Moments later, the doctor arrives and can’t conceal his astonishment at the sight of his new patient. “What the hell happened to her?”
For the first time since the One Way, Silver’s chest fails to rise. All rhythms of life stop, and the pump of arterial blood stops with them. His eyes drawn to the severity of the slashes across her torn flesh, the doctor can’t help but draw conclusions.
“These look like—”
“A work accident,” Alex interrupts him, disinclined to volunteer more.
Recognizing that now is not the time for questions, the doctor pushes an alert button on the wall and welcomes in a rush of nurses as Alex and Maydevine are shoved and jostled out of the way.
*************************
Hours into Silver’s surgery, Alex waits in the hospital lounge with her dried blood all over his clothes and hands. Maydevine returns from the hallway with two cups of coffee, and holds one out to Alex. In contrast, he’s taken the time to clean himself up since arriving at the hospital. There’s not a speck of blood on him.
Of the coffee, “It tastes like sewer sludge, but it’ll keep you awake.”
Alex accepts the cup offered to him and takes a sip. By the look on his face, it tastes a whole lot worse than sewer sludge.
Maydevine takes a seat beside him. “So, you want to tell me what happened tonight?”
Alex shakes his head. “You know as much as I know.” He takes another sip. “You want to tell me where you got that tag?”
Maydevine ignores the question. “Those looked an awful lot like talon marks to me.” He gulps down some of the foul muck in his cup. “What’s she doing getting one-on-one with a Chimera like that?”
“How should I know?” Alex shrugs.
“How long have you been seeing her?”
Alex persists with the disgusting coffee. “A while.”
“Why the hell didn’t you say anything?” Concealed hurt. “Payback?”
“You really think I’d be that petty? She asked me not to.”
Maydevine nods, expecting to hear as much. “Do you know why?”
“She thinks she let you down … again. She hates being a disappointment to you.”
Silence.
Maydevine fidgets. “How’s she doing?”
“As of tonight, not so fucking good.”
Abruptly, and covered in blood, Silver’s doctor reappears. They both stand as he approaches them, and Alex can’t stop the worry from coming out in his voice.
“She’s alive?”
“She lost a lot of blood. We nearly drained our blood bank trying to keep her from bleeding out. She was losing it as fast as we could put it back in.”
“And?”
“We managed to stop the bleeding.” He hesitates, pulling a small jar out from his pocket. “And we found this in one of her wounds.”
A Chimera talon.
“She was cut so deep it was lodged in her uterus,” he adds.
Maydevine takes the talon and examines the thing before pocketing it. Behind him, Alex falls back into his seat, his feet suddenly unsteady.
“Is she going to be okay?”
“We repaired her uterus as best we could, but the damage was significant.”
“Is she still … ?”
“Relatively intact? Yes, but she has absolutely no chance of ever conceiving again.”
Alex hangs on the doctor’s words, barely taking a breath. “Again?”
The doctor looks back and forth between Alex and Maydevine, trying to ascertain their relationship. “I don’t know how well either of you know this woman, or your relationship to her, but when she was brought in here tonight, she was pregnant.”
Alex is floored.
Maydevine tries to gauge his reaction, wondering how the repercussions of this news will be taken. He’d given up the hope of having any grandchildren the day that Silver enrolled in the Hunter Division Academy, but had Alex come to terms with the thought of never becoming a father? Had they even talked about it, he wondered.
Unable to formulate words, Alex drops his head into his hands. Emotions devouring him, he relies on Maydevine to speak to the doctor on his behalf.
“How pregnant?”
“Five weeks, give or take a few days. She probably didn’t even know.”
“Then don’t tell her.” Alex finds his voice. “You can’t ever tell her.”
Maydevine looks down at him. “She’ll read it in her medical file.”
“Then strike it from her record,” Alex addresses the doctor.
The doctor looks uneasy. “I’m afraid that’s just not possible.” He turns to Maydevine for support. “That would be cause for my termination.”
“Maybe.” Maydevine shrugs. “Maybe not. When can we see her?”
“She’s sleeping. If you come back in—”
“Now,” Alex interjects. “Take us to her now.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Standard Procedure
Maydevine opens the door to Silver’s hospital room and finds Alex sleeping awkwardly in a chair next to her bed, an Old World comic book open in his lap. He jumps awake when Maydevine slams the door shut behind him.
“Have you been home, son?”
Alex folds up the comic book and runs his fingers through his hair, trying to make himself look presentable. He’s barely slept, hasn’t eaten, and he looks terrible.
“Home?”
“Yeah, you know, the place where you keep all your shit.”
“I’ve had other things on my mind.” Alex sighs, rubbing his eyes. “She needs me here.”
He refocuses every last bit of his attention on Silver, stroking her hand while Maydevine flicks through her medical chart at the foot of the bed.
“Have you been anywhere? Outside? The cafeteria? The can?”
Alex shakes his head.
On the third page of the medical chart, Maydevine finds what he’s looking for. Satisfied, he drops the chart back down into its slot with a metallic clank. “Well, it’s time for you to fuck off.”
