by J. R. Rain
“How long have you been a medical examiner, Dr. Sculler?”
“Twenty-two years.”
“How many fatally injured boxers?”
“Just the one, although I’ve seen my share of brain injuries. Particularly football injuries.”
“Was Caesar Marquez’s brain similarly injured?”
“I’m scanning the autopsy images now, if you would like to look.”
“I would.”
“Then come around here.”
I hadn’t worked for the federal government long, but I had seen my share of medical examining rooms and corpses. And these days, death was something to analyze, not to fear. No, never again to fear.
There were dozens of images of a dead man in various stages of examination. The young man, from all appearances, was the same Caesar Marquez I had seen fighting in the YouTube clip.
As I leaned in behind Sculler, he clicked over to a cluster of photographs that focused on the man’s head. A few clicks later and the top half of the skull had been removed. The skin itself had been peeled down over the face. The next image showed, from all appearances, a very healthy brain. Finally, the brain had been removed and was now sitting in a small metal tray.
Dr. Sculler zoomed in on the freshly-removed brain that had been housed in a perfectly functioning young adult male just a few hours earlier. Sculler pointed to the screen, in particular to a red discoloration along the left temporal lobe.
“Bleeding,” he said. “The brain is susceptible to bleeding, especially after trauma. Unlike other body parts, however, when the brain bleeds, it’s a major problem. Bleeding in the brain causes pressure. Pressure can shut down various functions of the brain...and can lead to death. Often quickly.”
I said, “The official cause of death is epidural hematoma.”
“Yes.” He pointed to the screen. “Bleeding between the dura mater and the skull.”
“A brain hemorrhage.”
“Yes, but in this case the damage is technically classified as an extra-axial hemorrhage, or an intracranial hemorrhage.”
I nodded, taking this in. More and more it was looking like Russell Baker didn’t have much of a case. “Did you actually see the fight, doctor?”
“I did, yes. Later.”
“And did you see enough to warrant a brain hemorrhage?”
The good doctor removed his glasses. As he did so, a spirit of an elderly woman materialized behind him in the far corner of the office. The skin on the doctor’s forearms immediately cropped into goose bumps. He shivered slightly, oblivious to the sudden source of cold air. The old woman only partially manifested, hovering on legs that didn’t exist. If the good doctor could see what I was seeing, he would undoubtedly run for the hills.
For now, he only shivered, blissfully unaware of the spirit energy around him. The woman faded just as quickly as she appeared. The hollow look in her eyes would have been haunting, if not so familiar. At least, familiar to me.
After shivering some more, he said, “Quite frankly, no.”
I perked up. I just hate taking money from a client and then giving them nothing in return.
“No?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean that any punch at any point in the fight couldn’t have caused the injury. Very little is understood about brain injuries.”
“I understand, but is it your professional opinion that you think nothing in the fight warranted death?”
“Not professional. Personal. Unofficial.” He paused. “Officially, he died from a blunt force received during the fight.”
“Officially, but not likely.”
He stared at me, and then started nodding. “Not likely.”
“How old was the wound?” I asked.
“It was within the correct time frame. I have no doubt that it happened in and around the time of the fight.”
“Or possibly before?” I suggested.
The good doctor shrugged and rubbed his arms. After all, the old lady had reappeared in the far corner of the room.
“Possibly,” he said.
Chapter Nine
It took a few calls, a little waiting, a few more calls, and maybe a little begging to finally meet my next interview.
I met Ricardo Cortez at the Hard Rock Hotel’s massive, central bar, where we sat across from each other and nursed our drinks. Mine was white wine. His was a beer. Both of our glasses were small. Around us were the sounds of money being won and lost. Mostly lost.
“You were the referee for the Baker/Marquez fight,” I said.
He looked down into his beer. I suspected he often looked down into his beer for answers. That I quickly ascertained he was an alcoholic no longer surprised me. That I felt his overwhelming need and addiction to the stuff did surprise me.
It was almost as if I could reach inside his thoughts.
Almost.
Weeks ago, Hanner had told me that I could expect to start reading other minds—and not just those closest to me. And not just read.
Manipulate.
Jesus.
For now, I didn’t want to think about manipulating another’s mind—hell, it was all I could do to exist comfortably in my own.
Finally, Ricardo looked up from his beer. He said, “Yes.”
“How long have you been a referee?”
“Eight years.”
“Have you ever refereed a bout where a fighter was killed?”
Ricardo was a strong-looking Hispanic with what appeared to be the beginning of a tattoo under the right sleeve of his jacket. It looked like a snake tail. In fact, I was certain it was a rattle. We were mostly alone at the bar. Then again, the bar was so expansive that it was hard to tell where it ended and where it started. Nearby, a woman jumped up and down at the nickel slot machine. I think she’d just won a shitload of nickels.
Ricardo ignored the excited woman. Instead, he lifted his beer to his lips, and while he was guzzling he gestured for the waiter for another. Yeah, he was an alcoholic.
When he finally pulled away, he said, “That was my first death.”
“Hard on you?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m thinking it was a shitty day for everyone.”
“Yup.”
