by E. A. Copen
“Yeah, I got that the first time.”
“I dislike the use of threats.” He adjusted his jeweled cufflinks. “Please, don’t give me cause to make good on them.” He nodded to me and exited the pod.
Chapter Two
The door to Mia’s room creaked as I pushed it open. Han’s lips straightened to a thin line but didn’t look up from injecting a clear fluid into Mia’s IV port. Zoe held her daughter’s limp hand. Dark streaks painted Zoe’s cheeks and swept aside in ashen lines below her ear, tell-tale signs that she had cried through her mascara. When I entered, her face was as unmoving and resolute as stone.
“So,” I said, tucking my hands into my jeans pockets. “Marcus seems to think whatever’s wrong with her is metaphysical in nature. What do you think, Doctor Han?”
Han discarded the plastic syringe in the biohazard bin. “Traditional medical science has not improved her condition. The best I can do is keep her comfortable and her organs functional.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He frowned at me. “My professional opinion is that there is nothing physically wrong with her. However, there are variables I can’t account for that may be genetic in nature, as Ms. Matthias is fully aware.” He turned to nod at Zoe.
“You finished in here, doc?” I asked
Han took a clipboard from the end of the crib and clicked his pen before he marked his initials. “I’ll check back in an hour.” He offered us both a formal farewell with a fake grin and another bow before exiting.
I strode over to stand on the other side of the crib across from Zoe. “Zoe, if you want my help, if you want her to have the best chance, I need to know everything you and Doctor Han know.”
Another tear trailed down over her angular cheek. She stood in silence, the muscles of her jaw flexing as she fought the tightness and worry in her throat. I knew that look all too well. Stubborn anger. She knew she needed my help, but she didn’t want to think about it, let alone discuss it out loud.
I lowered my voice an octave. “Zoe, is Mia a wendigo?”
Another tear fell when she laughed in response. She wiped it away and looked up. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Kill us both, wipe us away like we’re some kind of dirty secret.”
“I’d never hurt a child. Never. But if she is, then I need to know.”
Zoe reached down and brushed a curl away from Mia’s eyes. “Mia is a werewolf, like her father.”
The skin on my arms and neck prickled. My brain went to work, trying to process what she’d just said, weighing it against the facts I thought I knew. Sal and Zoe had trouble conceiving and had turned to science to make it happen. After she miscarried, the two of them had grown distant. In hopes of fixing things, Sal sent her on a trip to Canada, where she supposedly hooked up with LeDuc. Sal had said it was LeDuc’s baby, that Zoe only came back long enough to get her things and finalize their divorce. He had been so sure the child couldn’t be his because of the affair.
Andre LeDuc had worked closely with Doctor Han and even shared a lab with him. That’s why I’d been so surprised to find him there in the behavioral health unit. Why was he tending to Mia and not a psychiatrist? The rapid-fire question and answer in my rational brain were slower than the answer that came out of my mouth.
“Is she…”
“A genetically engineered masterpiece.” Zoe wiped away another tear. “The result of a decade of research. A werewolf child immune to all the negative effects of silver. One step removed from the perfect predator Andre sought to create.”
That explained why Marcus was so interested in Mia’s survival. He and his pet geneticist, Han, might still be able to salvage some of the research LeDuc had stolen or destroyed by studying Mia. It was why he was so careful to keep her out of BSI reach.
“But that means—”
“Yes. Mia is Saloso’s daughter.” She squeezed Mia’s hand. “That was the deal we struck. I would bring the genetic samples to him, and he would give us a child. I didn’t tell Sal. He was so broken after the first loss, I couldn’t let him dare to hope. It was supposed to be a surprise. But when I got there, the treatments changed me. I was a monster. And like seeks like. I knew I couldn’t go back to my husband. Instead, I put all my efforts into making her…perfect in every way. She’s the future for all of us, my Mia.”
