Hemorrhage (Medicine and Magic Book 4)

by SA Magnusson

  Jen sat quietly in the backseat of her car, saying nothing as we hurtled toward the metro. Ariel had repaired the damage to her car using whatever restorative magic the shifters possessed.

  As we neared the city, she leaned forward. “I need to go home.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  She looked around the car. The shifters were all clothed. Though I’d gotten over my discomfort with their nakedness, as we were heading into the city, there required a certain amount of decorum. Even Ariel must know that.

  “I’m not entirely sure what you plan on doing, but I do know that I am seriously outgunned here. I don’t even know how to fight, not like you, Kate. And I have no magic, so if it came down to some sort of brawl, I would be helpless.” Her gaze drifted to Ariel in the driver’s seat. She hadn’t said anything about Ariel taking command of her car, but there was a stiffness to her posture. “You can borrow the car, but when you bring it back, make sure it’s got a full tank of gas.”

  I chuckled. “I will.”

  “I thought it would be exciting to be a part of all of this, but it’s not. It’s terrifying. When you were there and those shifters were jumping you, I thought you were going to die.”

  “So did I.”

  “Likely she would’ve had I not shown up,” Ariel said.

  “You’re not helping,” I said.

  “I don’t want to face life and death situations that involve the possibility of me dying. I deal with enough, trying to prevent others from dying at work.”

  “I’m sorry that you got pulled into all of this, Jen.”

  “No. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m glad I know this side of you. You are so much more of a badass than I had ever known—and I knew you were a badass before. Who else goes running into every single trauma that comes into the ER?”

  Silence fell for a moment. “Do you want to stay at my house? It’s closer to the hospital, and—”

  “Are you trying to take advantage of me when you come stumbling in all punch drunk on magic?” Jen asked.

  “You wish. I was just thinking that somebody had to take care of Lucy.”

  “You know, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to stay at your place. Especially if I don’t have a car and if you’re out too late.”

  I gave Ariel directions to my condo and walked Jen up the stairs to the unit, unlocking the door. As I did, there was a surge of cold along my spine, a reminder of the magic that Aron had placed to protect me.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing. Just a reminder.”

  “Am I going to be in danger here?”

  “You’re safer here than almost any other place. Apparently my grandparents and Aron have both placed spells around my home to ensure my safety.”

  “He really did care about you, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut to keep tears from spilling. “We never really had a chance to figure out if there was going to be anything more between us. I thought…” I shook my head. It didn’t matter what I thought, not anymore. Anything that might have been was gone. “Get some rest. Hopefully I won’t be out all night and won’t disturb you when I come in.”

  “You want me to wake you up?”

  “I’m on trauma. I’ll be up and out before you are.”

  “Damn, I forgot about that. You should just come in for the night. Hell, it’s almost one a.m., and that means you have to be there in just a few hours.”

  I hadn’t even bothered to look at the time, not wanting to. I had dreaded it more than anything. “I’ll be fine. Besides, if nothing else, residency teaches us how to handle sleep deprivation.”

  “You don’t have to toe the party line,” she said.

  “It’s not the party line. It’s the truth, and one of the reasons I went into ER medicine. I didn’t have to worry about staying up on call night. Do my shift, help as many people as I can, and head home.”

  “Just another year,” Jen said.

  A year, but so much could happen in a year. So much had happened for me over this last year. I had managed to make it through my training, but there had been a time or two when I had feared what might happen, times when I worried that my connection to the magical world might get in the way of my medical training.

  “Get some rest,” I said.

  I pulled the door closed, feeling the magical barrier reform as it did. At least she would be safe inside.

  Making my way down the hallway left me with renewed sadness, though it shouldn’t. Like the spells on my home, the repaired walls were just one more reminder of Aron and the fact that I’d never see him again. When all this business with the rune magic was done, I would finally be able to grieve him properly, but until then, I had to keep my head on straight.

  When I crawled back in the car, Ariel glanced over at me. “Are you ready?”

  “As ready as I can be,” I said.

  “Is your friend set?”

  “She’ll be fine. She’s strong.”

  “I gathered that. She had no exposure to our world before all of this?”

  “Not so much. Meeting John was her first introduction.”

  “Ah, so she is the one he mentioned.”

  “Oh, don’t tell Jen that John mentioned her, especially if he wasn’t interested.”

  “Who said he wasn’t?”

  “That’s even worse,” I groaned.

  Ariel smiled tightly as she pulled the car onto the street. It was dark, and I suddenly realized that she didn’t have any headlights on. Not that she needed them. Her shifter eyesight probably made it so that headlights were unnecessary—and might actually be detrimental to her being able to know what was out there.

  “You know how to find the council archives?”

  “I think I can manage,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I make it my business to know a great number of things,” she said.

