by Jenn Stark
We headed out in Nikki’s jeep, the late-afternoon sun baking down on us. “How’d your training session with Kreios go?” I asked.
She grinned over at me, then did a double take, whistling. “Not as well as yours, apparently. You look about a million times better. Spill.”
“Not Armaeus. More like better health through ink.” I shrugged. Okay, maybe there was something to the silver cure, because I felt better too. “You go first, though. Kreios have anything interesting to say while you were there?”
“That would be negative,” Nikki said, swinging her attention back to the street. “He had a half-dozen ninja boys in his crib to spar with me, then took a few rounds himself. He seemed more or less satisfied with the fight I put up, and then there was the spa, and then…” She frowned. “Wait, was all that on purpose? To distract me, separate us?”
“I don’t think so.” Still, it was a testament to my eroding faith in the trustworthiness of the Council that I had to think about it. “Nothing to be gained for them to have you out of the picture. All I did was a little domestic astral travel.”
Then again, what about Kreios? Had he wanted an excuse to avoid helping to search for the Hanged Man? Or had someone else not wanted him involved? And yet…that card he sent Nikki was all Devil, all the way. So…
Pushing those conflicting thoughts away, I filled Nikki in on my most recent astral travel adventure, and on the newest member of the Arcana Council playing hide-and-seek in the digital world. When I got to the part where we needed to catch the Hanged Man, though, her head swung toward me again.
“How do you catch someone who’s digital? He doesn’t have a body.”
“I think he does, actually. I think it’s a matter of bringing it to fully realized form again. Like if you amp the energy enough, it takes human shape.” I grimaced. “I really don’t know. But he’s apparently causing more trouble in his current state than he would in fully present form, and Armaeus wants him back where we can collar him.”
“Well, no one can say working with the Magician is dull.” Nikki leaned forward as she slowed the vehicle. “Here we go. No cops yet. No sign of Brody’s ugly-ass sedan.”
She angled into a side street and ditched the Jeep, the two of us swinging out of the vehicle. “Where’s Dixie?” I asked, surveying the building. The testing facility was in a half-filled strip mall, though it looked clean enough. A taqueria and a grocery store anchored one end, the other occupied by a beauty supplies outlet and a Dollar Store. About half a dozen empty storefronts were scattered between those end units and the MedTech facility, and maybe twenty cars were in the parking lot.
As we ambled along the sidewalk and stopped in front of the taqueria, a battered car pulled into the lot. It wasn’t Brody’s. But a breath hissed between my teeth as a woman and a bunch of little kids piled out of the car—four of them, all maybe between seven and ten years old. They headed for the medical facility as if they were going to the arcade.
Nikki grunted as they disappeared through MedTech’s doors. “Maybe there’s a daycare on-site,” she offered, but I couldn’t seem to tamp down my mad.
“Or maybe whoever that woman is, she gets paid by the head.” I started off, my feet moving in quick time to the outrage within me.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Captain America,” Nikki said, though she stayed beside me. “We can’t just walk in there blind. We need a plan.” At my glower, she continued. “Thing one, it’s about to become a crime scene, once Brody comes pounding in here with lights blazing. Thing two, I’m not packing. You don’t bring a glitter bra to a gunfight.” She eyed me. “I can’t imagine you’re carrying right now either.”
“No. But it’s not a crime scene yet, and I’m beginning to wonder how innocent anyone is in a place so openly working on kids. I get Dixie wanting to protect the Connecteds, but maybe Brody’s right in raiding the place.”
Nikki sighed, squinting at the building as well. It looked like a clinic—open, inviting. Not exactly what I’d had in mind for a front for disappearing Connecteds, but something had to have tipped Brody off. “Fine,” she said. “Most of the crime scenes I’ve processed were after the fact, not before. This will be different anyway.”
We headed down the sidewalk, past four empty storefronts as we approached the MedTech building. The door opened, and a young couple walked out, the man helping a woman stay steady on her feet, both of them young, laughing, and talking about crazy dreams. Nikki and I exchanged a glance. So far, the place seemed legit—but there were the kids to consider.
