Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Trust me,” Red grunted. “I’m doing plenty of screaming, it’s just on the inside.”

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” Bella said, grimly. “It’s the inside I’m worried about, if you’re suffering from any internal bleeding. Vickie said you took a good beating, even before the flamethrower came into play. Your mental functions seem intact, as obtuse and as irritating as they are. Any abdominal pain? Can you pick up on anything past the damage on the surface?”

  Red exhaled, and motioned for her to step back. He closed his eyes in concentration, then doubled over, clenching his teeth in agony. Bella rushed forward, but he waved her off. His breaths were shallow, but after a moment they evened out.

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “I turned the pain back on,” he gasped. “Just for a moment. And no, doesn’t feel like anything major’s going down in there.”

  “You’re sure,” Bella asked, doubtful.

  “I’m sure,” he replied. “Believe me, I know when something’s really wrong.”

  “Well, do you want drugs, or not?” she asked. “Because based on what we’ve done in the past, I’m going to be accelerating your natural ability to regenerate once I start on the burns and bullets. If I recall the last time . . .”

  “No, no drugs. They wouldn’t do much good, I’ve already numbed myself to most of it.” He gave her an odd look. “How is she?”

  “Who?” Bella asked.

  “Victrix.”

  “Concussed, bullet crease across the right bicep, multiple deep contusions, bone bruises . . .”

  “I meant how is she?”

  Bella sucked on her lower lip.

  “. . . PTSD and currently vomiting,” she finished. “Expressing gratitude to you for saving her life, y’know, between hurls. Nothing near as bad as you.”

  “Damn,” he said. “I shouldn’t have taken her out there. I was so sure she was ready.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” she told him, cleaning up what she could. Or rather, what mattered; when she started healing him, a lot of this wouldn’t matter anymore. Anyone else, she’d be debriding the burns; but for the Djinni, it would all just flake off. “Look, she was ready. How were you going to know someone was going to pull out a flamethrower? I mean, shit, who the hell packs a flamethrower to a warehouse?” Sucking her lower lip turned to nibbling on it, nervously.

  “You can’t prepare for that kind of thing,” he scoffed. “You have to be willing to roll with it. She froze up; it’s as simple as that.”

  She took a deep, deep breath. “I think she’s ready for the same head stuff I did with Mel. I would have broached it today if you hadn’t kidnapped her for the job. It’s not a cure, but at least she won’t freeze up again.” She paused. “I figured she was ready for a field job too. Or I would have overruled you. I am head of Echo Med, remember? Now shut up and hold on for the ride.”

  What used to take her ten to fifteen minutes to prep for, in silence, now took less than five with bedside chatter. Knowing the Djinni had “turned the pain off”—and boy, would she ever like to learn how he did that trick—she just put her hands where she wanted to. One on his forehead, one on the charred and bullet-ridden gut. Then she closed her eyes—she still needed to close her eyes—and dropped into the healing gestalt.

  The skin damage was a nightmare, and for that, she would need him to do the work while she powered him. He could do that. They’d worked it before. It was going to hurt, though. His skin seemed to be the one place he couldn’t actually control pain. If anything, it seemed amplified there.

  So work from the inside out; she didn’t actually do the healing. For Djinni, as for most metahumans, all she did was supply energy and somehow accelerate peoples’ natural healing. Hours became seconds; days, even weeks, became minutes. That was why she needed the pheresis rig, or she would pass out, working on someone as damaged as the Djinni was now.

  The few bullets that had gotten as far as the muscle got pushed back out as she healed, falling to the table with dull metallic sounds. Bones knitted, torn nerves regenerated. Muscle tears mended. A bruised spleen became a pristine organ, a kidney tear vanished. In ten minutes, there was nothing left to do but the skin.

  “Okay, Red.” She didn’t open her eyes. “Turbo-charge on, powering up. Do your thing.”

  She poured in the energy. He started screaming.