  “Has the archive been there for long?”

  “The archive in the city is but one building the council has there, and they keep them along the bank of the Mississippi River to ensure a connection to the lines of magic flowing deep beneath the city, and with that, they have no reason to move it. Why would there be, especially when it can be maintained? The nature of the protective seals around most of those places are extensive, enough that heading there will prove challenging.”

  “Then why again are we going?”

  “Because we have you, Kate Michaels.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You have a unique ability, and I suspect that ability will allow you to bypass the protections on the archives.”

  I wasn’t so certain that it would work. When Aron and I had intended to come here before, he would’ve been the reason that we would have managed to get inside, not me, and without him, it might be that there was no way of slipping past. Ariel might have a high view of my ability to squeeze past the protections the council placed on the archives, but my magic didn’t work like that, at least not that I knew of.

  We pulled along the street leading toward the archive. As we did, Ariel stepped on the brakes. As we drifted to a stop, she guided us off the side of the road.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “We aren’t alone,” she said.

  She nodded to Terrence and he pulled open the door, slipping out and shifting. It happened so quickly that I barely noticed what he did with his clothes. It was as if they simply disappeared.

  “Are his clothes a part of his shifting?”

  Ariel chuckled. “No. Not a part of his shifting, but there are ways of concealing them when we shift out of them.”

  “Then why do you stay naked when you shift in your den?”

  “Why do you wear clothes when you’re at home?”

  “Because it’s more comfortable.”

  “Is it? Have you ever tried to walk around nude? I can assure you that it is far more comfortable than yo
u realize, especially when you have the need to make a rapid transformation.”

  I couldn’t tell if she said it to make me uncomfortable or not. Either way, she succeeded. “Can you see what’s out there?”

  “No. There are voids in the night.”

  “Voids?”

  Did that mean that whoever was out there had somehow masked their presence? If that were the case, then it was either a mage—or it was someone carrying a rune.

  After the attack earlier tonight in the parking garage—could it really only have been earlier tonight?—I wondered if they had other ways of placing those runes and using them. Jen had called it a magic wand, and that might actually be what it had been. They had some sort of device they carried, and if they had placed runes on it, it was possible the device itself was what had created the masking. Maybe that was another reason I hadn’t detected magic when we were attacked before.

  “The same sort of void that mages think they can use on us. They are incompletely effective, though most within the council like to believe that they are powerful enough to maintain them.”

  “I’ve seen mages use a spell to conceal themselves when we rescued you,” I said.

  “You’re talking about your grandparents. They are quite high-level mages, and the complexity they can layer over such a spell would be enough to make it difficult even for us, though with enough time, we would be able to sniff past such a void.”

  And it was possible that the shifters had simply been distracted. They had been so focused on trying to call across the Veil that there had been considerable power getting thrown around at that time, enough that it might’ve been more than what the shifters would’ve been able to sniff through.

  “How many voids do you detect?”

  “Enough that I wanted Terrence to go out and investigate,” Ariel said.

  “How many?”

  “Ten.”

  Ten? That was too many. When they had been here before, there had been a handful, nothing more than that, and if there were ten now, that would be more than we would be able to withstand, wouldn’t it?

  I reached for my connection to magic. Even though I was tired, I had rested enough and was able to draw it around me, placing a barrier if I needed to.

  And I knew my barrier could withstand bullets. That was a mistake I wasn’t going to make again. But could I protect all of us against all of them?

  “We can’t take on ten, not with the four of us,” I said.

  “You continue to underestimate your abilities, Kate Michaels.”

  “It’s not a matter of underestimating my abilities. It’s about protecting those who are in danger. Do you have the ability to create barriers?” When Ariel frowned, I went on. “Shields. Some way of surrounding yourself with magic to deflect an outside attack.”

  “As you must have experienced when it came to the Great One, the nature of the shifter magic is quite a bit different. While we don’t have the same ability to create what you call a barrier, we have a restorative type of magic.”

  “How many bullets can you shift out of?”

  “Enough for this.”

  “I don’t want to put you into that situation,” I said.

  “You don’t get to choose on my behalf.”

  The door opened and Terrence slipped back in. He was naked again, and smelled of the familiar stench of blood. I had been around it often enough to recognize it. He didn’t appear injured.

  “There are three less, Ariel.”

  I blinked. “What did you do to them?”

  “I removed them as a threat.” He turned to Ariel. “One of them had this.” He pulled out a long, slender metal rod and handed it across the seat to her. She glanced at it before handing it over to me.

  It was about the length of my forearm and the width of one of my fingers, and marks along the side reminded me of the runes that had been placed on the mages, the same sort of tattoos that had given them power. The metal was cool, and as I ran my hand along the side of it, I felt indentations in the metal.

  “It’s one of their magic wands,” I said.

