by Amir Lane
My hands slipped on the windowsill. It was much easier to pull one of my sneakers off and use it to smash the rest of the window so I could climb out through the fire escape. I stumbled into the metal railing. The purple barrier flickered above me. I looked up at the glint of light, forgetting myself for a moment in the blood loss and overall exhaustion.
What was I doing?
Every step down the fire escape jostled the organs that were probably being held together by threads of fat at this point.
I either needed to spend more or less time reading Ariadne’s medical textbooks.
It must have taken me hours to reach the street. Every thump of O'Rourke flying into the barrier or running into the barrier or scratching at the barrier bruised my body. In the distance, sirens wailed.
It won’t be long now.
Either somebody was going to show up and arrest O'Rourke, or I was going to die and he was going to get away.
I should have proposed to Ariadne. I should have called mom and dad. I should have—
I doubled over onto the pavement and vomited blood. That was one of those seek immediate medical attention things, wasn't it?
There was this thing in Australia called swooping season, where big birds would swoop down and peck at people. It always sounded terrifying to me, and few things made me happier than the knowledge that it was something I would never have to experience. Birds in Canada didn't swoop like that. Clearly, nobody had given O’Rourke that message. My scream came out breathy. I threw my hands over my face. The only thing that kept him from tearing my fingers off was the hard shell of shimmering purple that covered me. The Arabic calligraphy glowing beneath my skin burned with the effort to keep it around me. Would it stay around me if I was unconscious? They were reflexive, sure, but what would happen if I passed out or ran out of energy to hold them up? Would they keep eating away at whatever fuel I had?
Will they come up if they have to do an autopsy on me?
He could have gotten away then. I didn't have the strength to keep both the cocoon and barrier up, especially not one that would keep out the civilians coming closer to watch.
The bystander effect. The more people there are watching, the less likely anyone is to do anything.
I had always hated the bystander effect. People died because of it. I hated it even more now that I was going to be one of those people who died because of it.
Bismillah il-Rahman il-Rahim, Bismillah il-Rahman il-Rahim, Bismillah il-Rahman il-Rahim…
The prayer played through my head like a soundtrack on repeat. In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. The words that came before each chapter in the Qur’an had given me the strength to survive before. Maybe it would do the same now.
I was completely drained. I had nothing else to lean on. No amount of prayer or magic would replace the amount of blood I'd lost quickly enough to be of any use to me. I tried opening my eyes, only to realize that they already were open, and I was seeing black because I'd lost that much blood. I looked up again for that light I'd seen, but there was no light, none at all.
By now, I was starting to recognize the soft flutter of air that accompanied O'Rourke's shifts. I braced myself for it, for whatever animal he was going to become. It wasn't an animal this time, though. Human hands grabbed at me. I rolled onto my back and aimed another punch at where I assumed his head was, the cross still between my fingers. It wasn't his head, but I did hit something. The iron stuck in his skin. Guilty satisfaction joined the pain in my stomach, but it only lasted for a moment. It wasn't enough to stop him.
Large, furry hands grabbed at my throat.
I pushed, far from strong enough to keep him away. The muscles in my stomach screamed in protest as I raised my leg to kick him off. I couldn’t get the strength to do more than shove him back a few inches. At least my vision was returning. I could make out the fuzzy shape of him, though I couldn’t quite tell if he was fuzzy because of my vision or because of the black fur covering his body. His eyes glowed like red headlights.
“I’ll kill you,” he snarled, blood dripping from his lips. “I’ll kill you, you stupid dumb bitch. You and Kieron and Audra. Then I’ll find Rowan and kill him myself, just like this.”
He punctuated each of the last words with heavy presses to my windpipe. When I pushed my hand against his face, his teeth clamped down.
I wish you were dead.
I had no voice to say the words. I could only mouth them. It was only the second time in my life that I had wished that someone was dead.
I'd killed Rutherford Bromley. There was no way I could kill Iain O'Rourke.
