by Jenn Stark
“No.” Another infernal giggle. “We don’t have to listen to you.”
She rushed me—they both rushed me—and in all of the two point three seconds it took them to reach me, they transformed from innocent children to feral teens.
While I generally had a soft spot for children, I had zero patience with feral teens.
I took the girl first, not even really hitting her as much as waiting for her to bum rush my fist. She hit it like a ton of bricks and crumpled as completely, her head practically separating from her shoulders. The boy was on me next, only he didn’t lead with his fists but his shoulders, pile-driving into me with a tucked head. I rolled back into a quick tumble, righting myself on the other side as he bit and scratched, my arms hooked through his as I staggered around.
“Nigel!” I screamed, and he was there, as unruffled as ever, his hypodermic plunging into the kid’s neck with laudable British efficiency.
A second later, the boy slumped in my arms.
Nigel and I stared at each other for a long moment. “I can’t believe you hit a kid.”
“She was attacking me.”
At that moment, the elevators on the far side shot open again, and we wheeled around. It was Ma-Singh and Mercault’s Ace, Luc Banon, both of them striding fast. “Police have been alerted,” Luc reported, his gaze swiveling from Nigel to me as I held the boy out, searching his body for obvious transmitters. “The accident victims will check out, but we won’t.”
He glanced to the boy in my arms, the girl on the floor behind us. “You hit a kid?”
“This one’s wearing an ankle bracelet,” I snapped, ignoring him. “Must have tripped when they left the room and alerted local authorities. Which doesn’t make any sense, frankly. I thought this was a top secret operation.”
“Could still be,” Nigel said, swinging around to relieve me of the boy while Ma-Singh strode past us and scooped up the girl. She looked a lot smaller when she wasn’t trying to kill me. “They know only that they’ve been summoned to the hospital, and on the face of it, the sudden influx of patients should keep them busy. Police provide as good a roadblock as anything else.” He turned down the long hallway. “There has to be more than one way out of here. Service elevator? Stairs?”
It didn’t take us long to find both of them, or to unceremoniously dump the children into a laundry basket we found in a back storage room. Ma-Singh and Luc exited first, calling the all clear before they headed to the front of the hospital. That left Nigel and me to get out the back. With our credentials hanging around our necks and the whole world on the run, we exited the service elevator without notice, pulling the cart out as well a second later.
The moment the cart cleared the elevator bay, however, the kids’ ankle bracelets lit up like the Fourth of July.
Shit!
“We could remove them,” Nigel said. We picked up speed, heading for the back door, our shoes slapping against the gleaming tiles.
“Too dangerous,” I said, still moving fast. “We need to deaden the electronics without releasing any security measures they might have stuck in there. I don’t want to go through all this only to have them lose their ankles.”
We burst through the doors to the sunbaked back parking lot. “Well, that’ll happen anyway if we don’t move fast,” Nigel observed.
“Give me a minute!”
I couldn’t risk losing these children outright, no matter how nervous I was about the Arcana Council discovering the potential truth behind their abilities. There was no time for worry or misplaced fear. Instead, I mentally reached out, dropping every last barrier I had as I flipped open my communications panel to the Arcana Council’s own version of Mission Control, Vegas-style.
A moment later, a wave of soft, sensual laughter rolled across the Atlantic, rich and far too satisfied.
“How can I serve, Miss Wilde?”
Chapter Ten
Help arrived before we were halfway across the parking lot, in the form of a naked and shivering Fool.
“I hate doing that!” Simon moaned as I fished in the laundry basket for a cleanish jacket. He shrugged it on, scowling into the bin as we shoved it across the parking lot.
“Stop!” he shouted, and we stopped, never mind that we were attracting attention now, medical reinforcements slamming their doors as they raced toward the demand inside. Most of the hospital workers kept going, eyes on their job, but some had fixed their attention on us.
“Simon…”
“Get them out of that bin—get them out now,” he said urgently. Nigel and I dove for the children, pulling them out of the basket as a shout of alarm sounded deeper in the parking lot. More than a few of the new arrivals were turning their focus on us.
