I shrug off her hand, but put up both of mine. “I know this isn’t your fault,” I say to Melinda, shooting a look to Jax, who steps down her protective alert mode. “I’m just… outraged.” I know that hospital errors occur—I’m sure they happened long before life energy hits were around to help fix them—but there’s something even worse about it when they have the power to sweep it away with a convenient visit from the government’s grim reapers.
Jax and Melinda are waiting for me to say something more, but I’m still trying to calm the righteous anger inside me. “You said surgical site infection.” I take a breath to settle the storm. “Where exactly?”
Melinda shuffles us closer to the patient. “Gall bladder removal.” She points to the man’s belly, just below his ribs, on the right side. “It’s not just the abdomen cut, but the bile duct and severed blood vessels. There’s massive infection throughout the area.”
I nod. “Can you remove the bandage?”
Melinda frowns and glances at Jax. “Yes.” She’s cautious, wondering where I’m going with this.
I hold up my own hands. The same life energy that’s making my face glow has given a vibrant fullness to my palms and fingers as well. But I’m sure they’re filled with germs. “I’ll need to scrub up, but if I can transfer directly at the point of the wound, it may help fight the infection better. Since it’s somewhat localized.”
Her eyes get large. She nods rapidly, then sets about lifting the hospital gown of the unconscious man and removing his bandage. Jax tugs me to the sink on the far side of the room and hands me disinfecting soap to scrub up. I wash three times, rubbing until my fingers are raw, then dry on a disposable towel Jax hands me. I’m careful not to touch anything until I return to the patient.
The wound is ugly, angry red puffs of flesh billowing out from where the invisible surgical threads hold the sliced skin together. I know that any life energy hit gives a little extra flush of health right at the entry point into the body—I’ve seen it with the kids at Madam A’s, where I could give their scrapes and small cuts a life energy kiss that actually made a difference. And back in the recesses of my mind, I’m thinking about Madam A’s new debt collector, Lirium, and his ability to keep the life energy from distributing throughout the body, so he can actually heal their wound or disease locally.
I have no idea how he does that. But the mere fact that he does makes me want to try. I place my hand gently on the man’s surgical wound and trickle energy in. I close my eyes, feeling past the transfer point and trying to imagine how I could keep the life energy contained in this smallish area of infection. But the man is so far gone, he’s like parched ground when the summer rains finally come. I open the trickle to a small gush, and his body soaks it up. I can’t even begin to contain it, but I know it’s at least passing through and thoroughly dousing the wound area. The mercy hit starts to burn good and clean inside me. I let myself breathe it in, reveling just a moment before I start to pull back. I can’t afford to drain myself to the bones like I did before. And with any luck, this patient won’t need it.
When I stop the hit, open my eyes, and lift my hand, I’m amazed: the swelling has shrunk and the red has all but disappeared. A hand grabs my upper arm—it belongs to Melinda, and her other hand is covering her broad smile while tears glass her eyes.
I want to smile back, but the nausea hits, and I grab onto Jax instead. She holds me up.
“Need to go,” I say.
Jax slips an arm around my waist and hauls me from the room. I make the mistake of catching my reflection in a mirror on the way out and get a flash of what she sees: blackened eyes, sunken cheeks, dried lips. Wyatt would think I was half dead already.
I try to straighten as we pass the nursing station, but I’m not sure it matters. We’re almost to the elevator when my palm tones a message. The only people who message me are Jax and Wyatt, so I know who it is, but I wait until I get to the elevator to check. I’m in no shape to call him back, and even a message is problematic: I have no idea what to say to Wyatt at this point. But I can’t help but look once the doors close.
Time to meet. The sender profile is someone named Zachariel, which is either Wyatt taking on the world’s most old-fashioned nickname or…
Oh no.
“Who is it?” Jax asks.
Sending coordinates. The GPS location scrolls past. The elevator starts to descend, but that’s not what makes the bottom drop out of my stomach. The estimated distance on the coordinates is so close they could be riding in the elevator with us. Definitely near the hospital. Which means they know exactly where I am. My heart lurches, wondering if I can get away from Jax before they find me. Somehow keep her out of this.