I didn't know where Raisa Karim was. Maybe on her way to the next city on her list, maybe in an upscale hotel sipping tea and flipping through a magazine. Either way, she wasn’t here. There was no way she could have heard my wish, especially not when I hadn't even said it out loud. There was no way she was close enough to feel the very real, very deliberate intention behind them.
Blood spattered across my face. O'Rourke's body flew back. Everything but the throb of my pulse against my eardrums fell silent.
Then, for the second time in 24 hours, all hell broke loose.
Screams rang out. The crowd dispersed to get away from the shot that had come out of nowhere. Sirens wailed right in my ears. I tried to sit up. The best I could do was roll onto my stomach and pull my knees close to my body. I tucked an arm under my head to protect it from the pavement. If I got trampled to death, I didn't care right now.
“Fairuz!”
Gentle hands touched my face. I cracked my eyes open. Indira’s face was blurry, and it definitely wasn’t because of any fur.
“Are you all right?”
I wanted to ask if I looked all right, but all that came out was an incoherent mumble that was neither French, nor English, nor Arabic. He shouted for a paramedic.
“You're going to be okay,” he promised. “Want me to help you think of something nice?”
I couldn't nod or shake my head. From my position, I watched a broad man walk out of the building across the street holding a sniper riffle. Two police officers rushed up to him. Couldn't they have gotten here any sooner? He handed one his rifle, still walking. As he approached, his voice became loud enough for me to make out his words though the underwater feeling muffling everything else.
“— questions all you want later. My detective is down, and she is more important!”
My vision focused enough that I could read the word police across his vest. The glint of light made sense now. It was from the reflection of the scope of a sniper rifle. Kieron had been an army sniper. He'd killed Iain O'Rourke.
Djinn wishes never worked the way anybody wanted them to. I'd wished for O'Rourke's death, and it came at the price of Kieron staining his hands with more blood.
I didn't know how to apologize to him for it, for everything. Not just because I didn't have the energy to do much as keep my eyes open anymore. There were no words for such a thing.
I might have lost consciousness at some point. The world moved around me as I was pulled into an ambulance. Kieron's hand was wrapped firmly around mine. My eyelids fluttered as I struggled to open them.
“— strength,” Kieron was saying. “These men are going to take care of you. I have to go talk to Internal Affairs but Indira is going to come with you. Hey, I said, he’s going with her! I'll come see you as soon as I can. I promise.”
I couldn’t open my eyes. Spots of light danced behind my eyelids. Team dad, I thought. I thanked him as loudly as I could inside my head and hoped it was loud enough for him to hear.
Chapter Nineteen
“We don't give points for frequent hospital visits, Miss Arshad. Let's not have you back for a while, okay?”
Dr Sidiqi smiled as she wrote out my prescriptions for antibiotics and painkillers. It had taken about seven hours of surgery to stich my muscles back together. According to the nurse who’d been in the room when I first gained coherency, most of the
time was spent trying to cut through my barriers. The actual work itself was closer to two hours. It answered my questions about my barriers and unconsciousness. Thankfully, I wouldn’t get an answer about my barriers and autopsies today, though it didn’t quite feel like it.
Even after forty-eight hours of being pumped full of fluids, I felt like I might have actually been dead, or at least still dying. The healing would have been much faster if not for the dehydration. Massive blood loss and no water to create new cells were a terrible combination. That was the worst of it, though. Once the magic in my veins had time to replenish, recovery was a much faster process. It wasn’t much worse than having an appendix removed.
“Here you go. Try to make sure she takes it easy,” Dr Sidiqi said to Ariadne.
“I’ll do my best, but I can’t make any promises with her.”
There was a slight smile in her tired voice. She tucked the copy of Anne of the Island she’d been reading to me into her bag. The position of her bookmark said she was halfway through. I didn’t remember us finishing Anne of Avonlea. I didn’t even remember us finishing Anne of Green Gables.
