Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4)

by Gene Doucette

  “The alcohol works,” Steven reported, somewhat understatedly.

  “No kidding.”

  I turned to examine the results, but there was no merman to see.

  “Oh, he ran off,” the iffrit said. “Or, you know, swam.”

  I turned around to continue hacking away at the other one with the sword, but he was already gone.

  “Adam!” Mirella shouted. She had four of them on her. Lenny had five, but he looked like he was enjoying himself, and I didn’t want to interrupt. Plus I’d never heard my girlfriend call for help before, so it was probably important.

  I jumped into the fray. I’d love to say my expert swordsmanship was instrumental in clearing the scene, but the iffrit on my back, power-spraying alcohol, was probably more crucial. Still, I mean that was my idea so yay me.

  It took only a few seconds for the alcohol to drive them off, and then we were clear to move.

  “Lenny!” I shouted. He had nobody left to hit, and was now eagerly punching the front façade of the pub. “They’re all gone!”

  For maybe half a second, the look in his eyes was the kind of feral you just never want to see in one of his kind.

  Just a half a second, though.

  “A got a few of ‘em, Adam, did you see?”

  “I saw!” I gave him a thumbs-up like we were talking about a great baseball catch or something. “Gotta move!”

  Lenny was unreasonably happy about being able to hit things that he was already predisposed to hate, and not get in any trouble for it. I decided what must separate him from the other demons wasn’t anger management so much as it was a native moral code. I’d never met one who had one of those before.

  This time, the demon was ready to lead and we were ready to let him. Thankfully, he decided the best route to the hospital was along the street and not directly through windows and doors and brick walls, because he was freight-train prepped to plow through all of that.

  Twice, mermen appeared in front of him. He went at them with a frenzied glee that was genuinely disturbing. Even Mirella was taken aback.

  “I’m beginning to see why you didn’t want me facing one,” she said, as we ran. She was referring to an event a few years back in which she—acting as my bodyguard—dispatched a demon with sharp objects and a lot of patience.

  “You’ve never seen a demon in a war,” I said. “They have a whole different level.”

  We were still getting assaulted, in the wake of Leonard’s forward thrust, but nobody stuck around for long because we switched from swinging swords first to spraying alcohol. This did more to repel them than the threat of losing a limb or a head. I’m tempted to reach for garlic/vampire comparison, but that’s inadequate. More like salt to a slug.

  Lenny got us to the hospital just as the sun was disappearing over the horizon.

  The building had an ordinary-looking double door front entrance that properly deserved to be up a set of stone steps but wasn’t, because everything on the island was low and squat and kind of unattractive.

  The doors were wood, set in a cement frame in a brick wall, and as I said, it looked just like the library the next block over. The only way to tell the difference was the caduceus sign out in front of the hospital.

  I assumed the door was locked or barred and was about to tell Lenny to kick it in, when someone opened it from the inside. A man I didn’t know was holding it.

  “Come in, come in!” he shouted, with a light accent that I thought was probably Haitian.

  Leonard stopped just before the door and stepped aside to let us through first. I think he recognized that if he hit the entrance at full speed he might damage the door and perhaps the building. The doorway wasn’t demon-sized.

  Once we made it through, he stepped in carefully, and let the man close the door and bolt it.

  The hospital’s waiting area was on the other side of the door. It was empty, so far as I could tell in the waning light.

  “You were expecting us?” I asked, although it wasn’t really a question. It was obvious enough.

  “Of course! I’m so glad you made it. I am Henri.”

  He offered his hand, which I elected not to take.

  “How did you know we were coming?” Mirella asked.

  “Well, she hasn’t been wrong yet, has she?”

  He winked at me, like I was in on some kind of joke, and I sort of wanted to punch him. That would have been a bad idea, because I was pretty sure he was a werewolf.

  “Hey, Adam, that was great!” Lenny said. “But, ah, I kinda don’t feel so hot.”

  Lenny sat down in one of the waiting room chairs.

  “You all right, champ?” I asked. “You did great.”

  “Woo, I don’t know, I’m light-headed. Never felt light-headed before.”

  He was sagging, so I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him.

  “Just the exertion, buddy, I’m sure.”

  “Adam…” Mirella said.

  “What, he’s fine,” I said. I took my hand away, and discovered his flesh was sticky. At first all I could think of was Steven’s question: do demons sweat? This didn’t feel like sweat, though. It felt like Bruno’s skin when he was dying. Then I realized what Mirella was seeing, and understood. Something was drastically wrong. Lenny was shrinking before my eyes.

  “I dunno,” he said. “I feel real funny. I…”

  He drifted off without finishing the sentence, looked over my shoulder like he was seeing something only he could see, and then with a great gasp, Leonard the demon completely disintegrated.

  16

  There are still things in this world that I’ve never seen before. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it usually occasions a moment of hesitation to marvel at the very fact that this is even possible still, after all this time.

  Then there are occasions such as this one, in which a creature I called friend more or less melted in front of my eyes. This was new, yes, but horror and revulsion were the words I’d reach for, way before marvel. There was still a pause, though.

