’s dented skull pressed to the front of Harsha’s mind. She shook her head to clear them. “But I saw them. They ” Her throat caught. She swallowed. “They ” No use. She shook her head.
“Where did you see them?”
It took a few tries, but she managed to gurgle, “In the emergency room.”
“Did you follow them to the morgue?”
Harsha replayed the night in her head, trying to recall every detail. “No. I fainted or something. I don’t remember much after they brought him out.”
“Do you know the attending doctors? You know the officer, right?”
“Yes. I run into Sergeant Kapahu from time to time. I didn’t pay attention to the hospital staff.”
“How about the accident? What did they tell you about it?”
Seraph’s tone bothered Harsha. She knew something, or believed she knew something. “Drunk driver, hit and run. They have no idea who crashed into him or where the other car ended up.”
Seraph rubbed her temples with vigor while little streams of smoke drifted up from her nostrils.
“You have suspicions. What are they?”
“This is a nice place. How long have you lived here?” The smoke streams continued to rise from Seraph’s nostrils, but she turned a smile to Harsha.
Harsha shook her head to clear it, sure her ears had fabricated the change of subject due to exhaustion or grief. “Excuse me?”
“You should visit Zeeb’s place this spring. I think you’d like it.”
Zeeb emerged from the hallway. He glanced at Seraph before meeting Harsha’s eyes.
They definitely knew something. Harsha crossed her arms over her chest, stuck out a hip, and glared at Zeeb. “Tell me what you know.”
He looked out the window. His jaw worked and his chest heaved several times before he spoke. “Can Seraph and I have a moment?”
Zeeb and Seraph knew something about Jason and Elaine’s bodies disappearing, but they wanted to shut her out of it? Harsha opened her mouth to blast him with profanities.
“Please.”
Too furious to stand the sight of either him or Seraph, she stomped to her room and slammed the door. Buried under two pillows with her face mashed into the mattress, she gave vent to her anger and grief. Raised voices and growl-like noises in the living room competed with her screams. When they died down, she abandoned her pillows to get answers.
She skipped washing her face and fixing her hair, not caring whether they knew she’d spent the last hour crying. She stormed into the living room. “Are you two done playing with me?”
Seraph’s face looked grave. “Did Dr. Green or the Rices ever mention Sophie?”
Harsha gaped at Seraph. “Sophie who? And why should I care?”
“Not Sophie like the name. SoPHE as in the Society to Prevent Human Extinction, S-O-P-H-E. Did anyone mention SoPHE to you?”
Harsha took a deep breath to settle her mood and reflected, trying to remember if she’d heard the name before. A small detail came to mind. “Dr. Green wore a pin that said SoPHE.”
The fire in Seraph’s
eyes flared. “We think they have Jason and Elaine’s bodies.”
“How do I get them back?”
“You don’t.” Zeeb put a hand on her shoulder. “Seraph and I handle this one alone.”
“What!” She smacked the hand away. Fists clenched at her sides, she shouted in his face. “You want me to sit here twiddling my thumbs while lunatic alien fanatics do heaven-knows-what to my brother’s body? Have you lost your mind?”
Seraph stood and patted the air. “You’re what they want, Harsha, because of your fae blood. It’s bad enough they have Jason’s body. It would be a disaster for all the hiders if they captured you alive. Please trust us. Zeeb knows these people. He has experience with them. It’s better if we handle this without you.”
Harsha didn’t hear her own scream, but she felt her rage compressing her vocal cords and diaphragm to reach the highest, loudest note possible. “No!”
The windows reverberated and her crystal ballerinas shattered. Seraph and Zeeb clamped their hands over their ears and crumpled to the floor.
Too infuriated to ponder the strange phenomenon, she dropped to her own knees to face them both. She whispered through clenched teeth, “I don’t care what it is you’re afraid of. If you have an idea where Jason is, I am going with you to get him back.”
