I matched his tone. “Except that monster I saw the other night. And whatever is making this symbol glow that same damn color you described.”
“It’s a leap.” Iverson was playing devil’s advocate, but he wanted to buy it.
“Maybe. But is it an idea we can afford to ignore?” I waited for the detective to come to a conclusion, watched his eyes as he clicked through all the possible repercussions.
Finally, he shook his head. “No. We need to move on it.”
“What do you want to do first?”
“I need to check on my niece and this new patient. Then we can start looking for evidence of portals.” He stood up and grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair next to him, where he had tossed it. “But keep an open mind. We can’t afford to close off other avenues of investigations.”
As we headed toward the elevator, I heard him mutter, almost to himself, “Not yet, anyway.”
Chapter 31
Lili
By the time we got to Kenny’s room, Susan was already there, checking the child’s vital signs. “Hello,” she sang out cheerfully, her voice belying the pinched look around her eyes and the worried frown she threw my direction. “Kenny’s looking great today, isn’t he?”
The boy produced a halfhearted smile in response, but the effort wore him out, and he slumped back against the thin pillow. Scott stood against the wall, as far out of everyone’s reach as he could manage.
I glanced up at the readout on the blood pressure monitor as I began to move toward the bed. My back was half turned when the nurse let out a squeak and jerked backward into me, knocking me back two or three steps.
When I regained my footing, I saw that Susan Yi was now frozen in place, staring wide-eyed at a blue glow emanating from Kenny’s arm. The boy held that arm out in front of him as if pushing it away.
“What is that?” he asked, his voice thin and wavering.
Will stepped into the room, casting around for the source of the noise, then stepped up beside the child’s shoulder, leaning in almost cheek-to-helmet to get a better view. “Dr. Banta, could you come take a look at this?” he asked, his voice calm.
I didn’t have to move. My gaze was already glued to the spot where Kenny’s skin had split along his forearm, a six-inch gap that initially looked like a skin-splitting fissure. When I looked closer, I could see that it was deep. If I stared at it carefully, I could see the outline of bone.
But only if I looked past the blue light shining out from the wound.
“Oh, shit,” Iverson breathed from the doorway behind me. Scott hadn’t said anything at all yet as he watched Kenny through narrowed eyes, but he and Iverson shared a significant glance.
For the first time, they were both openly carrying weapons, their guns in holsters slung across their shoulders, outside the hazmat suits. I wasn’t entirely certain what that signified, but it couldn’t be anything good.
Will put on his professional voice and demeanor. “Nurse Yi, let’s get this bandaged.” Susan nodded and left the room. “We’ll get this taken care of, Kenny,” Will said. When the nurse returned, Will said quietly to her, “Let’s assume that we shouldn’t let the light touch us, if at all possible.”
With a deep breath, Susan began to bandage the strange, glowing wound. When she had it completely wrapped, we all sighed in relief.
“That’s better,” Will began, but he was interrupted by a howl from Kenny. The boy writhed on the bed, arching his back and clutching his other arm against his chest. As I stepped forward to help hold him still, that arm erupted with light. The skin split open, as if it were ripping along a seam. Tears ran down Kenny’s face as he sobbed and screamed, “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.”
Susan circled around him then looked to us for guidance.
“Morphine,” Will barked, and then added the dosage.
As the nurse administered the pain meds, Will and I glanced at each other then moved toward the hall, not needing words to know that we should confer.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, as soon as I was sure we were out of earshot. “Did we cause that?”
“I think we might have,” Will said.
“I don’t think it wants to be covered up,” Susan said, joining us.
“It’s an illness, nurse. It doesn’t want anything.” Will sounded dismissive.
Free free free free.
The voices in my head disagreed.
I couldn’t say anything out loud about the voices. But I could stop whatever this was from doing anything to anyone else. “We have to lock down the ward.” My voice echoed back to me hoarsely, cutting through the sudden, delighted shrieks of the voices chittering inside my skull.
The same horrifying voices from my dream.
Home, home, home.
I imagined shoving them down, hard, and they subsided a bit.
Will took one long, hard look at me, and then nodded curtly at Yi. “You heard the doctor. Lock down the isolation ward. No one in or out until everyone here is cleared of whatever this is.”
Susan spun on her heel and pushed past Iverson, who slid out of the nurse’s way as she moved down the hall, the momentary lapse of professionalism she had shown by screaming forgotten in the familiarity of protocols.
Back in the room, Kenny began crying, and Will gently rested his gloved hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We’ll take care of you,” he said. “But I need to talk to Dr. Banta for a moment, okay?” The boy sniffed, blinking big, tear-filled blue eyes at Will, but he nodded.
Will motioned me away from the bed, keeping his voice low. “Have you seen this before?”
I shook my head without replying.
“Then why are we on lockdown?” His voice was hard.
“Look at that, Will,” I whispered, gesturing toward Kenny. He was cradling his arm, staring at the light, which had now gotten brighter, and was beginning to create a glowing blue spot on the ceiling. “You know damn good and well that’s not normal.”