The waitress set another beer before him, and Ricardo picked it up instantly.
I said, “Do you blame yourself for his death?”
“No one else to blame.”
“What about the guy doing the punching?”
Ricardo shook his head. “It was my job to stop the fight before it gets to that point.”
“Except it was a fluke punch. Everyone agrees. Most people think the fight was pretty even up to that point.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
I blinked. This was new information. Investigators loved new information. New information meant that an investigator was onto something. I liked that.
“How so?” I asked.
Ricardo rubbed his face and I saw the scarring on his own knuckles. Ah, he had been a fighter himself. In fact, now I could see that his nose had undoubtedly been broken a few times. Probably not a very good fighter. Probably why he went into reffing fights instead of participating in them. Reffing was easier on the nose.
When he had collected his thoughts and had decided just how much to tell me—and how I knew this was beginning to trouble me—he said, “Caesar was not all there from the beginning.”
“What do you mean?”
“Caesar looked, at least to me, that he’d already gone a round or two. Or maybe even three or four.”
“Anyone else notice this?”
“Hard to say. I’m certain someone on his crew would have known.”
“How could they miss it?”
“Easy to miss, unless you know what to look for.”
“And you know what to look for?” I said.
“Of course. All good refs do. It’s how we keep these guys from beating in each others’ skulls.”
“What do you look for?”
>
Ricardo was loosening up, forgiving himself, reminding himself that there might be more to this story than he knew. Again, how I knew this snippet of thought from him was seriously beginning to wig me out.
He said, “If you know a fighter, it’s easier. Then you know their mannerisms. You also know how much punishment they can take.”
“You ever work a fight with Caesar?”
“Yup. Two.”
“And he was different from the get-go.”
“Right. From the fucking get-go.”
“What was he doing different?”
“Dazed. Slower than normal.”
“Even though most judges scored it even?”
“I said slower than normal. Caesar Marquez was better than most. I even caught him staggering once or twice back to the corner. Not sure if anyone else had seen it.”
“What did you think about that?”
“I thought that something was wrong.”
“Enough to stop the fight?”
He shook his head and remembered the beer. He said, “I should have stopped it if I’d had any balls. I should have at least called called one of the doctors over. But...”
“But you just weren’t sure.”
He looked at me funny, as I had read his thoughts. “Right, I wasn’t sure. There was no reason for his symptoms, after all. The fight had been fairly tame.”
“But he was in trouble from the beginning.”
Ricardo nodded. “Almost as if...”
He couldn’t finish the sentence, and so I finished it for him. “Almost as if he’d been hurt before the fight.”
Ricardo looked at me again. “Bingo.”
“Hard to blame yourself for something like this.”
“Hard not to, either. I should have stopped the fight.”
“You did your best.”
He shook his head, and kept on shaking his head even as he finished his second beer and held up his hand for a third.
Chapter Ten
With Criss Angel in town, I figured something as mundane as a giant flying vampire bat would go unnoticed.
And so I stood on the ledge of my fifteen-floor balcony at the MGM Grand, one of the few hotels in Vegas with open balconies. It was perfect for viewing the Vegas skyline from...or leaping from.
Don’t try this at home, kids.
The hot desert wind buffeted my naked body. My longish hair snapped behind me horizontally. Standing naked on a balcony’s edge was liberating. Despite being perpetually cold and despite the hot desert wind, I shivered slightly.
After all, the wind was blowing where, as they say, the sun don’t shine.
I looked down at the city. An image of the young boxer collapsing in the ring came to me as I stood there. No surprise. This was the city where he’d died, where his autopsy had been conducted, and where I was beginning to suspect he had possibly been killed.
And not by Russell Baker.
Whether or not Caesar Marquez’s death was an accident—or something else—remained to be seen.
I didn’t need a psychic hit to know that something screwy was going on here. Something wasn’t right. What exactly, I didn’t know. Maybe I would never know.
I tilted my head back and spread my arms and deeply inhaled the heated desert air—air that was suffused with something that smelled suspiciously like all-you-can-eat $1.99 BBQ ribs.
I stood like that for some time, and the longer I did so, the more I was certain of one thing: I was becoming less and less human.
And more and more something else.
One of them.
I knew this because no human stood on the ledge of their hotel balcony, with arms spread, head tilted back, naked as the day they were born, reveling in their freedom, knowing that an even greater freedom was about to come. A freedom from gravity.
As I stood there, the wind whipping my hair into a frenzy, I wasn’t thinking of my kids or Kingsley or Fang or anyone. In fact, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was only feeling, only sensing.
The wind, the heat, the smells, the sounds.
I felt elemental. Animalistic.
I didn’t feel like a mother or a friend or a lover. I didn’t feel human. I felt, instead, deeply connected to the Earth, a part of the Earth, a part of its elements, its raw material.
I tilted my head forward, knowing that I had to either jump or go back inside. Sooner or later, the cops would be beating down my door. A naked woman on a balcony’s ledge was bound to draw some attention.
And I sure as hell wasn’t going back in.
