Chapter Nineteen Horns of a Dilemma
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“Stash your stuff. We have a bad one.”
They’d scarcely walked through the door when Denise jerked her head to indicate that Brie should follow her fast and close. Brie lifted her hand to Rashida in a hasty goodbye and stashed her backpack with Cindy with a brief nod of understanding, then hurried down the hall.
They swept into a trauma room, and Brie stopped cold. A red-haired girl, no more than six, lay on the bed. Her lips were white, her face tinged with green. Her breathing was shallow, and she lay perfectly still, except when a round of convulsions shot through her like a bolt of electricity, arching her back and shaking her limbs like rubber toys.
Her mother stood in a corner, her eyes wide with shock. She was being questioned by a nurse Brie hadn’t met before.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” she kept repeating. “She was fine when I brought her in. That doctor examined her, and she was fine. Just a fever that wouldn’t go away. I only brought her in because it was so high, and our doctor is away on vacation.” She looked at the nurse with tears spilling down her cheeks. “What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with my baby?”
“I don’t know, ma’am, but that’s what we’re going to find out.”
“Don’t just stand there, Weldon.”
Denise snapped her fingers, and Brie shot back into focus. She immediately walked to the girl’s side and assisted the other nurses attaching monitors, taking vitals, and taking her blood pressure. It was dangerously low, so low the machine registered an error the first time.
As Brie bent down to readjust the cuff and try again, the pendant slipped from her shirt, knocking lightly against the girl’s arm. Suddenly, the shaking stopped. Green eyes flew open, locking onto Brie in an instant of sudden, inexplicable lucidity. Tiny fingers curled around her sleeve.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, help me.”
A second later, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she started convulsing again.
There was a sudden commotion on the other side of the room. The nurse had dropped his clipboard. The mother was staring in complete shock. Even Denise looked rattled, planting her hands on her hips.
“Weldon, what was that?” she demanded. “What did she say to you?”
Brie stared for a split second longer, then the words burst from her lips. “It’s poison.”
There was a beat of silence.
“What?” Denise asked doubtfully, staring with concern. “Weldon, there’s no—”
“It’s poison,” Brie said, louder. “Cut her clothes off, don’t pull them over her head. Run fluids. A ton of them. She needs an anticonvulsant. Take vials of her blood immediately and deliver at least one of them to Rashida Botha down in the morgue. And pump some fresh air into this room. We don’t know how this got into her system, but it got in while she was here.”
Everyone in the room had stopped and was staring at her.
Of course they are, you lunatic. What the hell is going on?
If the situation had been any less urgent, if it had been anything less than a helpless child lying on the bed, she might have come up with some reasonable explanation. But there was no time.
Brie turned desperately to Denise. “It’s poison.”
Denise looked at her for a moment before nodding curtly. “Alright, you heard her. Cut those clothes off. Open that window, and pump air into this room. Make sure you’re wearing gloves to handle her. Somebody wash her face and eyes and try to swab her nasal passages. I need a tox screen ten minutes ago. Someone call the lab and tell them they have an incoming priority one. Get a vial of blood to Dr. Botha in the morgue.”
She rattled this off in a single breath, then turned back to Brie. “Weldon, get me ten ccs of diazepam, split into ten one-milliliter doses. Push every two to five minutes. Marcus, as soon as she stops shaking, you find a vein and run fluids right through this kid. We are not losing this little girl today, people.”
“What’s going on here?” Dr. Matthews stood in the door, a shocked expression on his face. “What have you done to my patient?”
Brie didn’t miss a beat. She turned directly to the mother. “Tell him you refuse his care. Tell him you demand a different doctor, and he needs to leave.”
The poor woman was lost in a storm of emotion, but when her eyes met Brie’s, they seemed to clear. She nodded swiftly and turned to Matthews. “I demand a different doctor. I refuse to allow you in this room. Get out, and bring me another doctor. Right now.”
Matthews stared at her, his face a mask of disbelief. He didn’t move.
Fortunately, that’s when the rage kicked in. “Get out of my little girl’s room,” the mother screamed, two inches from his face, “and bring me a doctor who knows what he’s doing right now !”
He stumbled backward, white with shock. A second later, he disappeared into the hall.
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Two hours later, Brie was sitting on the floor of a deserted hallway, her back against the wall and her head hung low, forehead almost touching her knees. She’d spent an hour and a half working with the little girl to try to flush the toxins from her system and manage her symptoms before she was stable enough to move to the ICU. She’d spent the last half hour sitting on the floor. She was exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically. She barely registered when Denise walked up, paused a moment, and sat beside her.
