by SA Magnusson
“What is it?”
“It’s that ability I have,” I whispered.
“Now?”
I nodded. I don’t know where the sense of death came from, but it was here somewhere, and near enough that it hit me quickly.
I stood and made my way through the hall, focusing on the sense of the grip of death, wanting to find wherever it was that it came from, thinking that if I could find it, I might be able to help. I needed to mix medicine and magic, as I had told Ariel.
“Dr. Michaels?”
I turned to see Kristin, one of the younger nurses in the ER, looking at me expectantly. “Yes?”
“You’re wanted in Trauma Four.”
That had to be the sense of death that I was picking up on it, but it seemed to be in a different direction than what I felt drawn toward. Maybe that was only my fatigue.
I followed Kristin, heading toward the trauma bay. “What is it?”
“A motor vehicle accident,” she said. “Pretty bad.”
Had it gotten to the point where they were coming to get me for traumas now? Could it have really gone so far? It seemed unusual, but then again, I had made a career of running after traumas, heading into them when, as a less experienced resident, I should have waited. And maybe that was now the reason I now got summoned.
When we reached the trauma room, I paused in the doorway.
It was an older man, heavyset, with his clothing all cut away. One side of his body appeared crushed, and blood had already pooled beneath the surface of his skin.
“Have you called the trauma service?”
“We have, but they haven’t made it down here, and the intern who was on thought that maybe there was something you could do.”
I glanced over to see Dr. Stefan. Why wasn’t I surprised that he was the one here? And why was I surprised that he somehow thought I had a way of doing something? Maybe I had been too open with my use of magic.
“Have you performed the FAST exam?”
Dr. Stefan shook his head. “I’m still working on my ultrasound technique. I’ve been off service for the last few months, and—”
I grabbed the ultrasound probe and began to complete the exam, looking for internal injury. From the crush injuries to his upper chest, the way that he appeared to be unable to move his arm, the degree of trauma had to be fairly significant. There wasn’t any sign of bleeding, not like there had been when I had done a similar exam on the pregnant patient.
“Was he wearing a seatbelt?”
“We don’t know.”
“Was anybody with him?”
“He came in by himself.”
The sense of cold continued to race along my spine. As it did, I decided to push my magic into him, reaching for the sense of whatever it was that had happened to him, thinking that I could use that to probe him for his injuries.
Magic raced through him, but not with any sense of control.
What the hell?
It was almost as if I had no control over my magic, but I had grown relatively skilled with using magic to probe for injuries. In this case, I wasn’t able to determine anything—other than that the patient was dying. And I didn’t need the magical connection to determine that. I could see that from the pooling blood.
“What else have you done for him?” I asked Dr. Stefan.
“We’ve got him typed and crossed for a couple units of blood.”
“I think we’re going to need to protect his airway,” I said, trying to think through things, but my mind was still foggy.
“He looks like he’s breathing fine now.”
“We don’t know the severity of his injuries. All we know is that he was in a significant accident and he’s not responding. Get ready to intubate him.”
Dr. Stefan paled and he looked almost as washed out of the patient.
“You need me to walk you through it?”
“I… I think I should give it a try.”
I didn’t disagree, but at the same time, I also didn’t think the patient would make it, so it probably didn’t matter if he tried now or not. The patient wouldn’t survive regardless of what we did.
“Have you done any intubations while on any of your surgical services?”
“I’ve tried, but…”
“This is a skill that you will need in the emergency room. I would suggest that you try to get as much experience with it as you can. Most of the anesthesiologists are happy to allow you to intubate, especially if they know that you’re an ER resident and not an anesthesia resident trying to compete with them.”
It was something that I wish someone had told me when I was early on in my career. I had been forced to fumble around until another resident had taken pity on me and finally agreed to allow me to practice. Intubation, like so many other things in medicine, was a skill.
I stood at Dr. Stefan’s shoulder, working with him as he prepared to intubate.
As he did, there came another surge of cold that washed around my spine.
At first, I thought it might be someone using magic, but that wasn’t it at all. This was a sense of power that came from the coming of death. The sense of it was more potent than I usually felt when dealing with someone dying. Could that part of my magic have been thrown off too?
I tried again to push my sense of magic through him, but once again, I had no control over it and it washed away, leaving me with nothing. There should be the sense of emptiness, but I didn’t pick up on anything at all.
Dr. Stefan slid the endotracheal tube into his throat. As he did, he glanced over at me. “I did it.”
I nodded. “You did it.”
The monitor beeped, his rhythm changing to asystole.
His eyes widened. “What? I thought that we could save him. I’ve seen you save people worse than this.”
There wasn’t anything that I could really say. It was hard losing a patient, regardless of how injured they were, and though it got easier over time, it was still never easy. “I know, but he’s lost too much blood, and severity of his injuries are more than what we were able to do. You did everything you could.”
“You mean we lost him?”