  She kept her emotions out of it, her mind detached—one of the surgeons said in this mode she worked exactly the same way he did, which she considered a compliment. Later, she’d cry for putting him through so much agony. Right now, it was fascinating to “watch,” and each time he did this, she learned a little more about how to heal. Some people didn’t respond as well to mere acceleration; some she had to “tell” the cells what to do. Watching him at work taught her more than she would ever admit to him. At least for now. More bullets dropped to the table; some rolled off and fell to the floor. Should she tell him there was a betting pool on how many he’d dump every time he was brought in? It might make him laugh.

  She sensed Vix flinching, sensed the guilt in the next room, when he started screaming. As if the poor thing could possibly feel any worse. Dammit all, why do my friends all have to be emotional basket cases? If she hadn’t had Sera to talk to, she would probably be an emotional basket case. The angel was a wonderful listener, and entirely without judgment. It was the greatest relief in the world to be able to say the horrible things she wanted to do to some people, confess her nastiest secrets, and know that there was nothing but acceptance behind those strange eyes. Acceptance, and forgiveness. No one had any idea how much she needed forgiveness. Nor how much she might need it if things went pear-shaped.

  * * *

  “Better now?” Einhorn asked anxiously. She had come in just after Bella left, since Vickie was in nothing nearly like the shape Red was in. Mary Ann was no Bella, but she was competent enough to take care of the brain-bruising of the concussion, and the bone bruises of her ribs, so she could breathe again.

  “Much, thanks,” Vickie croaked. At least the skull-splitting headache was gone.

  Einhorn beamed, and her little pearly horn sparkled. Vickie had to hand it to Bella, her handling of the healer was turning her from a self-centered little diva into a real asset. “Okay!” she said brightly. “Now just stay there and be quiet while it all catches up to you. I’ll send someone to check on you in a little bit.”

  The recovery room was quiet. Too quiet. Quiet enough that Vickie could hear both the Djinni and Bella talking all too clearly.

  “Christ,” Red muttered in the other room. “You kiss a girl, and she loses any semblance of bedside manner.”

  She winced. So . . . she had caught them in a clinch. And dammit, it shouldn’t hurt so much. She knew she had about as much chance with the Djinni as Herb did. Of course he’d be all over Bella, most guys were.

  And now they were talking about her. It made her cringe. It made her want to run back to her apartment. Not that she was in any shape to run.

  “She froze up; it’s as simple as that.”

  She hadn’t wanted to freeze . . . she’d been doing okay up until . . . it’s not as if she’d planned this. She had thought the Djinni got that. Maybe not.

  Dammit. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

  * * *

  “Sweet Baby Jesus.” Bella took a deep breath. She’d tried another trick this time, something she’d picked up from Soviette: empathic pain resonance, otherwise known as “pain absorption.” Wow, that sucked. But it had halved what the Djinni had been going through, which was just as well, considering—from what she could tell—he’d been on the ragged edge of sanity the entire time. “Okay, I take back every nasty thing I have ever said about you. That took guts.” There was no immediate answer. She poked his now-healed and baby-pink shoulder. “Djinni? You in there?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” he whispered. There were no quips, no stupid jokes, nothing. Bella laid a compassionate hand on h
is shoulder. Without a word, he reached up and grasped her fingers. He was just a fragile pile of flesh, and Bella felt his relief and near euphoria now that the pain had stopped.

  “Wait a sec.” She unhooked herself and moved the couple steps to the minifridge she kept in here. “Cherry, grape, or banana? Or—wait, there’s one orange left, yours if you want it.”

  “Orange,” he replied, pushing himself up to sit lightly on the exam table. “One part orange, ten parts vodka.”

  “I can do that.” That weird gal Upyr at CCCP made the most amazing, restorative popsicles. She pulled out the orange one and stuck it in a glass she poured full of vodka (which she also kept in the fridge), and handed it to him, then grabbed a banana one for herself. “Want me to suck on this provocatively while you drink yours?”

  “Oh good, a show. And here I was thinking I’d miss the main stage at Lady Godiva’s tonight.”

  “Moron,” she said, good-naturedly, and bit off the end of the frozen treat.

