by SA Magnusson
“We can stay for dinner if you tell me who you are using the paralytic on.”
Barden studied me for a moment before smiling and standing. “Thank you for visiting, Kate Michaels.” He turned to Jen, a wide smile spreading across his face. “And friend.”
“It’s Jen,” she said. “Jen Stone.”
“Of course, Ms. Stone.”
“Dr. Stone.”
“Is that right?” Barden asked, grinning.
I shook my head and grabbed Jen by the arm, pulling her with me. Regardless of what she might think, he was far too dangerous for her. And after seeing the way she perked up when we started talking about the runes, I worried that she might try to convince him to place one on her. Knowing Barden, he might do so as a way of trying to tie me closer to the Dark Council.
Barden guided us back out of the warehouse, barely giving me a chance to look around as we hurried through the main part of the building. The whirring of computers caught my attention, but only because the door quickly closed as we passed through the hallway. Magic receded the moment we stepped back out of the hall, heading into the main part of the warehouse. Whatever spell they placed was designed to conceal all of that activity.
“Why the spell?” I asked.
“What spell?” Barden asked, glancing over at me.
“The one that masks what’s going on back there. What are you trying to hide?”
“I’ve already told you that we no longer need to hide our actions. Thanks to you, we can operate much more openly than we ever have before. The mage council has honored their side of the treaty.”
“But you still don’t want them to know what you’re doing.”
“Much like they don’t want us to know what they are doing. Just because we have bargained for peace doesn’t mean that both sides don’t have something to keep from the other. The treaty doesn’t mean trust. It simply means we have elected to refrain from hostility.”
Barden motion for us to head through the door, and he paused a moment, watching me before closing the door and sealing it closed.
“You could have let us stay for dinner,” Jen said.
“I think we both know that would’ve been a terrible idea.”
“Both who?”
“He’s dangerous, Jen. You need to steer clear of him.”
“What if he places one of those rune thingies on me? Then I could have my own sort of magic. Or better yet, why couldn’t you place one of those rune thingies on me? Then if I’m with you and some idiot decides to attack me, I could have my magical barrier in place. I’d feel sort of bad ass.”
Exactly my fear, but I wouldn’t tell Jen that.
“How about that wine and reruns?” I asked.
“I thought you said you’re going to pass out?”
“And I still might, but I think I can stay awake long enough for a glass or two of wine.”
5
Morning came far too quickly, and I could barely keep my eyes open as I dragged my ass into the hospital. It was dark, several hours before dawn would break, and here I was making my way back to work. Mornings like these were even more reason to want to finish my residency and finally be done. I could find a nice ER that let me come in at eight in the morning, late enough that I could sleep in a little. Even if the shift went until eight p.m., what did it matter? It was just me, anyway.
Street lights glowed softly, making my headache worse. Somehow I’d managed to stay awake long enough to consume more than a glass or two of wine, knocking back a bottle of Pinot on my own. It had been nice sitting and chatting with Jen, simply relaxing, doing nothing more than that. It reminded me of some of our days off during medical school, the carefree time before residency when all we had to worry about was our performance on exams.
As I neared the hospital, the bright lights of the signage too much for me, a cold breath washed along my spine.
Magic.
Instinctively, I pulled upon my magic, pushing it out in a barrier, holding onto it so that I could defend myself against whatever attack might come. I looked around, hesitating to move until I knew whether anything would come out for me, but I didn’t see any movement. An occasional car passed along the street, headlights blinding and making my headache throb even more, but no one else walked along the street at this time of morning.
Movement should be easy to detect, but I saw no sign of it.
It was almost enough to make me run, but running only drew attention. If there was someone using magic near me, it would be better if they didn’t know I was aware of them. There weren’t many mages who would pick up on random magic used near them, not without holding onto a spell, so I had the advantage of hopefully surprising someone coming at me.
And if I couldn’t?
I wasn’t about to start a magical battle out on the street at four-thirty in the morning. It probably wouldn’t draw too much attention, not at this time of day, but there was always the possibility that some passerby might realize that something was taking place.
When nothing came of it, I continued along the street, hurrying as quickly as I could. I made sure to hold onto my barrier, ensuring the magical wall surrounding me remained stout, and felt no other surge of magic.
Maybe it was only my imagination.
I didn’t think so, though.
I reached the entrance to the ER. Even when I was working on other rotations, I still went through the ER entrance. There was something familiar about it, and I still used the same locker as I used during my ER shifts. I didn’t have to move things that way.
When I had changed into different shoes—I never liked to wear the same shoes at work that I wore on my way home—I hurried up the stairs to the surgical floor to begin rounds. When I stepped out of the staircase, another surge of cold worked along my spine.
It was faint, which suggested that it was weak magic, but it was magic nonetheless.
Who was using magic?
