by SM Reine
Marion tipped her head to the side, surveying him thoughtfully. “What does the test register for you, Dr. Flynn?”
“None of the stones react to mundane humans.” He lifted the page to show her the other side. “The stone that detects witches reacted to you faintly. So did the stone that detects angels.”
A word surfaced in Marion’s memory. “I’m a mage.”
“Based on your blood tests, you’re most likely a Gray mage,” Dr. Flynn said. “Gray is a word we use for anyone who has two factions in their ancestry—in this case, human and angel. Either your angel parent was a mage, or your human parent was a witch. Whatever the mix, it resulted in you: a half-angel who can cast magic.”
She turned her hands over to look at her palms, expecting flames to explode out of them. That seemed like the sort of thing that a half-angel, half-witch mage would be able to do. Nothing happened. Marion clenched her fists. “What else did you learn?”
“That brings me to the MRI results.” He opened the folder to a photo. It looked like shattered glass: white lines shooting out on a black background, with the indistinct shape of a skull blurred in the background. “I couldn’t scan you because of your unique physiology. If there’s something like a tumor, we have no way of knowing. Angels don’t get medical care from human hospitals and half-angel Gray are too rare to study.”
Her heart sank. “I see.”
“I can’t help you, Marion. I’m sorry.”
Perhaps that was why she believed she needed to see Seth Wilder. He must have been some kind of expert in angels—her breed, much to Marion’s surprise. She didn’t feel like an angel, half or whole or any proportion thereof.
In the meantime, she was left with no memory, no clues, and no plan.
Her throat burned. “What am I going to do?”
Dr. Flynn patted her knee. “I wish I could help you.”
“Thank you, Lucas,” she said, and then it struck her that she had slipped, addressing him informally. “I’m sorry. Can I call you Lucas?”
He opened his mouth, as though to argue with her—to ask her to call him a different name. But then he stopped. Considered it.
“Call me Luke,” he said.
* * *
Outside of Marion’s hospital room, at the nurse’s station, Oliver Machado sat beside Charity Ballard. She should have been working her way through heaps of paperwork. In theory, the hospital’s records were electronic. In reality, their budget couldn’t accommodate enough equipment or assistants to catch up with the laws about digital record keeping. Charity felt like she was constantly drowning in paperwork.
She was taking a break from fighting the hurricane of bureaucracy. Instead, she was watching a live stream of the news on her computer monitor. Charity didn’t bother turning it off when Oliver joined her. If he reported her for procrastination, she could report him for a hundred more dangerous infractions.
“Anything interesting on the news?” Ollie asked, rolling his chair over.
“More summit crap,” Charity said. “I’m so tired of hearing about it.” The news had been talking about the upcoming summit around the clock ever since it had been announced earlier in the year. The werewolf Alpha, Rylie Gresham, had made a rare public appearance to invite every faction to join her at the United Nations to hash out preternatural issues. At this point, Charity would have preferred to have teeth pulled than hear more about vampires, werewolves, angels, and demons.
“Why are you watching if you’re sick of it?”
Because pulling teeth still wasn’t as awful as staring down her stack of paperwork. “It’s important to be well informed.”
“It’s not going to have jack to do with us mundanes,” Ollie said.
Charity coughed into her fist. “Mundanes. Yeah.” Still, she didn’t close the video stream. A reporter was interviewing an angel about the issues the ethereal delegation hoped to tackle. That angel had the same shocking eyes as their newest patient, Marion. It was deeply unsettling.
“Can’t believe we invited those things into the NAU,” Ollie said.
She was inclined to agree. More angels in the region could only lead to badness.
Charity sighed and closed the news stream. “You look like you aren’t busy right now. Can you help me catch up on these forms?”
“I came here to help you, but not with paperwork.” He lifted his cell phone so that she could see the screen. “This was in the white pages today.”
Charity squinted. She hadn't been able to find her glasses, so she couldn’t see what he was trying to show her. “Is that a photograph of the patient you found camping? Marion?”
“With a number for a tip line,” Oliver said. “Someone’s searching for her.”
She took the phone from him and scrolled down to read the text. There wasn’t much information to go along with the blurry image of Marion; just a request that people report sightings.
“I wonder if she’s part of the ethereal delegation that arrived for the summit,” Charity said. “Although it’s strange she’d have ended up in this neck of the woods.”
“Strange and scary, isn’t it? We don’t need angels around here.” Oliver stood without taking his phone back. “I’m heading down to the lab to pick up a copy of her results. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Charity swiveled in her chair to watch him go.
Someone was looking for Marion. That was likely a good sign—wasn’t it? They would be happy to know that the missing person had been found. There might even be a reward.
And then they would take the angel-girl out of Ransom Falls before she could cause any real harm.
She rolled a few inches to the left, peering through the cracked door into the patient’s hospital room. Luke was sitting a few inches from Marion, his hand resting on her knee. They looked to be having a rather intense conversation.
Charity dialed the number in the ad, and someone picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?” asked a voice.
