Lethal Cure

by S A Gardner

  Oh, it didn’t? Strange, since your faith, and everything else you feel for him seem mighty healthy and back in control.

  Shut up! I swore one day I’d find this exasperating voice inside my head and take a gamma knife to it!

  Had to take one thing at a time. Right now I was all tangled up inside, not knowing what to feel, or where to go from here. One thing I knew. I owed him an answer. As pathetic and uncertain as it was. It was all I had anyway.

  I gave it to him. “I don’t know.” His magnificent head inclined. He turned me fully around, smoothing the bangs out of my inflamed eyes. The gesture, the gentleness and intention behind it slammed into me. My head almost flopped onto his chest.

  I stepped back, plastered my back to the IC wall, glanced up the foot difference in our heights and winced. How could he look like that in the fluorescent lights that made blue-tinged zombies of everyone? I didn’t dare think how it mutilated me right now. On him, the light only struck more power and beauty off masterpiece bone structure, a jade twinkle off golden eyes, and Prussian shimmers off raven hair. And how weird was it that I noticed this now? Moron.

  I exhaled. “We used every intensive supportive measure. His vitals and monitors all indicate he’s sleeping peacefully. Even his EEGs.” Which was a surprise. I’d expected the electroencephalogram to reveal some abnormal brain activity. “No surprises in the past two hours with minor sedation. Lab’s busy with the most comprehensive blood work we’ve done since forever, trying to figure out what’s coursing in his system.”

  “So he’ll be okay?”

  My exhalation was so deep it almost expelled my life force before I inhaled it back in. “I don’t know. It looks that way, but I can’t tell for sure. He surprised us one too many times as we treated him—I can’t even begin to form a diagnosis, let alone a prognosis.”

  “What happened after you disappeared with him in ER?”

  “For a while, nothing, even after he shook off the tranquilizer. He seemed stable if zonked out, as expected. Then suddenly he shot off on a rapid decline. With a new set of symptoms. I rushed with a desperate diagnostic treatment—that’s when the clinical picture strongly suggests a diagnosis we can’t prove, in this case, poisoning with a certain agent, so we administer its antidote, and if it works, it proves our provisional diagnosis—”

  He waved his hand, stopping further explanations. He knew all that already, huh? Okay.

  “Bottom line is, I have no idea if his stabilization indicates that the physostygmine did work, or if he beat this on his own, and—and if there isn’t permanent damage already.”

  He let a beat pass, didn’t contradict that last bit. Smart. Wouldn’t be wise to ply me with unsupported assurances. Then one of his winged eyebrows rose. “Physostygmine? Atropine’s antidote?”

  Both of mine shot up. It never ceased to startle me, the level of his medical expertise. Though it shouldn’t. As a black-ops agent, he had to be versed in emergency medicine for field emergency measures. As an assassin, he had thorough knowledge of every drug and poison this sick world had to offer.

  He pursed his lips, unconvinced. “But his condition didn’t resemble an anticholinergic toxidrome.”

  My shoulders rose in a damned-if-I’ve-figured-out-that-paradox-yet gesture, and wouldn’t fall again. They’d cramped. I was really beyond finished. I groaned, trapped in the spasm. An urgent step had his hands homing in on the foci of agony, pouring comfort into them. My senses leapt, me almost after them, closing the distance I’d put between us.

  Not on your life, De Luna. Or yours, St. James. Move away.

  I did, rotated miraculously relaxed muscles. The man had some serious mojo at his fingertips. Say something.

  It wasn’t easy, with a scraped-raw larynx and a yearning-battered heart.

  I swallowed. “You’re right. I formed this theory that Matt’s condition had two phases. You’ve gotten a good show of what I’m naming ‘phase one,’ the pre-convulsive phase. That was the sympathomimetic toxidrome. The hallucinations, the acute psychosis, the extreme violence and agitation, ending in the seizure. Then came ‘phase two’ post-convulsion. That was the anticholinergic toxidrome.”

  “How could he have two totally different toxic syndromes?”

  I sighed. “We combed through every database of drugs and poisons for drug interaction, side effects, overdoses, idiosyncratic and allergic reactions—the works—to look for something that may develop both clinical pictures in different stages—and nada. Of course. We didn’t really expect to find one. No drug ever changes its mode of action in mid-stride that way.”

