Wilde Child 7

by Jenn Stark

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “I should have had this idea myself. I could have made millions with the blood I’ve drawn from you.”

  Dr. Sells’s dry words accompanied the unhooking of a bag of thick red liquid from a stand. Working quickly and efficiently, she lifted another one into place, unclamped the tube trailing from it, and checked my vitals for the eleventy-millionth time.

  I tried not to watch the thin line of red trace its way to the empty plastic sleeve, focusing instead on the tray of cookies arrayed next to the paper cup full of Tang. I didn’t even realize they made Tang anymore. “How much more do you think you’ll need?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

  I wasn’t weak, exactly, and I was certainly motivated. But after today’s one-woman donation drive, I didn’t think I’d be looking kindly at needles again for a long time.

  “Not much. These supplies are enough to treat the children, the ones who received the most significant doses. With your concentrated blood additive filtered through the sun stone, combined with the antidote mixture Gamon had already created, the resulting product requires only a few milliliters in an atomized form to do the trick. Aerosol doesn’t normally work so well, but for this particular chemical mixture, it is proving remarkably effective. We’ll release it to the known distribution points of Gamon’s Fountain drug and its variants. Word is already circulating that the antidote gives a better high than the original drug.”

  I stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.” She tapped the bag again. “Blood of an ancient goddess, if you believe the stories.” Before I could protest further, she waved me off. “Anyone not infected who wants to buy whatever we have left of the mixture after the current caseload is exhausted will be required to donate to an anonymous fund Armaeus has set up to support Father Jerome’s work.”

  “Oh.” I sank back against the pillow. “Well, that’s okay, then.”

  She smirked. “I suspected you’d think so.”

  “And the local cases?”

  “Martine is fully recovered. He’s still quite gifted. He’ll be someone to watch as he matures. But his heart is no longer enlarged, its arrhythmia fully stabilized. He no longer complains of it dancing.” She smiled. “He’s asked after you many times, you know. I think he’s bonding to you.”

  I nodded wearily. “Yeah, well, we can’t find his family. So he’s going to need to bond to someone—someone who isn’t me. What about Brody?”

  “Detective Rooks recovered with remarkable speed. Per your instructions, we didn’t explain to him the exact nature of the compound that made up the antidote.”

  “Good. The last thing I need to have is him thinking he owes me anything. If it wasn’t for me, he would never have gotten sprayed in the first place.”

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Sells said, though she looked ready to argue the point. She tapped the bag, straightening it slightly, and I fought the slow queasy roll of my stomach. “This lot will complete Europe. There are isolated cases still coming in, but the side effects reported are not dire enough to warrant intercession. The fewer people who know the truth, the better.”

  “There’s already enough of those.” I thought of Gamon, running into the fire after the fading image of her god. The god who’d used her, then betrayed her, all to get at me. There’d been no sign of Gamon in the abandoned corridors of the Sun Pyramid, which was far worse than finding her body. She’d either escaped into the world, or she’d been carried out of it bodily. Neither idea particularly appealed, for very different reasons.

  The door to my room burst open, and Nikki strode in, a small figure in hospital scrubs trotting beside her. In fact, Nikki was dressed in hospital scrubs too, her auburn hair swept back in a ponytail, her statuesque form somehow filling out the usually shapeless garment in all the right ways.

  “Dollface.” She grinned, beaming at me. “You have a visitor.”

  “Is that a tailored set of scrubs?” I asked. Nikki smirked as Martine approached cautiously, looking from me to Dr. Sells, then to the blood bag slowly filling its way to the brim.

  “Are you all right?” the boy asked.

  I nodded. “You were right all along, Martine. I was the solution, just not in the way I’d thought.”

  He still frowned at the bag. “They’re taking so much.”

  “The human body is an amazing instrument,” Dr. Sells told him briskly. “Especially Sara’s version of it. For all the blood she loses, it’s replenished within her, faster than it is for most people. She’ll be a little dizzy for a while, but not too dizzy, and not for very long. She’ll be her old self in no time.”

