Chapter 17
Ileft the Palace in the disguise of a brawny, but otherwise non-descript human male, with the intention of heading to Maintown.
Apprehending more looters seemed like a good way to burn off some anger, and besides, I’d promised Gorden I would see to it that more enforcers were sent to his area.
If that meant I was the enforcer being sent, then so be it.
As a bulky male, I would look a lot less strange beating up criminals than I would as a woman or a teenager.
It took me a good hour to walk through the Mages Quarter and across the warded boundary into Rowanville, and the walk helped me blow off some steam and gave me room to think.
Was there a way for me to mobilize the citizens myself, without the aid of the Mages Guild?
It was becoming apparent to me that even if the Enforcers Guild was still resentful of me, and there were more than a few people around who were happy to take a shot at me on the Resistance’s behalf, there were others who had shown themselves to be allies.
There was Forin, the human who lived in my old apartment building, and then Nimos Barakan, a son of the Tiger Clan.
Lakin might even be able to help – he had to be released by now, along with my aunt Mafiela’s family.
They were probably conferring even now about what to do next.
Right. The Jaguar Clan. What side did they stand on?
Mafiela owed me for rescuing her granddaughter, Mika, from the Shifter Royale.
That had been fun, particularly since Mafiela had ignored my warning about a possible kidnapper, and her daughter Melantha had then blamed me for Mika’s kidnapping.
In fact, she’d come to my apartment and tried to kick my ass, and I’d had to threaten her with magical fire to get her away from me.
I know, I know. My loving family environment was a big part of why I had such a charming personality.
But Mafiela had begrudgingly sent me a thank-you card after Mika’s rescue, so maybe if I went to see her and asked for her help on this, she’d actually invite me into the house for a real discussion instead of making me wait on the front porch.
Yeah, or she’ll just try to rip your face off again.
Okay, so maybe I didn’t have the mental fortitude to attempt a civilized conversation with my aunt just yet.
But I could start by talking to Lakin, at the very least, and besides, I needed to make sure he was all right after his ordeal.
Once I was done here in Maintown, I’d pop over to Shiftertown and see what kind of reception I got.
Hopefully, Lakin wasn’t so angry at the Mages Guild that he’d refuse to work with me.
The sound of shouts and crying pulled me from my thoughts, and I looked around, trying to determine the source.
There was nothing happening on the street I was walking on – I was in a residential area, all the shutters closed, all the doors locked, not a single person enjoying the summer night on their front porch – so I followed the direction of the noise, heading west. A couple of blocks later, I found myself across the street from a hospital.
A large, horse-drawn cart had just pulled up in front of the two-story building, and as I crossed the street to get a better look, I saw wounded men and women being loaded onto stretchers and rushed inside.
They seemed to be suffering from burns, cuts, and broken limbs.
“Hey, you there!” Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned, startled to see it was a thirty-something civilian male, sweaty and dressed in a stained shirt and jeans.
“Come, help us get these patients in! The hospital is short-handed. It has asked all able-bodied Maintown civilians to pull together and help. You look strong enough.”
“Uh, sure.” Since I wasn’t dressed as an enforcer, I couldn’t very well tell the guy I was on patrol, so I let him pull me forward and introduce me to the two hospital staff who were directing the transport of all these patients.
We grabbed a stretcher, and I winced as they loaded an unconscious woman with a badly burned face onto it.
“What happened to all these people?” I asked the man as we carried the woman inside.
He looked at me as if I were crazy. “A battle broke out between the Resistance and the Mages at the Maintown-Shiftertown border. It was all over the radio. Didn’t you hear?”
“No, sorry,” I muttered. “I’ve been a little busy.” Obviously, this battle was a very recent development, since it hadn’t been mentioned at the meeting.
We carried the woman into a large room filled with beds.
The stench of burnt flesh, blood, and other bodily odors and fluids filled the air, along with moans and cries coming from the other rooms. We deposited her as gently as we could onto the last available bed in the room, then went back out to grab the next victim.
