Deja Who (6 page)

“Y
ou can just back right off, Nazir!”

The strange man who had accosted her on the street was in quite a snit. He kept batting the air like a spitting kitten when she came near, which annoyed the intern trying to stitch him up. And though they were in the least romantic place on earth, save for perhaps a sewage treatment plant or a phosphate mine, she was having trouble not staring at his peculiar, gorgeous eyes. One faded denim blue, one a light green like seawater. Even with his shock-induced tiny pupils, they were extraordinary.

He
was extraordinary, which explained why she was rapidly overcoming her knee-jerk reaction to someone in her mother's employ. He wasn't . . . handsome, exactly. If you took his qualities and examined them separately, he was downright funny-looking, like Julia Roberts or Gotye.

His nose was too long. His mouth was too wide. His eyes
were striking but odd. His hair was, as Madeleine L'Engle described such things, “hair-colored hair,” a sort of light brown with dim lighter brown highlights, and he needed a haircut; the ends curled under just below the nape of his neck. His thick bangs were always falling in his eyes—it was a wonder he had been able to spy on her at all.

So, yes: taken apart, odd-looking. Together, it worked. Together, he was somewhat . . . dazzling.

How annoying.

“Hey! Nazir! I'm screaming at you in the middle of an ER. Please pretend to care.”

She smiled at him. “No more Leah, eh?”

“I'll never call you Leah again, Leah! That Leah, the Leah that was, the Leah I might have had wonderful children with, is dead to me forever.”

“You are,” she decided, “overly dramatic. And possibly deranged.”

“Because I've been fucking stabbed, you heartless psychotic!”

“I'm not psychotic,” she said, stung.
Most likely.

“Warning her,
warning
her, and she stabs me!”

“It's true.”

“Twice!”

“I'm sorry about the first one,” she added.

“See? She admits it! Ow-ow-ow!” He jerked on the gurney, and seized the doctor's sleeve. “That stuff you said would numb me? Is not numbing me.” Then he snapped his head around to glare at her again. “Wait, just the first one? You're only apologizing for the first stab?”

“I thought you were the killer who keeps killing me.”

“I don't even know how to be in a conversation with her,” he complained to the harried intern. “Ow! You said the Novocain would kick in right away.”

“Usually it does.”

“Ow, argghh!”

“Unless I did it wrong again.”

“
Again
?
Here's some advice, doctor—if that
is
your real name,” he snarled, then ruined the fierce effect by puffing his bangs out of his eyes. “That is not something a patient wants to hear
ever
.”

“I didn't want to be a doctor,” the intern confessed. He was a harassed-looking blond twentysomething who needed a haircut and about thirty hours of sleep. Leah had seen skulls with shallower eye sockets. “My dad insisted.”

“Why the hell would you tell me that?”

“Sleep deprivation.” Leah cleared her throat. “Your father insists because in two lives your father—and mother, actually, in your last one it was your mother—wants to be a doctor, cannot get it done, and makes you go to med school to fulfill their thwarted dreams,” Leah told him.

She looked away from their wide eyes. God, when would she learn not to blurt out Insights to strangers? (At least, strangers who weren't new patients.) The intern had been trying to work and was clearly out of his depth and then . . . then she saw him. All of him. Saw his parents, saw their lives. Saw how it could end for him if he didn't break the cycle. A maddening aspect of her “gift”: there were plenty of times she interacted with someone for hours (her receptionist) or saw them many times (the woman who cut her hair every six weeks) and never got so much as a glimpse into their lives, past or otherwise.

She cleared her throat again

(stupid nervous tic; anxiety phlegm!)

and added, “Really, you should be a veterinarian. It's the only way I can see you getting out of this tedious cycle.”

The intern pounced. “I would
love
to be a vet. People are just gross.”

“Awful,” Leah agreed.

“Dogs and cats and, I dunno, birds and lizards, that'd be okay.”

“Much more interesting. Also,” she added, “they don't talk.”

“They
don't
talk,” the doctor replied, delighted. “But it's too late now.”