They sat in silence for a minute before Denise spoke. “It was strychnine. Well, something almost chemically identical to strychnine that the lab has never seen before. She inhaled it. It was all over her clothes, all in her hair.”
Brie didn’t say anything.
Denise put a hand on her shoulder and forced her to look up. “She’s alive, Brie. She has kidney damage, and her liver’s been through hell, but that little girl is alive because of you. We never would have caught it in time.”
Brie nodded slowly as the words sank in. “She’ll be okay?”
“She’ll be okay.” There was a pause. “Weldon, it was all over the room too. The poison. What you said about how she’d been exposed after she was admitted?” She paused again. “You saved the entire team from exposure.”
Brie didn’t say anything.
“How did you know? Did she say something to you?”
Courtesy of my magical necklace.
Denise leaned back against the wall. “The police want to talk to you. I told them you were under my direct supervision the entire time, and there was no information you could provide that I couldn’t.”
She looked at Brie. “Did I tell them the truth?”
Yes. Unless you count seeing a phantom woman who may or may not have hooves for feet blackmail that girl’s doctor into attempted murder as information.
Brie looked at her and nodded.
Denise exhaled. “There’s an ex-husband in the picture. No custody, very bitter after the divorce. Nobody saw him come in, but—”
“It wasn’t the ex,” Brie said in a quiet, flat voice.
Denise locked eyes with her and asked carefully, “You’re saying that someone else was responsible for her poisoning.”
“Yes.”
“Someone involved in her admission or initial examination, someone who works in this hospital deliberately exposed a six-year-old child to an unknown, lethal toxin,” Denise repeated carefully. “An action that would almost certainly have killed her and poisoned the rest of the emergency room team had it not been for your early diagnosis.”
Brie’s voice was a whisper. “Yes.”
“Any idea who that might be?”
Their eyes met briefly.
“Yes.”
Denise nodded in what looked like slow motion. “Matthews was in the showers when the police asked for him. He’s still in there.”
Brie found her voice. “They’ll never find anything on him.”
“No, they won’t,” agreed Denise. “Especially because this is such a bizarre, motiveless crime. He has no connection to this child that we’re aware of, Weldon. This is…” She exhaled and leaned her head against the wall in a rare moment of vulnerability. “This is one of the worst, most senseless things I’ve seen in all my years here. I can’t tell you why, but I know in my gut that you’re right.” She placed her hand on Brie’s shoulder again, gently this time. “You’ll need to give your statement to the police. Don’t speculate. Just tell them what you know. But first, I want you to come with me.”
Brie obediently stood and followed Denise down the hall. She didn’t have the energy to do anything but follow orders. People looked at them and whispered behind their hands as they wove their way through the hospital up to the ICU and into the child’s recovery room.
The little girl lay on the bed with her hair fanned out around her like a fiery halo. There were so many tubes in her arms she looked like a science experiment. Brie’s breath caught in her throat, but then the girl opened those bright green eyes and focused them on her. “I know you.”
Brie forced herself to smile, stepping closer. “You do?”
The little girl nodded.
Denise eased gently forward, gesturing between them. “Kylie, this is Brie. Brie, Kylie.”
There was another toothy grin. “Brie, like the cheese Mommy likes?”
The two women chuckled.
“Brie, just like the cheese your mommy likes,” Brie answered, perching on the bed. “It’s very nice to see you, Kylie. I’m sorry you’ve had such a terrible day.”
Kylie leaned back against her pillows, exhausted even by the effort it took to sit up. “The doctors said I almost died.”
Brie nodded gently. “Yes, you did.”
“And that you saved me.”
Brie cocked her head towards Denise. “Denise over there saved you. Nobody would have listened to me if it wasn’t for her.”
“Yes, but you… you saw it. You’re the one who saw what was bad and told everyone how to help me.” Kylie reached up a tiny hand toward her. “Thank you.”
Brie’s throat tightened as she took the girl’s hand. For a long moment, nobody said anything. They simply sat on the bed, listening to the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall.
“I’m going to go check on the mom,” Denise said quietly, backing towards the door. “She’s been with the police a long time. You got this?”
“I’ve got this.”
Kylie and Brie sat together quietly for a few minutes longer.
