The Templar's Legacy (Ancient Enemy) (12 page)

“Maybe you should go back to bed, hon. You look terribly tired. Vicky said she’d call and let you know when you can come down.”

I
was
tired. My brain was a bubbling cauldron of exhaustion, but it boiled on a sea of anxiety.

Calm down
,
boy, if she’s a spy and they whisk her away, we’ll find someone else to give you some pity sex and you’ll forget all about her.

Spring! Don’t try to be Dave. One’s enough.

I’m just saying...

Well
,
don’t.

Fine.
She mentally harrumphed and retreated into her hole.

Sleeping wasn’t an option so I went upstairs and started taking apart the surveillance box. If I couldn’t help her directly, maybe I could find the person responsible for McCormick’s death. I retrieved the disk and tossed the battered case and its internals into my closet where my old computers went to die.

Unfortunately, the drive had an old SATA interface, and I didn’t have any way to read it.

I ended up over at Dave’s place. He was more of an electronics tinkerer than I was. He got the drive hooked up. Fortunately, it was a standard and Dave’s Linux box recognized it immediately. We spent most of the day figuring out the files and then scanning through them.

We’d gone backwards and forwards through the tape looking for guys who looked Irish or were otherwise suspicious. Our search had given us nothing but bleary eyes. I much preferred the way they do it on TV—skip all the boring parts and get right to the villain and their treacherous deeds.

Once more, I watched up to the moment when Colette walked in the door. She checked in with Eli and again went into the little office provided by the Suites for their customers. She spent about fifteen minutes there before emerging and heading up the stairs. I really wanted to know what she had been doing in there. After that came the one man, followed by me.

I bet she was arranging for the sale of the hot diamonds she stole from the Irishman.

Yeah
,
Spring, I’m sure that was it.

I stopped the playback. “Damn!”

“What?” Dave jerked beside me. I hadn’t even noticed that he’d fallen asleep.

“Way to watch there, Dave.”

“Hey, you’re the jerk who called me at eight this morning, and
CSI Newark
is as boring as you would expect.”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“Find anything?”

“Not that I can tell. There are so many people coming and going, it’s impossible to know.”

“Just give this to the police. I’ll bet they’ve got facial recognition software that will give them a list.”

“Maybe.”

“Look, we’ll just delete the last half hour or so, and mail it in to Detective Hottie with an anonymous relay. Then she can do whatever it is she does.”

“Why won’t they let me see her?”

“Maybe she’s here illegally?”

“No way,” I said. I couldn’t believe it.

“Well, whatever, it’s time for dinner and you owe me a pizza.”

I got up and stretched. “Okay, come on let’s go.”

Detective Hunter phoned me in the car on the way to Frankies.

“Hey Detective, can I come and get Colette?”

“No Finn, I’m sorry, but she’s not here anymore.”

“What? Why didn’t she call me to pick her up?”

“Finn, she was taken into custody by Homeland Security agents.”

“You let them take her?” I’m afraid my voice was a little louder than necessary. “What do they want with her? Why did—”

“Finn, I didn’t have a choice in this, and they were not forthcoming on the why.”

“Do you know where they took her?”

“No Finn, I’m sorry, but I’m sure she’ll be alright.”

“How nice for you!” I hung up on her.

Ian Finn Morgenstern’s new book: “How to Make Friends and Influence People.”

Oh, be quiet.

In the end, there wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t reach Colette, nor did she call and leave me any messages. It made me crazy, to be so completely impotent. I’m afraid that I annoyed everyone around me for the next few days, and got myself banned from the police station.

I even called Senator Gayle, the senior senator from Ohio from whom I’d removed a shadow. He promised to look into it, but in the end couldn’t find any more information than I. Homeland Security was disavowing any knowledge of having Colette in custody. I felt like I was suddenly living in Nazi Germany.

I don’t know how long I would have kept it up, but one special night cut my craze short.

No one ever wants to be attacked in their sleep, but I’ve found it can be uniquely stimulating—especially when you share your brain with a dryad. The last time it happened, I awoke just in time to get punched in the face and fall onto a dance floor, so this time, when the call came, I was ready.
Heh
.

