by Tricia Owens
I spent a few more minutes with her, talking about inconsequential things she’d seen on the television. She fell asleep soon after because the suppressant that blocked her projection abilities kept her perpetually tired.
After ensuring her room’s door locked securely behind me, I went in search of Nurse Melody. I found her at an open cabinet, stacking bed sheets and blankets.
“She’s doing better,” she told me. “But the partial dose I gave her will wear off soon. Maybe as soon as tomorrow.”
A mental countdown began in my head. “I’ll get the money for the next dose, don’t worry.”
She smiled. “I know you will. You’re a wonderful granddaughter to her.”
That was debatable if I failed to complete this job for Tower and earn the bounty.
“I wanted to know…” I motioned at the door. “How many people have access to her room? The code to the lock, I mean.”
Nurse Melody considered the question. Then she looked both ways down the hallway to ensure that we were alone.
“It might comfort you to know that she’s not the only one here,” she said beneath her breath, so quietly I had to lean in to hear her.
“Well, I know there are three wings—”
“No, I’m not speaking of regular residents. Dandelion has a reputation for privacy and security, as you know. You weren’t the only family member to decide this would make a safe place to keep a war veteran.” When my eyes widened with understanding, she nodded. “Our protocols are strict. That keypad you saw also requires fingerprint identification on each button. Every employee has submitted theirs to Dandelion. Only Director Endicott and the nurses and orderlies who are approved for the day are programmed into the system for her door and given the code, which changes daily. That double fail safe keeps her as protected as can be.”
“I didn’t know that any other fighters remained in Victory City. I thought they were all institutionalized outside the borders.”
“Only one,” Nurse Melody confirmed. “He’s not like Elise, though. His condition is—he’s unfortunately quite angry. Traumatized. The treatment they administered to him after the war did the opposite of calming him down, and it’s a shame to see. He can’t let it go.”
Nurse Melody shook her head in apparent dismay. I saw her gaze flick to the right, to a short hallway with only three doors. I didn’t ascribe anything to it until she gave me a meaningful look.
Taking the hint, I quickly moved down the hall. Two of the doors were windowless so I moved to the third, which was the only one with a covered viewing window. Beside the door, two hooks on the wall carried white jumpsuits made of a shiny material. They were curious, but I wanted to see inside the room. I slid the covering aside and peered through the glass.
It was a room much smaller than my grandmother’s. The walls were made of brushed steel. A large intake vent hung in the center of the ceiling, surrounded by a dozen or so sprinkler heads. The only furniture was a metal cot covered with a rubber or foam mattress. A man dressed in plain pajamas sat cross-legged atop the mattress, his back to the door.
I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t need to in order to identify him. The floating ball of flame in the center of the room told me who he was—or rather, who he had been: The Pyrologist.
His powers had been a thousand times more powerful than Snelling’s, and with the scientist’s magical DNA enhancement he’d been turned inflammable, inside and out.
The man who had stood on the roof of City Hall and burned down hordes of demons with a tidal wave of flame now apparently spent his days in a room made of metal, spinning a six foot floating globe of fire.
I was sickened for his sake, and furious.
As though he could sense my emotions through the door, he turned his head, just enough to put it in profile. Though his hair was pure white and his skin drooped and was heavily veined, his features were tense, as though he were grinding his teeth to hold back a scream.
And then he did scream, and the fire ball in the center of the room exploded outwards. I yelped and fell away from the window as fire burst over the surface of the glass. I heard an alarm and running feet. Nurse Melody rushed up to me.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” I insisted as an orderly rushed up and unlocked the door using the keycode. Before he entered, he pulled one of the jumpsuits off a hook and stepped into it. He opened the door.
Heat didn’t bellow out like I expected. The large, humming vent in the ceiling had done its job. Nurse Melody donned the second jumpsuit and joined the orderly already in the room. I dared to approach the doorway. As Nurse Melody and the orderly tried to calm the still screaming man, I leaned in and looked around
The flame globe had seared black sooty images into the walls from floor to ceiling. Somehow the fire had burned details as clean as any woodcut. Agape, I studied scenes that I recognized instantly from black market photographs that Wolfgang had showed me. The difference was that these scenes were from a low perspective, as if they belonged to someone sitting or lying on the ground.
This must have been the perspective of The Pyrologist immediately following the final battle. These were genuine images of a city only recently destroyed. No victory flags colored the sky, no banners of hope and congratulations had yet been hung. It would be another two days before the city was renamed Victory City and the clean-up would begin, both within the city and within the military and government. In this single moment burned upon the walls, the victory could have been mistaken for defeat.
The black market photographs I’d seen hadn’t shown this many corpses. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay piled everywhere, ten foot high mountains of what had once been humans, demons, and cohabs. Cars were overturned or torn in half. Buildings had been brought down to their foundations or were mere shells gutted by the rising water.
