Hemorrhage (Medicine and Magic Book 4)

by SA Magnusson

  Cold flared on my back again.

  This time it was magic.

  I looked back out into the hallway. The curtain to the patient’s room was open, and if there was anyone out there watching, I should have been able to see them, but I wasn’t.

  Who would be attempting to use magic here?

  What if I’d been wrong? What if the rune wasn’t used up, but instead removed?

  In order to do so, wouldn’t someone have to be nearby?

  And here I had thought that getting him away from the shooter would keep him alive, but what if that wasn’t even necessary? What if whatever mage had placed the runes on him in the first place only had to be in a reasonable proximity to pull them free?

  “Doctors?”

  I looked up. The nurse pushing on the patient’s chest had sweat dripping from her forehead.

  Esquivo looked over at me, and I shook my head. What an asshole. He wasn’t willing to be the one to end this. I didn’t know how long it had been going on, but the clock showed that it was five fifteen in the morning, so I couldn’t have been here all that long. Long enough for me to have been thrown into something that should not have been mine. But then, had I not been here, I wouldn’t have known about what happened to him, and I might have missed out on seeing the runes missing from his arms.

  It was better that I was here. I didn’t like it, but it was better.

  “We can call it,” I said.

  The nurses all shuffled back. All but a few left the room. Esquivo stared for a moment before peeling off his gloves and heading out. It was close to the end of his call shift, so I could imagine that he wanted to get cleaned up and prepared to go through his rounds, but I needed to say something to him.

  I caught up to him in the hallway. “What were you thinking?” I spoke a little louder than I needed, and I made a point of lowering my voice. “The nurses say they had been calling you all night for low blood pressures.”

  “We get low blood pressures all the time on post-op patients. I didn’t think it was anything different.”

  “Even when his blood pressure dropped below fifties systolic?”

  “They never told me about that.”

  I didn’t know whether they had or not, but I couldn’t imagine any nurse lying about it. “I know call stinks, but you still have to check out the patient.”

  “Careful, Michaels. You’re not an attending. Shit, you’re not even a chief resident.”

  I glared at him. “Just answer your damned pages next time, will you?”

  “What do you care? You’ll be off the service in a week. Back down in your cozy little ER.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to handle a busy ER. Don’t give me cozy anything.”

  He opened his mouth to say something else, but I turned away before I said more than I wanted. I still had my entire day ahead of me, and now there were questions that wouldn’t leave me. Pulling out my phone, I flipped through the pictures until I came across the one of the runes that had been on Mr. Jimenez’s arm. Which one of them had been the one keeping him alive?

  Another surge of cold along my spine made me look around, but I still couldn’t find the source. After a cursory search, I couldn’t take any more time to look. I needed to get back to my rounds and finish my work.

  Hating that I had to, I tapped out a quick message to Aron, and sent it off.

  6

  It was nearly eight o’clock by the time I got home, and I was incredibly exhausted from the last few days. I still hadn’t recuperated from call, something that wasn’t uncommon for me. Oftentimes when taking call, it took me a few days to catch back up, just in time to swing back on to call again.

  I sunk onto my couch, and Lucy came and rubbed up against me. I scratched her behind the ears, glancing toward the kitchen. “Are you out of food?”

  She meowed, and I laughed. She was a funny cat, preferring to sleep on my head as often as she could, making a point of alerting me when she wanted my attention. When she wanted to be carried, she stood on her back legs, pawing at my leg, which she did now as I made my way into the kitchen.

  I almost dropped her when I realized Aron sat at my kitchen table, looking as good as ever. He was dressed in jeans and a tight T-shirt, and wore a leather jacket, much as he often did. A newspaper sat unfolded in front of him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You sent me a message,” he said.

  “I know I sent you a message, I just didn’t expect you to simply appear like this.”

  “You would rather I not come when you needed me?”

  “That’s not it, either. I would have liked you to have responded to my message.” It would be easier if he would text back, but Aron wasn’t necessarily a traditional texter. “Besides, I don’t know that I like you breaking into my condo.”

  “I am the one who placed the protections on it.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I would never do anything to hurt you, Kate.”

  I stared at him for a moment, meeting his icy blue eyes before turning away and pulling out Lucy’s food, dumping some into her dish. Thankfully she was a free feeder and didn’t gorge herself too much. My schedule was irregular enough that I couldn’t plan on feeding her on a regular basis. It did surprise me that she’d finished all of it, which told me that I hadn’t been keeping up with my end of the bargain to keep her food dish full.

  I checked the water and found it nearly empty too.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said, patting her. She ignored me as she started into her food, crunching it loudly, almost as if admonishing me for my delinquency. I could already tell that I’d pay for it later.

  When I straightened and turned back to Aron, he had folded up the paper and leaned forward. “Your question wasn’t very clear, Kate, and that’s why I came.”