  He reached up and felt about his face. “Is the Cloon still there?”

  “A little,” she said. “Mostly around the eyes and mouth, but you lost a lot of it.”

  He nodded and reached for his scarf. He belted his drink and wrapped the scarf around his head before reaching for a fresh shirt someone had laid out for him. Pulling it on, he felt Bella’s eyes on him.

  She flushed. “Uhm . . . I thought you might want to know . . . Bulwark. I was able to take him off all the life support except feeding. And . . . I got something from him.” She flushed even deeper. “So, he’s in there anyway, and as near as I can tell, he’s all there. He’s just not ready to wake up, and I don’t know why.”

  There was something about Bull she wasn’t telling him, that much was clear. Bull couldn’t be getting worse, she wouldn’t have kept that from him. Whatever it was, she was acting different. For one thing, she wasn’t hitting him. Granted, she had just spent a good deal of herself healing him up, but she knew he could take a hit. It was almost endearing, in an odd way, how she would sometimes accentuate her points by delivering a swift right to his chin. But that was mostly when she was mad at him, and generally she only got mad at him when it had something to do with Vix. He wondered what she was thinking.

  * * *

  Bella wondered what he was thinking. Before all the crap hit the fan, it looked as if he and Bulwark were getting kind of tight, in that manly-man sort of way. Afterwards, he picked up the slack with what was left of the Misfits, which was mostly Vickie. Well, and herself, she supposed. He’d actually had her along as a DCO on a couple jobs that weren’t covert, mostly to help her look as if she was utterly incompetent as the chief medical officer. I mean, come on, only on Star Trek did the CMO go on away teams; the previous, non-“Acting” CMO had been Doc Bootstrap, who’d almost never left the Echo campus. Djinni was turning himself around; so . . . how much could she actually rely on him for the Big Picture stuff?

  For that matter, how much could she rely on him for other stuff? He didn’t make any secret of the fact that he found her hot and hit up on her at every available opportunity, but how much of that was her, and how much was because he was a horndog?

  “You frustrate the hell out of me,” she said, without realizing she’d said it out loud until the words were out of her mouth.

  “Well . . . yeah,” he said. “Sorry, I thought we were talking about Bull. You just feel the need to pepper our conversations with derogatory statements towards me or something?”

  She felt heat rush to her cheeks. “I can’t read you,” she admitted. “I mean, I’m a fricking empath and I can’t read you. I don’t know when you’re joking, when you’re just being a . . . man . . . or when you’re serious. It’s frustrating. Especially when I want to know if you’re serious.”

  “I’m always serious,” Red said with a shrug. “Just ’cause I throw in the occasional dick and fart joke doesn’t mean I’m not being serious. Really, give me one example when I haven’t been serious.”

  She thought of their last assignment together.

  “What about the way you let me sock you in the jaw all the time?” she demanded. “I’ve seen you take sledgehammer hits and not go down, and a little tap from me puts you on the floor? Ha! And what about the way you strolled up to that contact on our last job and said ‘Hi sailor, new in town’? Christ, you almost blew his cover and his mind!”

  “He was about to blow his own cover, the way he was staring at you. Or more specifically, at your legs. He was supposed to be playing the role of a priest. Kind of a tough sell when his robes are sporting a tent, don’t you think? He needed something to jar him back to the job.”

  “He wasn’t staring at my legs,” she muttered. “And neither are you. Horndog.”

  “Hey, what do you want from me? Yes, I think you’re the hottest girl this side of Toronto, and I don’t hide that. I’m pretty up-front about it, you have to admit.” His eyes narrowed a little. “And yeah, I take your hits. You seem to enjoy them. I know I do.”

  She stared at him.

  “Are . . . are you suggesting you let me hit you as a form of foreplay?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “And I’m very, very serious about it.”

  Before she could stop herself, her hand was flying at his face. Her fist met his outstretched palm before she’d gotten more than a couple of inches. Crap! And I thought his chin was hard! He was scary-fast. And she still couldn’t read him.