  The doc adjusted the bag again, and I grimaced. Nothing like being good to the very last drop.

  “You’re synthesizing everything on-site?” Nikki asked, casual as all hell. Since she’d shown up at the Pyramid of the Sun, she’d stuck to me like white on a whalebone, questioning every move made by anyone who wasn’t herself, Nigel, Armaeus, or Ma-Singh. Dr. Sells wasn’t exactly known for her scruples when it came to running side tests on me.

  “We are,” Sell said.

  Fortunately, we didn’t have to take her word for it entirely. Armaeus was monitoring the amount of blood taken from me and synthesized into the antidotes. The resulting compounds were handled with the kind of security the NASA space program didn’t merit. I wondered if he let Sells create the organic version of the drug as well, for testing purposes only, but I couldn’t think about that right now. As long as I didn’t have to give up a milliliter more blood than necessary, I was all for it.

  At last Sells was satisfied. She unhooked the bag, then took apart the entire apparatus. Next she covered my much-abused arm with a bandage. The wounds I’d sustained on the altar had mostly healed as well, only the long white slashes where the Gods’ Nails had inserted themselves remained visible.

  I glanced over to where the nails now sat, once more ensconced in their jade box. I wasn’t in any hurry to use them again, but they were mine in a way that Soo’s jade amulet or the other symbols of her position simply weren’t. I’d earned these, and they had literally become a part of me. That meant something.

  “This is the last of it?” Nikki asked, drawing my attention. She eyed Sells skeptically. “You’re not going to come in and draw more in the dead of night or anything?”

  “Sara can be released long before that.” Sells turned to me. “As soon as you can walk without dizziness, in fact. But I would like to insist you get as much rest as possible in the next few days. And food high in antioxidants wouldn’t hurt. Maybe a vegetable or two if you’re feeling really crazy.”

  “I’ll eat,” I said tiredly, but I didn’t rise to her vegetable challenge. The kind of problems I had were not going to be solved by a spinach salad.

  Sells nodded, then turned toward the door.

  “Millions,” she murmured again as she walked out of the room.

  Nikki watched her go with narrowed eyes. “You good with Martine Short here? I need to make sure the doc doesn’t make a detour.”

  “Go.” I waved her on. The truth was, I didn’t trust Dr. Sells either. She’d been in Armaeus’s pocket since forty years before I was born, and she seemed truly dejected on missing out on her chance to roll the dice on my blood for her own personal profit. Then again, this was Vegas, and she’d been here since the 1950s. Living that long in this city probably did something to you.

  Nikki tousled Martine’s hair, then went off in search of the good doctor.

  Meanwhile, I focused on the boy. He’d taken up position on a chair by the door, leaning so far forward that he almost fell over. “You’re allowed to drag that chair closer,” I said, laughing when he scrambled to his feet, then crept forward, suddenly seeming shy.

  He put the chair as close to the bed as he could, then slipped into it, leaning forward once again to brace his hands on the bed. He looked into my eyes with the kind of searching expression that only a kid could manage.

  “Yo
u nearly died,” he said, far too seriously.

  I nodded but didn’t try to brush off the question. “I did. So did you.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t choose it.” His eyes seemed to grow bigger in his face. “You did. Miss Nikki said you always do.”

  “Miss Nikki?” I asked, as levelly as I could. “She tell you to call her that?”

  “It just seemed like I should.” He smiled broadly. “She looks like a Miss Nikki.”

  “She does indeed.” I matched his smile with one of my own and raised a brow. “So how come she’s a Miss Nikki, and I’m plain old Sara?”

  To my surprise, Martine frowned, and he glanced away. When he looked back, his face seemed somehow smaller…or his eyes bigger. Whatever it was, it made my heart lurch.

  “Can I ask you something?” he mumbled.

  Panic riffled through me. I’d somehow stumbled into a child emotional zone, with no one close to bail me out. Father Jerome was still half a world away; Nikki was on the hunt for Dr. Sells before she sold me out to Shark Tank. Even Nigel would have been useful here, and he was worse with kids one-on-one than I was.