Finn! Wake up!
Spring yelled right into my mind while she simultaneously jabbed a metaphysical finger into my adrenals. I shot up straight out of bed and shouted. “I’m awake!”

I landed gracefully on my butt beside my bed, still half covered in bed sheets. I groggily poked my head up and looked wildly around the room to find the threat. The sliver of moon and the twinkling Ohio stars cast practically no illumination, but it was enough to highlight the dark figure escaping through my window. To my second sight, he was surrounded by almost no aura.

I yelled, “Stop!” and put some force into the command. The intruder froze. I smiled in self-congratulations. I could really get used to these Jedi mind tricks that my Caduceus let me perform.

Still buzzing from the adrenal surge, I bounced around my bed and grabbed the stalker’s shoulders. His aura pulsed bright violet, he twisted in my grip, and a poorly seen fist flew at my face. I tried a Krav-Maga style elbow block-attack designed to stun my assailant while simultaneously protecting myself, but I mostly failed. His fist connected with the side of my head and rang my clock good. I fell back, pulling the ninja-wannabe backward into the room—on top of me.

Happily, he landed on my up-thrust elbow. His explosive exhale of air was followed by a gasp for breath. I grappled with the slim figure and was immediately distracted by some oh-so-interesting soft and squishy bits in my hands. He—was a she—and that discovery shorted my brain. In my defense, I was a horny 18-year-old boy, and my gonads frequently overpowered my higher cognitive functions. Anyway, her gender stunned me more than the blow to my head and stopped me long enough to allow the slender and very
female
attacker to spin in my grip and stab me in the chest with the knife I hadn’t seen in her hands.

Let me tell you, that can really ruin your evening. There was little pain at first. I didn’t even realize that I had been stabbed when she tried to grab the Caduceus from the string looped around my neck. I grappled with her for possession momentarily before the lights to my room turned on and my dad yelled wordlessly in alarm.

The light caught us both by surprise. Her eyes were all that was visible of her face behind her standard-issue black ninja-hoody-mask thing. They were wide, and the pupils were hugely dilated. The tableau held for a long split-second before she leaped off of me and was out the window with the flowing grace of a mongoose. As she went up and through, her bright violet aura now accented her slender legs and shapely derriere. That compelling, and oh-so-enticing, combination seemed very familiar. Unfortunately, I was distracted from the pursuit of that thought.

As I possessively clutched the Caduceus in my hand, the pain in my chest finally made it through the ultra-dense gray matter that composed most of my brain. The pain flared through me like white-hot fire. I looked down in shock to see the handle of the knife sticking horribly out of my chest.

Freaking out and panicking, I had to get that knife out of me. I grabbed it and pulled it out just as my dad was yelling at me to leave it in place.

My dad tossed my double bed out of the way, so he could get to me. It crashed against my room’s door and slammed it shut.

I looked up at my dad in shock and dropped the bloody knife. I then related the most important fact about the attack. “Dad! It was a girl!” I looked back down at the spreading blood and unnecessarily added, “She stabbed me!”

The pain in my chest doubled when I tried to inhale, and my brain ejected everything else.

I panicked and struggled to sit up, but my dad forced me back down.

“Lie down Finn! Don’t move!”

When I flopped back down, I exhaled and a fit of coughing exploded from me. Specs of blood spat out from my mouth onto my dad, myself, and my room. My cough got harder until I had no air left in my lungs. I raggedly tried to inhale again. Some air came in through my mouth, but the hole in my chest made a sound like the one you get when you are slurping the last of your milkshake through a straw—I still hate that sound.

I started feeling light-headed as I tried to breathe. This time, not so much blood came out of my mouth, but I managed to blow blood bubbles through my well-ventilated chest. That is seriously disturbing.

It seemed like no matter what I did, I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs and damn, it hurt!

My dad pressed his hand on my chest, causing more pain. He yelled to my mom. “Helen! Call 911, and then bring me some duct tape!”

