Chapter Twenty-Six
It’s really quite fascinating.” The voice faded in and out.
“You see here—I have to work quickly, or the wound heals itself before I can finish. One can literally watch the process in real time: bones knitting back together, flesh sealing up, even blood vessels closing and beginning to flow normally again. It is the most exciting thing I have ever witnessed, and I can assure you, I have seen a good deal!”
I felt like I was lying in the surf as it washed over me, with waves crashing and blotting everything out, and then receding, allowing me to surface and breathe for a moment.
It was a little like drowning, over and over again, or how I expected drowning would feel.
But I learned the rhythm, and the last time I surfaced, I pushed off hard from the beach and came up gasping.
“Oh, shit,” someone said, and I opened my eyes to find myself staring around at one of the operating rooms in HQ.
A very familiar bastard was stepping back from the table. He had a bloody scalpel in one gloved hand and had just thrown up a personal shield with the other, why I didn’t know. This room was in the belly of HQ and well protected.
And then the pain hit, I howled, and everybody ran for the doors. Everybody except the aforementioned bastard, AKA Arturo Sedgewick, the Corps’ chief physician. He stood his ground with his little scalpel, and the eyes I could see over his surgical mask merely looked annoyed.
“I knew you were going to do this,” he complained as I tried to remember how to breathe.
“Do what?” I croaked and then looked down.
At the open cavity of my abdomen, at blood and sutures holding my skin open around a gaping hole in one side of my belly, and at a long line of stitches on the other.
Stitches that were coming loose by themselves as the skin knitted up behind them, unraveling the line.
I stared at them for a second, weirdly fascinated, then pulled on the end of the thread. ..
And had the whole thing come out, with the tiny holes closing up after it, erasing like magic.
“Do you mind?” Sedgewick asked acerbically. “I’m not done.”
“What?” I looked up at him, understanding nothing.
“Yes, that’s helpful,” he said sourly. I opened my mouth to ask the first of a whole raft of questions, but never got the chance. “All right, nighty night,” he said, and raised his hand again.
And then I was falling down a lengthy hole, screaming all the way.
I hit down in a crouch, my toes instinctively gripping what felt like cold dirt, and my heart racing. For a moment, I just crouched there, wondering what the hell? Possibly literally, I thought, fear grabbing me by the throat.
But no demons came to drag me off to my just desserts, and no angels flitted by, at least none that I could see. Of course, I couldn’t see much. It was dark in here, quiet—I could no longer hear the surf—and strangely peaceful.
And then really boring, because nothing was happening, so after a while, I cautiously stood up.
If this is the afterlife, I’m really disappointed, I thought, moving tentatively around.
There continued to be more nothing, not even the red aftereffects of the brilliant lights in the operating room, where I assumed Sedgewick was still battling for my life.
Although how hard he was, I didn’t know, as Weres fascinated him, and I thought that Relics might even more.
A live war mage, on the other hand, wasn’t interesting at all, and Sedgewick had been known to try to sneak in autopsies on Weres without Clan permission.
What might he do for a chance to carve up a Relic?
I glanced around, suddenly nervous again, but if there was a way back to consciousness, I didn’t see it.
Or a way anywhere, for that matter. There were no open doors beckoning me to come toward the light, which I guessed was a good thing. But also no more overheard conversations, or the eighties music Sedgewick had had playing in the operating room, or—
What was that?
For a second, I thought I was imagining things, as a tiny flicker of something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye.
It disappeared when I looked straight at it, making me wonder if I’d seen it at all.
And then it reappeared, off to the left, just a flicker of a flicker, hardly anything. ..
I followed what appeared to be a distant gleam of reddish firelight through some kind of cave system.
Wherever the light shone, I could just make out a little stretch of brown stone wall or maybe hard, compacted dirt.
It bothered me, as I’d have hoped my brain—if that’s where I was—would be a little more imaginative, but no.
Or maybe yes, I thought, as the flame picked up speed and I started running, trying to follow the mad little thing through a maze of tunnels and out into—
Well, damn.
I grabbed the side of an opening in the rock to help me stop, because I did not want to run straight ahead, where a figure crouched in the middle of a small cave, hunched over an open fire.
