Captive Spirit

by Anna Windsor

  There was a stunned pause in the noise coming through the telephone speaker, followed by a hastily grumbled, “Soon.”

  The caller hung up.

  Tarek and Aarif stared at Strada, waiting.

  Hope flickered in the depths of their eyes.

  Tarek was shifting slowly into tiger form, fur washing across his human skin like a beautiful golden wave. Aarif was beginning to flicker, the intoxicating blue of his flame form showing through his eyes and pale cheeks.

  Strada couldn’t deny them.

  He nodded, and that fast, his true brothers were gone, racing from the warehouse, fire form and tiger form moving faster than human eyes could see. Strada had to use every ounce of his self-possession not to join them. He, too, could taste the meat, the fear, the blood their victim would spill.

  Griffen sighed. “Strada, if you and your brothers keep eating the people who hire you, the New York City market won’t support you for long.”

  “Point taken.” Strada actually managed a smile for his human ally as he surveyed the powerful, quiet mass of the Created Griffen was helping to train. “Fortunately, it will not have to.”

  (4)

  Bela’s blood pulsed in her ears as she pressed her hands against the sides of the injured detective’s face, growling from the fiery misery of Duncan Sharp’s wounds. She did what she could to absorb more of his pain. Not much. Not nearly damned enough.

  Camille Fitzgerald ran out of the basement treatment room to send word to the NYPD, leaving Bela with Andy Miles, Dio Allard, and the hastily summoned Mother Keara, fighting to save the detective’s life.

  Or his soul.

  Bela’s thoughts pitched against each other, still jumbled from the battle and the hard run back to the brownstone in Manhattan that she had inherited from a group of fellow Sibyls.

  “Saving his soul,” she muttered to herself. “Right.”

  Where the hell had that come from?

  Stubble scraped Bela’s palms as she let her earth energy flow into the detective to ease his torture, as much as she dared, since he was only human—at least for now.

  No regular hospital could help him, that much she understood, even if they weren’t saying it outright. Something was very, very wrong with this man’s wounds. It wouldn’t be safe to expose other living creatures to what they were seeing. If they couldn’t patch him up right here in her newly refurbished laboratory with its treatment room and full complement of traditional medicines and medical equipment, Duncan Sharp wouldn’t make it.

  Andy and Dio were struggling to cast the man’s broken arm while Mother Keara battled the supernatural slash wounds to his neck, shoulder, and chest.

  Bela made herself look at those wounds.

  Deeper now. Extending like living things, trying to eat away his skin and maybe even his bones. The slashes were oozing some sort of foul, bleak energy she had never encountered before, but the chain and ancient coin around the man’s neck seemed to be holding it back on at least one side. Bela hated the sight of that energy, and she despised what it was doing to the man she was trying to help.

  Enough. She focused her earth energy into blocking the advance of those slashes, just like Mother Keara was trying to do with her fire. No more death. Not here, not now—not ever again.

  Damnit. She was pulling at her power so hard that the floor was rattling under her toes, but she couldn’t see that it was making much difference. Her muscles strained to contain a fraction of the earth’s might and muscle, and she damn well would find some way to lend it to this human. It dug at her insides to admit he probably didn’t have much of a chance. Camille had taken the man’s badge and identification upstairs to notify the NYPD of the detective’s situation, via their liaison at the department’s low-profile Occult Crimes Unit.

  Duncan Sharp’s agony surged through Bela’s fingertips, and it would have knocked her backward against the yellow cinder-block wall if she hadn’t braced her legs against the rush of energy. Goddess, pain like that—it would kill a normal person. It might even kill a Sibyl.

  She was dizzy from the force of it, half disoriented for a second, but she fought back, and the detective fought, too. Bela had never sensed such raw, natural power in a human before, and his determination impressed her.

  “He’s strong,” she said, giving him another dose of earth energy, hoping it wouldn’t blow him apart.

  “He’s dying,” Mother Keara countered in her crackly voice. The sound seemed huge in the fifteen-by-fifteen space in the bottom corner of the Manhattan brownstone. “Hold him tight, now—hear me, child!”

