Darkness of the Soul (21 page)

Parker spread his palms. “Unless it’s some kind of sacrifice thing. I mean, you said it was supposed to be in honor of some death goddess, right? Feed it new victims every so often, before it turns on you and gets your ass on the sacrificial altar. Could be more than one. Could be just one, but I’m willing to wager that he’s playing the same old game they were way in the back when.”

Drakanis leaned back, as if he was thinking it over. There were a few things that meshed with what Parker was suggesting, but he was still somehow sure that they were just dealing with one guy, this time.
Not
like
he
couldn’t
have
gone
on
the
Internet
himself
and
looked
all
this
crap
up
either.
It
wasn’t
like
you
had
any
particular
difficulties
doing
it.
But Drakanis wasn’t buying that. Some internal radar, some sixth cop-sense—the reason he’d been good at his job and half the reason Parker had wanted him back—was telling him different. Their boy had known about it, known what the painting was, and what it was supposedly for, and was going for the gold. Their boy was also working alone. Drakanis would lay everything he had on that particular gamble.

He shook his head at last and continued, “No. Our boy’s alone. But I think he’s following the same rules. Somebody taught him what he’s doing.”

Parker raised his brows. “Cop-sense?”

Drakanis just nodded, solemn again. “Cop-sense.”

There was another bout of silence as Parker sized Drakanis up, trying to decide if he was serious about this or not. He finally broke it, as he heaved himself out of the booth and dropped cash on the table to cover the check. “Fair enough,” he said. “Forensics should be out of our way by now. Let’s go see.”

Chapter
19
 

3:00 pm, December 14, 1999

The moment of waking was a moment of agony; despite that, Damien Woods counted himself lucky to be feeling anything at all. How he was waking up, he wasn’t sure, but it didn’t diminish the simple pleasure of taking a breath and knowing there would be another one.

How
the
fuck
did
I
live
through
that?
What he’d done was supposed to have been fatal, no questions asked, no refunds or exchanges. One life for one life, that was the bargain, and yet here he was. That led him to his second question.

Where
the
fuck
is
here?
He opened his eyes, finding it difficult but manageable. It didn’t take much of a look for him to recognize his surroundings. Which hospital he was in, he didn’t know—his own guess was St. Mary’s, but it might have been Washoe Med—but the sickening green tile and the backwash of antiseptic smells marked the place as obviously as the smell of cow shit marked a farm.

He could hear the incessant beeping of something that might have been a heart monitor coming from just behind his head and tried to turn to check; then he discovered someone had been so kind as to truss him up like a Christmas turkey. He couldn’t guess why, but supposed he must have been thrashing a bit while he was out.
Was
I
out?
What
the
hell
happened?
He still wasn’t really sure, and he needed to know.

He tried to move his hands and arms and discovered they were restrained as well, and that it wouldn’t have helped anyway. The call button hadn’t been placed anywhere near his hand. It was probably still racked on the monitor behind him, since he was sure they hadn’t really expected him to wake up anytime soon, if at all, so he was left with his own built-in version.

He ran his tongue over his lips, closed his eyes, and took as deep a breath as he could. Doing so hurt, badly. Though what he’d done had been almost entirely metaphysical, it certainly seemed to have a good lot of physical side effects, but he wasn’t overly concerned about that. If the nurses came, he was pretty sure he could convince them to cough up a painkiller or two.
Might
even
get
some
morphine
out
of
this
one,
buddy
. And there was that whole “still alive” thing to consider in the wins column.

“Hey! Can I get some help in here, please?”

Christ,
even
my
tongue
hurts,
he thought, as he waited for someone to answer the summons, hoping they wouldn’t make him repeat it. He wasn’t sure he
could
try again, given what had ripped its way over his tongue, down his throat, and all through him in that initial effort. He didn’t need to worry about it for long, as a shocked-looking face peered into the room, blinked once at him, and then popped back out like it had never been there. He thought he had recognized the face, just for a second, but things were still looking a little blurry, and the face had popped out too quickly for him to really focus on it all the way. He reached out with his other senses, hoping to at least ascertain that whoever it had been was actually going to get help and was not just some visitor spooked by the strange man screaming in a hospital bed.

That
is
not
good,
he thought, as he tried to sense that other person and got absolutely nothing back. A true neutral—what he called anyone he couldn’t touch with his mind—was rare, and running into one usually signified trouble. He had gotten that far in his thinking when he realized his problem was a great deal more severe than that.

Letting his psychic senses roam free, he could feel nothing at all. Either the neutral and he were the sole occupants of whichever hospital this turned out to be, or things were past bad and edging into the territory of potential celestial clusterfuck. The former was bad, because that said prison more than it said hospital—antiseptic smell, comforting monitor beeping and ugly green tiles or not—and he doubted it was one that Parker would be dragging his assholes to either. The latter was even worse; he wasn’t feeling the weird mental resistance that came when someone was sending up smoke signals or trying to keep his mental eyes tied to the physical ones. It was more like being completely blind, and the thought of not having those extra senses scared him. If he was missing those, what else might he be missing? And what if the
talu`shar
had a few more playmates to throw at him?

He tried again to sit up, but the pain and the restraints they had put him in—and what the fuck was it, a goddamn straight jacket?—wouldn’t let him get more than a few inches closer to a sitting position. He lost that little ground almost immediately when he quit straining.

Okay.
New
plan.

