by E. A. Copen
Zoe’s eyes flared even brighter. “She’s my daughter!”
“You don’t love her. If you did, you wouldn’t be working with Marcus and Doctor Han.”
“You have no idea what I’m doing and with whom. You’re ankle deep in an ocean and claiming you can see the other side, Judah. If you lay a hand on my girl without my permission, I will rip you apart.”
I stood, one arm protectively over my aching stomach, swaying back and forth for a second before I lifted my fists in challenge.
She smirked. “You want to fight me?”
“Name the place and time. I’ll kick your ass any day of the week.”
Zoe’s head snapped toward the door. She lifted her unnaturally elongated arm and the claws retracted back inside her fingers. The skin knitted itself back together just as the door cracked open and Nurse Uhl peeked in, her brow knitted in concern. “Everything okay in here, ladies?”
“We’re fine,” Zoe said, flashing a coy smile.
I wiped blood from under my nose as the nurse looked to me. “I fell,” I mumbled.
She frowned. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” The nurse closed the door lightly.
As soon as she was gone, Zoe turned to snarl at me, “If you even think about telling Sal, I will make your life a living hell, Judah. Telling him won’t relieve you of your guilt. It won’t make you feel better, and it won’t help Mia. And you don’t want everything you’ve done to me and to Mia to be out in the open for everyone to hear, do you?” She gave a high-pitched laugh. “Imagine how much he would react if he knew it was your fault Mia was missing in the first place.”
I clenched my hands into fists and released them several times before I turned my head away. Zoe was right. If Sal knew the truth, he would hate me. My heart fluttered and then sank as I imagined the hurt on his face twisting into righteous anger. I had told him all those months ago that Zoe was dead, without a doubt, and the child was lost. And I knew how much he’d wanted a baby with Zoe. When she showed up with what he thought was a belly full of LeDuc’s offspring, it changed him. If he knew the truth, that I had cut Mia out of Zoe, left Zoe to die, let Mia disappear, he’d hate me.
The feelings I had for Sal were still fresh. He was the one good thing I had. It was selfish, and it was wrong, but I’m only human. Like it or not, humans are motivated more strongly by pain and pleasure than any other force in the universe, and I didn’t want to lose the man I loved.
“Fine,” I said at length. “But don’t think I’m going to let her slip away a second time.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Zoe stepped back and wiped her palm on her shirt. “Now, do your thing.”
“What thing?”
“That... aura thing Marcus says you do. Whatever’s wrong with her, wouldn’t it show there?”
I crossed my arms and turned to look at Mia’s crib. Examining the girl’s aura was exactly what I’d come back in there to do, that and grill Zoe for answers. I’d gotten my answers, even though they just led to more questions. Now, it was time to put my feud with Zoe behind me and do what I could for Mia. If I could do anything at all.
I let out a deep breath and closed my eyes, dismissing every thought in my mind. That’s the hardest part of magick, approaching it with a clear mind. If I were to go in with my worries about Zoe, Mia, Hunter or Sal weighing on my mind, it wouldn’t work. Worse, it might spiral out of control. I had to be completely focused on the magick flowing in, out and around my body. In and out. In... and out.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the world in a haze of neon colors. If you’ve ever seen an infrared image, those are the colors I see when I look at auras. Vivid orange, blue, green, and red painted the room, brighter in the spaces closer to people and darker further away. In the three to six inches above and around every human that the aura occupies, those same colors flow outward from a line of points going down the center of the body and important joints in the arms, legs, hands, and feet. Seeing auras was exhausting for me, but one of the most beautiful, magickal experiences of my days at work.
Mia’s aura was not at all beautiful or colorful. It wasn’t there at all. I blinked hard and tried again from the start. Still, no aura. That’s not possible, I thought. Everything living had an aura, even zombies. If Mia didn’t have an aura, what would that mean? Her heart was beating and her body was breathing, but she might as well have been dead.