  Still, I stiffened my spine. “Of course you can. We’re friends, and friends can ask each other anything.” Well, almost anything. If Martine was about to lay something on me seriously deep, he’d be better off shouting down a hole.

  “Do you remember your family?” His voice had dropped almost to a whisper, and a single tear dribbled down from his left eye, which he brushed away brusquely. “I mean, their faces? Their names?”

  “I…” I swallowed. This was potentially dangerous territory. Because there were two types of family in my world, the kind who made sense and the kind who apparently ate worlds for a living. But the tortured look on Martine’s face told me what he was truly asking, and for that, I did have an answer.

  “I do,” I said. “I grew up in a little town in the southern part of this country, called Memphis. And there, my…my mother raised me the best way she knew how. She cared for me and fed me and told me everything she could about how to be successful in the world, how to stand up for myself and face my troubles squarely.” I didn’t mean for my voice to waver, but it did all the same. Martine’s eyes grew wider, almost rapt.

  “Was she pretty?” he asked, and I almost choked on the laugh that burst from me.

  “She was,” I said. “She didn’t look much like me, come to think of it now. She was blonde and blue eyed and always smiling. She told me I had my daddy’s looks, but that he’d gone away and it was just the two of us, making our way in the world. And we did, you know.” I gave him an encouraging smile. “We did okay for a lot of years.”

  Please don’t ask me to explain where she is now, I silently prayed, but Martine lowered his gaze and studied his hands for a moment, the small, slim fingers laced together. “She died, didn’t she?” he said.

  “She did,” I replied. And then more words suddenly came, words I didn’t expect, about a group of people I’d not thought of in a very long time. “But after that, you know what happened? I found a new group of people who were almost like family. They took me in and loved me more than I ever thought anyone would.”

  He lifted his head again, his eyes still too large. “They did?”

  “They did. They all lived in RVs—sort of like houses on wheels—and they traveled throughout the country, seeing everything they could. The mountains and the desert, the oceans and the swamps. And, in time, they became my family.”

  I blinked, startled at the strength of the memory. I’d been seventeen, on the run, hitchhiking at a rest area just south of Memphis when a stout, blonde, grandmotherly type had bustled up to me, clearly seeing me for what I was, shell-shocked and hurting. An hour had flown by before she’d finally gotten me to talk to her. Then she’d announced she’d be my first ride, and I could get my second whenever I wanted to leave their group of RVers. I smiled, now, thinking of it. It’d taken me five years before I’d decided I was ready to leave. They’d been my family, at a time when no one else wanted the job. And they’d been good at it.

  Martine sighed, watching me. At length he spoke again. “I don’t remember my family.”

  I stiffened involuntarily, and he tensed too, clearly afraid he’d said something wrong.

  “I try to!” he blurted. “But I…whenever I try to think of them, there’s nothing that comes back. No pictures of my mom or dad, or whether I had brothers or sisters or a dog or…” He pursed his lips. “I think I would have remembered a dog, but there’s nothing there. Nothing at all.”

  I reached out a hand toward him, not knowing what else to do, and he slid his over as well, our fingers interlocking on the bleached hospital sheets.

  “What do you remember?” I asked, as gently as I could. “What’s the first thing?”

  He sighed, shrugged. “Waking up in a cave. I was a boy—I looked like this, and I could talk and write and run and I knew how to eat and be respectful. But I didn’t know how I knew these things. The general…” He shook his head slightly, forging on. “The general, she said that it was okay that I didn’t remember. That sometimes memories made us weak, and I was in that place to be strong. That she needed me to be strong.”

  He dropped his head again, but not before I saw the blush staining his cheeks. “I wanted to be strong for her. So I didn’t…I didn’t try to remember. Even in the early days when there was…something, something almost there I pushed it away.” He brought his gaze up to me, and his face was ashen, haggard, the face of a boy far older than his years, who’d already seen so much, traveled so far. “It was there, and I could have reached for it, and instead I pushed it away!”