I touched a hand to my head as if that would steady the dizziness and leaned against the wall. That was big news, bigger than I could process all at once. Sal had a daughter. He had a daughter who I had let get kidnapped and remain lost for over a year. A year! And how much of that time had she spent with Marcus Kelley and Zoe Matthias? How long had she been among monsters?
“Does Sal know?” I stammered.
“If he did, do you think he would be out in the parking garage instead of in here?” I pushed away from the wall using my hip and took a step toward the door only to stop when Zoe snapped, “And where do you think you’re going?”
“He deserves to know.”
Zoe’s growl vibrated through the room, loud, low, and inhuman. In a blur of motion and rustle of fabric, she rushed me and drove a fist into my gut. My vision shrank to a pinpoint as the air went out of me. I sank to my knees and then fell over, my head bouncing off the laminated floor. Zoe’s face hung in my vision behind a wall of sparking pain, her hand drawn back and fingers grown into claws, ripping through the human skin.
“Let’s get one thing straight. Mia is my daughter. Mine! And the only thing I have in this world. If he knew, he would take her away from me. I won’t let that happen, not so long as I live. Breathe one word of this to Sal, and I will rip your beating heart out of your chest and eat it in front of you!”
“If you kill me, who will help Mia?”
Zoe’s answer was an angry hiss. Her eyes lit up with the yellow glow of rage, and she swept her hand down, flinging me against the wall as if I were nothing. I landed on my face and didn’t bounce off so much as slide down. My chest, nose, and arms were screaming in blind, burning pain, so I just lay there and curled up, trying to will it away.
“Maybe I would do better to take out my frustrations on your son,” Zoe’s voice dripped venom.
I blinked away tears and rolled over. Twice, I tried to push myself up on wobbly arms and fell back down. “Do you really think I’d let you go anywhere with a kid, bitch?” I sat back on my knees and wobbled. “You don’t get to keep her. Not you, not Marcus. Not for your sick, twisted experiments and research!”
Zoe’s eyes flared even brighter. “She’s my daughter!”
“You don’t love her. If you did, you wouldn’t be working with Marcus and Doctor Han.”
“You have no idea what I’m doing and with whom. You’re ankle-deep in an ocean and claiming you can see the other side, Judah. If you lay a hand on my girl without my permission, I will rip you apart.”
I stood, one arm protectively over my aching stomach, swaying back and forth for a second before I lifted my fists in challenge.
She smirked. “You want to fight me?”
“Name the place and time. I’ll kick your ass any day of the week.”
Zoe’s head snapped toward the door. She lifted her unnaturally elongated arm, and the claws retracted back inside her fingers. The skin knitted itself back together just as the door cracked open and Nurse Uhl peeked in, her brow knitted in concern. “Everything okay in here, ladies?”
“We’re fine,” Zoe said, flashing a coy smile.
I wiped blood from under my nose as the nurse looked to me. “I fell,” I mumbled.
She frowned. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” The nurse closed the door lightly.
As soon as she was gone, Zoe turned to snarl at me, “If you even think about telling Sal, I will make your life a living hell, Judah. Telling him won’t relieve you of your guilt. It won’t make you feel better, and it won’t help Mia. And you don’t want everything you’ve done to Mia and to me to be out in the open for everyone to hear, do you?” She gave a high-pitched laugh. “I
magine how much he would react if he knew it was your fault Mia was missing in the first place?”
I clenched my hands into fists and released them several times before I turned my head away. Zoe was right. If Sal knew the truth, he would hate me. My heart fluttered and then sank as I imagined the hurt on his face twisting into righteous anger. I had told him all those months ago that Zoe was dead, without a doubt, and the child was lost. And I knew how much he’d wanted a baby with Zoe. When she showed up with what he thought was a belly full of LeDuc’s offspring, it had changed him. If he knew the truth, that I had cut Mia out of Zoe and left his former wife to die, plus let Mia disappear, he’d hate me.
The feelings I had for Sal were still fresh. He was the one good thing I had. It was selfish, and it was wrong, but I’m only human. Like it or not, humans are motivated more strongly by pain and pleasure than any other force in the universe, and I didn’t want to lose the man I loved.
