by SM Reine
Electricity danced down her upright arm and clustered on her fingertips. It arced from her fingernails.
Geoff dodged—barely. The lightning struck the wall behind him. It lanced up the bricks, sizzled against the roof.
He leaped toward Marion from the rear.
She swung around, annoyance twisting the graceful lines of her face.
“No,” she said, side-stepping him again.
The neon lights outside of Original Sin popped in a shower of sparks. Every single street light within range blacked out.
The night was absolute.
Unable to see, Geoff slammed into the trashcan. It exploded around him in a shower of stinking garbage. He shook it off, but old beer and vomit weighed his fur down.
His worst fears were true. There was only one type of creature that disabled all electricity simply by existing.
Angels.
The bounty on this kid should be a lot higher.
Light glowed at the end of the alley. Marion’s magic was gathering again, illuminating her the way that lanterns were illuminated by inner flame. Her eyes spilled ethereal blue down her cheekbones. She advanced on Geoff. “Who sent you?”
The back door banged open, bouncing off the wall. Geoff glimpsed Vasicek emerging from over Marion’s shoulder.
The megaira raised his gun. He fired as Marion turned to look at him.
Geoff didn’t get time to feel hopeful that Vasicek would finish the job. Marion plucked the bullet out of the air an inch in front of her nose. “Silver,” she said, rolling it between her fingers. “Whoever hired you must not know me well at all.”
She hurled the bullet at Geoff before he could react. It embedded in his foreleg as though shot from a gun.
There was no pain quite like silver burn. Geoff’s howls shook the bricks of the alley. His vision blurred, his head rang, his blood turned to acid.
Vasicek gave a strangled yowl.
And then he was silent.
Geoff couldn’t see what had happened to the demon. He could see nothing, think of nothing, feel nothing but the bullet. Marion seemed to have aimed it so that the point would flatten against the bone deep within his flesh. The moon was scorching him from the inside out.
Vasicek was probably dead.
Not enough money in the world for this.
Marion crouched and ran her hand through the ruff of hair at Geoff’s neck. He whined and snapped at her fingers. She pushed his muzzle to the pavement, as casually as though that were something she’d done to werewolves before. “I want you to shift back and tell me who sent you.”
If he could have, he would have. Anything to make her back away. Anything to stop the pain.
The charm wouldn’t wear off for another hour, and there was no way to tell her that.
She stood suddenly, distracted by another person appearing in the alley. Marion stood and turned to face them. The smell of her shock came off of her in waves so powerful that they pierced Geoff’s suffering.
“Mon dieu,” Marion said softly. Her hands balled into fists. Her voice strengthened. “Qu’est-ce que toi, tu fais ici?”
There was no responding voice. There was only blinding darkness, immense and total.
When the street lights flickered back on, Vasicek was dead, Geoff was still bleeding, and Marion Many-Last-Names was gone without a trace.
2
Ransom Falls, California—October 2030
It had been a long night in the emergency department of Mercy Hospital, but that was no surprise; the days surrounding new moons were always achingly busy. Shapeshifters who rejected the control of the Alpha went wild on the new and full moons. Even if they didn’t manage to hurt other people, they often hurt themselves.
Wild shapeshifters meant broken bones. They meant scratches.
Worst of all, they often meant bites.
There were procedures to prevent those kinds of incidents, but locking shifters in the safe houses hadn’t helped much as of late. They were always smashing their way out and biting people anyway.
That was what happened when you failed to pair the public’s safety net with a budget to match. Without adequate government funding, the burden of cleaning up preternatural messes fell upon the hospitals.
Dr. Lucas Flynn wasn’t paid enough to deal with that kind of crap, but he hadn’t gotten into it for the money.
He stopped in the doorway of the waiting room, cursorily studying the patients triage had lobbed his way. Luke’s reputation for being able to identify the origin of preternatural wounds meant he got first shot at every possible preternatural injury that happened within a hundred miles of Ransom Falls.
Most of the injuries on that particular night were ordinary. Dog bites were easy to pick out by the narrow bite radius and slow-healing defensive wounds, so he dismissed them in an instant.
There had also been a bar fight, judging by the men nursing black eyes in the corner. Hardly preternatural.
The women with the broken bones in the nearest chairs had been attacked by a shifter—or at least a gaean with super-strength. However, they hadn’t been bitten. Bones would heal without Luke’s intervention.
The two remaining patients jumped out at him.
“Which ones do you want to see?” Nurse Ballard asked, hurrying to greet him with an armful of paperwork. She shoved her thick-framed glasses up her nose with the back of her wrist.
“Those two,” Luke said, pointing. “Charts?”
Nurse Ballard handed them to him and nearly dropped the rest of the papers in the process. “I think this first one’s a chisav mauling. We’ve had sightings.”
“Right before a new moon? Unlikely.”
Luke examined the chart anyway, double-checking the photos of the irrigated wound before it had been bandaged. That was definitely the bite radius of a human mouth, not a chisav or dog. She’d been attacked, and it had been a shifter in his human form who had done the biting.