I hoped there were more beds in other rooms, because, otherwise, these poor patients were going to have to lie in stretchers on the floor as they waited for treatment.
It turned out that this wasn’t the first cart of patients to be dropped off, and nor was it the last. I helped unload three more carts, taking the wounded to different rooms depending on how the staff directed us.
All the victims had major injuries – apparently, the ones who only suffered minor burns or scrapes were simply sent home with instructions for care, and told to come to the hospital if they needed supplies – but some were much worse off than others.
The man with the broken arm, for example, was deemed much less severe than the woman bleeding out from a gash across her abdomen.
As I watched the nurses triage them, I couldn’t help but feel grateful for my shifter abilities – these poor humans would take weeks or months to heal from their injuries, and some might never regain the mobility they’d once enjoyed.
I was impressed with how calm the hospital staff managed to remain in the face of such suffering, assessing each individual’s injuries and sending them off to the right department, and refusing to flinch or back down when some people thought their cases were more urgent than they actually were.
They had a difficult job, and one I wasn’t sure I’d be able to manage with my temperament.
Bedside manners weren’t really my thing.
Between unloading and delivering the wounded, I also helped bring food to recovering patients and overworked hospital staff.
Repeatedly, I was asked to help hold a patient down so a broken limb could be set, or to assist in a minor surgery.
As I stood by surgical tables, cleaning used tools and implements and passing over new ones, all while listening to whimpers and screams and trying to ignore the stinging antiseptic smell, I wondered why Iannis hadn’t thought to send a mage healer over to help treat the wounded.
When I mentioned as much, both the doctor and a civilian volunteer standing nearby gave me withering looks.
“Haven’t the mages caused enough damage already?” the doctor snapped as she leaned over the abdomen of the patient she was stitching up. “We just want them to stay out of our lives. We don’t need them here in this hospital, barking orders and making things worse.”
I swallowed the argument that rose to my lips, knowing it wouldn’t do me any good to defend the mages, and kept my head down. I couldn’t bring myself to leave these people – they might be refusing assistance from the Mages Guild, but they needed all the help they could get.
“All right,” the female doctor I’d been helping said, wiping her sweaty brow as she turned away from her last patient of the night.
“It looks like we’ve done what we can for now.
You ought to head home, and the rest of you too,” she said, raising her voice so the civilian volunteers could hear her.
“Well done, everybody – we really needed and appreciate your help today.”
“No problem,” I said, relieved it was over.
Yeah, I’d wanted to help, but hospital work wasn’t for the weak, and after all these hours of relentless labor, I was beyond exhausted.
I filed out with the rest of the volunteers into the main waiting room, then bit my lip as I glanced at the big clock on the wall.
Nine o’clock was two hours past curfew time, and anyone seen on the streets who wasn’t an enforcer or a mage was subject to arrest. Yeah, I was technically both, but I’d just adopted this new disguise, and I didn’t want to lose it just yet by being forced to reveal myself.
Dammit, why couldn’t I have been born a bird shifter? My life would be so much easier if I could just fly places.
“Hey.” The guy who’d commandeered me into helping out clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“Why don’t you come join us for a drink?
” I turned to see him standing with two other guys, all of whom I’d worked with at some point in the evening.
“After the day we’ve had, we could all use a chance to wind down. ”
“Sure,” I said easily – a cool drink would be very welcome, and besides, there was no place else to go. “Where we headed?”
“Branson’s, of course.” The man gave me a strange look, as though he couldn’t understand why I was so clueless. “Where else?”
‘Branson’s’ turned out to be an underground beer cellar just a block away. It was located in a back alley, behind a thick wooden door with a sliding grate for a peephole. The man who’d invited me rapped on the door, and my sensitive ears picked up on a pattern that must be a sort of code.
The grate slid open, revealing a pair of dark, suspicious eyes. “Password?”
“Humanity.”