Movement in the corner of my vision made me turn my head. A small, thin, hairline crack of black spun its way through the air, a delicate, dark spider web. As soon as I looked at it, the black thing shot through the air and into Mia’s open mouth. Mia’s body lit up with radioactive colors pulsating out in a dizzying spiral. The only time I had ever seen colors like that, I got a migraine less than an hour later.
Mia’s body jerked. Zoe screamed for the nurse. I turned my head aside and rubbed my forehead with my palms while the door crashed open and new energy flooded into the room without warning. Nurse Uhl and another orderly rushed to Mia’s bedside and turned Mia on her side while she fell into a seizure.
The room suddenly felt too small, and the air too thick to pull down into my lungs. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and the sensation of being watched pounded against all the warning signals in my brain. The temperature of the room plunged until what little breath I could manage came out in tiny white wisps. No one but me noticed the drop.
A small, creaking groan echoed through the room. I turned around. The face staring back at me wore waxy blue-grey skin. The eyes were white and cloudy. She wore a dress that couldn’t have been in style since the Titanic sank, the whole front of the vivid white dress stained with blood. Her mouth opened and an ear-splitting, banshee-like screech came out. I threw my hands over my ears. Only then did I realize the sound was only in my mind.
The creature paid me no mind and walked forward to Mia’s crib.
“You get the hell away from her!” I screamed and drew back my fist, ready to throw magick behind the punch.
Zoe and Nurse Uhl turned to glare at me. “Excuse me?” The nurse said.
They can’t see her, I realized. The only reason I could was because of the aura sight.
The creature bent over the crib, its mouth opened. It opened too wide, the way a puppet’s mouth might, and a second smaller head popped out, this one with an oversized lamprey-like head and a pair of flexing mandibles. The small head shot out and snapped at the flashing colors of the girl’s aura. In response, the colors coalesced away from the creature to a single point in Mia’s chest and disappeared. The black dot shot out of Mia’s mouth again, bounced off the opposite wall, and sailed straight for me. I barely ducked out of the way in time to avoid being struck by whatever it was. Again, the creature wailed and the small head snapped back inside the human-esque head. In a strobing blur, it moved across the room and stood in front of me to screech one more time. This time, when she opened her mouth, I saw the second creature inside attached to her jaw where the tongue should have been.
I stumbled back and crashed into the wall. The creature shot out of the door. I pushed away from the wall awkwardly and ran out into the hall to follow it, but the creature was too fast. By the time I made it into the hallway, it was long gone.
Chapter Three
Five minutes later, I paced back and forth in front of the nurse’s station, arms crossed and head down. The nurses still hadn’t come out of pod four. The little girl who had been occupying the lobby earlier was gone and none of the other patients were up yet. The only person I had to keep me company was Marcus. He sat on the ugly yellow sofa, absorbed in yesterday’s newspaper. I had already told him what I saw. Well, most of it. I’d even walked the perimeter of the common area in search of the monster I’d seen only to come up empty.
“I hope the pacing helps you think.” Marcus turned the page.
“It has to be a spirit of some kind,” I muttered to myself, ignoring him. “But she obviously didn’t get sick here.”
“Not
here, no. She was admitted later.”
“So what kind of spirit haunts a person and not a place?” I shook my head. “And no aura. I suppose that explains the torporic state. She’s not even in her body. It’s like she’s dead, except her body hasn’t caught up. Then her aura lit up like neon without warning, like she was becoming aware right before the seizure.” I stopped pacing and turned ninety degrees to face him. “Has anyone else around Mia shown similar symptoms? Maybe any of the other patients here?”
Marcus lowered the paper. “You do realize you’re standing in a psychiatric ward? The other patients’ records will be sealed. I’m willing to bend a lot of things, but I’m not going to violate HIPPA standards to satisfy your curiosity. You’re free to ask around, of course, but I wouldn’t expect the staff to be any more cooperative. If they are, let me know and I’ll know who to tell the board to fire.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and bit my lip to keep from blurting out something that would have gotten me into even more hot water. “Where was Mia before you admitted her here?”
