His hands seized me on the shoulders and he rubbed my face into the carpet hard enough that my nose broke. I felt him clutching at me, scratching and cutting as he used his claws to hack at the waistband of my pants – then I heard another horrific cracking noise and it took me a minute to realize that the sound wasn’t made by him hitting me but by someone else hitting him.
A blast of chill ran through the room from the window and I could have sworn that there was a winter storm even though a few minutes earlier it had only been cloudy. A gust blew in a circle and I realized my door was open. The breath of frost licked at me and the feeling of a deep chill ran up my spine, causing me to wonder if it was from the blood loss. The cold wind carried its own smell, unique, but a subtle reminder of the walks I had taken around the grounds in the last few days.
I used the last of my strength to roll to my back and realized I was surrounded by the prostrate bodies of the agents that had stormed the room. My eyes moved to Wolfe, on one knee, still impossibly tall, but faced down by a dark figure that stood between him and me. Wolfe was breathing in fits and crimson ran down the side of his face in a dark stream from his ear. “Jotun,” he said in a low voice. “You’re still alive after all these centuries.”
“Only just,” came the quiet voice of Old Man Winter. His height was not quite that of Wolfe when the beast was standing, but seemed like a giant from my perspective. “The millenia have been kinder to you than to me, I’m afraid.”
“Let me have the girl,” Wolfe said, dragging himself to his feet. “You can have the little doll back when I’m done, but I have to…have to…finish…I can even leave her alive when I’m done…at least a little…”
“I think not,” Old Man Winter said without pause. “I have another squad of agents on the way, and you know that with my help…” He let his words trail off.
“I’m not done with her.” Wolfe’s voice was infused with a kind of mania that chilled me worse than the freezing air. He stomped his foot and I heard a snap that I suspected was the sound of his foot finding a Directorate agent’s neck as it landed. “I won’t stop until I have her, ‘til we…play.” The last words came out in a twisted, lyrical note that would have filled me with disgust if I weren’t completely wrecked.
“You are done with her,” Old Man Winter said as the chill intensified, both from his words and from a howling tempest of cold winds. “You will not seek her here again unless you wish to face me…and as old as I am now, you and I both know that although one may survive a confrontation between the two of us, the survivor would never be the same…”
I thought I saw a brief tremor from Wolfe, but it faded as his eyes flickered and the most horrifying creature I could ever imagine bounded out the window. I heard the crushing of snow for a few footfalls, saw Old Man Winter turn to face me with those ice blue eyes, and then it was as if my brain blissfully proclaimed me safe, because I lowered myself back down and passed out.
Sixteen
When I woke up, things were hazy and a small woman was hovering over me in a lab coat. She flashed me a quick smile as I blinked at her. “Don’t try and sit up yet,” she said, brushing a lock of black hair out of her eyes as she leaned over me. I obeyed her, mostly because I didn’t feel as if I could move. I looked down to see my clothes replaced with a hospital gown.
The memory of Wolfe’s attack cut through the haze and I felt nausea set in below the pain in my stomach. I started to gag as I recalled every sickening detail of what he tried to do to me and I began to retch. Searing pain raced through my abdomen.
“Whoa!” The woman grasped me under my shoulders, helping me turn. I threw up over the edge of the table, unable to control my reaction. A disgusting feeling of being violated seeped into me and I retched again. I wanted to shower, to scrub my skin until it bled. I grimaced from the pain in my stomach that was made worse by my heaving. “You need to settle down. That maniac nearly pulled out your intestines and that’ll slow anyone down, even a fast-healing meta like yourself.”
I coughed. “Who are you?”
She wrapped a stethoscope around her neck before answering. “Dr. Isabella Perugini. I’m the resident M.D. here in the medical unit.”
I blanched as she turned and injected a needle in an IV that ran to my arm. “Where’s Dr. Sessions?”
She snorted. “The lab rat is where he belongs – playing with test tubes and beakers.”
The haze of pain began to lift. It was still there; I just didn’t notice it as much. “So he doesn’t treat patients?”
“No.” She turned back to me, a clipboard in her hands. “I’ve treated you both times you’ve come through my doors. Want some medical advice?”
“Will it stop the pain?”
“Not immediately, but it could prevent it in the future.” She turned serious. “Stop facing off with this Wolfe character, will you? I’m sick of having blood all over my floor.”
“Send some of it to your pal Dr. Sessions; he’s jonesing for it.”
“First of all, it’s not all yours,” she said with a nod to a half dozen figures on beds down a line from me. The agents that tried to rescue me from Wolfe. “Second, if he wants it, Ron’s welcome to come over here with a mop; I suspect the janitorial department is getting quite sick of cleaning up these sorts of messes.”
“Did someone say my name?” I looked as far as I could toward the doorway and saw Dr. Sessions silhouetted in the frame.
“Yeah,” I said in a ragged whisper. “I was just telling Dr. Perugini that she should save you some of my excess blood since it’s everywhere.”
“Yes,” he said with excitement, “that would be marvelous.”
“Ron,” Dr. Perugini said in acknowledgment, with a tone that indicated some impatience. “Why are you darkening my door?”
“I came to give Ms. Nealon her test results.” His face twitched and he pushed the glasses back up into position on his nose. “Quite interesting.”
“Of course it escapes your notice she’s near dead,” Perugini muttered under her breath, sparking a quizzical look from Sessions. She opened her arms wide. “By all means, deliver your test results.”
“So what am I?” I said without preamble.
“No idea,” he replied as he crossed the floor and halted at my bedside. “You defy immediate classification.” A smile of delight colored his pasty features. “Truly bizarre.”
“He’s a sweet talker, that one,” I said to Dr. Perugini, who snorted again, this time in amusement. “Why is that bizarre?”
“I’ve analyzed hundreds of meta-humans,” he went on, “and most fall into common types – a half-dozen or so groupings depending on the special powers they exhibit. Some tend more toward incredible physical attributes, some have energy projection capabilities or—”
“Perhaps speak to the girl in English,” Dr. Perugini interrupted.
“No need for that,” he corrected her. “I gave her an intelligence test as well; I could be having this discussion in Latin and she’d pick up the essential points. The simple fact is—”
“I defy classification,” I interrupted, my words calm, coming out over the foul, acidic taste in my mouth from my recent bout of vomiting. “Even among the bizarre, I’m bizarre.”
A phone rang across the medical unit and Dr. Perugini gave Dr. Sessions a thinly lidded glare before striding away to answer it. He kept his distance, as though he were uncomfortable stepping any closer. Instead he stared at me in a way that, had any other man done it right now, would likely have set me to vomiting again. I stared back at him. “What?”