FoM02 Trammel (17 page)

Damn it, Dane didn’t want to feel sorry for Jonas, but he did. He was in so much pain, he had no idea why he wasn’t hammering his head on the floor to get unconscious again. But he couldn’t fathom the kind of agony Jonas was in. Sometimes, though, animals went somewhere else before they died. Their bodies became too treacherous to inhabit and their minds left. Even human animals got that little mercy once in a while. Jonas was staring at nothing out of his eyes that were canted funny in his face from his magic being gone before it could finish putting his head back together.

“Close your eyes,” Dane told him, putting an order behind it. “Try to get some sleep. You’ll need it for when we break out of here.” They would. Someone would fuck up. All they had to do was live that long, and living was what they did. Killing Jonas was Dane’s business, no one else’s. He was damned if he was going to let anyone—especially Moore and her peons—do it for him.

“Mother likes a good dog,” Jonas mumbled. But his eyes were closed, and Dane hoped leaving him alone would let him slide away into that white room where a creature’s mind went when it was waiting for the body to decide whether or not it was dying.

Dane wasn’t staying here. He felt the collar and found only weight and a slick, cool surface. He couldn’t find an opening or the runes that would be written on an artifact. Nothing. He squinted at Jonas’s collar and thought he saw something blinking, the tiny cool sparkle of an LED.

Technology and magic. Jonas was right. Time had happened to them. And here they were—

trammeled, caught in a net of electricity and things too small to see and too fast to understand, stopped in their tracks.

All this time, he’d thought that the thousand paper cuts of his little catastrophes were the way he was going to fail Cyrus. Ezqel had been right when he’d once accused Dane of having no imagination. There was no way Dane could have put the pieces together and come up with this.

Something hot was trickling down his cheek and he wiped it away with a twinge of panic that it could have been a tear, but when he raised his hand to see it, his fingers were coated with new, wet red over dried, flaking brown. Blood. He closed his eyes and wracked his limited mind for a solution to this. As long as he was still bleeding—only bleeding—he could believe he was going to get home.

Kristan got them to Detroit, driving the whole way without complaint. Through one of her contacts, she’d found a house they could stay in, a rundown brick colonial in the museum district of the city. It was abandoned and boarded up, without water or electricity, but the roof was intact—unlike the house next door.

Lindsay had focused completely on Noah during the long, daytime drive and through the night, tending his wounds according to Negasi’s and Beppe’s instructions—which mostly agreed with each other.

The drugs helped, kept him dull and silent. Lindsay knew the healer’s magic remained in the bindings on Noah’s wounds, but he wanted to do more. If giving Noah a bit of water now and again, and washing the

dried blood and lymph from his eyes and nose and mouth was all he could do, Lindsay would do it. It was better than the alternative—burying him.

Lindsay found some comfort in the small tasks, when he let himself. He would have stayed a long time in the tiny sphere of peace that formed when he focused completely on caring for Noah. Anything was better than feeling helpless.

By the following morning, Noah looked like he might live. He was conscious and lucid, which was a damn sight better than he’d been last night, but his face was still ravaged, and every time he tried to speak, it cracked and bled. Lindsay couldn’t tell what was skin or scab or blister or flesh anymore. It was painful to look at him—and Lindsay couldn’t make himself unwind the bandages and padding that hid Noah’s hands—but that was nothing next to the pain Lindsay could see in Noah’s eyes.

Lindsay had to find another healer. Every twinge and hiss from Noah made Lindsay’s gut twist; something needed to be done to stop the pain. That gave Lindsay the push he needed to leave Noah alone, when nothing else could have made him go. Kristan would stay behind to care for Noah. The day had finally come when he was glad she was there, and that was a horribly precise measure of how bad things were.

Kristan gave him directions to Apollo 11, a twenty-four-hour diner at the edge of the museum district, and told him to ask for someone named Patches. It looked like an old-school diner, complete with checkerboard floor, chrome trim, and frilly-aproned waitresses with perky ponytails and even perkier smiles.