“Is this the tip line?”
“If you have something to report, then yes, it’s the tip line.” There was a hint of humor to the voice, and Charity shivered at the sound of it. His voice brought to mind her childhood before Genesis, listening to the radio in the car with her father. That professional, silken voice that DJs used to have.
“I saw your advertisement. She’s here at Mercy Hospital in Ransom Falls, California.”
“Thank you.” Now that musical voice sounded deeply relieved.
There was rustling on the other end of the line, as though the man were about to hang up. Charity spoke quickly before he could. “Is she dangerous?”
“Very.”
“Should I call the police? Or the OPA? Wait, are you the OPA?”
“No,” he said. “But you might want to evacuate before we get there.”
Charity didn’t get a chance to ask whom she was speaking to or when “they” would arrive.
He hung up.
4
The next afternoon, Luke found Marion negotiating for her discharge at the nurses station. There was no way to tell that the patient had been speaking in French only hours earlier, completely incapable of understanding the language she now used with the confidence of a native.
“I’m sorry,” Charity was saying. “I can’t discharge you without speaking to Dr. Flynn.” Her eyes lifted over Marion’s head, expression brightening at the sight of Luke. “Here he is now. You can talk to him yourself.”
Marion rounded on him. She had eschewed the hospital gown for scrubs, which must have been donated by one of the female residents. One of the main purposes of scrubs was modesty: they were formless linen, tight enough to keep from creating a hazard, but not so tight as to be construed as offensive. On Marion, the scrubs looked like a fashion statement. Her thick brown hair, twisted into a sloppy bun, dangled along the lean lines of her throat. Luke could make out the lacework pattern of veins crossing under her jaw.
“They won’t let me leave. W
hy?” Marion asked.
“Typically, in a case like yours, we would contact social workers to help take care of you,” Luke said carefully.
“A case like mine? A half-angel?” She said that too loudly.
The nurses weren’t paying attention, but Luke guided her a few feet away and lowered his voice. “Someone who obviously needs help.”
“Was your plan to hold me here until I could be turned over to a homeless shelter?” She brandished her medical records at him, which she must have bullied out of Charity. “You’ve left spots blank on my records. You don’t even have my breed written down here. I would go into the mundane human system!”
She had no clue how much of a favor Luke was doing for her with that. The preternatural benefits system would have chewed a kid like her up and spat her out broken, and that was assuming that she wasn’t snapped up by a higher governmental power. The girl was a mage, after all.
“Look at me!” Marion touched her jaw, her neck, showed her hands to him. “How old do you think I am? Sixteen? Seventeen?”
“I’d guess more like eighteen or nineteen.”
“My parents will be worried about me. Furthermore, there’s likely a school missing me.” She shook her finger in his face. “You would have me sent into the system, abandoned, made someone else’s problem!”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions.” And all of them were wrong.
A wounded look flashed through her eyes. “I thought I could trust you, Luke.”
“You can trust me when I say I’m trying to do you a favor.”
“Don’t contact any social workers. You certainly don’t need to do me any favors.”
“Okay.” Luke caught Charity’s eye and circled his finger in the air. “Put together the discharge paperwork.” The sooner that Marion was out of Luke’s hospital, the sooner he could return to his normal life.
Marion was braced for battle, and didn’t appear to know what to do without getting one. She deflated. “Yes. Excellent. Do that.”
Oliver wheeled the patient who had been bitten by a werewolf the previous night down the hallway. At the sight of him, Marion’s anger vanished. She stepped behind Luke and gripped his sleeve.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. Did she recognize the patient who had been bitten? Or did she recognize Oliver?
Marion didn’t respond until the nurse and the patient rounded the corner. “What’s the best way for me to get out of town? Is there a subway?”
“In Ransom Falls?” They didn’t even have a coffee shop, unless you counted the diner, which served sludge that could only very generously be described as coffee. “All we have is the bus that passes through here on the way to Sacramento from Eugene. There are probably schedules in the waiting room, but—”
“Sacramento.” She nodded sharply. “I’ll start there.”
Charity approached with the paperwork. “Dr. Flynn—”
“Thank you,” Marion said, taking the papers from her. She signed the highlighted lines, then tossed them onto the counter. “I’ll be leaving now.”
“Wait.” Luke extracted his wallet and gave her cash. He didn’t check how much. “Buses aren’t free.”
“Thank you.” Marion managed a small, grateful smile. Then she was gliding down the hallway, tall, elegant, and inhumanly graceful. A creature unlike any that Luke had ever expected to see in Ransom Falls.
That was why he had moved there, after all. To get away from people like her.
“Do you think we should let her go?” Charity asked, wringing her hands. “It’s raining out there, and—and she has no idea what’s going on.”
Luke ignored his instincts shouting the same thing. “We can’t hold her against her will unless she poses a risk.”
“How do you know she doesn’t?”
He didn’t respond to that. He just went to his office.
Luke locked the door behind him. He couldn’t lock out his worries, though.
