by Jenn Stark
“Right.” I’d barely had time to pull out the stool from the desk at the far end of the room before Sells was back, holding up a gray tee shirt and sports bra. I took them both gratefully and tossed them on the examination table, then shucked my shirt as she closed the door behind her.
“You have a biohazard container or something?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“The sink is fine.” She didn’t comment as I tossed the bloody garments to the side. Instead, she stepped close.
“No entry or exit wounds,” she said. She opened a drawer and pulled out a plastic sealed container of wipes, which she handed to me. “Face. There’s a shower down the hall you can use when we’re through.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, and she watched me intently as I wiped the blood spatter from my face with the fresh-smelling damp cloths. I tossed them into the sink as well, then she started talking again.
“How soon after you were shot did you feel like something was off?”
“I…” I hesitated, trying to remember. “I felt the impact, the pain, difficulty breathing. Then Nikki got to me and pulled me off the shooter. We started running, and it…kind of all congealed. Like I was being covered over in glue or something. After that, there was still pain, but not much of it.”
“Were there originally exit wounds?” she asked, walking around me to survey my back. I stood in the center of the cool room without discomfort. I’d been naked a lot in my life, and anything was preferable than having a shirt thick with my own blood hanging off me. “There’s no scarring at all back here.”
“Yeah, I noticed that.” In a weird way, that sort of pissed me off. “Will…will those scars come back when I revert back to my mortal state? I worked hard to get some of them.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Assuming your shift to immortality didn’t cure a disease or illness outright, any scars incurred while you were mortal will reappear. In short, your body will remember who and what it was when you return—if you return.”
As soon as she said the words, a memory was triggered.
Not long ago, I’d journeyed to Hell. It had been every bit as miserable as advertised. While there, I’d encountered Armaeus in his mortal form. He’d told me he was ill. Dying, in fact. As an immortal, Armaeus was anything but sickly. But as a mortal… had some of what he’d said been true?
And if that had been true, had other things been true as well?
Sells continued, oblivious to my roaming thoughts. “You have to be the only person I know who doesn’t want to be immortal, in perpetually perfect health. Why would you revert back?”
“Because, this is messed up.” I waved my hand in front of my chest. “I’m not supposed to survive bullet holes. That’s not who I am.”
She studied me. “It’s who you could be, clearly. If you choose.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t,” I said. “You done looking at me?”
At her nod, I picked up the sports bra from the table, shimmied into it. “So, spill. How did I manage to make bullets disappear? Because if they’d gone through me, the back of my shirt would have shown it. Or are they still inside me?”
“They’re not inside you,” Dr. Sells said. She leaned against the counter as I pulled my shirt on. “The easiest way to explain it, is—”
A knock at the door interrupted her, and a moment later, Nikki strode in, looking like she was about to burst.
“What?” I asked, but she lifted her hands.
“It can wait.” She crossed her arms beneath her chest and surveyed me. “Definitely a wardrobe improvement,” she observed before turning to face Dr. Sells. “Whatever you were saying, please continue.”
Dr. Sells regarded first Nikki, then me. Then her eyes flitted to the back of the room, as if she was puzzling out a complex problem from memory. “Sara was struck by bullets that were made up of matter. Matter is simply a form of energy. Her body is now highly attuned to all energy, and can manipulate it at will. You may have heard the term ‘energy load’ or ‘energy dump’ in reference to bullets, and it can be taken quite literally here. Once the initial violation occurred, her own systems mobilized to synthesize the bullets, essentially making them part of her own body in the form of repurposed energy, instead of a solid mass capable of harming her internal tissue, organs, etc. It would have been the equivalent of getting a severe shock, but with no lasting damage.
Nikki whistled. “That’s one way to get your heavy metals.”
“And the disappearance of the other scars?” I asked. “That’s tied to this energy shift?”