“Hand.” Simon reached over and snagged my hand, then flicked his gaze to Nigel. “Take hers. You’ll ground us. Need to short out the bands. Every foot away from the building sped up the clock, and it’s about to trip new gears that…” He stopped short, then offered Nigel a rueful grin. “Sorry, it’s going to hurt.”
Nigel grabbed my other hand as Simon crouched to touch the first teen’s leg bracelet. A burst of electrical sparks shot into the air, and my every last nerve ending jangled; then it happened again, another shower of sparks and the smell of smoking wreckage—and even more smoking—
“Feu! Fire!” Whoever was doing the shouting, they weren’t wrong. The basket beside us whooshed into flames just as a service van raced up to us, both doors open as Ma-Singh leaned out. I bent down to pick up the girl and staggered to my right as Nigel collapsed on top of me, smelling disconcertingly like cooked Brit.
Ma-Singh leapt out of the van and pounded over, gathering up the second child while Simon shouldered most of Nigel’s weight. We raced forward, scrambling in ungainly fashion into the van as it picked up speed again. The stunned bevy of hospital workers alternated between shouting at us, shouting at the fire, and shouting at each other.
“Go, go!” I screeched, more to say something than for any real need to prompt them. Luc was at the wheel of the small van, and as I lurched over to pull the doors shut, I could see the baffled expressions of a half-dozen shocked medical professionals, confused as to why anyone would need to break out of a teaching hospital.
Then we were out on the main drag, and the sound of sirens crashed around us. I winced, holding the child in my arms tighter, until I realized the sirens were coming from our vehicle.
“What is this van?” I managed, and Luc glanced back, an uncharacteristic smile on his permanently dour face.
“You are not the only one with friends in dark places, no?”
We slowed markedly as soon as we got a half mile from the hospital, Luc switching off the sirens. Suitably circumspect, our van trundled past cops and other official-looking personnel, none of them giving us a second look. There must be some sort of signage on the van, I thought, grateful for the reprieve to look over at Simon.
He was focused on Nigel, who still lay slumped on the backseat. “Is he going to be okay?” I asked, frowning. I hadn’t thought Nigel would be truly hurt. “He was just a grounding rod, right?”
“Technically, yes,” Simon said, lifting Nigel’s eyelid. I didn’t like the crackling sound it made. “If he internalized any of that electricity, however, that…can cause some damage.”
I frowned at him. “What sort of damage?”
“The sort that can kill him.”
“What?” That roused me out of my crouch. The girl in my arms whimpered, and I eased her to the floor, grudgingly acknowledging that if I’d been fitted with an ankle bracelet, I wouldn’t play well with others either. “Tell me you’re joking, Simon.”
“You brought me over here to release the children. I released them. But that was some majorly high-powered tech on their ankles. It would have blown their legs clear off, making them easy to find. They also had electromagnet tattooing and chips in their skin. Someone was making damned sure these kids wouldn’t escape, and that someone programmed a huge elec
trical load to ensure that happened. All that electricity had to go somewhere.”
He opened Nigel’s other eyelid, grimaced. “You familiar with the skin effect?”
“No.”
“Electricity doesn’t move inside of things, like through a tube or, willingly, through the ground. It moves along the surface, or, literally in this case, across the skin. That’s called the skin effect. What happens when the skin corrodes, or there’s too much electrical load, is that the electricity goes deeper. Doesn’t have any choice, really. It’s like a wagon wheel dropping into ruts on a road. Only if those ruts are muscle and tissue and nerves and organs—that kind of zap can cause a whole lot of problems.”
I scowled toward the front of the van. “How far are we to Saint-Étienne?”
“Thirty minutes,” Luc called back. His voice now had an edge to it.
Beside Nigel, Simon looked grim. He shook his head. “That’s too long.”
“What do you mean it’s too long!” I snapped. I wasn’t only talking to Simon. My voice was railing in my mind as well. Do something! I ordered Armaeus.