“I’ll go in first,” Nikki muttered. As she strode ahead of me, disappearing into the building, a sound from the parking lot caught my attention. The young woman had stumbled, and I instinctively turned toward her, even taking a few steps before some part of my lizard brain realized that the man was now holding his girlfriend too close, too awkwardly, jerking her close even as his right arm came up.
“Gun!” I shouted, reaching for my own weapon that wasn’t there.
“Stay back!” he snarled simultaneously, but I was already several steps into the parking lot. The man followed my movement, swinging the gun. At least he was aiming away from the building now. If he shot, no one would be hurt. Other than me, of course.
“Slow down, slow down,” I said, lifting my hands as I took another step forward. “You okay? Can I help?”
“I said stay back!”
My first concern was for the woman cowering in the man’s arms. I caught the tightening of the man’s fingers an instant too late. He emptied a full round of curiously silent bullets in my direction as the woman screamed against him.
“Sara!”
The sound of Nikki’s voice seemed to be coming from far away as I felt myself pummeled by a half-dozen punches. Pain blossomed in so many places, I couldn’t track them, and the shots had been so quiet. Too quiet. Silencer? I shook my head, dizzy with pain, and all I saw was the man—the man and the woman—both of them turning now, running, the two of them clinging to each other as if they were in this, together… Could that be right? Could that make sense? Or was the woman this guy’s prisoner?
A wave of fury so strong it overheated my whole body, swamped me, then I was running too. Running, though my brain was sure—almost sure—I’d just been shot, though my heart was now pumping blood out of a half-dozen sluice holes, my breath wheezing, watery and thick—and still I ran. Faster than I should be able to, the ground between me and the fleeing couple racing by with every stride.
They reached their car first, and the part of my brain not grappling with getting shot registered surprise. It was a nondescript vehicle but nowhere near a junker, higher class than most in the parking lot. The woman moved to the passenger side, but it was the man who had shot me, the man who would pay. I tackled him as he reached the hood of the vehicle, and his gun went flying, his eyes a mask of confusion and even fear as we dropped to the ground.
Then I was hitting him. Punching, driving, pounding, my knees on either side of his body and his arms up now, elbows and forearms covering his face, the screaming woman out of the car once more and scrambling toward me… Somehow I knew she was coming for me, even as Nikki thundered up and the screaming suddenly stopped, replaced by sirens in the far distance, even though there was nothing that would stop me—nothing that would stop—
“Sara!” Nikki’s voice was beside me suddenly, her large hands jerking out to catch mine in motion. She pulled me off the man and away. “Girl—sweet Mary!” Her jaw dropped as she spun me around to her, and the sirens were suddenly closer—too close, too close! I jerked my head up, and she cursed as well, wheeling around to face the vehicles that would be converging on the parking lot within thirty seconds.
“I can run,” I said, pulling on her arm. “Something’s not right here. We need to go. To get out of here!”
“Right!” It was Nikki’s turn to reach for me, and she yanked me forward, slinging an arm around me and half carrying me as she started sprinting away, the pain in
my torso seeming to congeal a little more with each step until it wasn’t really pain anymore, wasn’t a rending, tearing agony. Instead, it was a dull, spreading sensation of fatigue, a chill that started at my stomach and radiated outward, each thud of my feet a jarring counterpoint to its numbing, blanketing wash.
We took off around the end of the strip mall where the Dollar Store was, then around to the back, racing past a series of delivery bays. Most of those bays were empty until we got to the back of the MedTech section of the strip mall. There, four or five trucks were backed against the wall, clearly in the process of unloading. Another van sat idling at the edge of the lot, its owner texting on his phone.
“Keep coming,” Nikki gritted out, and she left me there, stumbling forward on my own as she dashed off. I watched her rip open the driver’s door and haul out the driver—a thin guy little more than a teenager. Then she turned to me, yelling at me to hurry. Finding my second wind, I galloped around the delivery van and jerked open the passenger door, letting Nikki haul me in by my jacket collar and reach past me to slam the door shut.