“We can call a Code Blue, but it’s unlikely it will matter here.”
The cold continued to build, crawling along my spine, and then it filled me.
I stood frozen in place. As that cold worked through me, it came with a sense of power. Most of the time I was able to ignore that power, but I wasn’t able to do so this time. I let that power wash over me, no longer fighting, and something shifted within me.
There was a strange sense that reminded me of plunging into the biting cold of the Mississippi River last night. It was almost as if that power mingled with the power of this man’s dying, combining.
I gasped.
Power flooded into me.
“Dr. Michaels?”
I couldn’t speak. I didn’t trust myself to speak. The power that now worked through me was more than I was expecting. And I was borrowing—stealing—from this man’s death.
I hated that I did it, but at the same time, it seemed to be restoring me.
As it did, I realized that something had been dangerously wrong before. I wasn’t sure what it was, only that now it had washed through me, changing me, I no longer felt the way that I had, returning to the way I should feel.
I breathed out and blinked.
Whoever this man was had helped me, but why should he have needed to? What had that spell done?
“Are we going to attempt a resuscitation?” Kristin asked.
“We can call a Code Blue, but I don’t think it will do anything,” I said, my mind numb like the rest of me. Had I said that already?
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to attempt one. The power had helped me, and there wasn’t anything that we were going to be able to do to help this man regardless of what we tried. I couldn’t feel bad about taking power from him, and he wouldn’t have been able to survive it anyway.
Unless he had magic.
Could that be the case?
He shouldn’t have been able to survive it even if he did have magic. There were certain things magic couldn’t heal, and unless he was an incredibly powerful mage, there might not have a way for him to have done so. I backed away, unable to push away the idea that maybe I had taken power that wasn’t earned.
“Why don’t you finish up?” I said to Dr. Stefan.
Without waiting for his response, I turned away and headed out of the room. I took a moment to pause in the hall, looking around to see who else might be out here, but I was alone.
What had I done?
There had been times when I had used my strange connection to death to make my magic stronger, but this seemed different in some way. This had been used to make myself better. That wasn’t the same as using the dying energy of a Great One, or even the same as using the magic from Aron’s near death to attempt to heal him. This had been a selfish act.
And I didn’t know if it had mattered. Had I done nothing, had I let the power available with the man’s dying simply disappear, I would have remained injured. Though I still didn’t know what had happened to me, I did know the power from the spell had changed something.
“Kate?”
Blinking away the troubled thoughts, I looked over to see Jen watching me.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why don’t you go and take a break? I’ll cover for you. It’s Allen on today, so we won’t really even be shorthanded.”
I could only nod. Dr. Allen was better than having someone like Locks, who wouldn’t intervene. With Allen, there were times the upper-level residents didn’t get involved at all. It was a good opportunity for the interns. Dr. Allen was the kind of physician I wished I could be—the kind I once had thought that I could be, but the longer I spent in medicine, the more jaded I became, despite every intention on my part.
It was worse knowing that I could do something different with my magic. Having the ability to diagnose and help without the trappings of traditional medicine left me in a difficult position. Though I could often tell what brought someone in, I didn’t always know how to help them, even with magic. But if I worked on it, if I honed that connection to magic, I had to think that I would develop that skill in time.
Reaching the resident lounge, I flopped down on the couch and stared up at the ceiling. Strangely, I felt better than I had in days, and certainly better than I had before drawing away the power from the dying man. The pain that I’d awoken to this morning that I suspected came from the Taser was gone. The strangeness that I’d felt was gone. Had my connection to magic been restored?
I hesitated using it. What if it was still altered?
And if it was, then whatever I had done still hadn’t changed anything.
Focusing on the source of my power, a sense that came from deep within me, I pulled on nothing more than a barrier. It surged into place, slamming around me with a vigorous sort of force.
What the hell?
There was incredible power there, almost more than I had before.
Could I have held onto the stores of power the man dying had offered?
That didn’t seem possible. When I’d used the magic of dying before, it had been used up at the time of the death, leaving me no different than when I used my magic at other times.
This felt different.
Releasing my barrier, I sat up. What I wanted was to summon my sword, but I didn’t dare do that so openly.
Instead, I focused on my magic.
Reaching into my connection to it, I felt the stirrings of power. Normally, there was a sense of untapped power, a sense that I could unleash with the right focus. It was power that I had kept tamped down for my entire life, afraid to release it, not certain what would happen if I did. I had grown accustomed to holding it down, using everything in my ability to keep from using magic that would lead to my exposure. Since I had started using my magic, releasing that hold had been increasingly easy.
As I focused on the magic within me, there was something about it that was different.
I had a sense of my magic after confining it for all the years that I had. I knew just how much power I could wield, so it didn’t take much for me to know how much different this power was than what I normally had access to.
And it was considerably different.