Tired and drained, Alex has no strength left to resist when Maydevine ushers him up and out of the chair.
“Go home. Take a shower. Get a change of clothes. Clean yourself up.” He nods to Silver. “She isn’t going anywhere.”
Maydevine shakes off his coat and makes himself comfortable in the chair, but Alex is still hesitant to leave.
“You’ll stay with her? You won’t leave?”
Maydevine waves Alex away with a dismissive hand. Rather begrudgingly, Alex does as he’s told. Still covered in Silver’s dried blood, he’s quite a spectacle to behold as he ambles through the busy parking lot like a zombie, struggling to remember where he parked.
Should be easy.
Look for the battered vehicle with smears of blood all over the passenger side back door. The backseat is soaked with remnants of Silver, and something in the rear foot well catches Alex’s eye beneath the ooze.
Dog tags.
Jonathan Cross’s, caked in Silver’s blood, her black tag beside them.
Before driving away, he pockets them both.
*************************
Alex drops his keys into a stainless steel dish by the front door of his penthouse apartment. Everything is spotless and new, and it looks like a show home. A sleek, calico cat idles up to him and rubs around his feet, purring.
“Hungry?” He looks down at her.
The cat meows and skips toward the kitchen, hopping up onto the granite counter top and sitting politely beside her dish. Acknowledging that it’s way past her usual feeding time, Alex opens a cupboard and retrieves a tin of wet cat food from a neatly alphabetized and organized stock: Chimera chunks in gravy, Chimera pate, Chimera flakes with optical fluid jelly—a nice way of saying ‘eyeball juice’—and Chimera Premium Formula. A closer inspection of the ingredients list for the latter reveals a delightful assortment of tongue, brains, intestines, and rectal tissue.
Mmm, delicious. At least the cat th
inks so. Alex dumps the tin into her dish and tosses the can into the garbage. She meows a quick ‘thank you’ as he affectionately rubs the top of her head.
“You’re welcome, Ella.”
He heads for the bedroom, where he discards his clothes in the trash before jumping into the shower. Stale blood mixes with the water, rehydrating it and washing it down the drain. Unfortunately, the memory of the previous night doesn’t go with it.
Minutes later, Alex—still unshaven, wrapped in nothing more than a towel—saunters back into the bedroom and collapses onto the bed. He needs about twelve hours of sleep, but intends only to take a brief nap.
As soon as his head hits the pillow, his mind begins to wander and he starts to drift into unconsciousness. A crumpled picture of himself and Silver is now preserved in a picture frame on the bedside table.
It’s the last thing he sees before he closes his eyes.
While he slumbers, day begins to fall into night and he’s only awoken when his pager begins to beep. He snatches it off the bedside table, reads the message, and bolts into his clothes and out the door.
*************************
Alex burns through the entrance to the emergency room, flashing his Division ID. He locates a nurse and grabs her by the arm, forcing her attention on him.
“Where is she? Where’s Jennifer McAllister?”
The nurse shakes her head. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Maydevine hears the kerfuffle and appears at the end of the hall, motioning for Alex to follow.
Walking side-by-side, Maydevine fills him in. “They had to move her to a secure unit.”
“Why? What for?”
Maydevine leads Alex into another wing of the hospital: Quarantine.
Alex looks up at the sign. “Quarantine?” He stops Maydevine dead in his tracks and forces eye contact. “Wait, what happened while I was gone?”
“This is standard procedure.” Maydevine looks defeated.
“Standard procedure for what?”
“CV2 infection.”
Alex is visibly shaken. His shock quickly turns to anger and he vents it on a nearby trash can, kicking it down the hallway and sending its contents spilling out over the floor. “Fuck!”
Maydevine reaches out to place a hand on Alex’s shoulder, but Alex shakes it away.
“How did this happen?”
Maydevine has no answer.
“What the fuck happened to her?” Alex presses him.
“I don’t know.” Maydevine shakes his head. “But we need to make it our business to find out.”
Alex leans up against the wall, trying to compose himself. “I’m not leaving this hospital.”
“Yes, you are. I’m going to give you five minutes in there alone with her, and then you’re coming with me.”
“Not a chance.”
Maydevine squares up to Alex. “Look, son. I know you’re probably dealing with some really epic shit right now, but you still work for me. And if you really want to help her, you need to listen to what I’m telling you.”
Alex remains silent.
“Somewhere out there, inside this city, is a Chimera infected with a deadly virus capable of transmission to humans. The virus is escalating, and if it got to Silver, it can get to anyone. Other lives are at risk. We need to go back into the Fringe and find out where she was that night.”
Alex shakes his head. “Fringers don’t talk. You know that.”
“And so? What? You’d rather not try? You’d rather just sit here and let her die for nothing?”
Alex takes a deep breath. “She’s not gonna die.”
“You keep telling yourself that while you help me fix this.” He points to the room beyond the quarantine sign. “You’ve got five minutes. Then we need to run a little errand.”
Silence.