“It’s a requirement for all Canadian citizen to read the Anne of Green Gables books,” she’d said with mock-seriousness a few months ago when she’d discovered I had never read them.
“I don’t remember that being on the test,” I’d teased.
Through the haze of painkillers and general exhaustion, I could tell she genuinely enjoyed the books. Every now and then, she would stop and go on a tangent to explain something with her face all lit up. When I could focus on anything for more than a few seconds, I would read them properly. There was no way I was going to be allowed to do field work for a very long time, so I was going to have a lot of free time on my hands. Right now, I was fine with that. Everything hurt, and the painkillers had me fuzzy.
Underneath it all was the reminder that Rowan was running out of time. If they’d sent a púca after me, there was no telling what they’d send after him when they found him.
Ariadne kept her hand on my elbow as we shuffled through the hospital. In her other hand was the vase of flowers Raisa Karim had sent. If she was upset that my ex-girlfriend sent me flowers, I was on too many painkillers to tell. Standing actually felt better than sitting. The muscles in my stomach didn’t clench the same way when I was lying down or standing upright as they did when I was sitting.
The absolute darkness outside was such a sharp contrast against the bright hospital lights, I almost wondered, in the haze of lingering exhaustion, if I’d gone blind on top of everything else. My vision adjusted before the panic caught up to me.
In the car, I leaned the seat back as much as I could. The angle wasn’t comfortable on my hips, but hip pain was better than stomach pain right now. Ariadne drove slowly. I expected her to turn left, but she turned right instead. When I cracked an eye open, she said, “This road is a lot less bumpy.”
If she was taking the nicer road, she couldn’t have been that mad at me. Or maybe she just wasn’t that cruel.
“Are you mad at me?” I mumbled.
She let out a long sigh and slowed to a stop at the intersection. The red light was so much less bright than the hospital’s fluorescent lights. It made her glow like some kind of red-tinged angel.
“I was,” she said. “And then I was mad at myself for saying it was okay for you to go undercover. And then I was mad at Kieron, and Sabine, and Rowan. But it wasn’t any of their faults. It was those Black Birch fucks. You only got sucked into this because you went after that shade, and you only did that because it’s literally your job. They sent that púca after you for doing your job. That, and for looking out for Rowan. They— They tried to kill you!”
The back right tire hit a sewer grate. I arched, my muscles convulsing to escape the pain, and cried out.
“Sorry! I’m sorry! I wasn’t looking--”
Her hand found mine, and I squeezed it. The painkillers still in my system probably made it hurt a lot less than it should have.
“I’m okay. I’m all right.”
Relatively speaking, I was all right. Two days ago, I’d been convinced that I was going to die. Anything was a step up.
“So you’re… not mad?”
“Not at you. Mostly not at you. I’m mad at them. The Black Birches, Rowan’s family. Also still a little bit at Kieron and Sabine, but mostly the Birches.”
“Kieron trusted Finín. Iain. Whatever. He thought it was his friend.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m not blaming him, not really. I like Kieron. But Sabine should have known better.”
My eyes didn’t want to stay open. Even though this was a better road, I was being jostled too much to sleep. I should have gone to law school. Lawyers weren’t anybody’s favourite people, but I would probably get stabbed less as a lawyer than I did as a cop.
I would have hated it. Even without the stabbing, I would have hated it.
“Sabine said no. Finín — Iain — pushed her into it. He’s Interpol. He has more authority.”
She made an annoyed sound that suggested that wasn’t a sufficient excuse. Maybe it wasn’t. I couldn’t be suspicious of Sabine now. Not now, when I still couldn’t sit up properly. Tomorrow, or in a few weeks, I could latch onto my next conspiracy theory. For what was left of tonight, I wanted to curl up with my perfect girlfriend and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist. No Black Birches, no shades, no púcas.
“I love you,” I mumbled.
“I love you too.”