  “What wasn’t clear about it?” I pulled out my phone, flipping to the text that I’d sent him, and realized that it was a garble of letters. Maybe I had been much more tired than I realized when I’d sent it. “You mean you don’t understand this? It makes complete sense.”

  Aron smiled, and the ice melted from me. I sank onto the chair next to him, looking over.

  “You look exhausted.”

  “Just another week and I can be off the trauma service and can finally catch up with my sleep,” I said.

  “This is different than your usual work?”

  “Quite a bit different. The ER is shift work with an end point. With this…” I glanced over at the clock. I had to be up painfully early, and I could already count the hours of sleep that I wouldn’t be getting. Especially now that Aron was here.

  “What happened?”

  “Just another patient issue.”

  “Another one?”

  I told him about the gunshot wound and what I’d done, ignoring the way his eyes tightened when I described healing Mr. Jimenez, knowing that both he and my grandparents felt the same way about my use of magic. They would prefer I conceal it, keeping it hidden, but I no longer thought that I could—or should. Not if there was something that I could do, especially now that I didn’t worry about the council burning my magic off.

  “And you are convinced there was magic involved?”

  I pulled out the phone again and flipped to the photos I’d taken. When I showed him, his breath caught.

  “Where did you see this?”

  “On his arm.” I tapped on the tattoo from the man I’d assaulted with magic who had done the shooting. “This guy managed to deflect about three of my magical blows. From what I can tell, that has to mean a fair amount of power. And I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen them before.”

  “Your grandparents are powerful mages. It’s possible you saw runes like this growing up.”

  I didn’t think that was the case. Gran and Gramps were all about the spells, sort of the same as Barden. They didn’t use runes that I’d seen.

  I hadn’t yet told him about the fact that I had gone to Bard
en for help, and knew that the moment I did, he would react.

  “Barden tells me these are runes and that the mage who places them has to have some power, but he didn’t know enough about them to share with me anything more than that.”

  “He would be right, and I’m disappointed you went to Barden with this first.”

  “You were gone. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Send me a coherent message.”

  “I don’t want to have to reach out to you every time something goes wacky in the city. Besides, I didn’t really know if I was dealing with anything significant or not. He didn’t have that much magic. I could feel it, but it wasn’t strong.”

  “Strength within a rune has to do with the strength of the caster.”

  “How do you know?”

  Aron smiled tightly. “I have some experience with them. If the spell caster has reasonable strength, then the rune will carry that strength as well.” Aron swiped across the photos and got to Mr. Jimenez’s tattoos. “I take it this was the victim’s?”

  “They were until they disappeared.”

  “They disappeared?”

  “And then he died. Can a rune simply be used up?”

  I hadn’t felt the sense of magic anymore after leaving the room that morning, but I also hadn’t spent too much time trying to puzzle through it. We’d had a couple traumas come in, and I’d had to scrub into two cases during the day, not counting all of the evaluations we needed to do in the emergency room along with the consultations on the floor. The entire day had been exhausting. At least, for me it had. Dr. Darnold had been able to relax for most of it other than when we had to operate. It was often that way when it came to attendings, especially on the surgical service. It was the reason they liked working with residents.

  “Once placed, a rune draws its power from the person who placed it. The only reason the rune would disappear would be if the caster who placed it died.”

  “What if the caster changed their mind and decided to remove it?”

  “Such a thing would be possible, but difficult. Removing a rune such as this takes incredible power, and in order to do so, you need to have physical proximity. From what you’ve described, there wasn’t any other mage there.”

  “There was magic around the hospital this morning. It was subtle, but—”

  “This would not be subtle. Could there have been a mage in his room?”

  Not that I’d seen, and even if there had been—if someone had slipped in among the nurses—would I even know? There had been too many coming through there, and it wasn’t as if I had directionality when it came to detecting the use of magic. What I detected had been brief, certainly not enough to feel anything more than a short flash, and I doubted that would be enough to take away the spell.

  Without that having occurred, did it mean that the mage who had placed the rune had died? If so, what had happened to them?

  “What more do you know about runes?”

  “Unfortunately, not much more than Barden. I am familiar with how they can be placed, and I have some familiarity with various patterns that are used for power, but I don’t know that much.”

  “You said you had some experience with them.”

  “Early in my career, but that didn’t lend itself to me becoming an expert.”

  “Is there anybody on the council who might know more?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “Why do I get the sense you don’t want to take me to them?”

  “Involving you in this involves you in council business, Kate.”

  “It’s not council business. This is my patient. I’d like to know what happened to him.” And I wanted to be prepared if somebody else showed up in the ER with markings like that. I’d never thought to pay much attention to the tattoos on someone, but if there was a gang working within the city that used markings like that, I needed to be ready for it. And I still didn’t know why they seemed familiar to me. “Have you heard of any gang that uses magic like this?”

  “I chase demons, Kate, not gang members.”

