by Anah Crow
“You take that side, I’ll take this one.” Kristan had one of the heavy sheets unwrapped and started to spread it over Noah’s body. Lindsay helped, straightening it where it caught and bunched on Noah’s seeping wounds.
Kristan looked grim but didn’t flinch. After Ylli’s reaction, Lindsay understood what a blessing her willingness to help really was. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” she muttered. “I hope he’ll be okay. Cyrus really gets us in the shit.” She unwrapped another heavy cotton sheet and laid it out. “Starting to question all this. Later, I guess.”
Lindsay fought down a fresh wave of guilt and focused on keeping Noah’s body caught in his illusion while he and Kristan wrapped Noah in layer after layer of cotton. Negasi wasn’t even healing Noah yet and the man looked like he was going to pass out.
All of this was his fault. It had started with him, with his father’s desperation to have him “cured”. He had to wonder if Moore would have gotten even half the power and funding she had if he hadn’t manifested by setting his father on fire—with an illusion, yes, but the awfulness of the parallel hadn’t escaped him.
“We need Beppe,” Negasi said, opening his eyes and focusing on Kristan. “My wife has our car tonight, but Beppe is only three blocks west. A green door next to a music shop.” Three blocks. In this part of town, that was a long way.
“You are leaning fucking hard on my good nature,” Kristan muttered to Lindsay.
Lindsay met her eyes. “I’ll owe you.”
“You both can, when he’s better.” Kristan searched her pockets, coming up with what looked like a keychain can of pepper spray. “I’ll call if anything holds us up.” She left and the back door slammed behind her a moment later.
“It is time for you to leave as well.” Negasi sounded like he was under some great strain. “Step outside and, once you are there, take back your magic.”
Lindsay looked down at Noah for a long moment, looking past the burns to see the man who was his.
The man who trusted him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and then he turned and walked away.
Outside, he closed his eyes and slowly withdrew the magic that was keeping Noah safe.
There was dead silence and the total absence of Noah. Lindsay had become accustomed to him all the days that he’d held Noah’s magic in trust for him. On the drive here, at least he had known Noah was alive.
Now, there was nothing.
The air was split open by a sound Lindsay couldn’t even name until he realized it could only be Noah, screaming.
He spun and had his hand on the door handle, ready to rush back inside to help, when he realized this was why Negasi had sent him out. If he’d been in the room, he wouldn’t have stopped to think before he took away Noah’s pain. With the door between them, he was able to gain perspective—if his magic were to
interfere with Negasi’s healing, it would mean further disaster. He let his head fall forward against the door and took a slow, deep breath. If he wanted to be there for Noah, he would have to accept Noah’s pain.
Slowly, he pulled the door open and stepped inside. “May I come in?”
There was no answer. Negasi was rigid, his face streaked with sweat, and he struggled to hold Noah down. Noah was fighting him as though he would rather use the last of his energy on getting free instead of living.
“Noah.” Lindsay rushed across the room to put his hands on Noah’s shoulders. “Noah, I’m here.
Listen to me. You need to be still, Noah.”
Something seeped through because Noah fell still. He was shaking violently and, when Negasi moved the placement of his hands, he screamed again before subsiding. Suddenly, his eyes opened and he looked right at Lindsay.
“I’m here. I won’t leave you.” Lindsay met Noah’s gaze and hoped his presence made some difference to how much pain he knew Noah must be in. “You’re going to be all right.”
“I did not expect him to have so much strength,” Negasi said tightly. “He might live a few hours if nothing goes wrong. As for the rest, we will have to see.”
The other voice didn’t draw Noah’s attention, he was fixated on Lindsay. His lips moved, but Lindsay couldn’t tell what he was saying, because his face was so ravaged. Now that he could see Noah clearly, he wondered what had made him certain Noah could be saved.
“It’s all right, Noah. We’re with the healer. Negasi is trying to help you. I need you to let him help you.”