He wasn’t sure yet that all his gifts had been taken. Making that assumption when it was yet to be tested was just one of many possible roads toward panic, which was ultimately worthless at the moment. With that in mind, Damien reached out with his mind, trying to feel whatever they’d tied him up with so he could undo it—by force, if necessary.

The same thing that had happened before happened again: precisely nothing at all.

“Fuck.” He had said it out loud before remembering that it was going to hurt and then was left in a coughing fit as his throat tried to close up and get him to quit breathing and talking forever, instead of just for a little while. He was still sputtering and trying to look around through his tear-filled eyes when the face reappeared, and a tentative voice called for him.

“Damien? You… oh, fuck it.”

He knew the voice and knew he should have known to whom it belonged, but it seemed like he couldn’t stop coughing long enough to place it. A blurry shape that he recognized as female rushed toward him and then shoved him to one side. She slammed him on the back with a force that was surprising, given how small the person had looked. It did the trick though; his throat finally let go, and with an explosive final cough accompanied by a thick wad of phlegm that looked more like a blood clot than a pile of snot, he managed to catch his breath.

More shapes were gathering at the doorway to the room, and judging from the colors—which was about all Damien was able to really judge with any accuracy at the moment—at least one of them was a doctor. A white sheet floated in his field of vision. It was flanked by a pair of red and white blobs, and they were all coming toward him. The familiar voice came again, but Damien was fading out already. To him, it was like listening to a radio station as you pass out of the transmitter’s area.

Brokov looked toward the doctor as she saw Damien’s eyelids fluttering. She pulled back from the bed and let him alone, so he could lay flat again.

“Is he going to be okay?”

The doctor was one of the tribe that had been spawned, seemingly overnight, by programs like
ER.
He was young, too handsome for his own good, and always radiated an aura of overconfidence and arrogance, but he was still young enough—or maybe dumb enough—to admit when he wasn’t sure about something, given enough reasons. He looked Brokov over for a moment and then shrugged, watching as the nurses started loosening the restraints and checking to make sure Woods’ vitals were within an acceptable range.

“I really can’t say, Officer. When he came in, he was flatlining.” He flipped through the paperwork on the clipboard he carried—probably mostly for show—and shook his head.

“Flatlined a total of seven times, no visible cause. No noticeable brain activity. To be honest, Officer, I would have said your friend was going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life.”

The doctor arched his brows and looked over his clipboard at Brokov in a way that made her want to put her fist through it. “Are you certain you heard him speak, Officer Brokov?”

Brokov arched her own brow in return and opened her mouth. What was going to come out, she had no idea, but it was unlikely to be kind. However, she was interrupted by one of the nurses—a trainee by the look of her.

“Doctor Matthews?” The girl couldn’t have been much older than twenty and maybe even younger than that. The look on her heart-shaped face was part confusion and part fear and made her seem even younger as she looked shyly at the doctor through her dark bangs.

The honorable Doc Matthews, apparently hoping for any excuse to avoid further discussion with Brokov, practically floated toward the bed and the girl. The other nurse was busying herself trying to finish setting Damien to rights, studiously not looking at either her partner or the doctor, and Brokov wondered if Matthews was having a few problems following the old adage of not dating one’s co-workers.
His
underage
coworkers
, Sheila’s mind amended.

“What is it?”

Matthews and the girl were apparently in their own little universe, and the other girl had made a speedy exit, so Sheila tried again, clearing her throat first.

“What is it,
Doctor
?” The force she put on the last word was apparently noticed; the two of them split apart quickly, and the girl shuffled out of the room with one last longing look.
Does
she
even
know
how
bad
she’s
got
it?
Sheila wondered. The doctor glared at her, and then he cleared his own throat.

“Officer Woods is showing brain activity.”

“You don’t have to sound so depressed by it. I told you he was talking.”

Matthews gave her a look that could only be interpreted as “don’t tell me my business,” as he pinched Woods’ wrist and counted off the seconds. Then he put the arm back into the bed and stood again. He shrugged. “You have my apologies then, for not believing you.” He sounded about as sincere as a crocodile crying for its last meal, but Brokov decided to let it slide. There were calls to be made, and nobody else had wanted the shit detail of watching over the vegetable, so she didn’t have time to fuck around with some asshole doctor who thought he ruled the world.

“Fine. Any idea on when he might wake up again? Anything you can give him?”

“Officer,” Matthews began and then sighed. He shook his head. “I really can’t say. I’m afraid to give him anything, because I still have no idea what brought this on. From what I understand, neither do you. He may wake in five minutes, maybe in five days, maybe even never.”

Brokov tried to cover her disappointment, both professional and personal. Though she hadn’t really bothered to get to know Damien until just recently, there was a flicker of attraction there that she had hoped to see blossom or be crushed naturally, not chopped off like this. She apparently hadn’t done a very good job of hiding it, she deduced from the suddenly sympathetic look the doctor was giving her. She tried to hide the revulsion she felt at receiving sympathy from someone as slippery as this asshole apparently was, but that must have bled through a bit too. At least he didn’t say anything else or try to touch her. He just nodded once more, cleared his throat, and headed out.

Brokov turned her eyes back to Woods. She watched his eyelids flutter back and forth so rapidly she thought it was a wonder the eyes behind them weren’t falling out. She hadn’t been the one to find him—that unpleasantness had fallen on Perez—but when they had decided to send someone over with him, to keep them updated, she had been the first to volunteer.

Now there wasn’t a whole lot to do except make the calls, let Perez and the others know that he had woken up at least once but hadn’t said anything. She was technically off shift anyway and didn’t figure that anyone would begrudge her hanging out there for a little while longer.