Kristan’s directions led him to the back, past the kitchen and the bathrooms, to a door marked
Emergency Exit, Do Not Block
. Glancing back at the busy diner, Lindsay pushed the door open, waiting for a fire alarm that never came.

A staircase had been hacked through the original foundation. The dirty wooden stairs creaked with each step Lindsay took and led down to something that wasn’t quite a coffee shop.

Over the bar, a well-lit chalkboard menu listed things like prerolled joints and space cakes, as well as lattes and beer. The rest of the space was dim, and at first glance, the few people in the place looked normal. There were a couple homeless people sleeping under the tables, but that wasn’t a surprise. On closer inspection, Lindsay realized most of them—even the sleepers—weren’t human at all.

The bouncers at the foot of the stairs weren’t quite human either. One of them stopped Lindsay from crossing the room with a
look
and a quick shake of his head. “What do you want?”

“Patches.” Lindsay glanced around the room again and spotted an albino woman who fit the description Kristan had given him. She was sitting at a table near the rickety stage where they probably had poetry slams and folk music and the occasional rousing speech on equality. “Kristan sent me.”

Kristan said she’d been a regular in the downstairs room, once upon a time. The bouncer apparently remembered her, because he led Lindsay over to that little table and left him with a gruff, “Courtesy of Kristan.”

Patches apparently remembered Kristan too. She looked Lindsay over with a raised eyebrow and strange, colorless eyes, and shook her head. “Kristan’s changed. Good to know she’s still making best friends, though.”

Now that he was closer, Lindsay could see that Patches wasn’t quite albino. She was more lavender than white, and her skin had a harlequin pattern of varying shades of lilac and rose and paper-white that made her look like a doll formed from pieces of other dolls. Her hair was long and straight and faded purple, as though a neglectful child had abandoned her outside to be bleached by the weather.

“
Just
a friend. Coworker, more like,” Lindsay clarified.

Patches seemed satisfied by the explanation and let the matter go. “What do you have to offer in trade for my assistance?”

“We’re new to town and I have little of material value with me. But I do have my magic.” Lindsay had never been privy to Cyrus’s dealings; he had no idea if his magic would be enough. Kristan hadn’t said.

“What is it that you do?”

“I can offer minor illusions.” He couldn’t guarantee he’d have time or energy for more than that. He didn’t know how long they’d be here or how bad their situation was.

Patches’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded. “What do you need from me?”

“My apprentice was hurt in a fire. We don’t know any healers here. Can you help me find someone local?” Lindsay didn’t want to go into the details. The more information he gave, the less safe he felt.

“You’ll want to see a real doctor,” Patches decided, raising one of her oddly patterned arms to signal a bouncer, who brought her a small stationery box. Writing on what looked like a doctor’s prescription pad, Patches said, “Go see Dr. Ayesha Rajan. She’ll take care of you. Her office is in Greektown, over the Thai place. Give her this.”

Lindsay took the referral and tucked it into his pocket. “Thank you. How will I repay the debt?”

“I’ll contact you. I rarely have trouble tracking Kristan down.”

The bouncer led him back upstairs. One of the waitresses gave him directions to Greektown and Lindsay spared a moment to regret never learning how to drive. It was going to be a long walk.

Eventually, he came across a bus station on a line that would take him to Greektown and, from there, it wasn’t difficult to find the Thai place Patches had mentioned. In a neighborhood filled with places called Parthenon and Athens, something with Thai in the name stood out.

The second storey was available through a side door that opened into a stairwell. Dr. Rajan’s office was to the left at the top of the stairs, and Lindsay found himself face to face with a very human receptionist.

He wasn’t sure when he’d learned to distinguish humans from mages, but this woman was definitely human. There was no hint of magic to her at all.

Still, he handed over the referral and the woman smiled. “Dr. Rajan is with a patient right now, but she’ll fit you in as soon as she can. Take a seat in the waiting area and I’ll let you know when she’s ready for you.”

There were other patients waiting, but there were other doctors in the practice too. It wasn’t long before the receptionist was leading him back and getting him settled in one of the exam rooms.

“Dr. Rajan will be in to see you in soon,” the receptionist assured him, leaving him to stare blankly at the abstract artwork on the pastel green walls.

