"How are you feeling?" she asked, releasing me after a moment, and reaching for some supplies on a table next to her.
"Like a supervillain just threw me into a wall."
She let out a soft chuckle. "More specifically. Are you in pain? Dizzy? Nauseous?"
"Yes, no, and a little."
"You hit your head?"
"Yeah." I felt her start to daub at my forehead with a cold cloth, cleaning off grime and dried blood, though there wasn't much left, thanks to the rain.
"Mmmm. Well. There's some blood here. Are you sure it's yours?"
I opened my eyes and blinked at her. "Mine? Whose else would it be?"
The doctor lifted an eyebrow at me, dark eyes glittering from behind her glasses. "You tell me, Mister …" she checked her charts. "Dresden." She frowned and then peered up at me. "Harry Dresden? The wizard?"
I blinked. I'm not really famous, despite being the only wizard in the phone book. I'm more infamous. People don't tend to spontaneously recognize my name. "Yeah. That's me."
She frowned. "I see. I've heard of you."
"Anything good?"
"Not really." She let out a cross sigh. "There's no cut here. I don't appreciate jokes, Mister Dresden. There are people in need to attend to."
I felt my mouth drop open. "No cut?" But there had been a nice, flowing gash in my head at some point, pouring blood into my eyes and mouth. I could still taste some of it, almost. How could it have vanished?"
I thought of the answer and shivered. Godmother.
"No cut," she said. "Something that might have been cut a few months ago."
"That's impossible," I said, more to myself than to her. "That just can't be."
She shone a light at my eyes. I winced. She peered at each eye (mechanically, professionally—without the intimacy that triggers a soulgaze) and shook her head. "If you've got a concussion, I'm Winona Ryder. Get off that bed and get out of here. Make sure to talk to the cashier on the way out." She pressed a moist towelette into my hand. "I'll let you clean up this mess, Mister Dresden. I have enough work to do."
"But—"
"You shouldn't come into the emergency room unless it's absolutely necessary."
"But I didn't—"
Dr. Simmons didn't stop to listen to me. She turned around and strode off, over to the next patient—the little girl with the broken arm.
I got up and made my bruised way into the bathroom. My face was a mess of faint, dried blood. It had settled mostly into the lines and creases, making me look older, a mask of blood and age. I shivered and started cleaning myself off, trying to keep my hands from shaking.
I felt scared. Really, honestly scared. I would have been much happier to have needed stitches and painkillers. I wiped away blood and peered at my forehead. There was a faint, pink line beginning about an inch below my hair and slashing up into it at an angle. It felt very tender, and when I accidentally touched it with the rag, it hurt so much that I almost shouted. But the wound was closed, healed.
Magic. My godmother's magic. That kiss on the forehead had closed the wound.
If you think I should have been happy about getting a nasty cut closed up, then you probably don't realize the implications. Working magic directly on a human body is difficult. It's very difficult. Conjuring up forces, like my shield, or elemental manifestations like the fire or wind is a snap compared to the complexity and power required to change someone's hair a different color—or to cause the cells on either side of an injury to fuse back together, closing it.
The healing cut was a message for me. My godmother had power over me on earth now, too, as well as in the Nevernever. I'd made a bargain with one of the Fae and broken it. That gave her power over me, which she demonstrated aptly by the way she'd wrought such a powerful and complex working on me—and I'd never even felt it happening.
That was the part that scared me. I'd always known that Lea had outclassed me—she was a creature with a thousand years or more of experience, knowledge, and she had been born to magic like I had been born to breathing. So long as I remained in the real world, though, she'd had no advantage over me. Our world was a foreign place to her, just as hers was to me. I'd had the home field advantage.
Had being the operative word. Had.
Hell's bells.
I gave up and let my hands shake while I wiped off my face. I had a good reason to be afraid. Besides, my clothes were soaked from the rain and I felt desperately cold. I finished washing the blood away, and went to stand in front of the electric hand dryer. I had to slam the button a dozen times before it started.
I had the nozzle of the thing turned up, directing the hot air up my shirt, when Stallings came in sans, for once, Rudolph. He looked as though he hadn't slept since I'd seen him last. His suit was rumpled, his grey hair a little greyer, and his moustache was almost the same color as the bags underneath his eyes. He went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face without looking at me.
"Dresden," he said. "We got word you were in the hospital."
"Heya, John. How's Murphy?"
"She slept. We just brought her in."
I blinked at him. "Christ. Is it dawn already?"
"About twenty minutes ago." He moved over to the dryer next to mine. His started on the first slap of the button. "She's sleeping, still. The docs are arguing about whether she's in a coma or on some kind of drug."
"You tell them what happened?" I asked.
He snorted. "Yeah. I'll just tell them that a wizard put her under a spell, and she's sleepy." He glanced over at me. "So when's she going to wake up?"
I shook my head. "My spell won't hold her for long. Maybe a couple more days, at the most. Each time the sun comes up, it's going to degrade it a little more."
"What happens then?"
"She starts screaming. Unless I find the thing that got her and figure out how to undo what it did."
"That's what you want Kravos's book for," Stallings said.
I nodded. "Yeah."
He reached into his pocket and produced the book—a little journal, thick but not broad, bound in dark leather. It was sealed in a plastic evidence bag. I reached for it, but Stallings pulled it away.
"Dresden. If you touch this, if you open it up, you're going to be leaving your prints on it. Skin cells. All sorts of things. Unless it disappears."
I frowned at him. "What's the big deal? Kravos is all but put away, right? Hell, we caught him with the murder weapon, with a body at the scene. There isn't anything in the journal to beat that, is there?"
He grimaced. "If it was just his trial, it wouldn't be a problem."
"What do you mean?"
He shook his head. "Inside shit. I can't talk about it. But if you take this book, Dresden, it's got to vanish."
"Fine," I said, reaching for it. "It's gone."
He pulled it away again. "I mean it," he said. "Promise."
Something about the quiet intensity of his words touched me. "All right," I said. "I promise."
He stared at the book for a second, then slapped it into my palm. "Hell with it," he said. "If you can help Murph, do it."
"John," I said. "Hey, man. If I didn't think I needed it … What's going on here?"
"Internal Affairs," Stallings said.
"Looking at S.I.? Again? Don't they have anything better to do? What set them off this time?"
"Nothing," Stallings lied. He turned to go.
"John," I said. "What aren't you telling me here?"
He paused at the door and grimaced. "They're interested in the Kravos case. That's all I can say. You should hear word in the next day or so. You'll know it when you hear it."