  “I . . . don’t think . . .” She gulped. “No matter what you think, I’m not the sort who gets into slapping each other to sleep at night.”

  “C’mon,” he said. “That’s not what this is about. It’s about two people who just get each other.”

  What was he talking about? She didn’t get him at all! She couldn’t read a single thing from him.

  “You’re delusional,” she said flatly. “I can’t get a single read off of you. You have to be the most exasperating, aloof, secretive . . .”

  “Of course I am,” he interrupted. “You seriously want to get involved with a guy you can read like an open book? Where’s the fun in that?”

  That got her. He was right, of course. How many of her relationships had petered out, simply because she could predict exactly what was coming next? Because she could sense at any time almost exactly how a man felt about her. How much had that cost her? She had never felt that wonder at the beginning of where something might lead. She always figured this was a good thing. No mystery, no unpleasant surprises, no stupid games that could ultimately break her heart. She never thought she was missing much, and if anything, had been dealt a strong hand. But now, looking into Red’s piercing eyes, she felt something unsettling—uncertainty, and a strange attraction to it. Here was a man she couldn’t read. All she could trust were her instincts. They told her he was the classic bad boy, the sort that good girls always fell for, then got their hearts and sometimes more broken. Yes, but that only went when the good girls were going into the relationship thinking they could change the bad boy . . . not when the bad boy was changing himself. And Red was changing. Look how he’d overcome his negativity about magic . . . how he was helping Vickie over every single one of her neuroses. He’d done more for Vickie than she had.

  And that kiss that they had shared, she finally admitted to herself why she had surrendered to it. The Djinni was completely unknown to her but in that place, in Vickie’s spell, she had finally seen into him, just enough, to feel what for him must be home. And it felt right, it felt like something she could be a part of . . .

  She looked at him blankly, and felt herself moving closer.

  Come to think of it, I couldn’t ever read Bull all that well either . . . talk about Captain Control . . .

  And completely unbidden, without any warning, that little bit of memory that had leaked over from Bulwark flashed into her mind. It had surfaced earlier that day, finally something that could give her some clue as to what Harm had done to him. But instead of answers, it plagued Bella
with more questions, and hurt and jealousy. Harmony, leaning over Bull, as seen through his eyes. Harmony’s last, poisonous kiss, the kiss that stole his life-force and planted that draining, life-stealing hole in him. And her last words . . .

  “I think I loved you.”

  She had loved him. Had they been together, all this time? How could Bella not have seen that? You couldn’t be a human being and not want to know about love, want to be in love, want to be loved. A time always came when the love of your parents, of your friends, just wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for Bella, but nothing had ever been right, not the right person, not the right time. And dammit . . . dammit . . . Harmony and Bulwark . . . It wasn’t fair! That Harmony, that treacherous, lying bitch, had gotten to have all that and a guy like Gairdner and had killed it.

  And now, after having never really had a teenage crush, never had a first love, never had anything stick past “Mister Right Now,” here it was. Hope crushed by pain, longing by jealousy, everything hit with a freight train of despair and confusion. She’d been avoiding even thinking about that fugitive memory all day, maybe with the vague idea that if she ignored it long enough it wouldn’t hurt, or it would fade. Only it didn’t; it lurked and ambushed her, right in the middle of—whatever was going on with Djinni.

  She couldn’t take it. She had to get away from both of them. Lose herself in work or go for a long exhausting workout, or maybe just drink herself cross-eyed. But she had to get away, now, before she said or did something irrevocable.

  She wrenched herself away from Red. She wasn’t sure what she babbled, only that she said something to him. She couldn’t stay in the same room with him, not when she was being torn up by a million conflicting emotions. She couldn’t afford emotions like that. Not now.

  Maybe not ever.

  She fled, without even a backward glance.

  * * *

  Vickie didn’t want to listen. Didn’t want to hear it. But there was nothing in this room she could use to drown the voices out, not even a pillow to put over her head, just the flat paper-covered thing on the exam table.