  He stuffed his hands in his back pockets, spreading his legs wider. Seemed he was wrestling with the inconsistencies and finding no convincing way out, too. “Hmm. Could it have been an anticholinergic drug overdose all along? Most hallucinogens and incapacitating agents have atropine-like manifestations—anxiety, disorientation, hallucinations, convulsions, even coma.”

  Yup. Sure had his assassin business down pat. I shook my head. “All poisonings end in those, in the terminal stages. It’s the starting symptoms that differentiate the agents. And he didn’t have anticholinergic symptoms to start with.”

  “Could you have been too agitated to notice?”

  “Four words, Damian. Pale and sweaty before convulsions, flushed and bone-dry after.” Okay, so more than four. I meant two diagnostic symptoms per syndrome. Pale sweaty. Flushed dry.

  He nodded. “I did notice how pale and sweaty he was, in this cold, too. Even crossed my mind that it was a bad case of adrenaline rush. That is the original sympathomimetic syndrome. But no one overdoses on their natural adrenaline. So—he went flushed and dry on you later. Hmm. Could it have been two drugs, then? An immediate if short-acting one kicking in first, then, after he convulsed, the delayed-action drug taking over?”

  Damian’s ordered deductive process focused my own short-circuiting one. “That may be the only answer to explain the switch in symptoms. Yet two things don’t gel. First, for one of the known sympathomimetics, like methamphetamine or Ecstasy, to produce such violent mental symptoms to the extent that he no longer recognized us, it must have been an overdose and should have distorted his other perceptions, too. Not so. He had perfect coordination on a ledge four floors up, for God’s sake.”

  Damian nodded. “Yeah, someone on such a bad trip would have been physically incapacitated by the warping of all his other senses. And the second?”

  “The time frame. Any of the agents capable of producing his symptoms have a short onset of action. From minutes to at most a few hours. So even if I consider the onset of symptoms started with his driving stint from hell, or even during his ultra-violence during our blitz on the white-slavery auction, his exposure would still have to have occurred in the hours prior to our receiving Juan’s call. And that’s still out. Me and Lucia were with him at least six hours before any of that took place.”

  We’d been playing Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit all night. And he’d been calm, collected, beating the crap out of us, and in the best mood I’d seen him in ages. Oh, Matt…

  “Is it a possibility it was self-inflicted?”

  Damian’s question jolted through me. “You mean suicide?”

  He let a second pass, then shrugged. “An experiment. An attempt to make his load easier to bear. Matt lives with a kind of pain I can’t even imagine.” His lids lowered, obscuring his expression. Then he raised them, catching me in a blast of hellish fear and aggression. “Or I can. It makes me contemplate massacres.”

  I jerked away. He wouldn’t let me, pinning me to the wall, dragging me into a ride through his tormented imagination where I was in Matt’s wife’s place, suffering her gruesome fate, then deeper in hell to experience what he’d feel, do….

  Get out of my mind! I can’t handle more heartache. Not now.

  He must have felt the unvoiced plea, decided to spare me. He let me go, lowering fists to his side. “Matt must be a far stronger man than me. I would have lost
it a lot sooner.”

  “No! He didn’t lose it. No freaking way would he pollute his system with anything that would tamper with his reason and control. You wouldn’t even think it if you saw his murderous hatred of all drugs, and their manufacturers and peddlers. Even without that, he’d never do this to himself. To us.”

  “Even if he’d reached his limit.”

  “No!”

  Damian just nodded. Accepting my inarguable knowledge of my friend and his limits and reactions? Seemed so. Was I so sure?

  Yes, you are. This is Matt!

  “So self-inflicted is out,” he said, cool once more as he stabbed his hand into his hair, the longest I’d ever seen it, lying thick on his collar. “And accidental exposure is too much of a stretch. Then it has to have been intentional exposure. Any enemy you can think of who had access to him?”

  “We’re a deeply covert operation. Our enemies don’t exactly have our names and addresses.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  My next scheduled breath never made it.

