“I put Ned’s drops in my eyes to help find the Nymar when the lights went out. I could see those other scents down there as well.”
“The Amriany crawled in through some Mongrel tunnels,” Rico added. “They had a nice little system using some handy equipment. We might wanna think about knocking off something like that for ourselves.”
“Where’d they go from there?” she asked.
“Don’t know yet. Prophet’s with ‘em, but I haven’t heard back. I was about to give him a call.”
“Well, it’s another hour or so before we get to Chicago. See if you can find him. Once we get there, I doubt we’ll have much time to take a breath.” As if demonstrating her point, Paige pulled in a lungful of air and lowered her head. She busied her hands with the process of fishing a small tin of silver-tinted varnish from her pocket and applying it to the edge of one of her batons. Having the Blood Blade fragments melted into the varnish gave the weapon a steely texture, which meant it couldn’t be shifted into as many shapes as before. The trade-off was an edge that could cut through anything from cement and iron bars to Full Blood hide and was thin enough to keep from setting off metal detectors with any more frequency than a few coins at the bottom of someone’s pocket.
“What’s going on with you, Paige?” Cole asked. “Did something else happen in Miami?”
Working the foul-smelling paste into her baton, she asked, “How far did you get with those notebooks?”
The only thing worse than reading about the Nymar attack Paige had experienced was seeing the pain resurface on her face as she thought about it. “I got through the party where your friends were jumped.”
“Amy?”
“She was … I got to the part with her.”
Paige took another deep breath, tightened her grip on her weapon and took some bit of solace from the familiar pinch of the handle’s thorns against her palm. “I don’t know how long I was out after they started feeding on us. When I think back to that night, it’s all just a blur of sharp teeth, black tattoos, claws, and—”
“You don’t have to do this now, Paige. I’ll get to it.”
“No,” she insisted. When her fingers were sliced open as they grazed the edge of the wooden blade of the machete, she barely seemed to notice. Although her left hand could get the baton to shift into multiple shapes, her right could barely manage the machete’s basic form. “After the attack, there wasn’t much of an investigation. The cops came and asked a bunch of questions, but there wasn’t a lot to find. Amy’s body was gone by the time anyone knew something was going on downstairs, so nobody even thought to look for her right away. The rest of it was chalked up to drunk assholes being drunk assholes.”
“I thought that whole dorm would have known you were in trouble.”
“Nope,” she sighed. “Wes blocked the front door, so everyone either stayed where the music was or found another way to get to the first floor. Just another loud night at the Residence Hall. I don’t know. Maybe someone else did know something was happening, but it didn’t matter.”
“What did they do to you?” he asked. The question had come out no matter how badly he’d wanted to choke it down.
“I remember someone finding me,” she said softly. “I may have walked upstairs on my own or maybe someone helped me. I’d … lost so much blood that I could barely see straight. Somehow, I got to a hospital. Now that I think of it, there may have been an ambulance. I remember sirens. Yeah,” she said as her eyes took on a fresh intensity and her grip tightened around the handle of her weapon. “There were sirens, and they didn’t come from any cops.”
Chapter Nineteen
Carle Foundation Hospital Urbana, Illinois The past
Paige awoke several times after the attack, but this was the first instance when she had the strength or desire to keep her eyes open. The room was well lit, warm and quiet, enveloped by multiple sets of footsteps, hushed voices and a few blaring televisions in other rooms. In every aspect other than the square arrangement of its four walls and ceiling, it was the antithesis of the residence hall where Wes had thrown his party.
His name fluttered through her brain like a horsefly with hairs bristling on its body and wings cut from dirty plastic wrap. She closed her eyes, shifted in the bed, and took enough comfort from its clean sheets and sterilized pillow to give the whole waking up thing another chance.
She finally did open her eyes, and immediately wanted to close them. Then, as that desire soured into weakness, she choked it down and raised her lids, no matter how much it hurt or what was beyond them.
Someone was visiting whoever occupied the other bed in the room. The figure stood there, fussing with the sheets, straightening them until they were perfect. The back of his head was covered in coarse, salt-and-pepper hair. There were deep wrinkles along his neck, which could have been scars. When he reached for the other patient’s head, he did so with such recklessness that Paige sat up to see what he intended to do with the pillow he’d just grabbed. “Hey!” she said.
The man turned around, gripping the pillow in both hands. It might have been a more threatening image if there had been a face at the head of the bed or a person beneath the sheets. Now that she was sitting up, she could tell that the other patient she thought she’d seen was just a trick of shadows being cast by the light pouring through the window and the haziness within her own mind. A few more blinks cleared her vision enough for her to see that what she’d mistaken for feet was actually a bundle left at the foot of the bed.
“There a problem, miss?” the man asked. He wore simple blue pants that were too smooth to be jeans, too loose to be tailored, and too cheap to be anything but mandatory hospital issue.
“Do you work here?”
“Yes I do. Can I get you anything?”
“No, I don’t want anything. Were the police here?”
“Were you expecting them?”
She turned away, suddenly ashamed of the disappointment that made her feel like a kid who’d just discovered the sad truth about who hid the eggs on Easter morning.
The man walked over to her bedside, tossing the pillow so it landed exactly in its place. “You look like you’re doing pretty well.”
“Yeah? Maybe you should look again.” When he took another step toward her, she tensed and added, “Forget it, guy. If you think I’m helpless just because I’m in this bed, then you’ll really be surprised when I jam that IV stand up your ass.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“And if you say you like a little fight in your women, I’ll jam another IV stand up there to keep the first one company.”
“I wasn’t about to say it quite that way,” the man told her, “but your point’s been made. My name’s Ned.”
“I know.” Seeing the flicker of surprise on his face, Paige eased back against her pillows and told him, “It’s written on your shirt.”
“Oh, that’s right. It sure is, isn’t it? Normally someone in your condition isn’t so quick on their feet. Actually, many of them don’t get back onto their feet at all.”
“My condition,” Paige huffed. “I’m a little bruised, but I’ll be out of here soon.”
Ned walked over to the door, took a quick look to the hall outside and eased the door shut. “That,” he said while walking over to the bundle he’d left at the foot of the other bed, “isn’t exactly what I meant.”
“So what did you mean?” she asked as her hand drifted toward the call button hanging from her bed frame.
Although Ned looked at her long enough to see what Paige was doing, he didn’t make a move to stop her. Instead, he carefully unrolled the bundle, to lay it on the unoccupied bed, and began sifting through its contents. “You weren’t attacked by just some bunch of drunken idiots. That fella, Wes, had some very unusual friends that put you and your friends through hell on earth.”