Noah seemed to understand, because his breathing changed, like he was trying to get control of it.
Sometimes, he lost focus as his gaze wandered, but he would calm as soon as he got Lindsay back in his line of sight. Negasi kept working, his hands pinning Noah’s down as he tried to repair some of that damage there.
Outside, there was the roar of an engine as a car pulled up. It coughed and died and, moments later, the door banged open.
“Beppe,” Negasi said by way of explanation. “He’s human, but I need his drugs for this, and his equipment.”
“How bad is really bad?” The man who came in was older, tall and dignified with nearly white hair. “I never can tell.” He carried a large black bag, and he had a bright red duffel with EMERGENCY printed down it slung over his shoulder.
“Should-be-dead-an-hour-ago bad,” Negasi clarified. “I’ve done what I can for now.” He wiped his face on his sleeve. “He needs fluids and drugs.”
“That would be bad,” Beppe agreed. “I’ll see what I can do. Hello there.” He leaned over Noah and spoke to him. “I’m going to give you something for the pain. Do you have any allergies?”
Noah tried to shake his head a little.
“Excellent. Not that it matters much at this point, but it’s good that you can hear me.” Beppe was putting on gloves with a snap-snap. “You’ll need to move back, young man,” he said to Lindsay.
“I’m going to move to let the doctor help you,” Lindsay told Noah. “But I won’t be far.” He waited to see the understanding in Noah’s eyes before he stepped away.
“We have a problem,” Kristan hissed, grabbing his arm and pulling him all the way out of the room before he could protest. “Huge.”
Lindsay stared at her for a moment. A huge problem. What now? He took a deep breath. “Tell me.”
“We have to get out of here. Not back to the house. They know where it is.” Kristan actually looked distraught. “Vivian didn’t say how they found out or where she is. She just said we can’t go back. We have to leave as soon as we can.”
Glancing at the door, Lindsay nodded slowly. “And the others?”
“She contacted them too. We can find them again when it’s safe.” She took a breath, and let it out.
“We’re going to Detroit. That guy in there, Beppe, he’s gonna fix me up with a car. I have cash. We have to go as soon as Noah can be moved.”
Lindsay didn’t know when that would be. “I’ll ask them to make sure he can travel.”
“I know how to find another healer. We have to go where one of us knows people and...” Kristan left it at that, shrugging. “I’m going to get some cigarettes and something to drink. I’ll get some food too. Go on back in.” She nudged Lindsay out of the way, toward the healer’s room, on her way to the door.
Lindsay stopped with his hand on the doorknob and took a deep breath. Noah was going to be all right. Negasi and Beppe were going to help him. He had to be all right. And then they would leave Atlantic City and find another place to stay. Again.
Chapter Seven
Dane knew where he was before he was conscious. Not precisely where on a map, but he knew by the sound and the smell of it that he was on a cargo plane. He also knew something was worse than wrong. He couldn’t remember being in this kind of pain, a pain that had him biting through his tongue to try to pretend he wasn’t awake. His body felt sticky with blood, and there were streaks of searing heat through his flesh that never faded. His mouth slowly filled with blood from the ma
rks of his own teeth in his tongue, and there was no abating it.
“Pray hard.” The voice came from a few feet away. He knew it, but he’d never heard it sound that way before. Jonas. “Maybe you’ll die.”
They didn’t. Couldn’t. Dane opened his eyes and found his vision cut in half. One eye worked, he had no idea what was wrong with the other. When he winced, dried blood crackled on his face, and he didn’t want to know. He tried to move, and when shifting didn’t spill his guts on the floor, he pushed himself to sitting up. It was like he weighed a hundred pounds more than he had when he’d last been conscious. He had to turn his head to locate Jonas just beyond the bars of two cages—one for each of them.
Anything that was wrong with him faded into irrelevance when he managed to focus enough to see the condition Jonas was in. The other feral was naked. Most of him was naked. The rest of him was gone.
Missing.