“Fine,” I said at length. “But don’t think I’m going to let her slip away a second time.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Zoe stepped back and wiped her palm on her shirt. “Now, do your thing.”
“What thing?”
“That…aura thing Marcus says you do. Whatever’s wrong with her, wouldn’t it show there?”
I crossed my arms and turned to look at Mia’s crib. Examining the girl’s aura was exactly what I’d come back in there to do, that and grill Zoe for answers. I’d gotten my answers, even though they just led to more questions. Now, it was time to put my feud with Zoe behind me and do what I could for Mia. If I could do anything at all.
I let out a deep breath and closed my eyes, dismissing every thought in my mind. That’s the hardest part of magick, approaching it with a clear mind. If I were to go in with my worries about Zoe, Mia, Hunter, or Sal weighing on my mind, it wouldn’t work. Worse, it might spiral out of control. I had to be completely focused on the magick flowing in, out and around my body. In and out. In…and out.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the world in a haze of neon colors. If you’ve ever seen an infrared image, those are the colors I see when I look at auras. Vivid orange, blue, green, and red painted the room, brighter in the spaces closer to people and darker further away. In the three to six inches above and around every human that the aura occupies, those same colors flow outward from a line of points going down the center of the body and important joints in the arms, legs, hands, and feet. Seeing auras was exhausting for me, but one of the most beautiful, magickal experiences of my days at work.
Mia’s aura was not at all beautiful or colorful. It wasn’t there at all. I blinked hard and tried again from the start. Still, no aura. That’s not possible, I thought. Everything living had an aura, even zombies. If Mia didn’t have an aura, what would that mean? Her heart was beating and her body was breathing, but she might as well have been dead.
Movement in the corner of my vision made me turn my head. A small, thin, hairline crack of black spun its way through the air, a delicate, dark spider web. As soon as I looked at it, the black thing shot through the air and into Mia’s open mouth. Mia’s body lit up with radioactive colors pulsating out in a dizzying spiral. The only time I had ever seen colors like that, I got a migraine less than an hour later.
Mia’s body jerked. Zoe screamed for the nurse. I turned my head aside and rubbed my forehead with my palms while the door crashed open and new energy flooded into the room without warning. Nurse Uhl and another orderly rushed to Mia’s bedside and turned Mia on her side while she fell into a seizure.
The room suddenly felt too small, and the air too thick to pull down into my lungs. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and the sensation of being watched pounded against all the warning signals in my brain. The temperature of the room plunged until what little breath I could manage came out in tiny white wisps. No one but me noticed the drop.
A small, creaking groan echoed through the room. I turned around. The face staring back at me wore waxy blue-grey skin. The eyes were white and cloudy. She wore a dress that couldn’t have been in style since the Titanic sank, the whole vivid white front stained with blood. Her mouth opened, and an ear-splitting, banshee-like screech came out. I threw my hands over my ears. Only then did I realize the sound was only in my mind.
The creature paid me no mind and walked forward to Mia’s crib.
“You get the hell away from her!” I screamed and drew back my fist, ready to throw magick behind the punch.
Zoe and Nurse Uhl turned to glare at me. “Excuse me?” the nurse said.
They can’t see her, I realized. The only reason I could was because of the aura sight.
The creature bent over the crib, and its mouth opened. It opened too wide, the way a puppet’s mouth might, and a second smaller head popped out, this one with an oversized lamprey-like head and a pair of flexing mandibles. The small head shot out and snapped at the flashing colors of the girl’s aura. In response, the colors coalesced away from the creature to a single point in Mia’s chest and disappeared. The black dot shot out of Mia’s mouth again, bounced off the opposite wall, and sailed straight for me. I barely ducked in time to avoid being struck by whatever it was. Again, the creature wailed and the small head snapped back inside the humanesque head. In a strobing blur, it moved across the room and stood in front of me to screech one more time. This time, when she opened her mouth, I saw the second creature inside attached to her jaw where the tongue should have been.