Brie rubbed gentle circles on the back of the little girl’s hand with her thumb, and a warm feeling of relief bloomed between them. It reminded her of the way it felt when Cameron touched her, or when she’d touched him in his other form, when he was nothing but energy and light.
After a few minutes, Kylie shifted around in the bed.
“Can I get you anything else, honey?”
“No, I just want to go to sleep.”
“That’s a good idea,” Brie murmured, tucking her in. “Get some rest. Have a nice dream.”
Kylie snuggled deeper into the pillows, her eyes already beginning to shut. “Brie?” she asked sleepily.
“Yes?”
“Don’t let the bad blonde lady come back.”
Brie’s blood ran cold. “What bad blonde lady, honey?”
“You know. The one with the bad fairy dust. The one with the silver horns.”
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Brie didn’t know where she was going.
Kylie had fallen asleep. Brie had waited for her mother to return, her thoughts racing crazily. Then she took off through the hospital, almost running, without a thought as to her destination.
She was real. I didn’t imagine her.
She wanted to slap herself.
Of course she’s real. How could she not be? Matthews knows who she is. He’s spoken with her at least twice. That plot? The one that had something to do with a child? That was this. That was Kylie.
She’d ended up in an atrium, a space filled with plants and trees and enclosed by glass. She wondered if it was one of those meditative spaces they made for cancer patients. She sat down on the nearest bench and tried to think it through logically. If logic had any place in all of this.
By now, they’ve reviewed all the security cameras dozens of times. The blonde woman couldn’t have shown up on any of them, or they’d have locked down the hospital looking for her. And Denise couldn’t see her the other day in the ER. It wasn’t that the woman left before she turned around — it was that she actually couldn’t see her.
The realization struck like a ton of bricks.
She can only be seen if she wants to be.
Just like Cam.
Because she isn’t from here.
A second later, she was up and running. A few minutes later, Brie burst through the doors of the morgue so suddenly that Rashida nearly dropped her test tube.
“What is it?” Brie demanded, trying to catch her breath.
“Brie!” Rashida gasped. “Are you alright? I heard what happened—”
“I’m fine,” she said quickly, trying to calm her racing heart. “Ida, what is that stuff? The stuff they found in her system. What exactly is it?”
Rashida was looking at her like she might be crazy, but in light of recent events, it was understandable, and she certainly deserved the benefit of the doubt.
“Here,” she finally answered, “have a look for yourself.”
She stepped aside and indicated the readout screen of the mass spectrometer. Brie focused on the monitor and found herself looking at a series of symbols and graphs. She didn’t know what any of it meant.
“Okay, new approach. Why don’t you pretend that I don’t know anything about mass spectrometry and explain this to me as one would explain such a thing to a small child?”
Rashida sat beside her. “Alright. The mass spectrometer identifies unknown compounds by measuring the weight of their molecules after converting them into gas-phase ions.” This was met with a blank stare. “You might need to just take my word for it.”
Brie nodded. “Fair enough. Just tell me what it is.”
“I can’t,” Rashida answered. “I can only tell you what it very nearly was.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It was almost strychnine. It was just different enough from strychnine to fool all the usual tests. I’d never seen anything like it before.”
Brie absorbed this for a second, then looked up with a hint of dread. “Why do you keep using the past tense? Isn’t it still in the lab? Did you send it off to the CDC already?”
Rashida shook her head. “That’s the thing. The compound disappeared from every single sample you sent down. It completely disappeared before my eyes without leaving a trace.”
Brie sank into a chair.
Without leaving a trace that you can see.
“So, I was too late.”
“No, you weren’t. I got it into the machine right away. I took a video of the tests and the results. There’s a video of the substance disappearing.” Rashida sat beside her. “We might not be able to study the toxin itself, but because of you, at least we have an idea of what we’re dealing with. Because of you, dozens of families will get closure. And I’ll send that video to the CDC first thing in the morning. They’ll know what to do.”
No, they won’t.
Rashida stared at her vacant expression, then put her arm around her in a friendly hug. “You’ve had a helluva day. What do you say we go to a bar and get hammered? Maybe find me a handsomely crafted soccer player to give me a ride home?”
Brie couldn’t summon any enthusiasm, but she nodded. “I need to give my statement to the police first.”
“You go do that while I change. We’ll meet back here when you’re done. Say half an hour?”
Brie shot a look at locker number five. “Let’s just meet in the parking lot.”