As I suspected, he’d been lurking in the back of my mind. “What would you suggest?”
Heal him! He’s dying in my service, and you can heal him—
“He won’t accept it from me.” Armaeus’s voice also held an edge now. “Only you. You want to test what you are capable of, do so now.”
But—
“I’ll show you.” The sheer power of the Magician’s sensual pull on me was almost too much to bear. As our connection sharpened, I felt the magic pouring from him to me like a sluicing stream, filling me up, fleshing me out. At some point, I moved closer to Nigel, whose breath had started coming in strange, fitful rasps.
“Touch him,” Armaeus urged, and when I hesitated, he chuckled. “In whatever way you wish, Miss Wilde. You are not me, you do not need to use my methods, regardless of how much faster they are.”
“Crap,” I muttered, and I picked up Nigel’s hand, wincing at the brittle-paper texture. As I did so, Ma-Singh leaned past me, a knife in his hand. With a few deft swipes, he sliced through Nigel’s shirt, baring his pecs and abs.
I felt the flicker of awareness deep inside Nigel as I pulled his other hand toward me. This one was less charred, and I realized—it was the hand I hadn’t held. Even as I sensed this, my eyes showed me the truth of this thought. Nigel’s body was burned the way a body would be near a blast site—worse the closer it got to the source of the conflagration. And that conflagration had been me.
“Focus, Miss Wilde,” Armaeus murmured in my mind. “If you would help him, you must give yourself over to the process.”
“I’m not you,” I gritted aloud, but I placed my hands on Nigel’s chest. It was too warm—far too warm, as if he’d been cooked from the insides. I’d experienced that myself, and I intensified my efforts, half listening to Armaeus’s soothing directions.
From the center of my being, a strength, a fullness grew—not like a ball or a flame, not like a thing at all, but more a thought, a knowing, an intention that I now directed as a soothing, cooling mist through my nerve endings to my finger pads, until I imagined it, weblike, spinning out over Nigel’s body. As I moved up the side of his torso, I reached out with my mind and pushed gently against the damaged nerves, the organs. I had no idea what images to form of what these things looked like in the human body, but with another murmured word from Armaeus, I didn’t have to.
Nigel was no longer blood and bone and sinew, char and smoke. He was energy—nothing but energy, a field of electricity crackling in angry hisses in all the places he’d been damaged by my rash involvement of him in a Connected act. Those places were where I focused my attention.
With my fingers serving as cold, fusing conduits, I moved from frayed edge to shattered circuit on Nigel’s body, up past his seared abdomen, along the surface of his blasted pecs. His arm was far worse than his torso, barely emitting a bleat of energy as I passed over it, soldering the ends where I could and cooling the connections enough to mentally scrape away the debris. With each pass, the filaments of energy waved with a slightly brighter energy, and when I reached his wrist, it was only that evidence of past success that bolstered me.
Nigel’s hand was a ruin, seen through the filter of electrical impulses. Though it twitched and shuddered in my grasp, every inch of it had been shattered internally. In my mind’s eye, I imagined him holding a gun in that hand, climbing a wall, punching, tearing—all of it gone. As much as a heart and lung, the hands of an operative were everything, and now—
“Miss Wilde,” Armaeus sighed disapprovingly in my mind. “You were far more damaged than this.”
I need more help, I retorted, sensing the salt of my own tears scoring my face. More of you.
“Then take it.” A moment later, Armaeus opened the gates wider between us, and the full weight of his sensual power flowed into me, making me glow like a shining star, a beacon in the darkness to my energy-reading gaze. Without thinking, I lifted Nigel’s hand and pressed it to my face, dampening his palm with the tears that streaked my skin, cradling his fingers against my cheek, whispering a kiss of strength, of healing, of everything I was and anything I could be, so long as it would help this one man survive.
I could sense Nigel’s body convulsing in the distance, but that was far away—so far away—all I really needed to focus on was this hand, this strong and capable hand, these fingers, this energy. Energy that could build and restore, energy that could bring this loyal Ace back to where he was before, back to what he needed to be. Power flowed from me in a long, steady wave, spilling through his fingers and down his arm, setting the recently renewed circuits there alight with healing energy, generous and full.