I tried to shift onto my side to face her. The seatbelt kept me from going far, so I settled for tipping my head to the side.
“I mean it.”
“I mean it too.”
I swallowed down the lump in my throat. She didn’t say it much. She wasn’t one of those people who expressed love with words. When she did, it almost hurt.
Even through the haze, I recognized the sound of my ringtone. Where was my phone? It was obviously in the car, but where? I reached for it, but didn’t find it. Ariadne slipped it into my hand.
“If it’s work, don’t answer.”
I wasn’t sure if it was work or not, but it was Kieron. It was well past midnight and quickly approaching two in the morning. If he was calling, it was important. I slid my thumb along the screen and held it to my ear.
“Hello?”
There was silence on the other end. I opened my mouth to repeat myself when Kieron’s voice cut me off.
“Fairuz? I didn’t— think ye’d answer.”
I frowned at the slur in his voice. “Kieron, are you— drunk?”
“I may or may not be in some sort of state of drunk.”
He laughed a little humourlessly.
The pain in my stomach wasn’t from getting stabbed by goat horns anymore. Before I’d started in Special Crimes, back before I even became a detective, there were stories of Kieron’s drinking. As time went on, those stories stopped and I thought it was because they’d never been true in the first place. In the time I’d known him, I’d never seen him take a single drink.
When we’d first met, I’d assumed it was because he was a devout Catholic. It wasn’t until much later that he mentioned an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It wasn’t a secret, it just wasn’t something he talked about much. He’d been so proud of his sobriety. I didn’t know how long it had taken, but I knew it had been a fight. All that work he’d done to stay clean was gone now.
“I just… Fairuz?”
“I’m here.”
“I just wanted to tell you… I fucked up. Bad. I never… never should have put you in that kind of danger.”
Ariadne frowned at me. I shook my head in silent indication that things were not okay.
“Where are you?” I asked before I could let myself wonder how much of this relapse was my fault.
“Horseshoe Tavern. Do you have any idea how much I fucking missed whiskey?”
That seemed like a rhetorical question. I mouthed ‘Horseshoe
Tavern’ at Ariadne. She nodded and changed lanes.
“I’m on my way. Don’t have any more drinks, Kieron.”
“Okay, first of all, you are not the boss of me. I am the boss of you during work hours, and you are the boss of me never. Second of all, you are not allowed to fucking break out of the hospital. I am forbidding it.”
If I’d had his boyfriend’s number, I would have called him to deal with this. Indira was another choice, but it was the middle of the night. Even though both faeries and alkonosts were fairly nocturnal, Ariadne and I were awake and not that far from the bar.
“I was just discharged from the hospital. Does Merrick know where you are?”
“Told him I’m doing overtime ‘cause we’re understaffed.”
I didn’t think Kieron had told Merrick he was going to get drunk off his ass on a Wednesday or Thursday night — I wasn’t sure what day it was — but somehow, the fact that Kieron was lying to him was worse. They had such a loving relationship. They had a family. For a moment, I had a horrible image of myself in four years telling Ariadne I was working in the middle of the night so I could sneak out to get drunk. I’d been a casual drinker in university, but I didn’t think I’d ever been an alcoholic.
Not like Kieron.
Iain O’Rourke did this to him. It wasn’t me, it was O’Rourke. O’Rourke, and probably some self-medicating to deal with the PTSD he must have already had. The man had said something about Kieron’s father beating him. Between that and spending all those years as a sniper, I would have a hard time imagining he didn’t have some kind of post-traumatic stress.
I let Kieron talk about whatever came to his mind as we drove. Mostly, he complained about how long about it had been since he’d had a drink, which drinks he’d missed, which drinks he didn’t care for. By the time we pulled up to the bar, I almost wanted a drink. I hung up only because I was a few metres from the front door. Nothing would happen in the time it would take me to get to him. I straightened the seat, hissing through my teeth despite my best efforts not to.