“Get a dose of Retrolycathol in her before dawn. Call the OPA for a priest in case I’m wrong.” He was never wrong. “We’ll need a priest for the patient in the blue jacket anyway.”
Nurse Ballard frowned at the second patient. “Him? That’s definitely a werewolf bite.”
“Demonic influence,” Luke said.
“How can you tell the difference?”
He always could. The why of it didn’t matter, and explanations would delay getting necessary drugs administered and priests summoned. “You’ll want him in isolation until the priest arrives. Thanks, Charity.”
She took the Retrolycathol prescription to the pharmacy.
Luke would need a closer look at the patient before she got the Retrolycathol. There was no point subjecting her to months of unpleasant side effects unless it was truly necessary.
She was lucky to be eligible for Retrolycathol in the first place, though. Not all patients were that fortunate.
Luke stepped into an inpatient room to check on one such patient.
Mrs. Eiderman was a relic of another era: the kind of woman who would have been young and beautiful in the eighties, with hair teased tall, a love of shoulder pads, and a terrible smoking habit. Those had been the days when people understood that smoking was a deadly habit, but were too rebellious to stop. Women of the eighties had been high-powered business magnates, and they had been immortal.
She had been right not to fear lung cancer. It wasn’t lung cancer taking Mrs. Eiderman down, but lycanthropy.
How a shifter had managed to evade capture by the OPA on a full moon was one mystery. Why it would have sneaked into Sunny Vistas Retirement Home was another. Those mysteries weren’t Luke’s problem. What mattered was this: Mrs. Eiderman, a delicate woman of seventy-something years, had been bitten. She was too frail to survive multiple doses of Retrolycathol. And she was dying.
Three moons had passed since Mrs. Eiderman had been assaulted by a shifter, and all three moons had happened in Luke’s hospital. He hadn’t thought she’d survive the first of them. N
ow the fourth approached and she was still there, shrunken and frail, in a hospital bed.
There was no hint of weakness in the smile she gave Luke as he entered her room. “Good morning, Dr. Flynn.”
He glanced at his chart, looking for reports of mental failure. “Morning?”
She laughed. “Just seeing if you’re on your toes. I know it’s evening.”
“I’m supposed to be the one testing you, Mrs. Eiderman.” He sat on the chair at her bedside. Three moons he’d sat with her. Three sunrises. She was still smiling despite the golden eyes and unhealed bite wound on her forearm. “How have you been feeling?”
“Like I could lift cars above my head.”
She didn’t look it. If she’d been twenty years younger—even five or ten years—she might have been able to lift a semi truck, assuming she survived all six moons of transformation. Mrs. Eiderman was guaranteed not to last that long, though.
“Can you rate your current pain for me between one and ten?” Luke asked.
“Zero,” she said.
The last nurse to visit her had drawn a frowning face and number eight on the white board. Eight of ten. That was how bad her pain had been during an earlier visit. The painkillers were working. No wonder she was smiling so much.
Luke rested a hand atop hers, rubbing his thumb along her knuckles. “I don’t like having to bring this up, but you need to know…the moon is coming again. It’s tomorrow night.”
She sighed. “Will you be here for me?”
“Do you want me to be?” The patient had refused his company during her last transformations. Her dignity was too great to be seen when her bones were breaking and skin was splitting.
“I think so.” Mrs. Eiderman could barely open her eyes, but she was still giving a sleepy smile. The wrinkles on either side of her mouth had been carved deep by an entire lifetime of smiling. “This will be the last one, after all.”
“There’s no way to know that,” Luke said.
“Promise me you’ll be here?”
He wasn’t supposed to be on shift for that moon. “I wouldn’t dream of missing it.”
“It’s a date.” Her sleepy smile had turned lascivious. Mrs. Eiderman had made no secret of admiring Luke’s body. The fact that she didn’t mention it out loud this time spoke volumes about her condition.
Her last moon was coming.
“Damn,” he sighed, pulling the curtains around her bed to allow her to rest.
He was stepping out of the room when another nurse jogged to his side, eyes wild, stethoscope slipping from his shoulders. “Luke! Thank God you’re here!”
“What’s up, Ollie?” Luke asked with far less urgency.
Nurse Oliver Machado was a bit dramatic, to put it nicely. If Oliver had his way, Luke would have personally attended every single patient to come through the emergency department, including the ones with stubbed toes and mosquito bites.
Oliver stopped a foot away, leaning his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. “The woman. In the forest. White eyes.”
“Slow down and start from the beginning.” Luke might as well have prefaced every conversation with Oliver like that. “Aren’t you supposed to be camping this week? Scrubs are an odd choice for camping.”
“Well, I had to come in once I found her. She was wandering around the forest.”
“Who was?” Luke washed his hands in the sink, scrubbing his fingernails thoroughly.
“The woman,” Oliver said, frustrated. “You need to see her.”
“It’s almost the new moon, Ollie. I’m on preternatural rotation. We’ve already got two patients who need my attention and it’s not midnight, so I’d wager I’ll be too busy to see any random forest nymphs tonight.” He was joking, but if the woman were a nymph, then she wouldn’t have been the first one to wander into his emergency room.