Zeeb pulled his lips away from his teeth, revealing extra canines, his eyes narrow and dangerous. The expression set the hair on the back of Harsha’s neck to standing, but she held her ground. After several deep breaths, he forced words through his clenched teeth. “Fine, but you stick close to Seraph. At. All. Times. Understood?”
Harsha felt like telling him to stick it where the sun don’t shine. Instead, she nodded agreement and went back to her bedroom. She needed space.
Chapter 19
Harsha remembered hearing that saddles provided a comfortable riding experience compared to bareback. As a young lady, when she went through her love-of-the-horse-and-all-things-prairie-romance phase, she’d scoffed at the idea. Surely, bareback deepened the connection between horse and rider, allowed them to find their ways back to the natural rhythm that existed between man and beast before the dawn of ignorance, released them from the bonds of societal constructs, and let freedom soar.
Well, she didn’t know what it was like on a horse, but bareback dragon riding stank. The shallow ridges of Seraph’s spine made positioning difficult, and her rough scales tended to snag on fabric. The heat coming off the dragon rivalled a casserole not long out of the oven. Sweat soaked the inner legs of Harsha’s jeans. It looked and felt as though she’d peed in them.
Zeeb sat a couple ridges back, close enough to catch her if need be, but far enough to avoid unintentional contact. Harsha appreciated the space until they took off. That was when she found out how much thigh strength it takes to stay on a moving animal: more than she had. Zeeb helped her out with a hand on her back for the ascent— his thighs must be steel , she thought—and left her to fend for herself when they levelled.
An hour into the flight, she came to the conclusion she enjoyed pain. Not that she actually liked pain, but that her subconscious felt a deep need to punish her for past crimes, or something. Why else would she keep inflicting experimental cures, nature camps, and long, unprotected flights over shark-infested waters on herself?
She shifted, cautiously, to give her aching backside a new focus for the pain. Truth be told, the soreness helped. An image of Jason and Elaine slamming into the dashboard, made vivid by the memory of their battered corpses, cycled through her thoughts. She focused on the pain and heat, counted stars, looked for patterns in Seraph’s scales, tapped rhythms on her knees, went through a series of breathing exercises she’d learned years ago when she’d tried yoga to fix her condition, and wished for a stack of convoluted bookkeeping to sort through. By the time Seraph alighted on a tiny island to rest, Harsha felt antsy enough to take on the national debt. Just as soon as she showered, changed, and found a papasan to lounge in while she tackled the numbers.
“Be as quiet as possible while we’re here,” Zeeb whispered when she slid off, his lips tickling Harsha’s ear, his voice so low she strained to hear it in the pre-dawn quiet. “This is Wake Island. It’s monitored by the Air Force, so we need to stay hidden. Seraph’s cloak is good enough to fool their equipment, but we don’t want to attract attention.”
Harsha nodded acknowledgement and looked around for a level patch of sand to sit on. She grunted in surprise when Seraph’s wing draped over her, and stared in awe as coppery mist gathered around her. She expected to see Seraph’s human form, but a large, hollow rock covered her and Zeeb. Several small openings allowed a breeze to sift into the makeshift cave. Harsha scooched around until she looked out at the ocean from her position within the warm Seraph-rock.
“We’re safe in here. Try to sleep.” Zeeb kept away and refused to make eye contact, which suited her.
Curled up in a corner, Harsha shut her eyes. The morning she gave Jason the unicorn horn replayed itself, bringing to mind details she’d long since forgotten. It felt as though, if she stretched far enough, she could reach into her memories to pull him back to life. She choked on a sob and realized tears covered her face. Desperate to keep herself under control until after the crisis, she drew boxes, counted the grains of sand, and attempted to ease the soreness in her groin with gentle stretches.
