There was a certain appeal to the idea, but as I mulled it over, I glanced at the surgery kit waiting for me beside the toilet. “Perhaps another day. I… really have to treat Binah’s injuries.”
“Sure thing. I should go catch up on some of my reading, speaking of that. Between training and club duty, I don’t get into books the way I used to anymore.”
Despite his words, he didn’t leave, and I didn’t insist. After a while, I cleared my throat. “So… what do you make of our find? The Wolf Grove address?”
“It feels unreal,” Zane replied. He crouched down on the balls of his feet, elbows resting on his knees. “I mean… why would they be buying drugs?”
“None of the children ever showed signs of addiction, or abuse?”
“I… no. I mean, normal bumps and bruises, you know.”
“Were they expressive? Happy?”
Zane thought for a moment, his green eyes darkening as he thought back. “A lot of them were really damaged and depressed because of what happened to them. It’s hard to say. I mean, they did normal kid stuff… ran around, played with toys. But they’d been rejected by their parents, most of them. The norm kids came from the usual messed up home situations that land someone in the system.”
“Besides the school, where do they go?” I sat down on the floor, leaning against the bathtub.
“They’re placed with families, the usual.” Zane shrugged. “The Weeder kids know where to come back when they’re old enough, if they want to join up with any of our factions. We got Duke that way.”
“He was a foster at Wolf Grove?”
“Nah. He’s from a home in South Carolina. We met him there when we were doing this north-to-south charity ride. He’s pretty young… only twenty-two, twenty-three. That’s why he freaked out, you know?”
I regarded him in silence for a moment. “Anyone ever seen the Wolf Grove kids after they’re placed? Follow up with them into adulthood?”
He frowned, thinking, and then reached up to rub his neck. “I assume so, but I mean… they aren’t going to tell us anything about where they go. They’re in another state, and it’s confidential, isn’t it? Caseworkers dealt with them.”
“And the couple, being Pathrunners, were the Weeders who followed up in later years.” My stomach tightened nastily, panging with a sensation that had nothing to do with food.
Zane looked down at the floor, running his tongue over and around his teeth. Even I could tell that the line of thought had left him troubled.
“I don’t know what’s happening, to tell you the truth,” he said. “When we found out about the murder, everyone was so upset they didn’t ask questions like this. I mean, they’re the ones that died. They knew Michael, they knew John, they got on well with everyone. There was nothing about them that… I guess they didn’t seem like people who’d get mixed up in bad shit.”
“That seems to be the consensus.” I sighed. “Food for thought.”
“I don’t know what to think,” he said. “All of it stinks.”
“Mm.” In my opinion, it had stunk from the beginning. Catching and moving twenty-one living children was a kidnapper’s logistical nightmare, for one thing. For another, the signatures left at the house were the kind you left for a revenge killing, not a random murder. They’d been involved in something and reneged on it. ‘It’ could be anything. They could have sold party drugs on the side to put the best food on the table for their adoptees, for all we knew. My own assessment trended towards the cynical.
“In any case, I need to get onto these abscesses,” I said. “We will learn the truth as the evidence comes together. Out of interest, what are you reading?”
“Rumi,” Zane replied. “The war taught me that there’s a lot of things about Islam that I don’t know.”
That bought a momentary smile to my face. Some part of my wizardly nature was gratified by the act of Seeking. It made me think of Crina. “In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
“Something like that.” Zane flushed a dark reddish brown, the color of cinnamon, laughed, and left. When the door closed, I let out a tense breath.
Brain buzzing, I began to set up for the last activity of the night. Binah’s injuries weren’t the only ones that needed seeing to: It was time to remove the parasite and reclaim my magic.
Chapter 17
Skill at surgery comes naturally when you’ve spent half your life killing people. I’ve been up to my elbows in viscera since I was seventeen years old, but even I feel a moment of mental resistance to the act of sliding a needle in under my own flesh. There is a part of the brain that fights you as you focus, pierce and depress. It screams louder as the anesthetic fizzes and stings in the moments before it fades into warm, furry nothingness. Instinct as old as life itself rails in the back of your mind, the flesh-crawling, tongue-thickening revulsion of taking a scalpel, digging in to your stomach, and drawing it through skin, muscle, and fat.
I was holed up in the bathroom, lying propped up on rolled towels on a freshly bleached tile floor. With surgical gloves chafing my fingers, I made the first incision with steady hands and clenched jaws, careful not to cut the stiff tendrils of matter I could feel brooding under the surface of my belly. That wasn’t the part that set my teeth on edge the most: It was the sudden sense of wariness I felt… the observant pause of something else, something alien, taking note of what I was doing. I hadn’t realized that the damn thing had been moving inside of me all night until it froze.
Grimacing, I worked my fingers into the blessedly numb incision, feeling for the edge of the starfish. After a few seconds and a lot of blood, I found it, and worked forceps in from the other side.
It flinched away hard enough that the tip of the forceps jerked up out of the incision. I buckled around my abdomen as an awful prickling rushed through my torso… a sensation that turned to blinding agony as the multi-limbed mass of the parasite plunged deeper into my abdominal wall.
I screamed. I couldn’t help it. Snarling, I pushed past the deep wracking pain that boiled up from underneath the anesthetized patch of skin. I got the forceps back in and snapped then around a lashing tendril. They caught and locked, and this time, the parasite pulled them out of my hand and flung them to the ground, emerging briefly from the wound. I caught a glimpse of a gnashing beak-like mouth before the mass of it shot up into my chest.
My next breath cut with a wheeze, like someone had lowered a heavy load of bricks onto my chest. I could feel whip-like tendrils pushing up around my lungs. I looked down, shaking, to see that the parasite – and the sigil – had had vanished. The ‘legs’ were no longer visible. But I could feel its weight and shape against my ribs… from underneath.
“Fuck. FUCK!” I fought to breathe, pushing the surgical tray back. With shaking hands, I fumbled for gauze and saline. I grabbed the nearest plastic bottle and poured it over the open stomach wound, blind with pain. The smell of pure alcohol stung my nostrils. Fire raged through my nerves in the split second before my eyes rolled back and I passed the hell out.
I woke up struggling for air. The new tightness around my lungs and heart was still there, though the pain had faded to a dull throb. I sat up and coughed weakly, wincing as my lungs expanded within a too-small cage.
It was worse than anything I’d ever felt. It was worse than the upir blood. It was worse than being beaten naked in a bathtub, doused in cold water, and kneecapped. I’d experienced both of those things, I could speak with some authority. This thing, whatever it was, had wrapped my organs in barbed wire, the hooks turned inwards to press against liver, lungs, heart and stomach. It hadn’t been my imagination: the parasite was alive. It was intelligent, and its wordless communication was crystal-fucking clear. “Don’t try that again, punk.”