  Was this just a you-never-know-so-never-feel-too-safe kind of comment? Or did he mean that since both he and Sir Ashton had breached our shields, that anyone else could? Had? That we could already be in someone’s bull’s-eye?

  But we’d gone to extremes to tighten our security ever since our return from Russia, pouring excessive resources into maintaining our invisibility. We’d changed our L.A. Sanctuary’s location three times in the past four months.

  So was it not working? Did he know something I didn’t? Would he keep something that critical from me if he did?

  Critical my foot! It would be catastrophic. It would be the end.

  Damian, seemingly unaware of the chaos his remark had caused, went on pursuing his deduction process. “Let’s start breaking down your movements recently, stressing Matt’s. It’s probably payback from one of the drug cartels you’re so fond of decimating.”

  “How could they have reached him?

  “The only valid answer is an inside job.”

  “No!”

  “Think, Calista. Who but a mole could have had access to him, to poison him while he sat in your doctors’ room, eating pizza and playing Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit with you?”

  He stopped, winced. Then his formidable shoulders rose in resignation, dropped, his golden gaze growing turbid, leveling on me.

  What now? it asked.

  What now? He meant now that he’d let slip that he’d been monitoring our every breath inside our Sanctuary? Now that I knew he had broken his promise, if he’d ever meant to keep it? What did he figure? That I’d say: Oh, well, at least you’re not an enemy?

  Like hell!

  Seven

  “You look like hell, Cali.”

  Sure I did. I was wrecked. Literally and figuratively. The simple motion of reaching for the set of preliminary investigations Ayesha was handing me hurt. The very effort to think, to be, even more.

  My sight and mind blurred over the printouts. Dammit. Read them. Making sense of them would be a real plus, too.

  I did, I guess. Normal. Everything. Good. Or was it?

  I didn’t know. And that summed up my reality. I knew nothing anymore.

  Ayesha’s gentle hand slid down my back. Even that hurt. “Cali. You’re in bad shape.”

  Anxiety in Ayesha’s ever-serene voice rubbed some more salt into my inflamed nerves.

  I waved it away. “You don’t look so hot yourself, Ayesha.” The whole left side of her face was swollen, her lower lid pressing up on her eye. Matt’s blow.

  “I look a sight better than you, and that on its own is cause for extreme alarm.”

  I smirked at her. “See why I envy you your beautiful, dark skin? Your bruises are almost invisible. With my damn vampire complexion, I look like a crazy experiment in subdermal ink injections gone awry.”

  “Cali, I’m serious. You look real bad.”

  I moved out of range of her concern. “I started getting slammed about far earlier in the night that you did.” I pointed to various beacons of throbbing pain around my face. “This is a gang member’s fist. This is Lucia’s chin. The rest you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.” We grimaced in tandem, remembering. “But that’s not what I meant. You look—extinguished.”

  I’d just finished going through every scrap of Matt’s belongings, and directing an upside-down search of the Sanctuary. The others, the ones I trusted probably more than I did myself, were still searching. We were trying to disprove Damian’s suggestion that it had been an inside job. That possibility alone was enough to drag me into despair. I had no idea what I’d do if it turned out to be true.

  I headed to IC. Ayesha followed—hovered more like. I sighed. “It’s been a hell of a night and now day, Ayesha. And the suspicion that it isn’t over isn’t contributing to my state of health, mental or physical.”

  “That’s why you snapped? Yelled at Damian that way?”

  “You heard, huh?” I paused beside Matt, brushed a now-dry blond lock off his leonine forehead. Come back, please. I can’t lose you.

  Ayesha reached out, did the same, then transferred her hand to mine, stilled it, gentle, inescapable. “I bet everyone in greater L.A. heard, Cali. What was that about?”

  I started to shrug, remembered the cramp that had hit me when I last tried that trick, stopped. “Same old stuff. I yelled at him since I was too drained to kill him.”

  Ayesha’s eyes bored into me, tried to read more than I was volunteering. Seemed she realized nothing else was forthcoming, decided to concentrate on more important matters for now. Wise woman.

  She busied herself with the periodic adjustment of Matt’s measures, following my murmured directions, further lowering his sedation, replenishing his fluids, handing me more tracings.