“What the fuck happened to you?”
“Time.” Jonas was missing his arms from the elbows down and half of his head. There was no bleeding, as though he’d been halfway through healing when someone had stopped him. He lay in the corner of his cage like he’d been thrown there, and his legs were bent oddly in front of him.
Time. Dane’s good eye adjusted to the low light and he made out the glimmer of something around Jonas’s neck. His fingers told him the same thing was locked on him, made of something cold and too heavy for its size. His stomach twisted and he thought he was going to be sick.
“What did you do?” Dane couldn’t think of a reason why he and Jonas would end up in the same hellish situation. They were on opposite sides. That was part of the whole scheme of the universe.
“When you don’t behave,” Jonas said thickly, “Mother takes away your toys.”
It wasn’t what Jonas had done. Funny, because Jonas was such a fucking asshole, Dane could totally understand why someone would want to amputate his limbs, cave in his head, break his legs, and take away his healing magic. In the end, though, it was Lourdes who had gotten him in the shit.
Damn it, Dane didn’t want to feel sorry for Jonas, but he did. He was in so much pain, he had no idea why he wasn’t hammering his head on the floor to get unconscious again. But he couldn’t fathom the kind of agony Jonas was in. Sometimes, though, animals went somewhere else before they died. Their bodies became too treacherous to inhabit and their minds left. Even human animals got that little mercy once in a while. Jonas was staring at nothing out of his eyes that were canted funny in his face from his magic being gone before it could finish putting his head back together.
“Close your eyes,” Dane told him, putting an order behind it. “Try to get some sleep. You’ll need it for when we break out of here.” They would. Someone would fuck up. All they had to do was live that long, and living was what they did. Killing Jonas was Dane’s business, no one else’s. He was damned if he was going to let anyone—especially Moore and her peons—do it for him.
“Mother likes a good dog,” Jonas mumbled. But his eyes were closed, and Dane hoped leaving him alone would let him slide away into that white room where a creature’s mind went when it was waiting for the body to decide whether or not it was dying.
Dane wasn’t staying here. He felt the collar and found only weight and a slick, cool surface. He couldn’t find an opening or the runes that would be written on an artifact. Nothing. He squinted at Jonas’s collar and thought he saw something blinking, the tiny cool sparkle of an LED.
Technology and magic. Jonas was right. Time had happened to them. And here they were—
trammeled, caught in a net of electricity and things too small to see and too fast to understand, stopped in their tracks.
All this time, he’d thought that the thousand paper cuts of his little catastrophes were the way he was going to fail Cyrus. Ezqel had been right when he’d once accused Dane of having no imagination. There was no way Dane could have put the pieces together and come up with this.
Something hot was trickling down his cheek and he wiped it away with a twinge of panic that it could have been a tear, but when he raised his hand to see it, his fingers were coated with new, wet red over dried, flaking brown. Blood. He closed his eyes and wracked his limited mind for a solution to this. As long as he was still bleeding—only bleeding—he could believe he was going to get home.
Kristan got them to Detroit, driving the whole way without complaint. Through one of her contacts, she’d found a house they could stay in, a rundown brick colonial in the museum district of the city. It was abandoned and boarded up, without water or electricity, but the roof was intact—unlike the house next door.
Lindsay had focused completely on Noah during the long, daytime drive and through the night, tending his wounds according to Negasi’s and Beppe’s instructions—which mostly agreed with each other.
The drugs helped, kept him dull and silent. Lindsay knew the healer’s magic remained in the bindings on Noah’s wounds, but he wanted to do more. If giving Noah a bit of water now and again, and washing the
dried blood and lymph from his eyes and nose and mouth was all he could do, Lindsay would do it. It was better than the alternative—burying him.
Lindsay found some comfort in the small tasks, when he let himself. He would have stayed a long time in the tiny sphere of peace that formed when he focused completely on caring for Noah. Anything was better than feeling helpless.