Marcus sighed, folded the paper over his arm, and frowned at me. “Does this line of questioning mean you have some idea of how to proceed?”
“Maybe. I have a few ideas, but I need to do some digging.”
He stood. “Then perhaps you should busy yourself with that.”
“But—”
“It’s very late, Agent Black,” Marcus said in a tone that told me he wasn’t open to further conversation.
I glanced over at the ticking clock on the wall. It sat behind a wire cage on a pillar near the ceiling. One thirty in the morning. And they say vampires are nocturnal. But Marcus had a point. I’d been up since six the previous morning helping Tindall get ready for the election. Normally, my joints would have been aching and my face numb from exhaustion. Yet I was wide awake.
After a long moment of thinking about it, I realized I’d switched on a bit of magick on autopilot. Defensive magick isn’t my forte, but I can throw a little power into my muscles, making me stronger, faster, and generally more physically able than most humans. The big down side to doing that was, when I shut off the magick, I was even more tired. I drew in a deep breath and shut it down. Fatigue hit me like a face-first drop from a two-story window. I swayed on my feet.
Marcus put a hand on my shoulder and led me to the security doors at the entrance to the ward. The gentle buzz of the doors sounded. Marcus held them open. “I’ll see you out.”
In the elevator, he hit the button for the parking garage and stepped to the back of the car. “I’ll arrange it so that you’re able to see Mia whenever you like. So long as you’re working in the capacity of my agent, that is. I expect reports of your progress. I will call you. There’s no need to contact me.”
“And if I need information from you?”
Marcus reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a business card, and held it out to me. “You’ll leave a message with my personal assistant or make an appointment.”
I took the card and frowned at it. “Just so we’re clear, I’m being handed a case where I can’t use BSI resources, can’t speak to my actual employer without an appointment, and a lot of people are going to die if I fail? That’s the gist of things?”
He smiled. “That is the gist of things, as you say. Oh, and just one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t get distracted by pretty faces. Mia grows weaker with each passing day.”
The elevator slowed to a stop and the doors slid open. Sal had pulled his bike up right in front of the elevator. He leaned on it, smoking a cigarette. He stood up when he saw us.
“And here is where we must part ways.” Marcus gestured forward. “Looks like you’ve got a ride back to Paint Rock already arranged.”
I stepped out of the elevator and listened as the doors slid closed behind me. The parking garage felt even colder and darker than before. I rubbed my arms and listened to the sound of cars passing along on the freeway nearby. The gentle buzz of the lights overhead was the only sound.
Sal had a daughter, a little girl I couldn’t even tell him about. My life now hung in the balance based on whether I could figure out how to cure a little girl that the foremost medical minds in the country couldn’t help. Even if I could save her, I had to get her away from Zoe somehow if I wanted to keep her from being poked and prodded all her life.
Before I could deal with any of that, I had to face Sal, my boyfriend and—if I was lucky enough not to have ruined everything—still my best friend.
“Sal—”
“If you’re going to say anything at all about Zoe, let me stop you right there.” His tone was flat, without any hint of malice, though I read irritation in his posture. “I don’t know the story—can’t say as I care—and I don’t need to know whatever it is you’re doing for Marcus, or what those two have to do with each other. Based on what you’ve told me, the Zoe I knew is dead. She’s probably been dead a long time. I’m not pissed she’s alive. I’m only pissed she’s still managing to fuck things up for me after I buried her.”
I stepped forward. “What did she mess up for you this time?”
Sal flicked his cigarette off to the side and shrugged. “I figured you were pissed off I didn’t show at Tindall’s thing, and I know I haven’t been around a lot because of stuff I’m doing for the club. I promised you Tex-Mex, but with whatever Marcus has you doing, can I assume that’s off the menu now?”