Iverson finally spoke again. “I’ve seen it before—or something very like it, anyway.”
Will stared at the detective. “You have?” he asked incredulously. “When and where?”
“Dallas, a few months ago. But not in a hospital—at a crime scene.” Some memory reflected in Iverson’s eyes turned his gaze hard and cold for an instant, and it occurred to me that as pleasant as he seemed on the surface, I wouldn’t want to cross him.
“Explain it to us,” I said.
“I don’t know everything,” Iverson replied, “but one of the detectives on our team went undercover with a vamp, and our best guess is that she actually stepped into one of those lights and disappeared.”
“Wait. Stepped into it?” Will’s voice sounded almost shrill.
What does that even mean?
“Yeah. My captain says it’s some sort of portal—a crossover to where the vampires came from originally.” Iverson shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s right, but it seems plausible. As much as anything seems plausible anymore.”
The babble in my head started up again, incoherent, but so loud I could hardly hear over it. I shook my head, as much to try to clear the noise as in negation.
Will took a moment to digest the detective’s statement, and then turned to Scott. “And you, Agent Chandler? Have you seen it before?” His anger reverberated, even through the tinny sound of the vocalizer.
“Nothing exactly like it.” Scott’s own voice had taken on a perfectly professional tone, the one I was beginning to recognize as his cop voice.
Will stared at Scott with narrowed eyes, but when the FBI agent didn’t offer any more information, Will turned back to me. “Why did Felicity scream when she saw you? And why did you say you thought the virus and parasite were working together? What do you know about all of this?” he asked.
I was saved from having to answer when Susan came back into the room. “I’ve alerted security and administration. We’re officially on lockdown.”
We all stared
at one another for a moment without saying anything. Then Will and Susan and I began working through the containment procedures, though I could feel Will seething with anger beside me. Susan left long enough to let everyone still in the unit—few enough, on shift change—know that they were to stay in place for the time being.
As I walked past him, Scott grabbed my arm with his gloved hand then leaned in toward me and spoke quietly—as if I were the only one who could hear, even though all our radios transmitted on the same frequency. “I have one really important question.”
Inside my helmet, I tilted my head. “Okay.”
The corner of his mouth twitched up a tiny bit. “Do we have any oatmeal?”
Despite the situation, I couldn’t help but smile.
# # #
When Susan returned, she and Will began moving around Kenny, taking the boy’s vitals and noting them in his chart.
Placing my gloved hand on Scott’s forearm, I pulled him out of the room and around to the desk side of the nurse’s station.
I couldn’t speak, couldn’t say the words. I knew that. Besides, anything I said now would be broadcast to everyone in the unit, and I didn’t want that any more than the creepy voices in my mind wanted it.
I couldn’t say the words aloud.
But maybe I could write them.
A cube of sticky notes sat on one corner of the desk, a cup full of pens next to it.
“What is it, Lili?” Scott leaned around to see my face, but I shook my head and held up one finger.
Wait.
I peeled off the top note from the bright yellow pad and scribbled across it in green ink:
I caused this.
When Scott’s concerned expression didn’t change, I underlined the sentence and then wrote more.
I meant to write, “I am the source of the illness.” Instead I wrote, “We are aswang.”
Scott jerked away from me when he read the note, staring from it to me. I realized then both what I had actually written, and the fact that Scott had never told me about the creature’s last words to him.
Ripping another Post-It note off the top of the stack, I slowly printed the words:
I AM THE SOURCE OF THE ILLNESS.
To my relief, Scott didn’t try to argue with me. “Are you absolutely certain?”
When I nodded, he placed his hand on my back. “We’ll figure it out, then. You wait here. I’ll gather the others, and we will deal with it together.”
Before he left, he held his gloved fingertips up to his faceplate and blew a kiss toward them. Holding my gaze the whole time, he touched his hand to my faceplate. “You’re going to be okay,” he promised.
As he walked away, I believed him.
# # #
“Talk, Lili,” Will said, standing inside an empty patient room, arms crossed over his chest, the lines of his body radiating tension, even through his protective gear. Iverson leaned against the wall inside the door, apparently completely at ease, one foot crossed over the other.
I suspected the detective’s calm was a front. The pose looked too contrived in a hazmat suit.
Scott stood beside me, his silent presence lending a support I hadn’t realized I needed.
With his encouragement, I might even be able to say out loud what had been happening with me.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on. Really,” I said, when two sets of male eyes narrowed at me. “But I’ve been having strange dreams.” Abruptly, I sat down on the empty bed as my knees gave out from under me—I really was about to say this out loud, wasn’t I? “And Felicity was in the first one. Benjamin was in the one last night.”
“What kind of dreams?” Iverson asked, right as Will said, “Where have you met her before?”
I answered Will’s question first—it was easier, at least initially. “I’ve never seen Felicity before—not outside of my dream.”
“That’s impossible.” Will shook his head resolutely.
“We live in a world with vampires,” Iverson said. “Nothing’s impossible, man.”