  Tears were running freely down Martine’s face now, and I gripped his fingers more tightly, reaching over awkwardly with my other hand to grasp his shaking shoulder. He was trembling all over, and my first worry was over his heart—but I couldn’t stop the words tumbling out of his mouth if I’d wanted to, couldn’t interrupt the flow of his pain.

  “I might have had a sister, a mother. I might have had a father or he…or he might have been gone like yours. I might have been alone with my mother, or had three brothers and I don’t know. And now I will never know. The memories are all gone, gone away so far that I can’t bring them back.”

  “That’s not true, sweetheart. That’s not true.” I patted him more fiercely, still awkward, my heart breaking. It couldn’t be true, I resolved. He was just a little boy, a little boy with all his truths locked up inside him. He deserved to find his way to those truths, to find the family he’d lost—if there was still a family to find.

  “And then I saw you in my dreams and I painted your picture, and when the general told me I had to go find you and I thought…I thought: you could be my sister. My older sister who would let me call her Sara, like a brother would. If you were coming anyway to save us, to make us better, maybe…maybe you could stay with me. You could be my family, and I wouldn’t forget you!”

  He said this last with such renewed fierceness that I jumped, but it was Martine’s turn to grip my hand fiercely, his little ten-year-old face screwed up with resolve. “I wouldn’t forget you, Sara. Not ever!”

  “I know you wouldn’t, Martine, I do,” I assured him hurriedly, and I didn’t stop him as he lunged toward me, enveloping me with his thin, spindly arms. He was still so much closer to being a little boy than a full-grown person, and he sobbed in my arms inconsolably, letting out all the fear and anguish and pain he’d probably blocked from his mind during his months of incarceration with Gamon, whether on his own or with the help of her drugs and loyalty tactics. He sobbed until he had no more tears to cry, and then he kept his head ducked, his small body shaking, his hold never loosening until he fell asleep.

  “We’ll find your family, Martine,” I whispered as his shoulders finally eased, his tiny exhausted body relaxing at last. “We will.”

  And if we didn’t, I knew of another group of souls who made up a family as big as the open road. I coul
d find them again, I thought, and ask them to do for Martine what they’d once, a little over ten years ago, done for me.

  Because that was what families did.

  But for now, I let Martine sleep, long after the time when I could rightly have left the hospital and returned to the world outside. Long after Nikki returned to me, even, taking up her silent watch by the door, her eyes suspiciously bright in the room’s shadowy depths.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Armaeus didn’t send a car for me at the hospital. I appreciated that.

  When I left, Nikki and Martine waved to me from the posh cafeteria, the boy’s distress at me leaving leavened by his astonishment at the food he was being served. There were still many more tests he would need to undergo, and I needed time. Time to find his parents, if they were still alive. Or time to find a second family to open their arms to him. Either way, Martine would never have to forget that people loved him, ever again. No child should ever go through that.

  Pushing out to the sidewalk of Sells’s private clinic, I was surprised to find Ma-Singh waiting for me. The Mongolian stood in the half shadows, but his mournful expression lightened as he met my gaze.

  “Ma-Singh!” I looked around. “Tell me you haven’t been out here this whole time. Why didn’t you come inside?”

  The big man shrugged. “You have many who would protect you from the threats of magic in that place. You didn’t need me there. Eventually, though, I knew you would slip their bonds. I only had to be ready.”

  I sighed, but in truth, I didn’t mind. If ever there was a man who would save me from myself, it was this one. “I’m only going to the Strip.”

  He gestured to a car, which pulled out of the line and cruised forward. “And so I will take you. And await your call whenever you are finished.”

  Something about his gruff loyalty made me blink hard, but I looked away quickly. I’d already hugged the general once this year. If I did it again, he might spontaneously combust.

  Ma-Singh and his driver accompanied me to the Palazzo, though I knew the Magician would be waiting for me in his towers at the far end of the Strip. I needed to build up to that, though. I stepped out into the bright morning, two and a half miles from my destination, glancing across the street at the pink skyscrapers of Treasure Island as it soared over its faux pirate’s paradise of palm trees and murky lagoon. I needed the sun, but perhaps more importantly, I needed the walk.