The issue was that he already knew that Marion was not going to find a school missing her attendance, or Seth Wilder at her home. She might, however, find people who were looking for her. Some of them might be friendly. Most of them wouldn’t be.
Luke didn’t want any of those people hearing Marion ask after Seth Wilder.
Over the years, the man who called himself Lucas Flynn had grown accustomed to refusing to give help if it might make his identity vulnerable. He did his best using the tools that a doctor typically had, sacrificing time, energy, and money to treat patients. He ignored the other resources he might have been able to access, even if those other resources could have saved lives.
He was Luke Flynn, a mundane human doctor working at a small rural hospital in NorCal. The problems of a Gray mage like Marion Garin should not have been his issue.
Yet when he gazed out the window to see a slender teenage girl waiting at a rainy bus stop, he felt a powerful sense of responsibility that he couldn’t shrug off.
She needed help from Seth Wilder.
“No.” He closed the blinds on the window and turned to face his office. “No way.”
A medical degree for Lucas Flynn hung on the wall. His computer displayed paperwork for several shifter-bitten patients who needed his help. He had a cup of pens, a leather desk blotter, an executive chair. No guns, no knives. No signs of Seth Wilder at all.
He leaned back in his chair, pushing the blinds open with a finger.
Marion had good timing. A bus pulled up to the stop after a few seconds, leaving her little time to get drenched by the downpour. As he watched, Marion climbed inside, used the money he had given her for a ticket, and sat down. The bus pulled away from the curb.
She had officially left to find Seth.
“Damn,” Luke said.
He started to let the blinds fall closed. An instant before they obscured the sliver of street, the bus swerved. Brakes squealed.
Luke shoved the blinds aside as the bus tipped onto the two right-hand wheels. It teetered, then rolled and smashed onto its side. It skidded into a tree on the side of the road. The bus was crushed.
“Damn,” Luke said again, less calmly than the first time.
He yanked open a desk drawer, grabbed a handgun from its depths, and ran for the hallway.
The instant his foot crossed the threshold, all the power in the hospital went out. The lights died and there was no generator hum to follow. He skidded to a stop in the hallway.
People he didn’t recognize were heading toward Marion's former room. They warped the walls around them. Their skin glistened with pure magic.
Sidhe. Faeries.
And probably assassins.
The nearest of them was a leather-clad young man with broad shoulders and black hair that glistened faintly blue. He carried a bastard sword as long as he was tall. Luke could imagine Marion cleaved in half by that sword all too easily.
He raced toward them. “Hey!”
They ignored his shouting. As soon as they realized that Marion’s room was empty, reality distorted around them with a hard twist, a swirl, and an audible pop.
The assassins vanished.
* * *
Marion felt the assassins coming before they shoved her bus off the road. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure what she was feeling at first—that tickle in the back of her mind, the buzz at her crown, her itching knuckles. It was as meaningless to her as Luke’s English had initially been.
She understood once the windshield shattered and the killers leaped in. They were squat creatures with curly brown fur covering their human-like bodies.
They were urisk, and they wielded knives.
Marion was startled to recognize the creatures. She was even more startled when her mind was flooded with trivia about them. Urisk were tough creatures from a common caste of sidhe known primarily for their craftsmanship, although their nimble fingers were just as good at destruction. More of them had ended up in mercenary work than craftwork since Genesis.
How she knew this, she didn�
�t know, and she didn’t have time to dwell on it.
She leaped to her feet and flung a hand toward them on instinct—why, she wasn’t sure, because nothing happened.
An urisk slashed the bus driver’s throat. His body flopped onto the steering column. The bus veered on the slick road, tipping onto two wheels, and Marion tumbled back to her seat.
Glass exploded. Seats snapped from their moorings and a tree branch punched through the floor. Metal groaned as the bus collapsed at its center like a soda can in a crusher. The collapse separated her from the trio of urisk assassins.
She couldn’t remember if there had been any passengers at the front of the bus. If there were, then they stood no chance of surviving. The urisk would dispatch them as rapidly as they had the bus driver.
The people who sat near the back with her still stood a chance.
Marion took quick inventory: an older man, and a woman with a child. The child was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, but conscious. No fighters. Nobody who could help her.
She scrambled toward the crumpled center of the bus. There was a hatch in what used to be the roof. It had a bright-red handle visible even among the destruction. “Follow me!” she shouted to the other passengers. Her command was echoed by pounding at the front half of the bus.
“What the hell is going on?” asked the older man, helping the woman lift her child.
Marion didn’t have an answer for him. She gritted her teeth and slammed both heels into the door on the roof. It popped open.
She slithered onto the pavement, then reached into the bus again.
“Give me your hands!” she shouted.
The child did as she ordered, and Marion hauled him out onto wet pavement. Then she dragged his mother out. And then the man with the flannel shirt.
By the time they had all escaped, one of the urisk had ripped through the collapsed section of the bus. It launched itself through the shattered seats to attack Marion.
Its cruel fingers seized upon her ankle and yanked hard.