Destiny's Child (Kitsune series Book 3) (8 page)

Mom helped me totter out from between the beds, passing a TV in a metal frame that dangled from the ceiling.  Sweat lined my face.  Every breath hurt.  My collarbone ached as well.  Even my hair hurt.  But a human wouldn’t be so functional, so fast.  I had a lot to be thankful for.

The door to my room opened.  Sanchez stuck her head in.  Seeing me up caused a raised eyebrow.  “What’s going on?  A prison break?”  She muttered something to Kendall, and came into the room.

“Bathroom break,” I explained.

Sanchez crowded in, displacing my mom.  “Here, let me do it.”  She gripped my wrist, pulling up my arm.  For a moment, I thought she was going for a fireman’s carry, slinging me over her shoulders.  But she turned and brought my arm across her shoulders, sliding her free arm across my lower back.  I leaned into her, taking an experimental first step.

Sanchez had replaced her military fatigues with dark slacks and top, and a bulky coat left unzipped so she could reach whatever gun nestled in her holster.  She still smelled of gun oil and clove-flavored gum.  “Easy there.  One step at a time, kid.”  Her grip was strong.  She felt rock solid under my arm.  Here was a lady who took physical conditioning seriously.  I wondered if she’d like to go running with me sometime—when my life wasn’t in imminent danger.

She left me on the porcelain throne and went back out.  With my kitsune hearing, the conversation came easily through the closed door as I took care of business.  Standing, I leaned against the wall, then the sink, washing up.  Seeing my sweaty hair in a bird’s-nest tangle made me wince.  I looked tired and starved despite the naps.  The stark lighting washed out natural coloring.  Looking ghastly, I smelled less than fresh.  I so wanted a long hot shower.  Unfortunately, the best I could hope for was probably a sponge bath.

Now, if only I could get Shaun to volunteer for that little chore.

Once more, my stomach reminded me I was neglecting it. 
Hold on.  They’ve got to have food around here someplace.  I’ve just got to bribe someone to smuggle me something good.

I threw water on my face, vowed to borrow a hairbrush from mom, and pulled my gown aside enough to look myself over.  A bandage.  I pulled the edge up enough to peek underneath. 
Stitches
. 
Well what had I expected?
  The damage should have been bad enough to keep me in bed.  If I had any doubts about being
not of this world
, this would have chased them down and clubbed them to death.  I felt the last of my humanity crumbling, blowing away, and wondered just what was going to replace it. 

My shadow-man DNA?  Dad was a
shadow-man, a king, whose shadow could drown the world in darkness.  The thought of turning literally into
nothing
was scary.  What if, after a while, I couldn’t come back to being me?  Safer to just take a long hard look at Cassie.  She could teach me what it meant to be kitsune. 

But
there
was an emotional tar pit waiting to devour me.  She insisted I call her Mom.  She wanted to recover all those years we’d lost by being apart—all the lost birthdays and special moments mother and daughter are supposed to share.  I looked at the bathroom door, thinking of the human woman that had raised me with all her love.  She had this divorce to deal with.  I didn’t think this was the time to tell her someone else was trying to replace her in my life.

Sanchez rapped on the door.  “You all right in there?”

“Yeah.”  I went to the door and pushed it open.  Hands caught me on the threshold.  Sanchez steadied me.  I looked her in the eyes.  “But I’d do better on a full stomach.”

“I’ll see if I can get something from the nurse.”  Mom hurried off on her mission, leaving Sanchez to help me back to bed.

“How about you smuggle in a pizza for me,” I suggested.  “I’ve nothing against hospital Jell-O, but—”

Sanchez grinned.  “I’ll see what I can do.”

Arguing voices sounded out in the hall.  Sanchez threw a worried glance that way as she turned me around to sit on the bed.

I told her, “I can take it from here if you want to go see what that’s all about.”

She nodded, drawing her gun.  It was a monster: blue steel with a vented barrel.  Dirty Harry would be proud.  Gripping it in two hands, she hurried off.

Easing back onto the sheet, I watched Sanchez go out the door.  I caught a flash of even more white-coated personnel than before, and some suits that might have been hospital administrator types. 
Kendall held fast, denying them entrance. 

“Jane Doe” seems very popular.
  No doubt the doctors had as many questions about my physiology as I did, and Virgil was limiting access.  I grinned.  It felt good to have government muscle to hide behind.  Not being human, I could no longer think of myself as a freak. 
A refugee from the Twilight Zone is more accurate.

My former self had become a badly fitting pair of high heels that felt better off than on.  Still, that didn’t mean I wanted to wind up on the cover of some medical journal, having earned someone a Nobel Prize in weirdness.

A nurse was allowed in to see to my needs.  She had a china doll look, cobalt eyes, flaxen hair, cherry lip gloss, and an air of fragility.  Pretty, but somehow not quite real, she hurried over to fluff my pillow and pull up my sheet.  This happened with a great deal of groaning on my part.  All brisk professional in her starched white uniform, the whole thermometer and blood pressure cuff thing followed.

The discussions in the hall were louder now.  A piercing scream shivered me.  Gun shots boomed. 

What the hell!
 

My door burst open, letting a cloud billow in. 
Kendall fell backwards into my room and lay still on the floor, his legs keeping the doors from closing.  The doctors in the hall were crumpled and fallen.  Women in dark blue with black Kevlar armor, swords, and gas masks crowded into view.