“I dreamed about Felicity the night before she was admitted to the hospital,” I said. “And in my dream, I attacked her.”
Scott sat down next to me, his continued silence demonstrating support, not disbelief.
“Explain,” the detective demanded, his narrowed gaze shifting from me to Scott and back again.
As I described the first dream, I saw Iverson grow more thoughtful. Will, on the other hand, looked even more deeply skeptical.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Will said when I had finished speaking. “You dreamt about a child with curly blonde hair, and when you saw this patient, your mind filled in the blanks.” He waved his hand dismissively.
Iverson, however, watched me closely. “There’s more, isn’t there?” he asked.
“Yes. I don’t have proof, but I know I’m right.” Nausea roiled through my stomach, and I swallowed it down. “It started with my grandmother.” The trembling in my hands emerged as a waver in my voice. “She told me about the aswang.”
“What’s an aswang?” Will asked.
“Tell us,” Iverson said, more quietly than before.
I paused a moment to gather my thoughts, and I drew in a deep breath as I prepared to share the story of the last night my grandmother spoke to me.
# # #
The last time anyone saw this disease was twenty years ago, when I was twelve.
It’s why I became a doctor, actually. All of the children who contracted it went to my school, in a district that was made up of a largely Filipino community. But none of the Filipino children came down with it. My Inang, my grandmother, told me not to speak to the other children about it—but you know how kids are. As soon as she made it forbidden, I had to know more. So I started trying to find out why she had been so adamant about it. I talked to everyone who would listen: my teacher, the other children, my mother. My father had died two years earlier from a fast-moving cancer, and I was obsessed with illness. At first, I heard people saying that only the white children could catch it. Then a black student contracted it, and then a Japanese student who had recently moved into the district.
Two of the children died.
I went insane.
They weren’t my friends. They weren’t even in my grade—I don’t know if I could have picked them out in a crowd. But I had attached their illnesses to my father’s death, and I fell apart. I was still grieving.
After the children died, they shut the schools down, and I stayed home all day, crying.
That night, Inang came to tuck me into bed, steadying her slightly wobbly walk with her cane as she crept across my room and lowered herself down on my bed. She already looked haggard, though I wouldn’t understand that until later. Her eyes, bloodshot and red-rimmed, watered as she spoke to me. I knew she was serious when she used my full name.
“Halili,” she said. “I need to tell you a story.”
“Okay,” I replied, unwilling to tell her that I had outgrown bedtime stories—if I had dared to say so, there’s a good chance she would have whacked me with that cane.
She stared off into the distance. “Do you know the story of the aswang?”
“Sure.” My family didn’t go in for myths and legends, but plenty of other kids in our neighborhood had told the stories of the evil woman who stalked children at night, stealing their blood and breath and life. In some of the tales, she separated her torso from her legs and flew into the night—but I suspected that the other kids exaggerated when they told that part, each trying to outdo the other in describing the gory details of her ripping skin and dangling entrails as her wings lifted her into the sky.
“The stories aren’t true,” Inang said.
“I know that.” My preteen disdain for all things obvious laced my voice.
Inang smiled and ran her hand over my smooth, dark hair. “Do you want to know what is true, Halili?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“The aswang are tr
ue.” When I snorted, she gripped my cheek, forcing me to look at her. “They are real, and they are dangerous, child. And they will take you, if you are not careful.” Her dark stare bored into me.
“Take me?” My voice squeaked.
She let go of my face and folded her hands over the head of the cane. “We’re cursed,” she whispered. “The aswang will use us, if they can.”
“Inang, are you okay?” I brushed her hands with my fingertips.
She straightened, and for a moment, she sounded stronger than she had in a long time. “I will be, child. And so will you.”
Late that night, sometime after midnight, she came back to my room.
It seemed like a dream—for a long time I convinced myself that it was a dream.
Now I’m not so sure.
I awoke to see her standing over my bed, chanting, and when I tried to sit up, I couldn’t—my limbs refused to move. A blue light gathered around her and the chanting took on a weight of its own, adding to the invisible load of bricks that held me still.
Fear fluttered through my stomach when I realized I could see her, perfectly outlined in blue, holding a knife aloft. With a few swift slices, she cut across her arms, and blood dripped onto my face.
That’s the first time I heard the voices.
They screamed in Filipino, then in English.
No, no, no.
You can’t.
And some of them muttered, Lonely. So alone.
They were in my head, but Inang answered them—and I couldn’t tell if she spoke aloud or if I heard it in my mind.
“Yes. Hear me, aswang. You cannot have this one. She is mine, and I protect her.”
The voices laughed.
And then Inang raised her hands, gathering the blue light into a ball of power, and pushed it into my stomach. A powerful heat ripped through me where she touched, shooting up through my torso and into my head. I screamed, but no sound emerged—the magic that kept me still also kept me silent—and I felt the voices gather together to fight back.
But she was determined to protect me. I could feel that protection encircling me, running all through me. And it created a barrier. Inang built a wall and shoved the aswang behind it, where they couldn’t reach me.
Bloodborne (Night Shift Book 2) Page 12