  Bela increased the pressure in her hands, sending even more earth energy to surround the man’s prone form and press him into the hospital bed’s bloodied sheets. The old woman jerked the sleeves of her green robes upward as she bent over his bare chest. On the opposite side of the bed, Andy and Dio moved out of her way, slinging wet strips of plaster, their battle leathers smeared with white streaks of the paste.

  The deep slashes to Duncan Sharp’s neck and shoulder shifted from purple to black. Hair sprouted at the edges of each bloody cut. Orange tiger-like hair. The gluey scent of the plaster and the tang of antiseptic mingled with the smells of ozone and burning flesh as Mother Keara tried cauterizing the slashes again, this time with a directed jet of blue flame from her index finger, as exact as any surgical laser. The eerie light from the controlled fire made her fragile features seem almost translucent, and bits of her gray braids smoked from dozens of tiny sparks.

  The tiger fur disappeared, and the slashes stopped expanding wherever the full heat of Mother Keara’s fire touched the man’s flesh.

  The detective’s eyelids fluttered. He let out a low moan and jerked against the padded metal cuffs binding him to the rails of the hospital bed. Bela shoved both heels against the green tile floor, refusing to surrender her hold on his face. He fought her, his neck bowing as he tried to free himself from her grip.

  His heart stuttered, once, then twice.

  “Come on.” Bela hit him with another blast of earth power, and another, and another. She wasn’t quitting, and neither would he. “Come on, damn you!”

  His heartbeat caught like an engine and roared strong again.

  “Yes!” Bela’s shout echoed in the treatment room. “That’s more like it.”

  Her own heart picked up the same rhythm, almost bursting from the rush of small triumph. How much could he take? Humans weren’t cut out to absorb so much elemental energy, but regular painkillers were out. That kind of medication would dull his mind and his instinct to resist death. The infection or poison in those slash wounds might spread faster.

  Bela bent forward and pressed her lips against Duncan Sharp’s ear, ignoring the stench of fire and blood and lingering dirt and ammonia from the battle. “Keep fighting this,” she snarled, hoping to engage the amazing determination she sensed roiling through his essence.

  Some part of him seemed to respond to her, and his breathing and heart rate slowed into a more reasonable pattern. The relief helped Bela breathe better, too.

  Mother Keara stopped stinging the detective with her fire and dropped into the room’s only chair at his beside, limp, her head down like she might be trying to meditate. “Best I can do for now,” she mumbled. “I’ll be needin’ a rest. Some beer. And a little help with this, I think.”

  The lighting in the lab’s treatment room showed the blood and bruises in glaring detail as Andy and Dio went back to fixing Duncan Sharp’s arm. Droplets of water rolled down Andy’s leather sleeves as she worked, drawn from nearby pipes, faucets, and sprinklers, but also from the ample ambient moisture in the air. Andy’s damp red curls were plastered against her freckled cheeks, and she alternated between chewing her lip and glancing at Bela for reassurance as she tried to concentrate on the strips of plaster.

  “You can do it,” Bela told her as she gently massaged the detective’s jaws with her fingertips. “It’s just a simple radial fracture.”

  “Just a s
imple radio what-the-fuck,” Andy shot back. “Like I’ve been studying human anatomy my whole damned life, Bela. I’m an ex-cop and a greenhorn Sibyl, not a surgeon.”

  Bela ignored her bluster and kept working on the detective. Sibyls, even new ones like Andy, had no need for scans to tell them what was broken or how to set it, and Andy was doing just fine. Better, even, than Bela could do, because Andy was a water Sibyl. Healing was her most natural talent outside the management of water, like science for earth Sibyls, communication for fire Sibyls, and archiving and research for air Sibyls.

  Every time Andy placed another strip of plaster on the man’s arm, she infused both the cast and Duncan Sharp with a dose of water power, soothing and cleansing and absolutely reconstructive. Bela wasn’t even sure Andy knew she was doing that. It just flowed out of her, in perfect rhythm and measure.

  Whenever Andy gave the nod, Dio flicked her fingers and sent a rush of air to dry a section of the cast. Even with the bursts of wind, Dio’s wispy golden hair remained in position, every strand, pulled tight against her head and fixed at her neck by a single leather tie. Very neat. Far too neat for an air Sibyl. Unlike Andy, Dio wasn’t making eye contact with Bela at all, but that was nothing new, and nothing Bela could deal with right now.

