by Anna Leonard
“Jon, if you would just—”
“Lily, I told you—”
“Hey! Somebody grab that bastard!” A man’s shout, annoyed but not really worried.
Patrick turned in the direction of the shout, only to feel something slug him in the chest, knocking the air out of him. He bent over, catching a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of a shadow looming over him.
“Grab him!” the voice yelled again. “Grab the son of a bitch!”
Patrick was more than willing to, as soon as he could stand up again. Then he heard another voice yelling, “Get off of me!”
Lily sounded more pissed off than scared, but instinct took over even as he was realizing that, and he had his gun out of its holster and was turning to aim at the figure clad in black jeans and hoodie. In work mode Patrick’s well-trained brain took in the instant basics: solid build, white, five-eight or so, shaking as if he had a bad case of the d.t.’s, but with a chokehold on Lily, his other hand snaking around to reach for the purse dangling from her left shoulder.
“Lily, down!” he yelled, unable to get a clear shot while she was struggling with their assailant. Damn it, damn it, damn it!
Instead of going down, she threw her head back, knocking hard against the man’s face. The guy dropped her, and looked up to see a federal agent’s gun aiming at him.
Kill him, something shouted in Patrick’s brain. He threatened her! Shoot him! But a cooler, better-trained control remained, and his finger stayed on the safety, not the trigger.
The guy snarled, frustration contorting his pale, drawn-looking face into something barely human, and rushed him: a crazy movement, a desperate movement. At the last moment possible, Patrick flipped his grip so that the butt of the gun came into contact with the guy’s head. Two blows were what it took to drop him, and Patrick made a mental note to give Lily half the credit for the collar.
Only then did he hear the sound of feet running on the pavement toward them, and shouting. Unmistakable, the sound of cops on the move.
“I got him, I got him, Jesus, the guy just freaked on us!”
Only then did Patrick notice that the man’s hands were cuffed in front of him. That was what had hurt so much, when the guy nailed him.
“You should have gone peacefully into booking,” he told the body at his feet, even as he holstered his gun and turned to check on Lily.
“We’re making a bad habit of this sort of—Lily!”
She was still on her knees, blood flowing down the side of her face. “Lily?” He went to her, using his sleeve to blot the blood away.
“Bastard hit me!” She sounded so outraged, he almost laughed.
“He hit me, too,” he said, feeling the blow all over again.
“Yeah, but…that’s your job! Nobody hits me! How dare he! How dare he raise a hand to me!”
“Lily?” He hesitated. Anger was a normal-enough reaction to being mugged, but…her voice sounded…different. Strange. Thinner, more nasal. Had the guy broken her nose? Was she having a reaction to her earlier weirdness in the station? Jesus, he should have insisted that she go directly to the hospital, do not pass go, do not…He placed his hands gently on either side of her face, trying to get a better look at where the blood was coming from. The frission of pleasure that came from touching her was muted by the warm drip of blood. Scalp wound probably. But…“Lily, look at me.”
She drew away, as though affronted. “Who are you? Where is My Lord? How dare you touch me?”
“What?” He gaped at her, and then looked over his shoulder. “Hey, someone, get a paramedic here, stat!” Two dozen cops and not one of them useful.
“Take this idiot inside and book him,” he heard a gruff voice say, and then the scuffle of their assailant being taken away.
“Moron.” It wasn’t clear if the cop was talking about the criminal or the cop who hadn’t been able to control him. “Sorry about that. I swear, it was like he saw you guys and totally flipped out. Ambulance is already on the way. Check both of you out, make sure everything’s okay.”
“I’m fine,” Patrick said. The guy had hit him hard with the metal bracelets, but nothing was broken or otherwise in need of taping up. He’d cracked enough ribs in his time to know what that felt like. “Lily…she got knocked in the head.” All right, technically she had knocked her head into the prep. Not a useful distinction right now.