A moment later, the door opened again. Dr. Rajan was a small woman with bright eyes and skin the color of antique documents Lindsay had seen in museums. “How can I help you today, Mr...?” She glanced at the clipboard she was carrying and raised her eyebrows at him. He hadn’t given them a name.

“I’m Lindsay,” he said, offering his hand to shake. Her grip was strong. “Patches said you might be able to help me. I’m looking for a healer—a doctor—for my friend.”

Dr. Rajan asked a few questions about Noah’s injuries and, eventually, Lindsay gave her Beppe’s name and business card. Once she’d spoken to the other doctor by phone, she agreed to call in a prescription and meet with Lindsay after hours to see Noah in person.

Chapter Eight

When Lindsay was gone, it was harder to keep the pain at bay. He was lucky to be alive, but the fact that he’d been through all this before was no help at all, and he tried to push it out of his mind. His fire had become its own entity and turned on him. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure what had happened and didn’t know if he wanted it spelled out for him.

After months of wishing for death, after so much pain that he didn’t know how he was still alive, Noah was pissed off. He lay on a bed in a dingy room, the white of the clean sheets on him and under him making everything else grayer by comparison, with a small window through which he could see an equally dingy sky.

Detroit. The border was so close. If Noah hadn’t had Lindsay to worry about, he would have told Kristan to dump him on the other side. He wanted the hell out of this mess. But he was in it now.

This was where his first life should have brought him. The old ways of building clans, the trading of children, the bonds that held them together—that was all meant to keep magic alive in the human race.

Even if that wasn’t there to hold him in place, Noah couldn’t deny that leaving would be turning his back on a threat so horrible that no one but the most paranoid had suspected it was growing.

Thinking kept him from scratching at his healing skin with his bandaged hands. The painkillers Lindsay and Kristan put in his IV worked, but left him mottled with hives everywhere his skin was whole.

The antihistamines that went alongside helped, but not nearly enough. It was torment, and he knew there was worse to come if he responded to this healer as badly as the ones his father had brought him. The list was long and included some of the best healers his father knew: the ancient shaman who had accompanied Abram to take Noah from the hospital, a gypsy midwife from the East Coast, Alice-from-up-river who once healed Abram from a kick to the head from a horse, Noah’s mother who had kept Abram alive long enough for Alice to come that time and who had pushed influenza and blood fevers out of their region. Finally, Nathan had come home from England. Their time together had been brief but Nathan had done better than the rest, if only because Noah wouldn’t let his brother fail in front of their father.

Maybe it would be different this time. Everything else was different now. He flexed his half-healed fingers inside their bandages and they felt whole. Last thing he remembered, he didn’t have hands anymore.

Just black spindly claws that threatened to crumble as Lindsay tried to cover them up. The memory brought back a wave of horror and Noah leaned over to vomit into a pan that was waiting on the bed, just in case. It wasn’t the first time.

“Hey.” That was Kristan, coming in at a run. “Don’t fall over.” Noah wanted to hate her, but she had learned quickly where he could be touched, and she didn’t forget. She got a hand on his shoulder and a hand on the side of his head, supporting him as he retched bile and what looked like charcoal into the white enameled pan.

“I’m okay,” Noah protested, as she carefully arranged the pillows so he could rest on his side.

“Thought of the wrong thing, that’s all.”

“Time for you to turn anyway,” she said, pushing pillows up against his back and hips. Mercifully, the burns there had been minimal. “Done puking?”

“Think so.” Noah closed his eyes and tried to get his stomach to settle. The more he remembered, the worse he felt.

“Stop thinking,” Kristan said flatly. Funny, it was the same thing Dane had said.

Noah lay there and listened to her move around the room. She brought him water to rinse his mouth and to drink, and she washed his face and neck and arms. Ironically, she made an excellent nurse.

“You’re messing with me.” He felt too relaxed and well-inclined toward her for it to be anything else.

“A little,” she admitted. “Don’t freak out. You’re way too tense for a guy who was on fire a while ago. You have to stop being pissed off. Don’t tell me you’re not.”