To my surprise, Sells merely shrugged. “Possibly. Or it could have happened during any other trauma to the body you’ve experienced since Armaeus made you immortal. You probably retained the veneer of those scars like a layer of outermost skin. With one good electrical jolt, those skin cells would have sloughed off.”
“So she’s immortal. How’d Armaeus make that happen, exactly?” Nikki interjected. “It seems like that should involve a goat sacrifice or something.”
“Nothing so dramatic,” Sells replied with a smile. “The Magician has held his role for over a thousand years and has helped many mortal candidates ascend to their positions as Council members. The next step, to render a human immortal without the further binding to the Council, proved easy enough.”
I lifted my brows. “He’s tried it before?” I asked. “With who?”
“Well, with me, for starters,” she said. “I’ve been a member of the Council’s medical staff since 1952.”
While Nikki devolved into another series of curses involving biblical characters and bicycles, I studied the good doctor. It made sense, I realized. She more than anyone had value to the Council alive and strong, once they’d spilled their secrets to her. And for her to carry around those secrets…
“You haven’t aged in over sixty years?” I asked. “Not at all?”
“Not at all,” she agreed, smiling. “In fact, I reversed the aging process until my body reached age twenty-eight, by any tests I’ve been able to run. My skin occasionally gets damaged from sun and elements, and ages appropriately, until one morning I wake up to find that, in fact, my brow has smoothed out, the laugh lines have disappeared. I routinely get scanned for disease, cancer, skin and joint conditions—and nothing, so far. I’m as healthy as I was when I truly was thirty years old, probably a far sight healthier now, if I’m honest.”
“And you can stop bullets?”
“I make it a practice not to try to find out, but theoretically, yes. I can synthesize foreign objects as energy if forced to do so.” She shrugged. “I’d demonstrate, but getting killed or even injured still hurts. The body is still traumatized by the violation. And the blood loss is very real as well.” She gestured to the sink. “You lost a lot of it.”
“That’s why I got so dizzy,” I said. “Blood loss.”
“It takes a while for the body to react to such a significant trauma,” she said. “When it did, I suspect you adjusted rapidly.”
“She started running,” Nikki put in drily. “Shot full of holes, and she was running. Unbelievable.” She blew out a breath. “So you’re unkillable now. You both are. I’m totally outclassed.”
“Not unkillable,” Sells lifted a hand. “Just not by ordinary matter. You can be killed by magic, which is essentially extreme doses of energy. In that event, your system will overload—short out, if you will.”
“As if I’ve been electrocuted,” I said, thinking about how badly I’d hurt after my date with Tesla’s spear during my last astral travel session. A session I’d taken without the benefit of Death’s pure silver.
“Probably the closest way of explaining it, yes. If you get hit with a large enough influx of magical energy, you will die. Your body won’t be able to compensate for that, there will be nowhere for the energy to run off to. It will remain within the confines of your flesh and bones, and overwhelm you.”
“So you’ll fry,” Nikki summed up. Her face looked a little whiter now.
>
“You’ll fry,” Sells agreed. “I’ve seen it happen only a few times, but it was enough for me to commit myself to a strict code of conduct where the Council was concerned. I serve the Magician, and only the Magician. I am his employee. Accordingly, any crime against me is a crime against him, and none of the other Council members or anyone else with sufficient magical ability has seen fit to invite his displeasure.” She cracked a grim smile. “I’ve found that’s worked out well.”
“And you’re looking pretty great for pushing ninety,” Nikki observed drily.
That caught my attention. “There’s research going on now to reverse the aging process, isn’t there? Human research. Labs in Silicon Valley.”
“Not just Silicon Valley,” Sells said. “There are locations worldwide—Zurich, Tokyo, Oslo. The work is proving unusually promising of late.”
I thought about what I’d encountered in Silicon Valley, with Tesla and his energy field. “Because Tesla’s involved with it? I assume you know about the Hanged Man and his research.”