By the following morning, Noah looked like he might live. He was conscious and lucid, which was a damn sight better than he’d been last night, but his face was still ravaged, and every time he tried to speak, it cracked and bled. Lindsay couldn’t tell what was skin or scab or blister or flesh anymore. It was painful to look at him—and Lindsay couldn’t make himself unwind the bandages and padding that hid Noah’s hands—but that was nothing next to the pain Lindsay could see in Noah’s eyes.
Lindsay had to find another healer. Every twinge and hiss from Noah made Lindsay’s gut twist; something needed to be done to stop the pain. That gave Lindsay the push he needed to leave Noah alone, when nothing else could have made him go. Kristan would stay behind to care for Noah. The day had finally come when he was glad she was there, and that was a horribly precise measure of how bad things were.
Kristan gave him directions to Apollo 11, a twenty-four-hour diner at the edge of the museum district, and told him to ask for someone named Patches. It looked like an old-school diner, complete with checkerboard floor, chrome trim, and frilly-aproned waitresses with perky ponytails and even perkier smiles.
Kristan’s directions led him to the back, past the kitchen and the bathrooms, to a door marked Emergency Exit, Do Not Block . Glancing back at the busy diner, Lindsay pushed the door open, waiting for a fire alarm that never came.
A staircase had been hacked through the original foundation. The dirty wooden stairs creaked with each step Lindsay took and led down to something that wasn’t quite a coffee shop.
Over the bar, a well-lit chalkboard menu listed things like prerolled joints and space cakes, as well as lattes and beer. The rest of the space was dim, and at first glance, the few people in the place looked normal. There were a couple homeless people sleeping under the tables, but that wasn’t a surprise. On closer inspection, Lindsay realized most of them—even the sleepers—weren’t human at all.
The bouncers at the foot of the stairs weren’t quite human either. One of them stopped Lindsay from crossing the room with a look and a quick shake of his head. “What do you want?”
“Patches.” Lindsay glanced around the room again and spotted an albino woman who fit the description Kristan had given him. She was sitting at a table near the rickety stage where they probably had poetry slams and folk music and the occasional rousing speech on equality. “Kristan sent me.”
Kristan said she’d been a regular in the downstairs room, once upon a time. The bouncer apparently remembered her, because he led Lindsay over to that little table and left him with a gruff, “Courtesy
of Kristan.”
Patches apparently remembered Kristan too. She looked Lindsay over with a raised eyebrow and strange, colorless eyes, and shook her head. “Kristan’s changed. Good to know she’s still making best friends, though.”
Now that he was closer, Lindsay could see that Patches wasn’t quite albino. She was more lavender than white, and her skin had a harlequin pattern of varying shades of lilac and rose and paper-white that made her look like a doll formed from pieces of other dolls. Her hair was long and straight and faded purple, as though a neglectful child had abandoned her outside to be bleached by the weather.
“Just a friend. Coworker, more like,” Lindsay clarified.
Patches seemed satisfied by the explanation and let the matter go. “What do you have to offer in trade for my assistance?”
“We’re new to town and I have little of material value with me. But I do have my magic.” Lindsay had never been privy to Cyrus’s dealings; he had no idea if his magic would be enough. Kristan hadn’t said.
“What is it that you do?”
“I can offer minor illusions.” He couldn’t guarantee he’d have time or energy for more than that. He didn’t know how long they’d be here or how bad their situation was.
Patches’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded. “What do you need from me?”
“My apprentice was hurt in a fire. We don’t know any healers here. Can you help me find someone local?” Lindsay didn’t want to go into the details. The more information he gave, the less safe he felt.
“You’ll want to see a real doctor,” Patches decided, raising one of her oddly patterned arms to signal a bouncer, who brought her a small stationery box. Writing on what looked like a doctor’s prescription pad, Patches said, “Go see Dr. Ayesha Rajan. She’ll take care of you. Her office is in Greektown, over the Thai place. Give her this.”