I didn’t have the ability to track directionality using my sense of magic. There were times that I had tried, but that had been while driving, and taking large circles around several blocks gave me the opportunity to detect shifting within the magic, just enough that I could tell where it was stronger and weaker.
It started to recede, becoming fainter. Whoever was using magic near me had some control over it. Could it be rune magic, the same as the gang members had used?
I paused at the nurses’ station and pulled up my patient list, scanning for the gunshot patient. Mr. Jimenez was still checked into his room, so at least he hadn’t signed out against medical advice. There had been enough of that tied to magic recently that I didn’t want to be the one responsible for others.
“Any status changes overnight on these patients?” I asked the night nurse. She was an older woman by the name of Margaret, and I’d found her to be the no-nonsense type. When I was on call, she was reasonably proficient, and rarely called unnecessarily. Some of that might have been because I did my best not to annoy her. It wasn’t unheard of for nurses to harass residents with questions they could’ve answered on their own, simply because the resident had been either unkind or arrogant around them. I tried not to act that way with the nurses, mostly because I worked enough night shifts to know how hard the overnight could be.
“Nothing too significant,” Margaret said. “Oh. Wait. Your gunshot patient started to decline.”
“What you mean decline?”
“His blood pressure started to bottom out, became a little tachycardic. The wound started seeping. Dr. Esquivo was on call and had us give him some blood, but I’m not sure that was completely effective. It helped with his pressure and his heart rate, but he still doesn’t look right.”
I clicked into his chart, frowning to myself. How could he suddenly have started to decompensate? He had been magically healed by me, and then the rest of it had come from him.
When Margaret had said that his blood pressure had decompensated, she had been underestimating, if anything. Some of the
blood pressures were dangerously low. Had he been in the ER, he would have triggered a trauma team activation.
“Is Esquivo with him now?”
“He never came by. Just phone orders.”
Christ. Phone orders on a blood pressure like this? The least he could do was get off his lazy ass and come in and evaluate the patient, especially when the blood pressure was dropping. Thankfully I’d come in when I had, but I shouldn’t have to be here this early to take care of problems like that. They should be addressed by the on-call physician.
“I guess I know who I’m seeing first,” I said.
Margaret just nodded and continued working on the computer.
When I reached the room, I found another nurse inside. He was young, with an athletic build and bright red hair. I hadn’t seen him when I was working before.
“Are you Dr. Esquivo?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Michaels. I’m on for the day.”
“Oh, thank God. I’ve been trying to get Esquivo in for the last hour, but he hasn’t answered.”
“What’s been going on?” I asked, turning my attention to the patient. Breathing was rapid. His blood pressure on the last reading was low, barely in the seventies systolic, and his heart was beating a little fast, thumping away in the low one hundreds. All of it was signs of volume loss, but we had corrected that during the surgery. He shouldn’t have any volume issues at this point.
I pulled back the sheet. His dressing was saturated. Blood soaked through.
“When did you last change this?”
“About an hour ago,” he said.
“And he’s already soaking through?”
“Right. That’s why I’m trying to get a hold of Esquivo. What do you think is going on?”
“Well, for someone to suddenly have this significant change in status, it suggests that either he has some internal bleeding, or…”
Or it was something even more significant. I started thinking through the various diagnoses and came up with a possibility. With someone as sick as he had been, as injured as he had been when he first came in, the possibility of a consumptive coagulopathy existed. It would leave him without many platelets functioning, and in that case, it wouldn’t take much for a blood vessel to sheer off and start bleeding.
It would be one of the worst-case scenarios. We saw it occasionally in the ER, but not so often that I was skilled with the diagnosis and treatment. Worse, working it up and fully evaluating it would take more time than I thought we had.
“Or what?” the nurse asked.
“Or he has something awful like DIC,” I said.
I’d read about it, but I hadn’t enough experience in medicine to have seen it myself. I guess that made me lucky, but it was unfortunate. There might not be anything we could do for him.
“Has he had labs drawn this morning?” I asked.
“Not yet. With everything we’ve been doing, I didn’t want to poke him again.”
“I’m going to put some orders in, and why don’t you go out and call lab to have them come up stat.”
He nodded, and I was thankful he didn’t argue. I needed him to step out so that I could do what I intended. They might not be able to help him medically—it might be one of the first times where my knowledge failed me—but I wondered if there was anything I could do magically.
When the nurse was gone, I touched his arm, creating contact between the two of us. That was part of it, I knew, but there would be more. Pulling on magic, I pushed it out, letting it wash out from me and into him. It swept through him in a wave. The power I pulled on was a sense of warmth, and mixed with it came an urgency, a desire on my part to heal him. Hopefully that would be enough to direct the magic, to guide it, but I no longer knew whether that would be effective.
As I had before, I detected the strange emptiness.