“The Magician keeps me apprised.” She nodded. “There are two issues for humanity reaching its greatest potential. The first is their inability to access their full mental and psychic abilities. The second is humans’ regrettably short lifespan. It would appear that Tesla is finding ways to circumvent both.”
“It would appear.” I squinted at her. “You’re rooting for Tesla, aren’t you?”
Dr. Sells chuckled. “I serve the Magician, Miss Wilde. I don’t root for anything that he doesn’t truly need.” She tilted her head, regarding me steadily. “But our focus here is on you. I can do a full scan on your body, but I can already tell you what I’ll find: perfection. You’re perfectly healed.”
“That is so cool,” Nikki breathed.
I grimaced. “Right. So to sum up, then, being immortal means that I’m not killable by traditional means, I don’t age, I heal immediately-ish, and I can heal others.”
“Not the last.” She waved off my immediate protest. “Your healing ability was born of your psychic ability in and of itself. It’s augmented by your immortality, yes, because that magic is being channeled through a perfect cell structure. But you could do it before.” She gestured to me. “You did do it before, in fact. Ma-Singh, just not completely.”
I nodded. Armaeus had said the same thing, but strangely, I believed the words more when coming from Dr. Sells. “Anything else I need to know? Do I still have to eat, sleep, that sort of thing?”
“You’ll find that sleeping makes you stronger and not eating makes you weak,” Dr. Sells said. “Much like when you were mortal. Everything else is largely the same. And to be clear, you can be killed by some traditional means. If your body is dismembered and incinerated—”
“Got it, got it,” I said, lifting my hands.
She nodded. “Your abilities are magnified somewhat because, again, your cellular structure has been improved, and that forms the cradle of your abilities. But you won’t suddenly manifest skills you didn’t have before. You’ll simply be better at the ones you do have—and perhaps you’ll notice some that you didn’t realize you had but were always there.”
“Good enough,” I said. “And the reverse switch? Do you know how you can go back, should you ever wish to do so?”
“I won’t wish to do so,” she said firmly. “The first lifetime was difficult, watching my friends die, having to disguise myself enough to pass as their peers until there was no one left. Since then, it’s arguably a lonelier existence, but loneliness was never an issue for me.”
“Didn’t answer the question.”
“The Magician,” she said summarily. “He was the agent of your immortality; he is the sole agent of your mortality. Much as you, Miss Wilde gave him the cup of mortality to escape a magical wound that was overwhelming his body, and then were the agent of his own magic resurging to regain his immortality.” She waved a hand. “Magic is most often a very simple construct. He who gives is almost always he who takes away.”
“So I need to ask him to set me free, and he’ll do it.”
“Technically speaking, yes. Of course, the Magician is…inscrutable. You are arguably one of the strongest humans he’s ever rendered immortal, without you proceeding on to ascend to the Council. I myself have no Connected ability of any merit, and yet my skills as a surgeon and my abilities to accurately diagnose and treat a wide range of Connected maladies have dramatically improved since I achieved immortality. But I don’t have true abilities. Magical abilities. From everything I know of him, I cannot imagine the Magician would give up the opportunity to study the impact of your immortality on those abilities anytime soon.”
I didn’t think so either, and a thread of unease snaked through me. Sells walked over to the sink and picked up the tank top. For the first time, I noticed her hands were gloved. She might be immortal, but it didn’t mean she played things fast and loose.
“I can run some tests on your blood if you would like specific information on the differences between your pre- and post-immortality counts,” she said, holding up the shirt. “Probably a good idea for a baseline, regardless.”
“Fine,” I said, and she pulled a clear bag from the drawer, dropping the shirt inside it. “So, you started working for the Magician in the 1950s. You didn’t know the Hanged Man.”
“Not in person, no. I was a medical professional at the time, though as a field nurse and later a private nurse. I was aware of Nikola Tesla from that vantage point. It was only after I began working with the Council that I understood his greater role.”
“And he’s made up of pure electricity right now, no body at all,” I said.
“Correct.”