I really wanted my dad to stop pushing on the knife wound, but every time I tried to talk, I ended up trying to cough my lungs out, so I gave up and tried to concentrate on my dad’s voice.

“Finn, you have a sucking chest wound, do you understand?”

That sounded bad. Fear thrilled through me and my panic stepped it up a notch, but then it felt like someone poured a bucket of calm over my head, which then flowed through my entire body in a cool wave. The pain didn’t go away but became distant and less important. My constant struggle for breath didn’t go away, but my fear did.

I relaxed and concentrated on breathing. My coughing stopped, and while I still felt short of breath, it didn’t really bother me anymore.

As I calmed down, my dad’s controlled panic became more obvious to me. I found I could now focus on what he was saying.

“Stay with me, son. I’ve got you. You’re going to be okay. That’s it, just relax and breathe.”

I nodded and tried to reassure him. I pushed the words out between my breaths. “Got it...dad... I’ll be...fine.”

My dad gave me an odd look, and then my mom pounded on the other side of the bedroom door.

She sounded frantic. “Jack! The door’s blocked! I can’t get in!”

My dad grimaced and then met my gaze. “Finn, I’ve got to go let your mother in. When that happens, I’m going to have to let go of your wound. I need you to put your hand on your chest here, can you do that?”

“Sure, Dad.”

My dad took my hand and slid it under his. It was really painful, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I was feeling pretty good. I lifted my head, spit a gob of bloody phlegm at the floor and studied the intricate pattern it made on the hardwood while my dad jumped up and over to the bed. With one quick shove, he pushed it away from the door and let my mother in. She was followed by my little sister, Holly.

As he did this, I sat up by sort of shimmying my back up against the wall and panting heavily. When my dad turned, he let me know what he thought of that. “Finn! What the hell are you doing? I told you to stay on your back!”

I smiled and waved weakly at him with my free hand. “S’okay dad...I’m feeling better.”

He didn’t believe me and forced me back down. Back on my back, he used my sheet to get as much of the blood as possible off me and then ran a strip of duct tape over the knife wound. He followed that with several more until I had a big duct tape bandage covering a third of my, fortunately hairless, chest.

I thought to myself,
Wow, that is really going to hurt when they pull that off.
That struck me as funny, and I started to giggle. What the hell was wrong with me? Who laughed at a sucking chest wound?

Spring answered that question.
Finn! Stop laughing. I’m releasing endorphins to control your pain, but you are going to hurt yourself if you keep laughing and moving around. I’m trying to encourage healing and I don’t need you tearing it all up again. Your lungs are in bad shape. There is fluid in the left lung, and a pneumothorax is preventing it
from fully inflating.

Spring, how do you know all these medical terms when I don’t even know them?

I have to do something to while away the night—now that you won’t let me go dancing.

Spring, the last time you took me dancing, I got smacked in the head, and several people ended up injured from the stampede I caused when I lost it!

So, now we stay home all night while you sleep. Tell me, how’s that working out for you?

Damn, you’re cranky late at night.

That seemed even more funny, and I felt another laugh bubbling up, until I noticed my mom kneeling beside me, stroking my head. I had no idea how she got there, but she looked terrible. Her face was white with tension, and her eyes were full of fear and brimming with tears. Behind her, Holly was standing stricken with her hands over her mouth.

I tried to lift my hand to pat my mom’s face, but my dad and Spring both growled at me. Instead I misquoted Monty Python to her, “It’s okay Mom, it’s just a flesh wound. I’m feeling much better now. I think I’ll go dancing.” I turned my attention to Holly. “Don’t worry, sis. Big bro’s gonna be fine. Spring’s got it all under control. She’s fixing me.”
Aren’t you?

Spring growled in my brain.
I’m working on it. You can help by not talking so much.

Okay! You don’t have to be such a grump.

 My dad looked seriously at me—thinking through what I had just said. While he did that, he was unconsciously licking the blood from his fingers.

“Dad! That’s just gross.”

When he realized what he was doing, he actually blushed and snatched his fingers out of his mouth. “Oh! Sorry Finn. Just a bad habit.”