A sharp pain hit my arm.  The nurse had jabbed me with a needle, injecting God knows what.  I sagged, bleeding tension, losing
sensation in my body.  My senses swam.  My muscles slackened.  Doing anything seemed too much effort.

An evil grin plastered on her face, my nurse said, “Nothing to get excited about, just our usual recruiting drive.”  I managed to focus on her name tag: MISSY.  Her voice caressed with saccharine sweetness, “Sometimes, when you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”

Though I probably didn’t have the energy for it, I tried to
cross over.
   Focus slipped.  Desire evaporated. 
Stupid drug.  Need to … to… 
The world around me turned soapy, slowly listing side to side.  Fear and alarm melted on my tongue like cotton candy.  Though I’m not sure what the joke was, I laughed and Missy laughed with me. We were having a party.  The room filled with armored women bristling with guns and swords, wearing masks over their faces that made them the silliest things.

“If only Shaun were here…”  I sighed.

“I know, Moppet, I’m sad too that we can’t wait for him.”  Missy dragged me off the bed, into a wheelchair someone wheeled over, having dragged Kendall away from the door.  “But the fighting’s getting heavy downstairs.  My diversionary force will be pulling out soon, drawing off your protectors so we can bail by another route.”  She threw a blanket over my lap.

TMI: too much information
. 

The only diversionary action I wanted to know about involved me and Shaun in a passionate lip-lock.  The sunlight through the windows shifted to an oily green, coloring my skin gecko.  That was interesting.  I giggled, holding up my hand, staring.  Five fingers became ten, then five again as I wiggled them.  And giggled.  Wow.  Whatever she’d given me was the
good
stuff!

The women picked up a shot comrade and followed, as Missy took me to a waiting elevator.  Unconscious on the elevator floor, my mom blocked the door, a spilled hospital tray next to her. 

Mom!  Get up from there.  You’ll get your clothes all dirty.

They dragged her out so most of us could go in.  Those that couldn’t, ran for the stairs.  Through the closing doors, I looked with great concern at my squished Jell-O.  Pieces of it quivered in fear. 
Poor thing.

The doors shut.  Missy pressed the button for the top floor. 

My hand no longer looked green, having turned both smoky and tangy like a good bar-b-q sauce.  I licked my thumb to confirm the sensation.  It tasted fuzzy.

Missy squeezed my shoulder with a grip like a raptor.  “We’re going for a fun little helicopter ride.  You’re in for a real treat.”

“Oh, I’ve done that before, with a mothman.”

One of the girls snickered as the doors opened.

Missy glared at her.  “Something funny to you?”

The girl straightened, losing expression.  “No
, Ma’am.”

We left the elevator at the top floor, joining with the others from the stairwell.  They wheeled me off, ignoring questions from curious onlookers.  Chair and all, I was carried up a last flight of stairs to the roof and set down.  They wheeled me across the roof, through bright sunshine and a blustery wind.  The rooftop shone, mostly white gravel, although someone had taken red spray paint to create an intricate pattern right smack dab in the middle.  It looked as if some of the white pebbles had been killed and had bled out, giving their all for art. 

A voice in the back of my head said,
Spell circle
. 

We sent some empty spray cans rolling as we passed.  The roof door slammed shut and locked with a click.

The
whump-whump-whump
of rotor blades announced the arrival of a blue and gray helicopter that looked dolphinesque with its stubby beak of a nose.  It descended to the far side of the roof, settling on skids, a honeycombed barrel hanging under its belly.  I softly sang, “Rocket’s red glare, bombs bursting in air…”

We stopped well short of where it settled.  Someone blocked our way, a shifting shadow, surrounded by curling red flames.  It took me a moment to recognize the figure.

Cassie!  She’d come to see me off. 

Piercing the
whump-whump
of the rotors, her voice slashed out, shedding modern phrasing as her centuries-old nature immerged.  “You have erred grievously, laying hands upon my precious daughter.  Release her now and I promise you
merciful
deaths.”

EIGHT

“Is that a dog or dinosaur?

I’m just too stoned to see.

So I’ll throw a bone and run away

from the Death-of-me.”

                          
                            —Perilous Paths

                           
                               Elektra Blue

Missy flicked her fingers Cassie’s way.

Responding to the command, several of her evil minions lunged forward.  They held machine pistols by front and rear grips, the ammo clip
in the middle between their hands.  The guns chattered, breathing fire and blue smoke.  Spent casings spun through the air, littering the rooftop.

Either my senses were completely unreliable—for some reason—or time was broken, out of joint like a big dawg.  The chopper’s
whumping
became a drawn-out, sludgy drone.  The gunfire attenuated, turning brittle.  Cassie’s screen of dancing flames slowed, fire taking on a weird glassy sheen.  It seemed I could actually see the spinning slugs melting to nothing.

Whatever they tranqued me with is off the hook!

Cassie faced the weapon fire fearlessly, as though it were a summer shower.  Her face melted, reshaped, and darkened with rusty red-orange fur as she waded forward.  Her golden eyes brightened, incandescent coins in her head.  Long, pointy ears appeared atop her head.  Fox ears.  Her head became a fox’s, though the rest of her remained… 
Wait a minute.  Is that a fox tail flopping out of her pants?

Epic kewl.

Fox mixed with human, I wondered if I could do the half-and-half thing too.  I fingered my cheeks, kneading them like dough.  “Foxy face, foxy face…  Where are you?” 
Damn.  It didn’t work.

Missy gave me a long stare, her eyebrows arching as though my words were incomprehensible, or maybe it was just me.  She dragged her attention back to the battle.