No, I did not want to do that at all. Because the cave was just a cave, with nothing to recommend it except the vague impression of rain blowing outside of a jagged opening on the other side, but the figure. ..
Shit, shit, shit.
That was me, wasn’t it?
She had the same dark brown hair and the same features, I supposed, but that didn’t mean jack in this instance.
There was a fierceness about her, even in human form, a predatory intensity that I hadn’t known my face could stretch to.
Those might be my features, but there was a very different mind behind them, one I didn’t particularly want to meet.
She wasn’t dressed like me, either. Instead of a bloody hospital gown, she was wearing a brief leather skirt that looked like it had been ripped directly off of some animal with no other work put into it, and, as far as I could tell, nothing else except for a lot of dirt.
Long, matted, stick-strewn hair frizzed around her dirty face, and row after row of necklaces—bone, amber, cowry shell, and carved wooden beads—draped her torso.
She looked like a wild woman. She looked deranged. And now she was also looking up and—
Shit.
For a moment, the two of us locked eyes, the modern, freaked-out version and the... ancient counterpart? Was this some kind of ancestral memory, or whatever New Age stuff they were peddling these days? Or was this my third?
Or was I so high on Sedgewick’s supply that I was seeing things?
‘Cause I was voting for the latter, and I was voting hard.
“Dead war mage,” she finally said, the firelight flickering in her eyes, and her voice a low rasp.
Then she went back to poking at the fire with a stick.
I just stood there, clutching the wall and wondering if she meant me.
Was I dead?
I didn’t feel dead.
But then, what did death feel like?
Because if this was it, I had been seriously misled.
I cleared my throat after a moment. “What?” I said, brilliantly.
She looked up again, seeming surprised to see me still standing there.
“Dead,” she said again, and paused. “Not alive,” she added helpfully, as if wondering if I might be slow.
“Um. No? I’m—that is, we aren’t, if you’re me?”
I got nothing back that time.
“We’re on an operating table,” I said, trying again and venturing a little closer, because she didn’t seem hostile at the moment. “Sedgewick—the Corps’ doctor—he’s trying to help us.”
Hopefully.
My counterpart looked at me blankly for a moment and then tried again. “Did this.”
“Sedgewick? What did he do?”
She just looked at me some more. I’d seen that expression from a couple of my instructors when I was being particularly dense. It hadn’t been pleasant then, either.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, frustrated. “I’ve... had a day, okay?”
She sighed and tried again. “Dead?”
I shook my head and sat down opposite her. It was warmer here. I didn’t realize until that moment that I’d been cold.
“No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. We’re not—”
She held up a hand, and an expression that might have been slight irritation crossed her features. “No. Listen.”
She pointed at me with a dirty finger that had a nail long enough to be considered a talon. And maybe it was, for all I knew. I shut up.
“Dead,” she said again, and waited expectantly.
“Uh, dead?” I repeated, because that seemed to be what she wanted.
She nodded. “War Mage,” she added, and then looked at me again.
“War mage.”
“Did this.”
“Did... this?”
She just looked at me some more. It seemed to be taking a lot out of her to have this conversation, maybe because, while we weren’t dead, we were close. How much blood had we lost?
Too much, at a guess.
And she was probably the one healing us, too, because that sure wasn’t me.
“Together!” she suddenly roared, startling and frightening me to the point that I scrambled back on the bone-strewn floor.
“I don’t know what you want!” I yelled back, and had half a dozen heads turn toward mine, because I was suddenly conscious again and being wheeled down a hall on a gurney.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Sedgewick said crossly, and the next second I was out again.
◆◆◆
I woke up to an immense sense of déjà vu. I was back in my bedroom at home, it was crowded with people, and one of them was Hargroves. I was pretty sure that your boss wasn’t supposed to see you in your nightie quite this much, I thought blearily, struggling to sit up. And going nowhere.
“It’ll be like that for a while, mage,” Hargroves informed me dryly. “You almost bled out.”
No shit, I didn’t say, mainly because Cyrus was holding a glass to my lips.
He knew me too well.
I drank the tepid water anyway, because I was thirsty. And then struggled into a more or less seated position, just because Hargroves thought I couldn’t. I was slanted to the side a little more than strictly normal, but technically, it was sitting.
He sneered at me, or maybe not—he pretty much always looked like that—and tossed something onto the bedclothes.