  Duncan Sharp’s bouts of pain were just about all she could handle, though they were becoming less and less intense. He seemed to be sleeping now, and the wounds still weren’t expanding. Another minute or so, and the cast was finished. As well done as any hospital could have managed—maybe even a little better—but that broken arm was the least of the detective’s problems.

  Mother Keara was still resting and muttering and meditating as Andy and Dio turned to the treatment room’s shiny medical sink and washed their hands. That dark, chilly energy oozed toward them out of Duncan Sharp’s slash wounds, but it shattered against the elemental protections on Mother Keara’s robes and Andy and Dio’s leather battle suits.

  Dio glanced at the remnant energy as it dissipated, and pointed it out to Andy.

  “Bad shit,” Andy diagnosed. “Do we need to reinforce anything to hold that energy, Bela?”

  Bela shook her head, not wanting to break her concentration enough to speak.

  The metal frame of Duncan Sharp’s hospital bed, the cuffs on his wrists and ankles, and the walls of the treatment room were already completely encased in elemental locks—fire, air, earth, and water energy stacked like tightly fitted bars built to contain supernatural forces.

  Well, exactly like bars, because once upon a time, the treatment room had been an actual jail cell intended to contain paranormal creatures. When she took over the brownstone, Bela had expanded the area into a reasonable-sized infirmary, put up drywall, improved the plumbing, laid tile, and painted the whole room a festive yellow.

  Well, it had seemed festive at the time. Now it seemed like lemons exploding all over neon bananas.

  “This place is too flippin’ bright, by the way.” Andy shook her hands off, not bothering to reach for a towel to dry them. Dry never lasted long for Andy, anyway. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Whatever,” Bela mumbled, keeping her focus on the places where her fingers connected with Duncan Sharp’s face.

  “Blue might have been a better choice for a sickroom,” Andy continued, straightening up the sink area. “Or brown.”

  “All earth Sibyls love brown,” Dio said to Andy, keeping her face turned away from Bela. “And of course we don’t have enough of that color around here.”

  Bela managed not to sigh. Dio was referring to the fact that Bela had reworked the whole outer laboratory surrounding the treatment room in soft sands and browns, to modernize it. She had kind of gotten carried away and painted the whole brownstone in the same shades while she was at it. She hadn’t gotten around to replacing the furniture yet, but she was planning on that, too.

  “Dry up!” Mother Keara’s sharp Irish command to be quiet was punctuated by a flicker of flame from both of her shoulders, followed by a jet of smoke that covered both Andy and Dio, muting the yellow of the wall behind them with a thin layer of soot. “Upstairs with the both of you. Help Camille get ready to call a few more Mothers.”

  Andy and Dio finished cleaning up from the casting and took off like two scolded kids. Mothers—especially fire Sibyl Mothers—tended to have that effect on people.

  Mother Keara’s sharp eyes followed Dio’s retreat until the outer lab door slammed. She lifted one tired, trembling hand and pointed a knotty finger at the door. “She’s trouble, that one. Maybe there’s a reason she kept to herself all those years and never joined a triad. You should be takin’ her scrawny ass straight back to Greece.”

  Bela drew a careful, slow breath, then disengaged her fingers from Duncan Sharp’s face. She didn’t detect any change in his pulse or his breathing. So far, so good. Figuring she could risk a minute or two away, she turned to better face Mother Keara—and made sure to put a little earthy rumble into her response. “Dio’s mine, old woman. Don’t insult my air Sibyl or my judgment.”

  Mother Keara rubbed her wrinkled chin as she laughed. “You never do what you’re told, do you? If I’d known you as a baby, I’d have found yer fire. Why yer mother set you to shakin’ rocks and dirt, I’ll never understand.”

  “Me neither.” Bela started for the sinks but found she didn’t want to go much farther away from Duncan, in case his terrible pain came charging back. She hesitated near the foot of his bed. “I’ve never been much good at the whole earth-moving trick.”