Alex hesitates, but finally sums up the courage to head through the large double doors. On the other side, he finds himself in the first segment of a full hazmat decontamination chamber. Before he can go any further, he’s instructed to put on protective clothing, including heavy breathing equipment. Once he’s adequately dressed, and his hazmat suit has been checked over, he’s sent into a small room with hermetically sealed doors at each end. The door behind him closes and the room is flushed with a chemical spray before the door at the other end opens.
In this room, Silver lies in a bed surrounded by medical equipment. She’s pale and weak. Her breathing is shallow and rapid, and tiny beads of sweat are glistening on her skin.
Alex approaches the bed and brushes damp hair away from her face, but she’s completely, devastatingly unresponsive. Gently, he lifts up one of her eyelids and reveals a change that sends a shiver down his spine.
Violet eyes.
Meanwhile, Maydevine waits outside quarantine, twirling a cigarette between his fingers. He jolts back into reality when Alex swings open the door and steps confidently into the hallway, charged with a new found vigor.
“Let’s go.”
CHAPTER SIX
Jennifer McAllister
Much to Alex’s confusion, Maydevine pulls his car up outside a Sentinel District apartment building.
“I don’t understand. Where are we? What’s here?”
Without answering, Maydevine gets out of the car and lights up a cigarette, swiping his wrist across the parking meter. A smiley face pops up on the screen, and a cheerful voice lets him know that his parking request has been approved.
He hands Alex a cigarette. “I already told you: I need your help with an errand.”
Disregarding the signage that blatantly prohibits smoking in this area, he leads Alex into the building and up to the fifth floor. At apartment number 508, Maydevine takes out a key and lets them both inside.
“Who lives here?” Alex wonders.
“No-one. Not anymore.”
Inside the apartment, however, it’s clear that someone does live here—or did, very recently. It has the look of a woman’s home, judging by the colors and the décor. Maydevine heads straight for the kitchen while Alex stops to look around, examining various ornaments and pictures. He barely pays any attention to Maydevine, who’s busy rooting around in cupboards and drawers, pulling out materials as he finds them: garbage bags, a knife, duct tape.
Alex finds a high school diploma on the mantel and picks it up, his face wrinkling up into a frown at the name beneath the picture.
Jennifer McAllister.
“I thought you said …” His voice trails off.
He turns around in time to see Maydevine push open the door into the bedroom, the sight of the interior making him drop the diploma on the floor, the glass smashing at his feet.
“Holy shit.”
A woman’s fresh, dead body is lying on the bed.
Maydevine, still puffing on his cigarette, doesn’t seem bothered by it. “Meet the real Jennifer McAllister.”
“Oh, fuck.”
Maydevine strolls into the bedroom, dumping his collected supplies down on top of the soiled bed sheets. Still wary, Alex tiptoes up to the other side of the bed and pokes at her body, just in case.
“You killed her?”
Maydevine looks around the room for something. “Where did you think I got the tag? A second hand shop?” He drags a large sports hold-all out of the closet and brings it up to the bed, pulling out the contents and discarding them on the floor.
Alex is dismayed. “I didn’t imagine that you’d kill an innocent woman for it!”
Maydevine shrugs. “Innocent is a bit of a stretch.”
“Why? What did she do?”
“There’s no need to fixate on the particulars. Grab her legs.”
Alex doesn’t move. “You’re making me an accessory to murder.”
“All the things you’ve done in your life, and this bothers you?”
“I’ve never killed someone like this.”
“And you still haven’t. Now grab her legs.”
“No.”
&nb
sp; “No?”
“You heard me.”
They face each other in a silent stand-off.
“Do you really want to know what happened?” Maydevine relents.
“I think so.”
“Fine.” Maydevine points to Jennifer McAllister’s body with his cigarette. “Essentially, this is a dead whore.”
“Excuse me?”
“A woman of loose morals.”
“Yes, I know what a whore is. But prostitution’s illegal in the Sentinel District and I just didn’t picture you as the type.”
Maydevine shakes his head, tapping ash from his cigarette onto Jennifer McAllister’s corpse. “I had nothing to do with this.”
“Then who the fuck? And why are we here?”
“Because I offered to clean up for a friend.”
“That’s some friendship.”
“Ain’t it, though? He was paying her for sex because the last time he nailed a Jade in the Fringe he ended up with the clap, and had a hard time explaining it to his wife. He figured this was safer.”
“By the looks of it, he was wrong.”
“Blackmail. She threatened to tell his wife that he knocked her up and made her have an abortion. She kept the fetus in a jar as proof. Who the hell does that? That’s when things got ugly.”
“Okay, so who was it?”
Maydevine’s stern look invokes the code of secrecy between Agents, and Alex gives him a quick nod of assurance.
Satisfied with that, Maydevine tells him the truth. “Carter.”
Alex makes no attempt to hide the shock on his face. “Sterling Carter?! Your Deputy?” he scoffs.
“I’d prefer to think of it as a happy coincidence.” Maydevine shrugs. “I said I’d wipe up after him, in exchange for my own little favor. And besides, he’s not my Deputy anymore.”
“Since when?”
Maydevine indicates toward the body. “Given the circumstances, I thought it would be appropriate for him to step down. He drives one of the transport trucks now.”
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