“You have to see this one. She’s asking for you, Doctor.”
Luke’s eyebrows lifted. “For me? Specifically, by name?”
The expression on Oliver’s face was opaque, but the urgency in his eyes said that he knew.
He knew.
Worse than that, the patient knew, too.
This was someone that Luke needed to see.
“All right,” he said. “Take me to her.”
The other patients would have to wait.
* * *
When Marion woke up, she only knew those two things: That her name was Marion, and that she was awake.
That was all.
She catalogued a few other facts in the moments that followed. Her body was female. She had large breasts, wide hips, and a flat stomach, all hidden underneath a starched white sheet that made her think of hospitals.
Hospitals—Marion knew what a hospital was.
Marion sat up and the sheet puddled around her waist. She was wearing blue pajama pants. Ribs jutted from beneath her breasts. She looked as though she hadn’t eaten in quite some time, although she didn’t feel hungry.
The crook of her elbow itched. Someone had taped an IV needle to her arm. She tried to pick the tape off with her fingernail.
The door opened.
A man entered, and the sight of him made her forget about the IV. He was an attractive man in his prime years, with a square jaw, narrow shoulders, and brown skin. His black hair was cut short to the scalp.
He spoke in a language she didn’t understand. His mouth moved with harsh syllables. An American voice, somewhere from the western side of the country, and it was infuriating that Marion could identify where he came from but didn’t know the words themselves.
This man wore plain blue medical scrubs—something else that Marion recognized. He had a badge clipped to his chest. The name was blurry at a distance. Marion needed to wear glasses, she realized.
When he moved near enough to sit beside her bed, the badge came into focus.
Lucas Flynn. He appeared to be a doctor.
“I’m not sick,” she said immediately. She was speaking in French, which must have been her native tongue.
He stared at her as though she were a ghost haunting his hospital. His hand rubbed his jaw. He must have been on shift for hours because a beard shadowed his chin.
“I’m not sick and I don’t need a doctor,” Marion said, speaking slowly in the hopes he would be able to pick up a word or two. “I need to find Seth Wilder.” The name was rattling in her head, bouncing around, clearer than anything else she knew. Clearer than her gender, clearer than her own name, clearer than the overwhelming confusion.
Marion needed Seth Wilder.
The doctor’s eyes narrowed. He clasped his hands in his lap, then unclasped them, then sat back in the chair. The request displeased him.
He said something.
“I don’t understand you,” Marion said, thrusting her arm toward him. “Please remove this. I don’t need it and it’s uncomfortable.”
The doctor lifted one finger, telling her wait a moment non-verbally.
He put gloves on before removing the IV. It stung a little, but Marion felt much better without it.
“Thank you,” she said.
And he replied with something that she suspected meant “you’re welcome,” which was such basic English that surely she should have known it. She could only understand the context, though.
Dr. Flynn took the gloves off again, tossed them into the trash, and extracted a cell phone from his pocket. He continued to speak in that frustrating American accent as his thumbs moved over the screen.
After a moment, his phone spoke in an automated, robotic voice. “Do you know any English?” The doctor’s phone was speaking her language. Dr. Flynn smiled at her expression and turned the phone so that she could see the screen. He’d opened some kind of translation app.
“No, I only speak French,” Marion said.
He seemed to understand that. He typed again, and the phone said, “My name is Dr. Lucas Flynn. Do you know where you are?”
She held her hand out to take the
phone. He dropped it in her palm. “I don’t know anything,” she typed, and the phone read it aloud in jilting English. “I can’t remember anything before waking up in this hospital room.”
They exchanged the phone again. “You’re in Ransom Falls, California, which is in the western North American Union. You were found walking in the forest outside of city limits, alone and confused.”
Marion didn’t remember that part either. It explained why she felt sore, though.
“A nurse found you,” Dr. Flynn went on, still using the phone. “The nurse said that you’ve been asking for a man named Seth Wilder.”
“Yes,” Marion typed. “I need him.” She felt as sure of that as she was of her name, and as unsure as she was of everything else.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Marion.”
“Do you have a last name?”
“I’m sure I must, but I don’t know it,” she said.
That was a fact that seemed to bother the doctor as well. “How old are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do you live? How did you end up in the forest outside of Ransom Falls?”
“I don’t know. I’ve already told you everything I can remember,” Marion typed. “If the only things I remember are my name and Seth Wilder’s, he must be important to me somehow. I believe he will be able to help me remember everything.”
When she passed the phone back to him, their fingers brushed.
The instant that they touched, Marion felt as though a door had opened in her mind.
She jerked away from him.
The violence of her reaction surprised both of them. “I’m sorry,” Dr. Flynn said aloud, and he quickly typed the apology in his phone to be translated into French as well. “Je suis désolé.”
“It’s okay,” she said in English, and her accent was similar to the doctor’s: harsh, American, West Coast in origin, as natural as though she’d been speaking it her entire life. “You didn’t hurt me.”
“Well, damn,” Dr. Flynn said. She understood the second thing he’d said as well as she had the first. He leaned back in his chair as though trying to put a few more inches between them. Who could blame him?