It was this emptiness that I’d sealed off to heal him the last time, and I had to use it again. Before, I had at least an idea of what I was doing and where to focus, but this time I didn’t know.
Maybe I wouldn’t be able to.
Pushing more magic out, I let it wash over him, over and again. Power continued to flow from me.
It filled the emptiness.
That wasn’t what I wanted.
I needed to wrap around it. That was what I had done before, but when I attempted to do it this time, there was nothing.
Cold crept along my spine.
For a moment, I worried that it was magic, but it was worse. Death.
I’d already rescued him from death once, and I needed to do so again, but could I do that without knowing exactly what was going on?
If it was a consumptive coagulopathy, it involved excessive bleeding. Was there anything that I knew and could do that would reverse that?
Not easily.
Pushing on power, I continued to let it flow out from me, sweeping into the patient.
I swore under my breath, trying to find some way—any way—of keeping him alive. I needed answers about the runes, and if he died, I wouldn’t have them.
My gaze drifted to his arm where the runes were.
They were gone.
How was that possible?
All that remained were the biblical quotes along with the marking of a cross.
Could that be why he suddenly struggled?
It didn’t make any sense. Why would the tattoos suddenly disappear?
Unless they had been used up.
There was power in them, that was what Barden had said, but that power also had limitations, much like all magical power had limitations. There was only so much I could do at any given time, and when my magic failed, I could no longer continue to hold it.
What if the rune had been expended?
The wound on his belly continued to seep. Even as I watched, I knew there wouldn’t be anything that I could do. Cold crept up my back, becoming biting, much more so than it had been even when we were in the operating room. I pulled the dressing off, and blood pulsed from the open wound.
Christ. I had healed him. I had been responsible for bringing him back, and now he would die?
Pushing more and more magic into him, I could feel it drifting into the emptiness.
It was a waste. There might be a way of saving him, but my magic wasn’t the key. I needed a mage, but more than that, I needed someone who could help me understand what had happened.
The nurse came running back in. “Lab is on its way, but…”
“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” I said.
“Isn’t there anything you could do?”
“Look at it. He’s bleeding out.”
The nurse grabbed for more gauze and pressed it against the man’s belly, but even as he did, the brief flash of cold told me it was too late.
The heart monitor flipped and then went flat line.
“Trigger a code blue,” I said.
It didn’t matter, not at this point, but we had to go through the motions, especially as he was a postoperative patient and relatively young. More than that, he’d been stable up until the middle of the night. I’d be blamed for what happened, but it was Dr. Esquivo who was the one who should have been responsible for helping him. Would it have changed anything if he had responded when called?
Probably not, which made it all the worse. As much as I wanted to blame someone—anyone—I’m not sure that it mattered.
Nurses rushed in, and Dr. Esquivo—a tall, dark-haired man with an arrogant smile—strode in.
“Michaels. What did you do?”
“Only what you should’ve done all night,” I snapped.
“What happened?” Esquivo said.
“He started bleeding. I don’t really know what happened.”
“This far out? What would cause that?”
“What’s on your differential diagnosis?” I asked. We were the same year in residency, though I was far closer to being done just by the nature of the shorter residency duration of emergency medicine compared to surg
ery, but if he was going to come in here and try to get me to answer questions on his behalf, I would pimp him back. Besides, it was his fault that the patient was like this.
“Michaels, we’ve got a code—”
“I know we have a code, but I also know that there’s not a whole lot that we’re going to be able to do for him. We can push fluids and try to resuscitate him, but it’s not going to make much difference.”
And it didn’t matter what he and I were doing. The nurses were pushing the fluids while one of them was performing CPR. There wasn’t anything we could do. And Esquivo would have no idea that I had detected the cold grip of death.
“You think nurses were too aggressive when changing his dressing?”
The red-haired nurse glared at him before turning his attention back to chest compressions.
“When have you ever known the nurses to be too aggressive with replacing a abdominal dressing? Come on, Esquivo, we went to medical school. Think about this. Recent surgery. Trauma. What’s that set them up for?”
“Oh.”
With the realization, the tension went out of him. Both of us knew there wouldn’t be much that could be done. It would be supportive care, but with him bleeding this profusely because of it, there wouldn’t be anything we could do. I considered drawing labs just to confirm it and decided that it didn’t matter, not unless we brought him back. I no longer even tried to use magic on him. There was no point. Magic had simply poured into the empty void of nothingness.
I couldn’t take my eyes off his arm where the runes had been. More than anything, I wanted to call Barden and ask whether there was anything he knew about runes that would explain this happening, but I doubted he would answer.
Could it have anything to do with the magic I’d detected on my way into the hospital? I hadn’t determined the source, and it hadn’t come again, but could Jimenez have been attacked again?
Cold flared on my back again.