“It's not, actually.”

“All the money they spent, sending me to school.” He looked at his bloody gloves and shook his head. “I can't do it to them. They took out loans. They took on second jobs. They helicoptered the hell out of me.”

“So?” She had zero patience with parents living their dreams through their progeny. And not much more for the progeny who wouldn't stand up to said parents. Then again, Leah allowed she had a peculiar bias against parents in general, after being raised by the foul unnatural creature who was her mother. “If you won't stand up to them, get used to this life again and again. It's your fourth pass, you know.” It was. She could see it, could see the doctor, all of him: George Stanton, DOB 2/6/1821, DOD 6/2/1865. Harry Bennett, DOB 6/3/1865, DOD 1/2/1905. Carolyn Whitman, DOB 1/2/1905, DOD 12/5/1968. All docs. All hating it. All dying in a state of vicious dissatisfaction. The saddest thing about her gift was when she explained
their mistakes to people, only to see them turn around and make more of them.

“I'm so sorry to interrupt this bit of career counseling, Dr. Pay Attention to Your Patient. I myself never planned on becoming a Pee Eye, but none of the local art schools would take me and I hated my part-time job at the morgue. But I am a stabbing victim in mortal agony, so fix me already!”

“You are not,” Leah said, annoyed.

“Which part?”

“You're not in agony.”

“You don't get to decide about my agony,” he snapped back. “You don't get to decide anything about me. In fact, you should be way nicer to me so I don't press charges. Like, fourth-date nice.” His gaze dropped to her breasts, which she should have minded, but he had such a stupidly hopeful look on his face she did not. On the other hand, he might have been eyeing her cleavage (such as it was) for weapons. Which, since she had two more knives concealed on her person, was wise.

“That reminds me,” the doc said, finishing the last stitch with a satisfied grunt. He straightened and rubbed his back, cursed when he remembered he still had bloody gloves on and had smeared just Archer's blood all over his shirt, and yanked them off. “Did you want to press charges, Ms. Nazir?”

She closed her eyes but the outraged shriek came anyway:
“What?”

“I did have cause,” she reminded him.

Archer was so outraged he could only gape at her for several seconds while the doctor cleared away the mess—they were short of nurses at Northwestern Memorial, and it was making
everyone grumpy. Finally, he managed, “Right, I forgot, she's an Insighter, so she gets a pass on felony assault because
bogus.
”

The doc nodded. “She does if you killed her before.”

He was wrong, but Leah said nothing. Sometimes it was better to let people keep believing the myths. In fact, she could file a complaint about the stalking, but couldn't have him prosecuted for anything he might have done to her in a former life.

“First of all, I didn't kill her before. I've never killed anybody in any life. Second, our judicial system,” Archer announced to the room, “needs work.” He thought of his father for a moment, and the uncle his father was in prison for killing, and shivered.

“On that we agree.” Insighters were rare, like physics geniuses, and like physics geniuses, they were treated with a combination of awe and impatience, and sometimes bone-deep dread. People needed them and resented needing them. They could do things most could not, and their talents weren't quantifiable or controllable. It made for uneasy symbiosis. The Traynor bill, which had been plodding through Congress for years, did nothing to clarify matters. It had made things murkier, and even Leah didn't think Insighters should get away with some of the things they got away with. “I won't press charges. You have been punished enough.”

“Got
that
right.”

“But when you get out of here, we are going to see It. Also, you will need a new job because you will not be spying on me any longer. Tell It to hire someone else.”

“Got
that
right.” He paused. “Are you calling your mom It?”

She ignored him. “Dr. Drange, are you admitting him?”

“It's Derange,” the doc, whose ID badge was smeared with blood corrected, and what an unfortunate name for a physician.
He was scribbling in Archer's chart. “Overnight at least, yeah. Couple of stab wounds would normally warrant a longer stay, but they're pretty shallow. Messy, but not dangerous.”

“What do you know about my stab wounds? You're a future veterinarian! I happen to think they're messy
and
dangerous.”