Then we were off.
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Nikki practically howled as she hammered the vehicle around a bend. “We shouldn’t go in there, I said. Oh, what can it hurt? she replied. What could possibly go wrong in a building about to be crawling with cops and bad guys, and some loser with a gun!”
She turned and raked me with wild eyes, and I shrank back against the door in the face of her confusion, her panic. “Why aren’t you dead?” she demanded. “I mean, look at you. Your clothes are covered in blood, your face—”
“Blood?” I asked dumbly. We hit an intersection against the light, and Nikki’s cursing was put to far better use as she bounced across the road and deeper into the scrubby suburban warren of streets and flat tract housing, all of it in varying shades of tan.
Meanwhile, I reached down, and, as if I was watching this happen in a movie and not with my own fingers, I plucked my tank top and drew it away from my skin. Nikki was right. It was riddled with holes and thick with blood. My blood, still sticky and viscous and wet smelling, my senses suddenly registering again.
“I stink,” I muttered, and Nikki’s rejoining laugh was a little too close, too crazy to make me feel good. I lifted my tank higher, exposing my belly.
“You stink. Yeah, you stink. You smell like someone who just got their body shot to hell. How could you even, how were you…”
Nikki suddenly cut the wheel hard, running us up on the curb. I lurched toward her, practically falling into her lap before I recovered enough to pin myself against the passenger door again. She cut the engine and stared at me.
At my stomach anyway.
“You…” She swallowed. “You were shot. Several times. You bled. A lot.”
“I…yeah,” I said, also staring. The skin of my stomach was smooth, unblemished. And by that, I meant completely unblemished. Even some of the older scars that should have been there from injuries long past no longer were, the skin as smooth and pink as if I’d just rolled out of a bassinet. I hiked the bloody mass of my tank top up farther and looked at Nikki.
“Nada. God, that bra is pathetic, though. Good thing it’s toast.” She wrinkled her nose at it, then her gaze lifted to mine. “But that doesn’t answer the bigger issue here. Those were bullets. Real bullets, from a real gun. And they went into you with a splatter.” Her eyes went wide. “Are they still in you?”
I drew an experimental breath. My lungs inflated, my ribs expanded. Nothing seemed cracked or hemorrhaging. Gingerly, I palpated my stomach, tensing against the expectation that there might be a hard obstruction lodged inside me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Turn around,” Nikki ordered, and I obligingly did so, wincing as she barked another curse. “No exit wounds,” she growled.
“Well, there are no entry wounds either,” I pointed out, settling back into the seat to face her.
“Yeah, but your shirt and hoodie isn’t a bloody mess on the back. It’s clean. Which means those bullets should still be in your body, and you should still be dead.”
She stared at me, hollow-eyed. “Why aren’t you dead?” she whispered. “I’ve seen the Magician heal you—but not like this. Not anything like this. You…you’re hurt, usually. Hurt bad. And then you get better. This…wasn’t that.”
I shook my head. The sound of sirens was closer now, and, while they weren’t heading our way, we were still sitting in a stolen vehicle, and I was half-covered in blood. I looked around, wondering how much DNA was on the van. “They’ll find this. That driver…”
“I’ll take care of the van. You start talking.”
Nikki put the vehicle in gear again, and her phone buzzed. As I tried to flap my shirt to dry it a little, gore and all, she yanked the phone out of her pants, then flipped it toward me. “It’s Dixie,” she said.
I lifted my brows. “I thought she was supposed to be at MedTech to meet us.”
“I thought so too. Brody could have waylaid her.”
I nodded. “Yeah. If he’d taken any time to think about it, he would have realized he couldn’t trust her to stay put.” The phone buzzed again, and I gestured to it. “You gonna get that?”
“Eventually.” She eyed me as we turned down another street. “Talk. You’re not as surprised as you should be. What’s happened to you that you can now take a bullet and not die?”
“I…” I swallowed. Armaeus hadn’t told me this was what would happen if I’d gotten shot. Then again, he hadn’t said much of anything useful about my new and rarified condition. Why hadn’t he told me? What was going on?