Enough so that it threatened to burble up from within me. The power surged, flowing through me, and I sealed it off. There was a sense of knotting it off, and had I not had the experience of doing so, I’m not sure that I would have known what to do—or would have been able to effectively seal it off.
The door to the resident lounge opened and Tyson Chald glanced over at me. He was a second-year resident from somewhere out East and smart. He cocked an eye at me. “What’s up, Dr. Kate?”
“Just trying to recover.”
“I heard you had one of your patented traumas. Didn’t turn out so hot this time?”
“They don’t always turn out so hot.”
“Hey, I heard about that uterine rupture you took care of the other day. That’s some crazy shit you did.”
“It was crazy.”
“What made you think that was the only way to save them?”
My eyes had drifted shut and I didn’t know if he was asking because he was genuinely curious or because he wanted gossip. It could be either. “The fetal heart rate was too slow. Baby needed to be delivered.”
“Even with an unstable patient?”
I opened my eyes. Was he challenging my decisions? With as off as I’d felt lately, I no longer knew.
“The patient—the mother—was stable at that time. I wasn’t going to lose the baby.”
“Isn’t the mother the patient?”
I sat up, staring at him. “They both were. A term—meaning viable—infant and mother are both my patients. The infant was in greater danger at the time, which was why I acted. The mother was in trouble, but she had time. Had I not done anything, we would have lost the baby. Does that answer your questions?”
He raised his hands and sat back, crossing his legs and grinning at me. “Hey, I just was trying to understand how you think. You’re the trauma monster, after all.”
“Trauma monster?”
He shrugged. “That’s what some of the interns call you. It sort of fits. Even when you were a second year, you were a monster when it came to traumas. I think even the attendings are happy when you’re the one to show up.”
I didn’t like being called a monster, especially so soon after what had just happened and the way I felt about my magic. Rather than staying and arguing, I got to my feet and headed back out of the lounge.
“Dr. Kate!”
Glancing over my shoulder, I frowned at him before continuing onward, ignoring Tyson as I headed back out into the ER but unable to shake the sense that somehow regardless of how I wanted to use my magic, I was a monster.
10
At the end of my shift, I found myself back along the shores of the Mississippi River. I couldn’t help myself. The spell that had been cast remained, surrounded by power, by other spells placed by mages of considerable talent, but still not enough to eliminate the spell that had been placed here originally. As I stood near it, I realized there was something about the spell the mages of the mage council had done, a way of trying to keep others from getting too close.
The sense of magic alone should be enough to do that. Magic was odd in that way. It had the ability to send other magic users away, keeping them from getting too close. I hadn’t asked Jen about how it felt, but she would have to be aware of it, too, though in the time since learning of my connection to the magical world, she had never seemed as if she were all that disinclined to remain near me—or my magic.
The park was empty, or seemed to be. A trail worked its way through the center of it, heading toward the shores overlooking the Mississippi River. W
hat had once been a lush, green lawn was now dried and dead in the early December cold. A layer of frost coated the grass, and branches on the nearby trees swayed with the steady wind. I pulled my coat around my shoulders, but even that wasn’t enough to keep out the wind and cold. The sun had already set, though it did so early at this time of year, darkness hanging over everything. The streetlights cast a dim glow, not nearly enough for me to see much more than what I already did.
I had to believe that mages were nearby, watching this place, hiding in the darkness, but I saw no one. More likely than not, they were shielded.
Taking a moment to summon my magical sword, I did so with a subtle power, drawing only a little bit, not wanting to fully draw upon it and reveal my presence. All I wanted was to reveal the mages watching, nothing more than that, and I could do it without drawing too much power from the sword.
I hadn’t tested my magic enough since taking power from the dying man in the emergency room, and I wasn’t certain what would happen when I used it in this manner. Would it be different? Attempting to seal my home had certainly been different, and so I had to believe that this, too, would be.
Thankfully, the sword burst into a glowing purple light.
I withdrew power from it, wanting to mask it, and found that I required much less energy to do so than before. Did I still have some residual magic from borrowing from death?
Turning slowly, I counted three people standing within the park who hadn’t been visible before.
Interesting. They must all be members of the mage council, though I wouldn’t put it past Barden to leave others of his council here, as well.
There was nothing about the pattern that I could tell without getting too close to it. The more that I stared at it, the more certain it was that whoever had placed it had considerable magical talent, more so than what I was capable of, and a connection to spells that was significant.
It was more than simply placement of the spell. It had to be. The fact that this was here, formed in this fashion and so similar to runes that I’d seen left me believing she was a follower of Odian.
Now I just had to find out who she was.
I made my way to the river, pausing along the shores. As I did, a reminder of what had happened the night before came to me. I had connected to power on the other side of the Veil, borrowing from the power of the ley lines, drawing from magic that should not have been dangerous to me. I had enough connection to that magic in the past to know that it shouldn’t have overwhelmed me.