I release her and brace my shoulder against the wall. “Remember those debt collectors I told you about?” My words are wheezy. The mirrored metallic finish of the elevator mocks me with a distorted ghost-like reflection. Like my days aren’t simply numbered, but already expired.
“How did they get your private line?” Her voice ticks up another level of alarm.
I just shake my head. Maybe I can run. Or hide. I just need an hour or two to recover from this mercy hit…
My palm tones again.
I grit my teeth and hold it up to see.
Ten minutes. Don’t make us come to you.
“Shit,” I say, leaning my forehead against the cool steel of the wall. No time to recover. No time to run. They’ll just come after me, anyway, that much I’m sure of. If they can slash my palm phone, they can track me. Or worse… they’ll just skip all that and go direct to Sterling.
I twist my head from where it’s pressed against the wall and peek at Jax. “I don’t suppose you have that gun with you?”
She gives me a look like I’m crazy. Of course. No one could get a gun past security in a hospital. Far too many people would like to use one on the debt collectors coming for their loved ones. Damn it.
I brace against the wall again, well enough that I can tap into my palm screen.
I’ll be there.
Jax is watching me, judging me with her scowled looks. Even though she knows all my secrets, she doesn’t really understand what’s at stake. How much I have to lose. Or how little, depending on how you look at it. They’re either going to expose me or kill me.
And given those options, I know Jax wouldn’t approve of the choice I would make.
Once Jax and I reach the lobby and then the street, I realize the coordinates for my meetup with the Gehenna people is somewhere in the ring of support medical businesses that surround the hospital. Every med complex has these smaller buildings clustered around the towering central behemoth of the hospital—they provide therapies for patients whose hospital visit didn’t end with a debt collection. Or sometimes even those who do: racking up medical bills is how most people become so indebted that their life’s potential no longer earns them the right to keep living it.
What I can’t imagine is why these rogue debt collectors want to meet here.
Jax and I make it to the line of taxis outside the hospital main entrance. The nausea of the mercy payout is fading enough that I can stand on my own, but she’s still giving me looks of concern.
“I’m not armed with much more than my fists at the moment,” she says, “but I can throw a decent punch.” It chokes me up a bit that she wants to help, even though we both know it would be pointless: without a weapon, she’s defenseless against debt collectors.
“I don’t pay you enough to risk your life,” I say with a small smile. Then I show her the coordinates. “Besides, it’s in a med building. They can’t cause too much trouble there.” We both know that’s a far stretch from the truth, but it sounds good.
She just shakes her head. “Give me some time. I can pull in some favors. You don’t have to walk into these asshole’s den all alone, just because they called.”
“I don’t have any time, Jax.” I suck in a breath, willing my body to recover more quickly from the payout. Strolling
into this situation already half-beaten-up isn’t going to help. “They’ll come for me if I don’t go to them. At least this way, I’ll give the impression I’m badass enough to march in and face them.”
Jax snorts. “Badass… you look like a kitten on a bad run of skeet.”
I grimace. “Then I’ll just have to be smarter than they are.”
She sighs. “Just… call me when you talk your way out of this one, Wraith. Don’t leave me with nothing to say when Melinda calls tonight to ask how you are.”
I grin and pull her into a brief one-arm hug, then nudge her toward a nearby cab. “Get out of here. I can handle this. I’ll be fine.” I say it so she’ll leave, not because either one of us believes it’s true.
Once the cab is pulling away, I unlock the information Jax gave me on Gehenna and skim it as I hobble along the sidewalk in the direction of the coordinates. There isn’t much data: the picture is some biblical scene of torment and hellfire, and the text says Gehenna was possibly an actual ancient place that practiced child-sacrifice. A group of debt collectors who are in love with the idea of death: shocking.
What I don’t get is what they want with me.