Nikki was clearly waiting for an answer, though, and at least I had one to give. “After the fight with General Som, I was hurt—worse than I expected. Armaeus fixed me by making me immortal. Temporarily.”
Whatever Nikki had expected me to say, that wasn’t it.
“Immortal,” she squawked, whipping me a hard glare before refocusing on traffic. “You’re immortal. Like the Council members. And Highlander.”
“Not like the Council members, and it’s only temporary. I can switch back.”
“How? When?”
I scowled. “I don’t know.”
“I thought Armaeus and the gang weren’t totally undead, though. Wasn’t that part of the deal? They’re immortal but not unkillable?”
I’d thought so too. I stared down at my blood-soaked shirt. “Apparently there’s a loophole.”
“A pretty fucking big one.” Nikki bounced back onto a main avenue, and I looked up, seeing the familiar towers of the cluster of hospitals off Rancho Drive.
“I don’t need to go to the hospital, Nikki. What are they going to examine me for, a bloody shirt?”
“We’re not going to the hospital,” Nikki said darkly as her phone started buzzing again. She threw it at me. “You’re going to ring up the Council’s doctor on call and figure out what the hell just happened to you.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Dr. Margaret Sells wasn’t at any of the downtown hospitals, and it took us another fifteen minutes of Nikki violating traffic laws to reach the clinic on the outskirts of town where Dr. Sells administered to the sick and Connected, when she wasn’t assisting the Council with their medical care. While we waited in the lobby, Nikki held up her phone. “You keep standing there all bloody. I’m going to call Dixie back before she has a coronary,” she said. “They won’t make us wait long.”
Judging from the stares I was receiving from the receptionist, Nikki wasn’t wrong. The place resembled one of the technoceutical labs I’d recently visited more than any sort of clinic, I decided, with its white glassed-in lobby and sparkling floors. The ladies behind the desk were all wearing white jackets, however, including the redheaded, bespectacled receptionist, and I appreciated that.
Still, I wasn’t entirely happy about being here. Dr. Sells had a tendency to poke first, ask questions later, and she’d straight-up drugged me with high-grade tech
noceuticals once before just to see what would happen. Universal healthcare took on a whole new level of suck when there was only one doctor you could see in the entire world.
Nikki’s voice lifted, making it easy for me to hear her side of the conversation. “Slow down, Dixie…slow down,” she was saying, but it didn’t appear she was making much headway. I could hear Dixie’s high-pitched panic across the room, and I winced, glad I wasn’t talking to the woman.
Dr. Sells chose that moment to appear in the doorway, her classic ice-blonde good looks somewhat pinched above her doctor’s jacket, suit, and sensible pumps.
“What happened?” she asked sharply, and Nikki looked up, her gaze meeting mine. She’d find me when she was done with Dixie. I waved her off.
“I got shot,” I said simply as Dr. Sells crossed to me. “It hurt a lot at first, and then not at all—and now there’s not a mark on me.”
She halted in front of me and surveyed my bloody shirt, then lifted her gaze to my face. “The Magician made you immortal. But you haven’t ascended to the Council,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Right on both counts.”
“He didn’t inform you of this—ability.”
“He didn’t inform me of much of anything, no. I’m hoping you can fill in the blanks.” I gestured to my shirt. “Since these were definitely not blanks.”
She nodded and turned on her heel. “Grace, escort Miss Dawes back when she’s finished with her phone call. Otherwise, we’re not to be disturbed.”
“Of course, Dr. Sells,” the perky redhead agreed. Then we were through the door and into a long, carpeted hallway. When I’d been at Sell’s clinic before, it’d been in a warehouse-sized intake room. This wasn’t that.
“How many clinics do you have?” I asked.
“Four, currently, if you include the specialty wings. I find it makes it easier if I can go where I’m needed, versus having patients come to me. In here.” She stopped in front of a room, opening its door and gesturing me inside. “I’m going to get you some clothes.”