There was a siren and the heavy crunch of the ambulance; the EMTs wasted no time when the call came in from the police station.
“Oh God. God. What’s…?” She was looking at her hands, flexing them, fingertips into her palms, shaking her head back and forth. “My fingers feel funny. They itch. And burn.”
“Ma’am?” A paramedic squatted next to her, reaching out with a cautious hand to get Lily’s attention.
“What’s happening to me? Where am I? How dare he lay hands on me?”
The paramedic looked up at Patrick, who shrugged, feeling unutterably helpless. “The guy rushed us, grabbed her. She gave him a serious head butt…”
“That’ll knock some confusion into ya, yeah. What’s her name?”
“Lily. Lily Malkin.”
“Ms. Malkin? We need to get that bleeding stopped, is that okay? We’re going to take you to the hospital and patch you up, make sure everything’s working okay. You good with that?”
“Jon?”
Her voice was soft, thin, and it hurt worse than the mugger’s fist. But the box’s lid held tight. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, give in. The clock was ticking, and the Serpent was still out there, waiting. Threatening.
“You go with him, Lily-kit. I’ll go get this guy, and it’ll all be over.”
Lily didn’t remember much about the trip to the hospital. A lot of questions, and fuzzy-outlined men in faded white uniforms, and sirens that made her skull want to shatter until she started to cry, and they made the driver turn it off.
Then they were there, and she was being unloaded into the E.R. It was surprisingly, blessedly quiet. Lily was stripped of her jeans and sweater, the items going wherever her coat had already disappeared to, and wrapped in a flimsy paper robe that barely wrapped around, but came down her knees.
It bothered her that she couldn’t stop her fingers from curling and uncurling. A nervous twitch, and if the doctors saw it, they’d sedate her, try to keep her. Lily didn’t mind doctors, but she didn’t want to be here. Not now. Now with her brain all fuzzy and noisy, like a radio station picking up two different signals and only one speaker.
“Hush.” The static gave her the finger, and continued.
“Ms. Malkin?”
“Yes.” She looked up to greet the doctor. He had a clipboard and an air of competence that she found reassuring, even if he did seem barely twenty.
“All right, let’s take a look at you, shall we?” He stepped closer, and removed a light pen from his coat pocket. “Look up, please?”
Lily hesitated, and then looked up.
“Well…” He paused. “How’s your vision?”
“Okay. The light’s sort of weird, but no blurriness or blind spots.” The paramedics had asked her the same thing.
“And you haven’t…”
“Taken any drugs or alcohol, no.” Telling him that her eyes had been doing that on and off all week probably wouldn’t help her get out of there, so she didn’t. And she hid her fingers in the flimsy paper cloth of her exam gown.
The doctor went ahead and checked her vitals, finding nothing particularly off kilter. Her reflexes were, in his words, fabulous, she didn’t have a headache, and he didn’t notice the way her fingers kept flexing. She didn’t tell them about the ache in her fingertips, either.
“All right, let me go check up on your X-rays. I’ll be right back.”
She sat on the edge of the cot and waited, her legs swinging annoyingly in the air. Who designed these exam rooms, anyway, the Jolly Green Giant? God, while she waited here, who knew what was happening out there? What had Jon found?
&
nbsp; A nurse walked by, and she reached out to grab at her sleeve. “Where’s a phone?”
“Excuse me?”
Lily mimed picking up a receiver and dialing. “A phone?”
“There’s one down the hallway…oh, no, it’s broken.” The nurse frowned. “You don’t have a cell phone?”
“Never needed one,” Lily said, cranky. Why did everyone assume everyone else felt the need to be in touch at all times? All she wanted was to make a simple phone call. And her purse was off somewhere with the rest of her belongings, she realized. The cops had taken it as evidence, or something. “Never mind. I don’t have any change on me anyway.”
“I’ll tell you what. Let me get a chair, and we can let you use the phone at the desk. Okay?”