The coordinates say I’ve arrived, so I close out my palm and look up. I’m standing in front of a holistic healing clinic called Reiki Energetic Therapies. I squint at the weathered sign and check my palm again: this is the place.
It’s tiny and seedy compared to its neighboring clinics of glass and chrome. This one’s just a narrow store-front with a door that’s peeling paint and a frosted-over window hand-painted with a tawdry illustration of their services: a bare-chested therapist strategically placing his hands on a woman’s unclothed body. It could be an advertisement for sex services, except those are legal, whereas the neon-lit list of therapies below the picture generally aren’t: acupuncture, biofield therapies, magnetic stress reduction, therapeutic touch. They’re all on the Department of Life and Health’s list of “fictional medicine” and quickly became illegal once debt collection was instituted. It wasn’t so much that the government cared if a medical procedure worked—the bureaucrats simply preferred to have you rack up medical debts with approved, expensive therapies. But a few of these service providers are still around, having earned an exemption from the bureaucratic morass with a freedom of religion claim. Apparently laying hands on people to manipulate their life energy actually predates the vaccine-gone-wrong that produced debt collectors in the first place. Now that it’s mutated and entered the gene pool, the unlucky ones like me who actually express the debt collector gene are tightly controlled—it’s not like an actual debt collector could set up a shop like this. But an ordinary person, who believes they have that power in their hands? Apparently, yes.
My ten-minute clock is ticking near zero, so I struggle to quickly wrap my head around the idea of rogue debt collectors working with ancient religious practitioners. I had dismissed these alternative therapies as wishful thinking spurred on by the proven existence of life energy. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was precisely the kind of place a debt collector could operate without notice… but to do what exactly?
Somehow I can’t see it being anything good.
I pull open the decrepit wooden door and stride into the murky interior of the clinic, trying to appear confident. My corporate heels click on the chipped, grungy floor tiles. A middle-aged man sits in a cheap plastic chair, his arm around a woman who’s probably his wife. She doesn’t look well. Another woman sits behind a counter that stretches the width of the clinic. She looks up from her screen as I approach. She’s pinch-faced, like she’s practiced a lifetime of disapproval, and her bright-red lips form a pucker of judgment as she looks me over.
“Room twelve,” she says and pushes a button. Part of the counter swings open to let me pass. The door behind her simultaneously slides open, revealing a long hallway with a bend at the end. Everything—the walls, the floor, the counter—is the same dusty, grime-coated off-white color. I stride through, checking for room numbers. The door behind me slides shut and clicks, and the numbers count up toward the end of the hall. Around the corner, at what appears to be the farthest reach of the clinic, is door twelve. Just as I reach it, the door slides open.
Standing at the threshold is tall, dark, and mysterious: the same debt collector who found me at Hughes’s house. His broad frame fills the doorway, blocking my view, and his smirky grin stretches across his face.
“Told you she’d come,” he says over his shoulder. He steps back and sweeps a hand to welcome me into the tiny, off-white room. As far as I can tell, he’s wearing the same black trenchcoat and jackboots as the last time I saw him.
“You could use a new costume,” I say as I brush past him.
“Well, yours is certainly an upgrade.” I ignore the salaciousness in his voice, but quickly move to position myself in the room as best I can. Unfortunately, there’s really nowhere to go: it can’t be more than ten by ten in here. A clinic-style elevated bench crowds one wall, a cabinet with a sink stands across from it, and at the wall opposite the door, a man is seated in the same kind of hard plastic chair as the waiting area. His legs are crossed, and his hands are clasped at his knees. He’s watching me like a snake eyeing a tiny canary who’s just landed within his reach. His trenchcoat is worn and dusty as well, but he’s older than the other collector, maybe mid-thirties.
I angle my body into the farthest corner from the two collectors, but it’s painfully clear I’m not leaving the room unless they want me to.
“Zachariel, I presume?” I ask the seated man.