I stumbled back and crashed into the wall. The creature shot out the door. I pushed away from the wall awkwardly and ran out into the hall to follow it, but it was too fast. By the time I made it into the hallway, it was long gone.
Chapter Three
Five minutes later, I paced in front of the nurse’s station, arms crossed and head down. The nurses still hadn’t come out of pod four. The little girl who had been occupying the lobby earlier was gone, and none of the other patients were up yet. The only person I had to keep me company was Marcus. He sat on the ugly yellow sofa, absorbed in yesterday’s newspaper. I had already told him what I saw. Well, most of it. I’d even walked the perimeter of the common area in search of the monster I’d seen, only to come up empty.
“I hope the pacing helps you think.” Marcus turned the page.
“It has to be a spirit of some kind,” I muttered to myself, ignoring him. “But she obviously didn’t get sick here.”
“Not here, no. She was admitted later.”
“So what kind of spirit haunts a person and not a place?” I shook my head. “And no aura. I suppose that explains the torporic state. She’s not even in her body. It’s like she’s dead, except her body hasn’t caught up. Then her aura lit up like neon without warning, like she became aware right before the seizure.” I stopped pacing and turned ninety degrees to face him. “Has anyone else around Mia shown similar symptoms? Maybe any of the other patients here?”
Marcus lowered the paper. “You do realize you’re standing in a psychiatric ward? The other patients’ records are sealed. I’m willing to bend a lot of things, but I’m not going to violate HIPPA standards to satisfy your curiosity. You’re free to ask around, of course, but I wouldn’t expect the staff to be any more cooperative. If they are, let me know, and I’ll know who to tell the board to fire.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and bit my lip to keep from blurting out something that would have gotten me into even more hot water. “Where was Mia before you admitted her here?”
Marcus sighed, folded the paper over his arm, and frowned at me. “Does this line of questioning mean you have some idea of how to proceed?”
“Maybe. I have a few ideas, but I need to do some digging.”
He stood. “Then perhaps you should busy yourself with that.”
“But—”
“It’s very late, Agent Black,” Marcus said in a tone that told me he wasn’t open to further conversation.
I glanced at the ticking clock on the wall. It sat behind a wire
cage on a pillar near the ceiling. One thirty in the morning. And they say vampires are nocturnal. But Marcus had a point. I’d been up since six the previous morning helping Tindall get ready for the election. Normally, my joints would have been aching and my face numb from exhaustion, yet I was wide awake.
After a long moment of thinking about it, I realized I’d switched on a bit of magick on autopilot. Defensive magick isn’t my forte, but I can throw a little power into my muscles, making me stronger, faster, and generally more physically able than most humans. The big downside to doing that was when I shut off the magick, I was even more tired. I drew in a deep breath and shut it down. Fatigue hit me like a face-first drop from a two-story window. I swayed on my feet.
Marcus put a hand on my shoulder and led me to the security doors at the entrance to the ward. The gentle buzz of the doors sounded. Marcus held them open. “I’ll see you out.”
In the elevator, he hit the button for the parking garage and stepped to the back of the car. “I’ll arrange it so you’re able to see Mia whenever you like. So long as you’re working in the capacity of my agent, that is. I expect reports of your progress. I will call you. There’s no need to contact me.”
“And if I need information from you?”
Marcus reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a business card, and held it out to me. “You’ll leave a message with my personal assistant or make an appointment.”
I took the card and frowned at it. “Just so we’re clear, I’m being handed a case where I can’t use BSI resources, can’t speak to my actual employer without an appointment, and a lot of people are going to die if I fail? That’s the gist of things?”
He smiled. “That is the gist of things, as you say. Oh, and just one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t get distracted by pretty faces. Mia grows weaker with each passing day.”
The elevator slowed to a stop, and the doors slid open. Sal had pulled his bike up right in front of the elevator. He leaned on it, smoking a cigarette. He stood up when he saw us.