  Mother Keara shrugged. “Who needs terrakinesis? Lots of shake, rattle, and roll, for what? Can’t rightly use it in a full-pitch battle without tearin’ down whole cities.”

  A little flame issued from Mother Keara’s right knee, and she stared at it like she might be divining the future in its red-orange depths. “You’re a first-rate terrasentient, great at readin’ what the earth has to tell you. That’ll be good for our Camille, since she’s got a measure of pyrosentience. Readin’ objects with fire, that’s almost a lost skill at Motherhouse Ireland—and it needs developin’.”

  The tiny flame disappeared, and when Mother Keara looked at Bela, she seemed sad on top of fatigued. “Camille’s never been the best at pyrogenesis—fire makin’. She took a lot of guff from her sister Sibyls over it, comin’ up.”

  It was Bela’s turn to shrug. “Camille did well enough firing up in DUMBO when we had to have her help. I can live without the smoke and sparks the rest of the time.” Though in truth, she missed the crackle of fire energy in the air, and worried a lot about Camille’s physical and mental health because of that absence. Fire Sibyls cut off from their inner heat suffered in ways Bela didn’t even want to consider.

  Mother Keara scratched the side of one braid, setting another bit of her hair on fire and putting it out, all in the same motion. “It’s in her, the full measure of fire talent. It’s just lost in all her grief and guilt. One day, the right spark, and—” Mother Keara didn’t need to find a metaphor. She just opened her palms and let the flames burst upward to char the stone ceiling of the treatment room.

  “Bela?” Camille’s call from outside the main laboratory door was tenuous, but Bela could tell by her tone that she had important information.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “And you can come in if you want. He’s stable for now.”

  There was a whisper of footsteps, and Camille came to stand in the door of the treatment room. Framed by the bright yellow walls and door facing, she seemed even more petite and withdrawn than usual, and the absence of smoke and fire on her person was baldly obvious in such close quarters with the heat blazing from Mother Keara’s every curve and angle.

  Camille’s long auburn hair was pulled into a ponytail that hung over her shoulder, and the curling tip of it nearly reached her slender waist. Her nervous aquamarine eyes went from Bela to Mother Keara, then quickly back to Bela again as she dug at the leg of her jeans with chewed, ragged nails. “The Occult Crimes Unit not
ified One Police Plaza,” she said. “I told them to stay clear until we understand whether or not his wounds are contagious, but they wanted an update in no less than fifteen minutes. It’s been about that long.”

  Mother Keara gave no response, and Bela knew the old woman was trying not to intimidate Camille.

  Bela moved aside so that Camille could see the sleeping detective and the wicked-looking wounds readily visible on his tanned chest, neck, and shoulder. “We’ve fought it to a draw for the moment. Meaning he’s not dying right this second or changing into anything other than human. Yet.”

  More of that sickly dark energy slid out of Duncan Sharp’s slash wounds, heading for Camille, only to perish against the elemental locks of the cuffs and bed.

  Camille drew back a step, watching the foul energy break apart. “What is that shit? And what were those things that attacked us in DUMBO?”

  “Trouble, no doubt,” Mother Keara grumbled as she stood. She hobbled across the room toward Camille and put out her hand for support, though Bela didn’t think she really needed it. As Camille took her by the elbow and moved to help her out of the laboratory and back upstairs, Mother Keara looked pointedly at Bela. “If that porcupine of an air Sibyl you’re so bent on keepin’ is worth her freight, she’s upstairs in her archives right now, huntin’ answers.”

  Bela was too tired herself to argue the point or defend Dio again. She let Mother Keara go with Camille to summon more Mothers, and took a seat in the metal chair Mother Keara had vacated. The metal was still hot enough to melt ridges in her leathers along both sides of her ass.

  Wonderful.

  Bela rubbed her hand across her eyes and refocused on Duncan Sharp’s breathing and heartbeat. Still steady and regular. She didn’t catch any hint of pain at the moment.

  Good.

  She made herself get up and go to the sinks. From a too-yellow cabinet overhead—Goddess, what had she been thinking when she bought that paint?—she took down a smooth cotton cloth and dampened it with warm water. She brought the wet cloth back to the detective’s bedside and began to dab away the grit, soot, grime, and blood from his stubbled cheeks.