Lily tried to smile at the woman who was, after all, trying to help. They grabbed a wheelchair from the hallway and the nurse—Georgia, according to her name tag—pushed her to the nurses’ station, where a quick conversation with the woman behind the desk got a heavy sigh and access to a phone.
Lily closed her eyes and tried to remember Jon’s number. She usually had an excellent memory for numbers, but…there it was.
“This is Special Agent Jon T. Patrick. Leave your name, number and a brief message, and I will return your call as soon as I am able.”
Lily put down the phone and thanked the nurses numbly. There were a lot of reasons why his phone wasn’t picking up. He might be in a warehouse, or a basement. Somewhere a signal didn’t get through. That happened, didn’t it? Even to FBI-issue cell phones? No reason to assume anything was wrong.
“You okay, hon?” Georgia wasn’t that much older than her, if at all, but her concern had a definite maternal feel to it, and suddenly Lily wanted to cry. Her own mother had died when she was a child, and while her father had loved her, he wasn’t exactly the sort to use nicknames or endearments.
“Yeah. I just…” Just what? Was upset because her Fibbie wasn’t answering his phone? That he was more concerned with the stats of his case than her well-being? He had shoved her off to the paramedics fast enough, not even letting a mugging slow him down.
Lily was angry but she wasn’t sure why. At Jon, Special Agent Patrick, for thinking of the case before her? Or herself, for letting it matter? She had no claim on him, and he had no obligation to her.
“We need to get you back to the cubicle,” Georgia said, turning the chair around and pushing Lily back to her cubicle. “Doctor will be here soon, not good to have him thinking you slipped out on him. Gives them complexes when that happens. Fragile egos, these doctors.”
“Ah, there you are. Georgia, what have I told you about kidnapping our patients?”
Georgia helped Lily out of the chair and back onto the cot, not giving the doctor the benefit of a response. “You hang in there, hon.”
“Thank you.”
“So.” The doctor consulted his clipboard, and then looked directly at her, as though he had already memorized everything he needed to say. “Your X-rays show nothing wrong. Your heart rate is elevated slightly, but nothing that is out of place for what you’ve been through. You have, as expected, a concussion. The pupil enlargement is worrying, but without anything setting off alarms…. I’m willing to release you so long as there is someone to drive you home and stay with you for the next twenty-four hours.”
There was a dry cough from just outside the cubicle’s heavy white curtains, where Officer Stephens was unapologetically, part-of-the-job-ma’am eavesdropping.
“I have a police escort,” Lily said dryly. “I think I’m okay.”
After the doctor ascertained that yes, Officer Stephens was there for the sole purpose of making sure she didn’t fall down and go boom again, and would stay with her until a family member could arrive, he agreed to release her into the gentle care of Newfield’s finest.
They brought her her clothing and drew the curtains for privacy. She managed to get re-dressed without too much difficulty, but her sweater snagged on a fingernail and the threads dragged out, making her swear unhappily and without much enthusiasm. She had never been very good at cursing.
Lily finally got her shoes on and laced them up, then pushed the curtain aside to interrupt Stephens and the doctor still talking.
“I’ll be right back.” She was moving slow, but her feet were steady under her, the walls weren’t doing the woobly thing again, and everything smelled and sounded normal. She made it to the phone at the nurses’ station and looked at the woman behind the counter with the best pitiful expression she could manage.
It must have been pretty effective, because the deskbound nurse just waved a hand at the phone as though to say “have at it.”
She could recall the number easily now. But the result was the same: it went directly to voice mail.
She should have gone back to Stephens’s custody, had him drive her home, taken the pills they were going to give her and settled in on her sofa with a blanket wrapped around her, surfing the TV. Maybe she’d order food and invite the boys in. It would be the least she could do.
Come to me.