“I think,” Derange added, raising a blond brow at her, “your heart wasn't in it.”

“Shows what
you
know.” Archer was out of his foaming rage and entering Sulk Mode.

It did, actually. My heart wasn't in it. Well, the second time.

“I said I was sorry,” she said when they were alone.

“You apologized for one grotesque wound, not both.”

“As I am certain,” she continued, “you are sorry for spying on me and scaring me.”

“
Scaring
you? No way in hell. An IRS audit wouldn't scare you. Goddamned Typhoid Mary wouldn't scare you.” Since Leah had met Mary Mallon just last year, he was correct. “You don't scare.” A half-second pause, followed by, “Okay, sorryIscaredyoubutyoudidn'thavetostabmetwice.”

“You're right.” She thought for a few seconds.
Am I really going to do this? Yes. I am.
“Can I get you anything?”

He blinked those dazzling eyes at her. “What?”

“You say ‘what' a lot. Magazines? Gum? A cigar? Do you want me to call anyone?”

“. . . no.”

He doesn't have anyone. Like me.
The thought brought another unwitting smile to her lips.

“Why are you looking at me like that with your sexy shark eyes?”

“I . . .”
Because I can't see you, and I would like to.
“I apologize.”

“I'll tell you what I'd like.” He shook his head. “I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I'm even thinking it. But . . .”

And that's how she found herself spending the night curled into a surprisingly comfortable chair beside Archer's hospital bed, the beeps and boops of the monitors around her lulling her into a sleep almost deeper than Archer's drugged one.

T
hree days later, they were ready to knock on It's door. Three days of Leah making several trips to the hospital to check on a private investigator who had the perfect name for a private investigator (or perhaps an action star): Archer Drake.

“Really?” she couldn't help asking. “You didn't make it up? Or legally change it?”

A shadow had crossed his face when she wondered aloud if he'd changed it and why, but it was gone so quickly she wondered if his wounds were bothering him and she had misinterpreted his expression.

“Go away, it's my real name, stop coming around and challenging the reality of my name, you awful—Laffy Taffy! Mmm, bring banana-flavored next time.”

“I will not. There is no worse taste in the world than artificial banana. Well. Lava, perhaps.”

Two days of frustrating sessions with clients while all the
time wondering what nonsense patient Archer Drake, condition satisfactory, was getting up to. Two days of anticipating and dreading the confrontation with her mother. Ha! Confrontation . . . her mother would never stoop to acknowledging any of Leah's righteous fury. What was the word to describe a confrontation of one?

And as if all that wasn't nerve-racking enough, two days of repeatedly staring hard at Archer Drake and verifying that, yes, she could not see him.

Unprecedented.

All that to say, for three days she almost forgot to be resigned to her untimely murder.

Upon discharge, Archer had insisted on taking a taxi to his apartment, and they'd agreed to meet at her office later that day. “Are you sure?” she asked for the third time, walking him through the hospital lobby. He was wearing scrubs, a reluctant gift from the admitting physician (his clothes were, of course, ruined), and walking carefully but energetically. “Perhaps you should take the day to rest.”

“Cluck-cluck, Leah. No. I want to get this over with. Also, I have a
thousand
questions for your mom. Your mom! I still can't get over that.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah, well, it's happening, honey.”

“Do not,” she warned, “call me honey.”

“Whatever you say, sugar bear.”

“Good God.”

“Hey. Thanks for taking care of me.” His odd eyes were sparkling at her—she was unaware that people's eyes could actually sparkle in real life. He was like a live-action anime cartoon.
“Which you should have anyway since you put me in
the hospital
with
multiple stab wounds
but I'm beginning to see you had your reasons. Maybe. I dunno. You're a weird chick, Nazir.”

“Call me a chick again, you will be right back in here.”

“I believe you, duckling. See you in a few hours.” He dropped a fast kiss to her right cheek and she was so surprised she played statue and watched him hurry out the door and back into the world.

Odd man. A very odd man.