I leaned in further and turned my head to follow the diorama all the way around. It was a relief to see survivors in it, though none appeared to be members of the public. I saw shell-shocked soldiers, and two people whom I thought might be freedom fighters because of the attention being paid to them. There were also military leaders gathered near a truck. Many were in grim discussion with each other, but many more formed a sort of human wall, blocking what was happening at the back of the opened vehicle. Because of The Pyrologist’s low perspective, I could see that a man with his wrists shackled, his clothes torn, and a hood pulled over his head was being shoved into the back of the truck.
“Arrow, you can’t be in here,” Nurse Melody said urgently, pushing me out of the room.
I went easily, mumbling an apology. After one last look at the now mumbling Pyrologist, I hurried out of Dandelion. Out front, I checked the shadows again, but my mind was partly back in that metal room with the burned diorama. The war had been devastating, involving magic, planetary catastrophe, and demons. Only one man, Dr. Febrero, had been responsible for all of it and he had been killed in the final battle.
So who, then, had been that man in the hood? Who had the government hidden away from us? A secret fighter? An unnamed accomplice of Febrero’s? Why didn’t anyone know?
~~~~~
Endicott tapped his fingers atop his desk blotter. “Did you do this deliberately, Melody?”
His trusted staff member ducked her head and studied her shoes. “I didn’t know that this would happen, Henry.”
They were alone in his office with the door closed, so no one heard the breach of protocol. No one called him Henry except his wife, and since the divorce was about to be finalized he doubted he would hear it much longer from her, either. But that was fine now that he could hear it from Melody.
When he’d first entered the health care industry he’d expected to go into nursing. He enjoyed bringing peace and happiness to the underprivileged and the abandoned. He traced the compulsion to the fact that he was adopted and had never been able to shed the devastating knowledge that the two people who should have wanted him the most had not. Here, he
dealt with those who had been abandoned at the end of their lives rather than at the beginning, yet it seemed a good fit for him.
But as a human who’d tested dormant, nursing jobs had been difficult to get. They tended to go to those with magic skill. The only path available to him had been the lower paying administration one. Even as the director he earned less than many of his nurses. The salary didn’t bother him as much as being kept apart from personally helping people. It was disappointing, but he’d made it a point to frequently visit the residents of Dandelion and try to administer his own brand of healing within the constraints of his position.
The fighters, however, were proving to be a challenge. What had happened today, while quickly controlled by his staff, was another example of why Dandelion might not be as equipped to handle these special residents as he’d promised. He hoped he wouldn’t reach the point of having to demand their removal because he believed that they in particular had been cruelly abandoned.
“I’m sorry,” Melody went on. “I was only trying to help. I thought that Arrow needed to know.”
He sighed. He felt bad that Melody appeared so stricken. While she was guilty he couldn’t punish her. Not when he understood her motives completely.
“The war is over,” he said quietly.
She nodded, still staring at her shoes.
“That’s what they tell us,” he added.
She looked up, hope crouching in her eyes.
“Elise may be too far gone to help herself,” he said. “Harrison, too. He’s a living bomb at this point.”
“But Arrow,” Melody blurted.
“Yes. Arrow.”
Endicott had run Dandelion for nine years. He wasn’t sure if he’d make it to an even ten. Back before the two freedom fighters had been moved into his care he would have predicted a long, boring career for himself. Not any longer. He’d grown something perhaps worse than a spine: he’d grown a conscience.
Damn him for giving a damn.
“She’s old enough. Hopefully powerful enough.” He pictured the fire starter’s room whose walls had been washed down, hiding the evidence of a truth not many did or should know. What could Endicott do? Continue to lie to himself that a great injustice hadn’t occurred? Look the other way while he knew that it was still occurring? He might be poorly paid and non-magical, but that didn’t make him a coward. Or an accomplice to deceit.
He placed his hand briefly on Melody’s shoulder. “You did the right thing,” he assured her. “Now it’s up to her.”
And we cross our fingers that we aren’t betrayed.
Because Lord knew, it was what this city did best.
“Oh, hello.”
Startled, Endicott looked past Melody’s shoulder at the young woman who had flung open the door of his office as though she owned the place.
“Are you the boss?” she asked before snapping her gum between her teeth.
“Pardon me, but do you have an appointment?” he demanded of her, annoyed because he knew she didn’t. “Please return to the lobby and visit the reception desk. Arlene will be happy to assist you.”
“I’m betting Arrow doesn’t bother with Arlene at Reception, does she?”
A cold certainty crept into Endicott’s bones. He assessed the woman closer this time, noting the silver tattoos on her legs, the shimmery color a result of ferrous magic. She was an Electro-Magnetist, a rather rare talent for all the wrong reasons. As someone with access to medical journals he was aware that the majority of EMs were mentally unstable due to metal poisoning.
This young woman appeared to fit the profile.
Altering his tone so it was conciliatory, he said, “Perhaps I can assist you. I’m Henry Endicott, the director.”
“Perfect.” The red-haired woman slammed the door shut behind her and gave him and Melody a sharp grin. “I need some answers and you lovely people are going to give them to me.”