In the evening, high in the air, with the soothing white noise of the wind rushing over Seraph’s wings and the gentle light of the moon and stars casting glimmering patterns on the sea, the weariness of Harsha’s body caught up with her mind and dragged her toward sleep. She flicked the palms of her hands and pinched her arms, heedless of whatever bruises she caused herself. They’d be nothing compared to falling hundreds of feet over the middle of the ocean. She considered striking up a conversation to aid her attempts at wakefulness, but except for the two sentences on the island, Zeeb hadn’t spoken since the trip started, and Seraph seemed content with the quiet.
She slipped to the left. Zeeb’s fingers dug into her flesh, pushing her back into an upright position. Her eyes snapped open, her heart racing and side throbbing. Too soon, her eyes grew heavy.
Shaking her head, she broke the icy silence between her and Zeeb. “How do you know so much about SoPHE?”
Air whooshed by. Seraph flapped her wings. No sound came from behind her.
Warnings flashed across her mind. She lacked the strength to catch Zeeb if he fell asleep and slipped. Elbowing him might tip him off. Slapping his face, tempting as it was, required a twist that could tilt her into the water below. His thigh, however, was reachable.
“My d Aargh!”
Too late to stop herself, she pinched as he began talking.
“What was that for?”
“Sorry. When you didn’t answer, I was afraid you fell asleep.”
He muttered something that sounded like impatient faerie-fish. Harsha decided not to hear it.
“I was deciding how much you needed to know.”
She did hear that. Her fingers itched to pinch him again, this time with sincerity. She didn’t bother to mask the icy edge in her voice. “I think, under the circumstances, a lot.”
“Please let Seraph and me handle this alone. There’s a nice Aswang in Manila. You can stay with her.”
She clenched her teeth shut and pushed her words through them. “Tell me, Zeeb.”
Thirty seconds elapsed before Zeeb sighed and saved himself from another pinch. “Dad was working in nuclear medicine when Mom got bitten. The first night she changed, he called his best friend, a geneticist named Rob Younkins, and their old mentor, Tom Brown. Mom didn’t know what had happened to her and after they told her, she begged them to help her. They had the same theory you did, that a condition she got from a bite must be an infectious disease. They tried a few of the obvious treatments—antivirals, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, stuff like that—but the change got worse with very full moon and they decided they needed a quiet place to
work, away from civilization.”
He fell silent. Harsha wanted to tell him to hurry up and finish his story, but he seemed to need time to reprocess whatever had happened.
“Mom, Dad, and Tom pooled resources to get together the money to buy a small island in New York. The little ones aren’t as expensive as you’d think and it’d be someplace a crazed werewolf couldn’t escape, but close enough to a big city for them to get what they needed. They leveraged everything they could and had started negotiations when Younkins called to tell them he had found an organization that would fund the research in exchange for the right to use any findings at their own discretion.”
He paused again. Harsha shuddered, uncomfortable with the sense of foreboding growing at the base of her skull. She tried to suppress it, telling herself not to be so cowardly. Nevertheless, when Zeeb spoke again, she bounced in her place.
“Dad left mom at Tom’s and went to check it out. The organization owned a seventy-five acre island and had an enormous research facility filled with cutting-edge equipment and beautiful rooms for the staff. At first, Dad was thrilled. It was like the candy store of medical research. He spent the night in one of the guest rooms, but he couldn’t sleep. He kept having this feeling he’d missed something, so he went exploring. Turned out, Younkins hadn’t shown him everything. When he got home, he told Mom they needed to look for a cure on their own, packed their bags, and got them on the first flight to Alaska. He never told her what he saw.”
“Did he tell you?”
“Yes.” Anger seeped through the tight, single syllable.
She waited for him to keep going, but he remained silent for a long time. Although she sat as firmly on Seraph’s back as her limited strength allowed, she felt as if she were suspended in midair, in that moment of weightlessness right before the plummet. “Zeeb?” she asked when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “What should I expect?”
He took several deep, agitated breaths before he answered. “Have you ever seen any documentaries on animal cruelty?”