“Does that make him more powerful than the Magician?”
She stopped what she was doing and turned, her brows lifted at the question. But she didn’t speak at first. At length, she nodded. “It’s a reasonable conclusion. My initial response would be, of course, that no member of the Council is stronger than the Magician, by virtue of his position as leader. But Tesla has not been corporeal for decades. He has been living in a field of pure energy—though not unlimited energy. He’s been constrained by the developments of human technology.”
And ego, I realized. If I hadn’t baited him with his own ego, I’d probably still be stuck in his little electrical salad spinner.
Sells finished zipping up the plastic bag and shucked her gloves as well, dropping those in the biohazard container before pulling a new set from a drawer. “When Tesla returns to bodily form, there is some question as to how powerful he will be. At that point, could he be as strong as the Magician? Perhaps.” She nodded. “Perhaps.”
“Then why would Armaeus bring him back?” Nikki interjected, her brow furrowing.
“Well, that answer, at least, is easy,” Sells said. “He needs him.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sells lifted the bag full of my disgusting shirt. “I’ll be right back.”
The moment the doctor stepped out the door, Nikki turned toward me. I remembered her excitement when she’d first walked in the room. That excitement returned now, fourfold.
“So, Dixie is hyperventilating with worry,” she said quickly. “Brody showed up after the patrol cars hit, responding to the shooting, nothing else. Turns out the raid was a test of her ability to keep her mouth shut, and she technically failed, though he doesn’t know it yet.”
I shook my head, trying to follow. “Failed how?”
“He figured she would go into the building again, make a stir, clear out any Connecteds, exactly what she’d asked us to do. He was on his way to bust her when the 9-1-1 call came in about the shooting in the parking lot. He hit the place, sirens wailing, the same time the patrol cars did, and whad’ya know, no Dixie, no anyone, nothing but a guy weakly flailing on the ground beside his car, his firearm discharged and shell casings and spent bullets all over the place, beat to shit, no one able to remember nothing, no how.”
I frowned. �
��Security cameras?”
“Not functional, either inside the lobby or trained on the parking lot, which is a lucky break.” She grimaced. “I’m not a huge fan of lucky breaks.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Who’s the guy with the gun?”
“They’ll ask him as soon as they unwire his jaw,” she said, eyeing me reproachfully. “Remind me not to piss you off, by the way.”
“Well, don’t unload a bunch of rounds into my belly. So why’s Dixie upset? It sounds like she got out clean.”
“Because you got shot at—shot at, importantly, not shot. She said she was in the beauty supplies shop, never saw us arrive, never saw anything until an aspiring nail tech screamed that there was a man with a gun. She burst out of the store, saw us running for the hills, couldn’t make sense of the scene. She mainly needed to get the hell out of there before Brody found her lurking around. She’s convinced he knows something is up, but she’s not talking and he’s, so far, not asking.”
“Well, tell her to find out who the shooter was.” I tilted my head. “She doesn’t know I was shot, is what you’re telling me. You didn’t tell her.”
Nikki shrugged. “This whole thing feels too hinky all of a sudden.”
“You got someone to wipe down the van and return it?”
“Please. After all those years in law enforcement, I know how to vacate a vehicle without leaving behind DNA. I called in a favor from a couple of buddies while you were getting checked out. The van will be found two blocks from the MedTech building by the guy who lost it in about…” She checked her watch, “fifteen minutes. Needless to say, he will most likely elect not to allow his outrage at getting a beat down from a girl develop to the point where he had to admit his own error in losing control of his vehicle. I’m not sure what was in the van, but chances are it wasn’t something that would be safe cruising around the back streets of the Vegas suburbs.”
I nodded. “So all we have is a building we weren’t supposed to be at, in advance of a raid that was never supposed to happen. We approach the building, shooter comes out, and, with very little provocation, unloads his gun at me.” I paused, considering all that, not liking the calculus. “We should go visit the poor man in the hospital.”