The flame appeared in my thoughts. A single, unwavering flame, and within the flame was a creature that should have looked hideous to me, but didn’t. It was a creature I felt an extreme fondness for. A love for.
It was, after all, me. In a different shape.
A very different shape.
I lowered my arms and looked down. There was nothing to hinder my drop. No buttresses or projecting balconies.
Just a straight drop.
And so I did just that, tilting forward away from the ledge.
Dropping.
Chapter Eleven
As I fell, as the warm desert wind thundered over me, the winged creature in the flame rushed toward me, filling my thoughts.
I shuddered violently—but kept my eyes closed as I continued to plummet.
I was bigger now, I could feel it, but I hadn’t yet fully transformed. I didn’t dare open my eyes, knowing the closing of my eyes, the flame, the image...and faith were all part of this process.
I continued to fall, knowing my body was changing rapidly. Metamorphosing. I also knew that the speed of my metamorphosis was contingent on the circumstance. A shorter drop would result in a faster transformation.
Now, I could feel my arms growing, elongating, feel my body becoming something greater than it was before. Denser, heavier. My awareness of my own body expanded instinctively, exponentially.
I was no longer what I was.
No, I was something much, much bigger.
Much greater.
My wings snapped taut, catching the air, manipulating air, using the air, and now I wasn’t so much falling as angling.
I opened my eyes.
Before me stretched the Vegas Strip, in all of its glittering, neon, sinful glory. I flapped my wings hard, instinctively, gaining altitude. Instinctively.
Keeping to the shadows in a city that never sleeps and never turns off was no easy task. And so I took it up another hundred feet or so, flapping my wings, catching hot drafts of sinful air. Yes, the wind was warm and dry and not very different from the air in southern California. That would change in a few months. In a few months, Las Vegas would go from temperate to nuclear.
Too hot for even the undead.
I flapped my wings casually, cruising above the glittering city. I circled once around the superheated laser beam emitting from the Luxor. I continued on, moving north over a cluster of world-famous hotels. The Bellagio with its intricate fountains, the Paris and its Eiffel Tower replica, the Mirage and its gardens, Treasure Island with its pirate ship.
And one flying monster. I wondered idly if the Excalibur needed a real-life dragon. It could supplement my income.
So far, people weren’t pointing into the sky and scattering like frightened rabbits before a hawk’s shadow. That was a good thing, I guess.
I caught a warm updraft and spread my wings wide and hovered high above the city of sin, staring down, using my supernaturally-enhanced vision to see not only the multitudes crowding the sidewalks, but their actual expressions. Most looked tired. Most looked drunk. There were many groups of young people, no doubt celebrating twenty-first birthdays. A handful of older types wore shorts and T-shirts and sandals. One woman was walking through the crowd bare-chested, high as kite, although not as high as this kite. People stopped and stared at her breasts, but for the most part, she was ignored.
Welcome to Vegas.
I saw young men handing out flyers to strip club
s. Most people tossed the flyers aside, which cluttered sidewalks and gutters, pushed along by the warm spring breeze.
I had seen enough of the lights, the gaudy hotels, the plaid tourist shorts, the filth, the degradation, the glitter—and beat my massive wings as hard as I could and shot up into the night sky. I continued flapping them, forcing the rapidly-cooling air down below me. I rose higher and higher, so high that Vegas itself was nothing more than a pinprick of light.
A bright pinprick of light, but a pinprick nonetheless.
Here, on the outer edges of the atmosphere, where little or no oxygen existed, I flapped idly, serenely, holding my position. My mind was mostly empty. Mostly. Images of Kingsley flitted through. Of my son with his growing strength. Of my daughter who seemed to understand that something very strange was happening in the Moon household.
I would have to tell her, too, I thought. Tell them both. Everything.
Up here, far above Earth, it was easy to forget that I was a mother, that I had responsibilities. Up here, high above the Earth, it was easy to forget who I was. Up here, drifting on jet-streams and updrafts, buoyed by winds unfelt and unknown by anything living, it was easy to forget I had once been human.
The wind was cold. But not so cold as to affect me in any way. I merely acknowledged the cold, like a scientist noting the cancerous effects of the latest sugar substitute in lab rats.
I spread my wings wide and rode the wind, rising and falling, listening to it thunder over my ears and flap the leathery membranes that were my wings. I did this for an unknowable amount of time, hovering high above the Earth, correcting my altitude ever-so-slightly with minute adjustments to my wings, turning my wrists this way and that, angling my arms this way and that.
This way and that, adjusting, correcting, hovering.
Later, I tucked my wings in and shot down, aiming for the bright speck of light, perhaps the brightest speck of light ever.
Las Vegas.
Chapter Twelve
I alighted on the balcony.
There, I merged with the serious-looking, dark-haired woman in the flame and, after a moment of slight disorientation, found myself standing naked again on the balcony of the MGM Grand Hotel. I often wondered what the transformation process looked like to an outsider. Did I contort and jerk like they do in the movies? Or did I transform in a blink of an eye? I always sensed that my transformation took only a few seconds, but since my eyes were always closed and focused on the flame, I would probably never know. Maybe I would transform for Kingsley one night.