He smiles, and it’s an indulgent thing, like he finds me amusing and has all the time in the world for such amusements. “No, my name is Moloch,” he says in a crisp British accent. “I’m the one who thinks we should kill you, Ms. Sterling.” He tips his head to tall, dark, and smirky, who no longer has a smirk on his face, but has closed the door and blocked that escape with his body. Just in case I was thinking of running. “Zachariel is the one who thinks you should live.”
“Well, I’m glad we got that straight.” My heart’s pounding, but the adrenaline seems to be fighting off the shakes from the payout, so outwardly, I seem calm. My brain is clicking through the possibilities here—clearly they didn’t simply lure me in to kill me outright, or I would already be dead. I stall while I try to think this through. “Nice place you have here.”
Moloch’s smile grows, and he unlocks his hands from his knees, holding them palm up. They’re crisscrossed with a myriad of red lines, each a thin death-tally carved into his flesh.
I shudder.
Moloch gestures to the dingy walls. “It’s dreary, but we provide a badly needed service. One the government is too afraid to supply, and the mob can’t see beyond its own self-interest to engage in.”
“Life energy trades.” I don’t bother to hold back my disgust, but I can’t help but wonder at the audacity of setting up a collection center in broad daylight. Next to a hospital no less.
“I suppose you could call it a trade, although the small cut we keep for services rendered is gladly paid by those who use our therapies.”
I think of the man and the woman in the waiting room. “You transfer from the healthy to the sick,” I guess.
He tips his head to me. “Well done, Ms. Sterling. A man desires to heal his wife. A mother wishes to save her sick child. Who wouldn’t give their life for someone they love?”
Moloch’s smile twists my stomach, and I suspect he’s never loved anyone a day in his life.
He continues without missing a beat. “How unfortunate that the government sees fit to ban such a thing as private life energy transfers. So… we’re relegated to working in the grime and the shadows, taking our fill from the fetid underbelly of the city. But you’re very familiar with living in the shadows, aren’t you, Ms. Sterling?”
“My name’s Wraith,” I say. “As long as we’re passing out collector names.” I picked my name for the same reason I chose my suit:
to make an impression. I have no idea where Zachariel’s comes from, but it’s obviously a collector name. I remember Moloch’s listed in the information about Gehenna—he’s clearly adopted some kind of persona from that cult-of-death. And his sick desire to feed off the desperation of the poor to save their loved ones somehow fits with all of that.
Moloch stands up from the chair, and I have to fight the urge to back up against the wall. Instead, I flex my hands, making ready for skin contact with one or both of them, if I have to. He takes two steps closer, then simply leans against the counter, folds his arms, and studies me. Zachariel stays by the door. He’s also looking me over—must be my blackened eyes and hollowed cheeks making his brow scrunch up. Last time he saw me, I was fresh off a hit from Hughes.
“Wraith.” Moloch rolls the name around in his mouth like he’s tasting it. “Appropriate, I imagine, for the collector daughter of the most influential anti-collector activist in state. Which makes you quite the conundrum… Wraith. Yet Zachariel seems convinced you might be extremely valuable to Gehenna.”
“All right, then,” I say. “Let’s get to the negotiations part of this distinctly sleazy visit. What do you want?”
Zachariel arches an eyebrow, and his eyes seem to be laughing, but if so, he manages to keep it inside. Moloch’s also amused by my upfront push.
“I said Zachariel seems convinced,” Moloch says. “You’ll have to understand my skepticism, given who your father was and his mission these last twenty-five years. That would be about how old you are, wouldn’t it, Ms. Sterling? After the collectors came for your mother, and sadly now your father, I can’t imagine you feel anything but extreme loathing for debt collectors.”
“Well, I’m certainly not fond of two out of three in this room.” I can’t seem to drag Moloch’s intentions out of him. Which makes a hot sweat break out at the back of my neck. Maybe they’re just toying with me before they finish me off. Although I still can’t understand the why of any of it. Except that my father and I stood for everything anti-whatever-Moloch-is. Death. Casual life energy transfers. Living off the misery of other people’s lives.
The Debt Collector (Season Two) Page 8