“I’m sorry, Sal.” I rubbed my aching head. “God, if I could just get a day off to get the rest of my life straightened out.”
“That’s how we all feel.” He nodded. “You want me to take you back to Tindall’s to pick up Hunter?” He turned and winced as he watched a car roll down the narrow ramp toward the exit. “Bet Hunter’s pissed at me now, too. I promised him I’d be there.”
“Let me call ahead. I don’t want to show up unannounced, especially after what just happened. Tindall was pretty shaken up by the escort.” I fished out my phone.
“About that, Judah—”
I held up a finger. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Tindall’s phone rang twice before he picked up. “Judah? Fuck, woman, that had better be you.”
“I’m fine,” I answered. “How’s Hunter?”
Tindall muttered a prayer of thanks and added, “Oh, he’s passed out in the spare bedroom, oblivious to the world. Barbra went in to tuck him in. I honestly wasn’t expecting to hear back from you tonight. But I’m glad I did.”
“You want me to come pick him up?”
There was a short pause on the other end. “You know I can drop him off early in the morning. I hate to wake the kid. I know Barbra was looking forward to having someone besides me to make breakfast for. That is, if you don’t mind. Been a long time since we had a kid in the house. I think... I think it’s good for her.”
I couldn’t help but smile. Shortly after moving to Paint Rock, I learned that Tindall and his wife had a daughter who had gone missing in the chaos of the Revelation. He didn’t talk much about his personal life with me, but I knew the lack of closure was a strain on his marriage. She’d never wanted to talk about it, and he’d turned to drinking until a few years ago.
“I trust you, Tindall. Just make sure it’s early. He’s got to get ready for school.”
“You take care, Black. I’ll see you in the morning, all right?”
Tindall and I said our goodbyes, and I hung up. “Tindall’s going to keep him overnight, so it looks like my evening is suddenly free except for all the work I’ve got to do.”
“Let me take you out now,” Sal offered. “It’s still early enough we can slide in somewhere before last call.”
I wanted to go with him. Nothing sounded better than throwing a few beers back with Sal, especially after what I’d just seen. But I also had a mountain of work in front of me. I needed to hit the research, see what I could find. Maybe someone out there had gone through something like what
was happening to Mia.
“Judah,” he said folding his arms, his tone was almost exactly like the one my mother used to use when she wanted my attention.
“What?”
“I know that look. You’re about to turn me down to pull an all-nighter on your next big case.”
I sighed. “I have to work, Sal.”
“Nobody on their deathbed ever wishes they’d spent more time working for assholes like Marcus Kelley.”
That made me smile despite myself. Sal climbed onto his bike, pulled his goggles down, and then took the helmet hanging from the handlebars and held it out to me.
“You’re not going to take no for an answer are you, Sal?”
“I’m going to make you relax and enjoy something if it’s the last thing I do. Now, get on the damn bike.”
I took the helmet from him, securing it via a strap under my chin. Sal slid the leather vest off that he wore over his jacket and then held the jacket out to me. I frowned, studying all the patches he wore on the vest, and wondered what they meant. Sal’s membership in the Tomahawk Kings was the one thing that still made me hesitate about getting closer to him. I didn’t know much about motorcycles and knew even less about his so-called motorcycle club. What I did know was that they were involved in something shady, especially the way Marcus had spoken of them to Tindall. The last thing I needed was to create a misunderstanding between him and I. I couldn’t endorse that life, not as an officer of the law.
“Take it,” he insisted. “If your arms go numb with cold, you’ll let go and throw the balance off. Then we’ll wreck and both regret it.”
“You sure your club buddies would be okay with you riding around with a fed?”
He tossed the jacket to me. I caught it on instinct. “Let’s iron that part out when we get to where we’re going, okay? If you don’t like how that talk goes, I’ll call you a cab. And if anybody talks shit about it, I’ll straighten it out. Deal?”