  Mirella uttered a prayer to a minor goblin god of combat before speaking.

  “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I was sick, and expected to spend the next several years remembering the moment I convinced Lenny to leave the safety of his second-floor room.

  “You,” Mirella said, to the werewolf who let us in, “what is this? What’s going on?”

  He looked about as stunned as we were, though.

  “I… I was only here to hold the door and show you upstairs.”

  She looked about ready to take his head off with one of the swords.

  “If you can’t explain it, lead us to someone who can. We wouldn’t have gotten here without that demon, and I would like to find out who’s responsible for what I just saw.”

  “I don’t… we didn’t have… I mean…”

  “Son, maybe you’d better just do what you’re here to do,” I said. “It’s been a long few days for everyone.”

  He nodded quickly.

  “It’s this way.”

  Henri led us out of the waiting room, through the empty emergency area I’d never been into before, and to a hallway and a stairwell.

  Mirella continued to look about ready to murder everything that moved.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, quietly.

  “Leonard was a warrior and that was not a warrior’s death. I’d like to correct this.”

  I forget sometimes what it must be like to deal with the specter of one’s personal demise as a matter of course. What I mean is that even though I end up in situations where my life is at risk—this happens slightly more regularly than it should, to be honest—I don’t go to bed at night understanding that one day I will actually die, if not from the sword then from old age. I never had to cope with personal mortality as a consequence of time, in other words.

  Mirella had to, though. So did everyone else who wasn’t me, or a vampire, or Eve,
my redheaded counterpart. (Also, vampires almost don’t count, because they do die from the ravages of time, it’s just that the ravaging is psychological.) I thought Mirella was interpreting Lenny’s death a little more personally than I was, essentially.

  “This man,” she said, pointing a dagger at the back of the guy leading us up the stairs. “He is no man. What is he?”

  “Werewolf. You can tell by the hair and the musculature. The jawline is a pretty good indication too.”

  “It’s not a full moon.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Werewolves don’t need full moons. They’re like that all the time. The whole moon-transformation thing is just a myth. So is the idea that they’re half-wolf.

  “But he couldn’t have done that?” Mirella asked.

  “To Lenny? No.”

  We reached the second floor, an area defined by a long corridor that appeared to have been unaffected by the tsunami.

  Doctor Lew Cambridge stood in front of a door about halfway down.

  “Adam!” he shouted, before practically running up to greet us.

  He looked pretty rough, like he’d been living in the wilderness for two weeks. I probably looked just about as bad.

  “So glad you’re here, this is so exciting!” he said.

  “Hi Doc,” I said. “What’s exciting?”

  I could think of a lot of answers to that, but I figured he was speaking about something very different than anything on my mind.

  “I can’t just explain, I have to show you!”

  He reached out to take my hand, but had to stop when Mirella put a blade against his neck.

  “Hi… Mirella, isn’t it?” he asked, in a decidedly less bubbly tone.

  “He could have done it,” Mirella said, to me. “This doctor.”

  There was a world of information hidden underneath the way she pronounced the word doctor. He was a human on an island of non-humans, doing research on those non-humans, and there were a lot of residents who thought there was something wrong with that. It struck me mostly as unnecessarily paranoid, but I knew the doctor pretty well and always saw him as coming from a place of innocent curiosity.

  I didn’t think Mirella was one of the people who thought poorly of doc Cambridge, but maybe before this she hadn’t been.

  “Done what?” he asked, in a tone consistent with a person unaccustomed to being threatened.

  “Lenny,” I said. “The demon. Did you know him?”

  “Of course, sure.”

  “He just disintegrated. Downstairs. He’s a puddle on the emergency room floor by now.”

  “You know, when demons die—”

  “Yeah he was alive when it happened.”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes, I know what might have happened there, but I had nothing to do with it. None of us here did. There’s a lot you don’t understand right now.”

  “Then help us to understand,” Mirella said.

  “I will. But you really need to come with me so I can show you. I can’t do that without a head.”

  I put my hand on Mirella’s arm.

  “He’s probably right about that.”

  She lowered the sword, turned, and said under her breath—so only I could hear—“I may have to go back outside to kill more of those things.”

  These are the kind of mood swings you have to expect with someone like her.

  “I’m sure we can find someone in the hospital for you to kill. Now let’s see what the nice doctor can show us.”

  His general demeanor substantially tempered, doc Cambridge led us silently down the hall, while Henri the werewolf followed from a considerable distance.

  The doctor paused at the door.

  “Do you remember what we talked about the last we spoke?” he asked.

  It seemed like an awfully long time ago, but I did. I nodded.

  “Good.”

  He opened the door.

  On the other side, was what I’d call the standard trappings of a biological laboratory space. I could make that association because I once spent several months in and out of a medical research facility, unwillingly, while a small team of scientists tried to figure out what made me immortal and disease-proof. There were a few things I recognized, I’m saying, although I couldn’t necessarily speak to what all of them were called or how they were used. I knew what I was standing in, though.