Maybe she would have him stop on the way home and pick up a few movie rentals. Something to keep her mind off whatever was going on with Jon. Keep her from worrying about whatever was happening to her, which couldn’t be anything because the doctors didn’t find anything. Something to de-stress by. A romantic comedy maybe, or a Marx Brothers movie.
Come to me.
Lily shook her head, trying to dislodge the odd whisper she kept hearing. She just wanted to go home, that was all. Go home, and have Agent Patrick call her and say he’d gotten the guy, that he would never hurt another cat again, never call her house or break into another cattery. And then Agent Patrick would return to Washington, and she could get her life back under control.
Without conscious volition, Lily moved away from the nurses’ desk, across the lobby to where a large picture window would have let in sunlight during the day. The hospital was built into part of a hill, so they were raised above ground level slightly, even though the E.R. was technically on the first floor.
She looked into the sky, noting that the moon was almost finished waning. The end of the week would be the new moon, when the sky would be lit only by the distant stars.
Come to me. I need you.
She looked down, as though searching for the source of the whisper. A half-moon driveway, with an ambulance waiting outside, and beyond that a parking lot, cast into shadows by the streetlights.
A smaller, more distinct shadow moved by the ambulance, catching her attention. A man, half hidden, looking up into the window.
Looking at her.
I need you. Come home.
She couldn’t see his face at that distance. And yet, she knew it. Lean and regal, black hair oiled back off the high forehead, a hawk’s nose and black eyes that saw everything and valued far less.
It looked nothing like the face in the drawing they had shown her. But she knew him. The Night Serpent.
And then she remembered. Everything.
Chapter 14
“Ms. Malkin?”
Lily turned to see Officer Stephens standing there, her coat and purse over his arm. “They just need you to sign some paperwork. I’ll go get the car, okay?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
She looked back, but the figure was gone. Had it even been there? She was operating on autopilot, her body moving and her mouth talking while her mind was somewhere else entirely. All the nightmares, the shadowed hallucinations, the voices, the strange unease and desires she felt…
All real. And impossible.
You are not who you are.
Impossible.
You are the Superior of the Guardians of the Children of Bastet.
Impossible.
And yet the memories flooded her, the solid pain each one brought proof that impossible did not mean unreal.
…Dancing in the gardens under Her approving eye…
…grooming a sleek spotted cat
, its head resting trustingly on her bare forearm, the rumble of its purr a blessing from Herself…
…the appearance of a man in the temple, seeking wisdom and guidance…
…hushed conversations, avoiding the attentions of the beasts she had once catered to, guilt-stricken as she did what her lover asked of her, never asking why he asked, why she gave….
…the heat of her lover’s gaze as he touched her…the heat of his gaze as he repudiated her, betrayed her, murdered her….
That thought stilled her.
Murdered. She had been murdered, the blood pooling on the cool stone floor, her body left for the temple beasts to discover.
Lily shuddered, feeling the information break over her, drowning her, even as her body left the hospital, got into the car, was driven away.
Murdered?
You betrayed them first. You gave Her secrets to an outsider. For what?
For love. The memory of a face again. Dark, intense eyes burning with need. Ambition.
For love unrequited. The need was not for you, but power. He used you for his own ambition. And you died for it. Died unjustified, cast off by the Mother and forbidden peace by all the gods…
Eight lives passed behind her eyes, all lived so much as this current one had been, with hesitation and uncertainty, alone and afraid…Each life a cycle of the same choices, the same failures, century after century. Never able to trust, to make the leap, to break the cycle. Always ending in failure.
Until this life. Until the day she moved to Newfield. The day she stepped inside the cat shelter, determined to overcome her fear. That had made the difference, she was certain of it.
There is something I’m supposed to do. Something important. But I don’t know how. Or when.
Another dream-memory, recent this time. A lean, elegant tawny cat, its pelt covered with black spots, sitting in a classic temple pose. Pale olive-green eyes staring at her, the pupil growing larger and larger until she was about to fall into them.