A racking cough pulled my attention free from the intensity of my thoughts, and I blinked up—
Only to see Nigel staring at me, his eyes wide and incredulous, his mouth agape. The searing blast pattern on his face was gone, his skin no longer raw and red. His eyes were no longer weepy with burnt tears, but blue and clear and fixed on me with utter confusion.
“Sara?” he asked, his voice like gravel.
I pulled his hand away from my face. It was no longer burned either, the skin perfect and clear. Beneath the tattered remnants of his shirt, Nigel’s chest and belly betrayed pink, soft skin, and Simon reached out a quelling hand as the operative sought to sit up.
The Fool glanced over to me. “Not bad,” he allowed.
Nigel’s gaze shot from the Fool and back to me, and from the front of the van, Ma-Singh grunted with satisfaction before turning back toward Luc and continuing in his gruff, low voice, words I couldn’t understand, but clearly some sort of play-by-play commentary of what was happening in the back.
“What—how?” Nigel managed, and looking around the van, I could ask the same thing. Both of the teens were now stretched out on the floor of the vehicle, wrapped in blankets. At their side was Ma-Singh’s guard. Nigel still lay half-sprawled on the seat, staring at me warily as I eased away from him, bumping into the still mostly undressed Fool in the process.
“How far are we?” I called to the front. It seemed a far better choice than answering Nigel’s question.
“Turning now,” Luc responded, and my eyes flared wide. No wonder they’d been able to get the children settled. How had I not realized so much time was passing? I looked up to the front of the van and through the windshield, relieved that no official vehicles were waiting for us, lights whirling. “And no tails from the hospital site at Lyon. Radio chatter has been mostly peeved. They know someone escaped—the orderly and guard downstairs are proof of that, but since they weren’t aware someone was being held in that underground bunker, they have nowhere to go. I have a feeling it’s going to turn into a huge headache for Interpol before the day is out. Especially with Marguerite and Roland in the States.”
“Good,” I said. The busier we could keep those two, the better. Especially until we got the children safely
hidden away.
Nigel stayed uncharacteristically quiet as the van pulled into the opened garage, and the doors on the vehicle instantly opened—both to the side and to the back. Father Jerome’s bald head poked around the corner.
“Sara!” He beamed. “I was so glad to receive Monsieur Banon’s call. We have everything ready.” His gaze dropped to the children, and his smile turned concerned. “Injuries?”
As he listened to my terse account of the events at the hospital, he waved over a trio of white-coated assistants, who trotted forward with rolling carts. They loaded the teens onto the gurneys and whisked them off, the feral creatures still mercifully quiet. Then Father Jerome’s eyes widened as the robed Simon and rags-covered Nigel stepped down from the van. I followed, Ma-Singh close enough to me that no one could tell I was ready to collapse.
Luc slammed the door and came around the front of the van. “Tonight, we wait and we watch, to see if anyone is following,” he said, waving to the château. “We will be safe here. And both of you need clothes.”
Nigel frowned, still clearly bewildered. “But what—what exactly happened just now?”
Luc snorted in disgust. “Thirty minutes in the arms of a beautiful woman as she cried healing tears over your burned and bloody skin,” he muttered. “Leave it to a Brit to miss all that.”
Chapter Eleven
There was no coverage of the Lyon hospital on the local news, no mention of it on the scanners, other than a few injuries noted during the skirmish tied to panicking victims of the nearby traffic accident. The guard Nigel had so helpfully decked was apparently not local law enforcement, more likely a hospital rent-a-cop not looking to call attention to his failures.
Nobody mentioned the escape of two children with flu-like symptoms.
Nigel, Luc, Father Jerome, Ma-Singh, and I sat around the large butcher-block table in the kitchen of the château, a far less imposing space than the formal dining room down the hall. “You think they knew what they had down there?” I asked as the news scanned by on three makeshift monitors.