  It wasn’t the kind of place I’d expect to find in a hospital. Maybe this was my being naïve, but I associate this sort of research with exploitation, and hospitals with healing, and those don’t traditionally go together. Or, they do, and I’m wrong.

  But I’m burying the lede.

  At the far end of the room, in a large tub, was a mermaid.

  The sides of the tub were polished steel and the water inside was churning under Jacuzzi jet power so it was hard to see all that much of her, but I’d been looking at the male version for along enough to recognize that this one was both the same species and a different gender.

  At least, outwardly.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Mirella asked, perhaps excited by the possibility of someone to kill soon.

  “Yes, but she’s sick,” Cambridge said.

  The mermaid had the same bullet-shaped, hairless head, but her face was a little rounder, her nose more pronounced, and she had breasts, which was really the big differentiating characteristic.

  “Sick how?” I asked. “No, actually, let’s back up because I need to know more of this story. You told me in the bar that you had a piece of a mermaid up here. That’s a pretty big piece.”

  “Oh, that? No, that turned out to be nothing. They are very different than anything popularly depicted, as you see.”

  “We’ve seen,” Mirella said.

  “I was approached, not long after you and I spoke, Adam. A very persuasive young woman who promised she had a mermaid, and promised to take me to her.”

  I assumed we were talking about a succubus. Gordana, possibly. There weren’t a lot of persuasive techniques that could convince a man to drop everything and go live in the woods with the specious promise of a mermaid. True, there actually was a mermaid at the end of this particular promise, but that seemed like a statistical anomaly.

  “So you ran off to live in the woods,” I said.

  “For a while, yes. And fortunate to not be here when the wave came! I wish my colleagues had been as fortunate.”

  “Continue, then,” I said. “She’s sick.”

  “Yes. I did what I could at the camp, but there is really no substitute for the equipment in this room. If I had any chance of making her better, it had to be here.”

  We stepped a little closer. Mirella, recognizing the lack of immediate threat and the changing reality of the situation, finally put her sword away, and actually started to look less bloodthirsty and more curious.

  “How is she sick?” she asked.

  “That’s a complicated question,” the doctor said.

  The mermaid’s arm—only slightly less muscular than the merman versions I’d been avoiding—rested on the edge of the tub. Her head was tilted back and her eyes, though open, appeared unfocused and staring at a point on the ceiling.

  I touched the top of her hand. This evoked a response: she noticed for the first time that there was someone else in the room. Her hand flipped over and took mine in something almost like a handshake. Her grip was weak, but not insubstantial. There wasn’t any anger in her eyes, which was more than I could say for any other member of her species.

  The flesh of her hand was sticky.

  “I can only assume now that she’s not the only one,” Cambridge said. “If what you described…”

  “Lenny fought with a sick one, contracted it, and died of an accelerated version of what’s happening to her,” I said. “I understand now. Did you treat Bruno as well?”

  “Bruno? The incubus? No, why?”

  “He was sick too. He died from wounds inflicted by one of her kind, but he suffered from the same condition.
Thing is, he had it before the wave. He had it as far back as the hotel room.”

  “I don’t understand. What hotel room is this?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Well if he was sick, he didn’t bring it to my attention, and he could have contracted it from our friend in the tub.”

  I looked into her eyes again. None of the rage I saw in the rest of her tribe was there. She seemed to be aware that the doctor was trying to help.

  “Either she gave it to him, he gave it to her, or they both caught it separately. I’m not sure I like any option. But I understand now.”

  “What is it you’ve come to understand?” Mirella asked.

  “Just about everything, I think. Doctor, I need you to take me to her now.”

  “Her who?”

  “You know exactly who. The prophet and I need to have a conversation.”

  * * *

  Cambridge, and the werewolf Henri, brought us to another room on another part of the floor. This section was devoted to patient rooms, but—like most of the place, really—had more of an office building feel than anything. I don’t know if I can fully explain what the distinction is. Narrowness of corridors, maybe. I thought if Lenny had survived long enough to get a room here, it’d be a problem since the doors weren’t wide enough to admit a demon on a crash cart. Although the crash carts weren’t big enough to hold a demon, either.

  It was obvious enough which room we were heading toward, once we rounded the corner. Ahead of us was a makeshift campsite set up in a small open space that had a previous existence as a waiting room and nurse’s station. It now had a hot plate, a microwave, a small refrigerator (I assumed the latter two were scavenged from whatever kitchen was in the building) and five people I didn’t know.

  In a cursory review, I counted one human man, a succubus, a male and female elf, and a male goblin. The human was the only one out of place, and it’s possible I was missing something that would indicate a more exotic lineage, but I wasn’t curious enough to stop and verify.

  All of them looked about like what you’d expect from a band of people who had been living off the land for an extended period: hungry, dirty, tired and uncomfortable. They appeared to know who I was, though, because I commanded all of their attention as soon as I came into view. Mirella is a lot better on the eyes and she was heavily armed, but nobody treated her to as much as a glance.