Melody shot a look of distress at him before shaking her head emphatically at the young woman. “Everything here is confidential. We won’t—”
A snap of the fingers. Endicott had seen it during training videos, but never in person. The sudden ozonic scent, the static tension in the air that lifted the hairs on his arms—he opened his mouth to shout a warning.
He was too late.
The white bolt appeared out of nowhere and struck Melody square in the chest. A spot as black as pitch exploded across the white front of her uniform. Her body stiffened and jerked in a horrible way before it tumbled to the floor where it lay, twitching.
“Melody!” he choked out.
“Try CPR,” the red-haired woman said casually as she buffed her nails on her sleeve. “Sometimes it works. Not often, but…”
Endicott didn’t need to be told twice. With a cry, he dove to Melody’s side and began compressions. As he worked over her, tears in his eyes, her attacker glided to his side and stroked a hand through his hair.
“While you’re doing that, you can answer some questions for me, hmm?”
Chapter 11
I raced back to the parking lot of the supermarket, brimming with questions. But to my frustration, the Center for Living Resistance had moved on. Wolfgang did that whenever he felt antsy or when he believed he was being spied upon. His timing for paranoia couldn’t have been worse. I rode around for nearly an hour, checking all the major parking lots, but I didn’t spy the colorful RV. The mystery of the hooded man would have to wait until I could locate my friend another day.
It was difficult to let go of something so tantalizing, but I had to remind myself that I couldn’t become mired in the past. I had trouble here in the present involving this shadow killer that I needed to deal with, or else I’d be doing my conspiracy theorizing while in prison. And with Dandelion demanding money…I couldn’t afford to spend time on a tangent.
Fortunately, I had just enough money left over from Tower’s advance to hire an information agent. The problem was that I could only pay for so much.
I looked over the pricing chart at the street kiosk. “How much to learn about specific news items in the last month?”
The agent, a young man with dark skin and a bushy beard that he obsessively plucked at, sighed and didn’t quite roll his eyes but it was a close thing. “That’s not how it works. You pay on a sliding scale depending on how much confidence you want in the information.
“If you want news based on up to five keywords and which has been confirmed by one to two sources, this is your price for the Bronze Package.” He leaned forward and pointed his pen at a line on the chart. “If you want more keywords—up to ten—and confirmation by three to five sources, you pay for the Silver Package. Ten or more keywords and five or more sources—the full confidence Gold Package. The Gold Package also comes with two photos or one transcript, depending on the nature of the news item.”
“These prices are higher than last time,” I complained, though in saying that, I realized the last time I’d paid for news was around the time I’d pulled my grandmother out of government care. Ever since, I’d relied on Wolfgang or rumors at school to inform me.
“The truth costs,” the agent said with a careless shrug.
“And that’s the problem, isn’t it?” I shot back.
Another shrug. “You could always use the online news channels.” He tried and failed to keep a straight face. Everyone knew the internet had been co-opted by the government years ago.
I felt humiliated and dumb. Also poor. The connection didn’t escape me. “I’ll take two of the Bronze,” I mumbled as I handed over the last of my spare cash. “How good will these sources be?”
“Good confidence for general conversation, not recommended for use in school papers or work related publications. If you’d like a veracity guarantee with high confidence, that only comes with the Gold Package.”
I waved him off and filled out the keyword forms he gave me. In five minutes, I had three articles between my two packages. I rode to the empty lot of a liquor store and
sat there to read.
The information started out iffy. It stated that the homeless man had attacked only one teenager when my other sources claimed it was two. I hoped that the rest of the information was more trustworthy.
I learned that Snelling’s secretary Bedelia had a last name of Hartley. Something tickled my mind. A connection had to exist between her and the mailman, Lou Blueheart, and the teenagers, Kora Wynn and...who was the second?
I snapped my fingers. “Adam Manhartz, that’s—”
My eyes widened. “Of course,” I whispered to myself. It had required speaking Adam Manhartz’s name aloud to recognize the connection.
Bedelia Hartly.
Lou Blueheart.
Adam Manhartz.
Someone was killing people whose last name included some derivation of ‘heart.’ I felt energized at having caught it, but what did it mean? Those surnames were different enough to nix any hope that the family lines were connected, but somehow they were connected. At least, as long as my information was correct.
From my second info pack I learn that Marcus Morrison’s body had been found in his office at Filkmore Academy with a gunshot wound to the face. Medical records had been used to identify him because he’d been unrecognizable. The police claimed to have possession of the murder weapon and a suspect, though they didn’t name me, at least not in these sources. Again, something to be taken with a grain of salt.
I didn’t doubt that Morrison had been shot, but I strongly doubted that it was the reason for his death. I also doubted that he’d been found at school. My money was on the immediate vicinity around Ozium.
I left the parking lot and headed to the Sinistera. From there I walked across the street to the bar. In the daytime, it was difficult to recall the unease I’d felt that night as I’d attempted to confront the shadow creature. Had it been too tired from its recent murder of Morrison to attack me, also? Perhaps I’d been incredibly lucky that night. Drunk as I’d been, I doubted I would have been able to fight it off the way I’d done in Snelling’s kitchen.