  Again normal. And Matt looked better. His tan was overcoming the lividness, his breathing and heartbeat deep, slow, rhythmic. He even opened his eyes and recognized Ishmael at one point. That of all signs spoke volumes for no lasting brain damage. We had no news yet on what had plunged him into that psychotic-convulsive attack to begin with. But medically speaking, it was as if it had never happened.

  But was he going to make it back, whole?

  The digital clock on the wall said ten a.m. That made it more than thirty minutes we’d been going over and over Matt, conducting one neuro exam after another and checking and rechecking him down to his hair roots. There was nothing more to be done. He’d wake up when his body decided, not in response to anything we did.

  Walking out of IC still gave me a sick feeling. Knowing he was in the hands of capable intensivists didn’t lessen the waves of nausea each step away from him spread inside me.

  Ayesha kept her hand on my arm. Knew I was starting to wobble? Bet she did. She kept it there all the way back to our “hub,” the room in which the core team relaxed and held meetings.

  I paused on the threshold. Last night I’d stood right here, bogged down in pizzas. Matt had been sitting in that chair over there, his blond head thrown back, eyes closed. God, he’d looked so strong and whole and stable. That perpetual thrill of thankfulness for having him had hit its usual spot behind my sternum. Stronger than usual. I’d announced the saving arrival of pizza and he’d jumped to his feet to take my load.

  Ayesha towed me to an armchair, supported me down into it. Propping her lean hip on the table, she picked up where her line of interrogation had been aborted. Must have seen me wandering and decided to drag me back. Must be burning with curiosity, too.

  She raised one eyebrow. “So—why yell at Damian tonight of all nights, right after he earned our undying gratitude by saving Matt? What happened to kick up the old grievances?”

  I threw my head back on the battered leather headrest. “Oh, these are spanking new ones. It’s the end result that’s old. You know—him being a double-crossing, lying bastard.”

  Ayesha sighed. “He had a good reason to hide the truth from you back in Russia, Cali.”


  “Hide the truth? That’s the new commercial name for lying through his teeth?” I rolled my eyes. They nearly didn’t make it back to their original position. Boy, I was beyond done in. “Oh, yeah, I forgot. You’re the president and probably the only member of the Damian De Luna Can Do No Wrong Fan Club.”

  “One day you’ll push him away once too often, Cali.”

  “And may that day be today!”

  The look she gave me transmitted all her sage thoughts. Moron was foremost among them.

  I exhaled, shook my head. “You’re not the one to talk to here, Ayesha. Why tell you his latest transgression when you’d only excuse it, rationalize it and make it look like the only thing he could have done? You took one look at him and hopped on his side for the duration.”

  Ayesha’s chocolate-brown eyes grew even more placating. Help—she’s in mom mode.

  “I’m on his side because he’s on yours.”

  I snorted. It didn’t come out as effectively as intended. “He says he is. Talk is cheap. And though before Russia I never would have believed it, Damian can bury you—hell, he can flood California off the map—in talk. And all the while he lies to me. At every turn. Out of caring, of course.”

  “He doesn’t care for you, he loves you.”

  “Love doesn’t give you the right to interfere in your loved ones’ lives!” Betrayal and indignation had me sitting up. They were no match for my jellied muscles and gravity. I flopped back. “Your first husband loved you, didn’t he, Ayesha? Wanted what was best for you, right? But of course you were too young to know your own good, so he beat you up to discipline you, imprisoned you in your own home to protect you from the big bad world, alienated all your family and friends and decided what you should do every second of your life so you wouldn’t be exposed to harmful influences.”

  Two long strides brought Ayesha before me, her lithe, whipcord body tense, her feet spread apart. “Damian is nothin’ like Jordie! Jordie was an insecure, vicious fool who couldn’t hold the respect of a woman with identity or experience, who picked a sheltered, ignorant girl to marry so he could feel like somebody holding her strings. Damian is a powerful man who’s secure in his own real as hell worth. So much so he went and picked the most challenging, not to mention the toughest woman on earth to fall in love with. But you being tough doesn’t make worrying about you any easier. In fact, he has every reason to worry more. And it doesn’t make him a sick monster like Jordie if he wants to make sure you’re safe, Cali.”