  “Mages don’t require magic wands, Dr. Michaels.”

  “Mages don’t, but those without power do. And these rune mages have no power of their own. They use markings placed on their skin along with this, apparently.”

  “I have not heard of mages placing markings on items like this before. Could this be how the archer was injured?”

  I had suspected that, and seeing the magic wand made it even more likely. If they were placing runes on things other than people, then they were drawing considerable power, especially if it required a mage to draw from.

  “I don’t understand it,” I said. “If this is about a transfer of power, then what mage would allow themselves to transfer so much of themselves?” I asked.

  Ariel frowned. “None on the council.”

  “And none on the Dark Council, either.” None of it made sense.

  “What would you have me do?” Terrence asked.

  “We cannot leave them here,” she said.

  “Would you like us to eliminate the remainder?”

  “Not all of them,” I said. “We need to ask them questions.”

  And if I could find the shooter, he was the one I wanted to question.

  I tried not to think about it in any other terms. Did I want revenge for what happened to Aron? That was part of my motivation, and as much as I tried to deny it to myself, that thought was there, lingering within me. And yet it shouldn’t be. I was trained to heal, to help, and not to allow myself to get caught up in those sort of emotions.

  Terrence and Jayson slipped out of the car, shifting as they did, disappearing into the night.

  I grabbed for the handle of the door, but Ariel reached across, grabbing my wrist.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Your men would go out there and kill, but I need answers.”

  “They will eliminate the threat. Then we can complete our task.”

  “Our task is not only to get into the archives. I want to know who is helping them. If we can figure it out, we can end this, and then we don’t have to worry about ongoing attacks. Someone has helped these mages acquire knowledge that they shouldn’t have.”

  I pulled my arm free and pushed open the door, stepping out into the night. As I did, I reached for my magic, wrapping myself in a barrier. I held onto it lightly, not attempting much more than to maintain it in place. I wasn’t able to detect the void in the same way as Ariel and the shifters.

  I hurried forward, searching for magic.

  The rune magic might be concealed, but the shifters were not, and the shifters would be able to sniff out the rune mages.

  In the distance, I detected the sense of cold. I made my way toward it, and as I did, I could see the outline of one of the shifters. I didn’t know which one it was, but either way, he was massive, and he stood almost perfectly still.

  If only I had some way to mask myself.

  Since I didn’t, I had to rely upon moving quietly, staying in the shadows along the street and creeping forward.

  Maybe I should’ve grabbed the magic wand. Would I have been able to use it?

  The shifter moved forward and then was suddenly thrown back. He howled softly and rolled to his side. Another blow struck him. It came from the opposite side. I couldn’t see what was hitting him, but whatever it was kept him incapacitated and he whined softly in a painful cry.

  Dammit.

  I couldn’t simply leave him, though it might not matter. He could shift and restore himself, but if they struck him enough times before he managed to do so, it was possible that he would be killed before he had a chance to recover.

  I pulled on magic, forming the sword.

  Each time I did, it became easier. Some of that had to do with the fact that the magical sword was now familiar to me, and some of it was that my magic required a certain visualization, a willing of magic rather than speaking the right words or pe
rforming the right movements, the same way my grandparents had to perform their spells. Familiarity made that easier. Quicker.

  I pushed power through the summoned sword. Light glowed along it and unmasked the rune mages. I would have to think about that later and what it meant.

  Five rune mages surrounding the fallen shifter.

  I leapt toward him, encircling him with my barrier. Their attack began immediately, slamming into my barrier, but it held.

  I looked down. “Can you shift?”

  The shifter growled.

  “I have you protected with the barrier for now, but I need to move it so that I can attack. Can you shift?”

  He rippled, transforming briefly into human form—Terrence—and then back into wolf. As he did, the bleeding began to abate, but he moved more slowly than he had before.

  There were limits to their ability to shift, and it was possible that he had reached the end of his limitations. What would happen if he needed to shift now? Would he bleed out? I wouldn’t be able to take the time to heal him, even if I knew how.

  “I’m going to move the barrier, so you’re going to have to be ready to attack,” I said.

  He snarled.

  “Keep one of them alive, if you can.”

  The magical assault on my barrier continued, and I twisted the sword. One of these days I would have to begin training with it more formally. I’m sure that Master David would be thrilled to work with me, especially as he had already offered, but for now, I would have to use what I knew of my training to force the sword through a series of movements.

  Terrence leapt out of my barrier and lunged toward two of the rune mages.

  I pushed toward the other three, slamming my barrier into them, drawing their attention. I carved through one and nearly stumbled at the lack of resistance my magic sword met as it cut the man in half.

  Magic had done that?

  The sword started to falter, but I forced it back into existence, trying not to let myself get distracted. I could incapacitate rather than kill. It would take more effort, but I could do it.