  “You could have just said no.”

  “No. I don’t, but maybe one of the knights working these days might know.”

  “Is there anyone you trust enough to ask?”

  “I trust all of the knights.”

  “Right. I know that’s the company line, but is there anyone you really trust? Like, is there anyone you would trust to share with my secret?”

  “You know I would never reveal that to anyone.”

  “I know you won’t, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll be able to keep it a secret for too much longer. It seems as if too many people know that I exist. Between the shifters and the dark mages and Solera, how could I even think about keeping this a secret?”

  “It’s still not safe for you to reveal the nature of your talents,” he said.

  Talents. I didn’t always feel as if they were talents. Sometimes they were a curse, though it was that curse that had allowed me to do so much. At least I didn’t have to believe that I had dark magic, not as I once did. I might not know whether I had demon magic or something else, but there was a hope that whatever I possessed would be useful.

  “Well?” I asked.

  Aron frowned. “Well what?”

  “Are we going to see if we can figure out anything about these runes or not?”

  “I’m not so certain that is wise,” he said.

  I grunted. “There’s a lot of things that I have done that aren’t wise. Using my magic at work ranks up there, but I keep doing it.”

  “You don’t want to stay in and get some sleep? It seemed as if you were tired.”

  “Oh, I am tired, but I am curious about this, too. If there’s anything that I can do to figure out what’s been going on, I want to know.”

  And maybe I shouldn’t have. The thing about it was that learning whether there was something taking place and having anything I could do about it were quite different. There might not be anything that I could do, not when it came down to this magic, and better use of my time might be continuing to focus on staying out of trouble.

  But the patient had died.

  I dragged myself into my bedroom, threw on comfortable jeans and a jacket, and headed back out. Aron stood waiting for me with a look of uncertainty on his face. It was unusual for him. Aron was confident most of the time, though he never really bordered on arrogant. It was what made him so likable. Not only was he incredibly capable and knew it, but he didn’t throw it out there and force me to see it.

  “What kind of car are you driving tonight?”

  “The usual,” he said.

  “There’s nothing usual about your cars. Most of them are exotic.”

  “There’s nothing exotic about them. They’re simply nice automobiles.”

  I grinned. What Aron considered a nice car, most other people would drool over. Hell, for that matter, I’d come to enjoy riding in them, as much as I tried to deny it. There was something about sitting in those plush leather seats that I had to acknowledge.

  When we reached the street, I glanced around. It was cool, a crisp evening air carrying the scent of freshly cut grass. I waited for the possibility that I might detect another burst of magic, but there wasn’t any. Aron watched me and I shrugged, following him along the street until we reached his car. It was a deep blue BMW, a slick two-seater, and when he unlocked it, I climbed inside.

  “Right. The usual,” I said, laughing as he crawled in and tapped the ignition. The car growled as it started, and I could only shake my head. There wasn’t anything more to say. “Where to?”

  “For what you’re asking about, I think we need to go to the archives.”

  “The archives?”

  “It’s meant for all mages, though it has generally been restricted to knights, archers, and members of the council.”

  As usual, he slammed on the gas, sending me flying back in the seat. I’d gotten over the nausea that came from being slammed back like t
hat, but I still hadn’t gotten over the overwhelming sense of speed. There had to be some way for him to conceal us from the police, as we’d never been pulled over, but I still didn’t know what sort of spell he used or whether it was anything he simply placed on the car. There wasn’t the compression I felt when we had traveled a great distance quickly. He didn’t use that sort of magic, though I suspected he used a variant of it.

  The river loomed into view in the distance. Within the Minneapolis and St. Paul area, there was only one true river. There were others, the confluence of waterways forming ley lines that swept through the city, granting power to it and creating a reason for the various magical sects to be here, but the Mississippi was generally the river.

  He pulled into a part of the city I don’t know that I had ever been before, and we raced along the street, reaching an enormous rectangular building, designed in some sort of modern architecture. No streetlights glowed, giving everything an ominous sort of air.

  “This is the archives?”

  “What did you think it would look like?”

  “I don’t know, some sort of library. Gargoyles and that sort of thing.”

  “That merely draws attention to it.”

  “And this doesn’t?” I asked as we pulled along the driveway leading up to the building. It might’ve been a house once, but it was enormous. A manicured lawn stretched along either side, with shrubs that had been groomed and shaped growing on either side of the driveway.

  “There are others just like this along the street,” Aron said.

  “And how many of them are owned by the council?” He didn’t say anything, and I laughed. “How many?”

  “All of them,” he conceded.

  I could see why the council would want to be here. Not only did the river grant access to the power flowing beneath the city with the ley lines, but the view would be spectacular. This house was situated on a bluff, looking down toward the water, and gave a little view of the downtown in the background. At night, it was little more than a twinkling of lights in the distance, and I could imagine it was equally impressive during the daytime.