Miranda threw the door open and Captain Blair turned, mid-word, from Rachel to her.
“You have a way to help?” Miranda didn’t bother with introductions. This was a time to be rude.
His eyes darted away and he raised a shoulder. “I said…may. As in, maybe. Or, rather, depends on what we’re looking at.”
“May we come in?” Rachel asked, kindly.
“If you think you could help.” Miranda moved out of his way.
“What happened?” Captain Blair searched the room, investigating. He stopped when he reached the bed, eyes lingering on Devin.
Devin let out a shallow breath and the Captain moved on.
He examined the door—splintered, destroyed—then leaned past the doorframe where Miranda’s bath waited, cold and stained crimson. “What in the fuck happened here?”
“Graves stabbed him,” Miranda said, not bothering to look anywhere but Devin. She set her hand on his chest gently, waiting until she felt the slow, feeble rise of breath.
“Where?” Rachel kneeled on the bed. She was already unwrapping Miranda’s attempt at a bandage.
“He’s lost a lot of blood and I’m worried that something internal was damaged. We’re always taught to protect that area of the abdomen, because a strike there could be fatal. My hope is that we got lucky.”
Rachel craned her head, hands already smeared in blood—Devin’s blood. Miranda froze, icy fingers of dread squeezing her heart until she thought it would burst.
Rachel looked back up from the wound, her eyes soft with compassion. “I…I’m not a doctor.”
“But?”
When she met Miranda’s eyes there was a sadness in them that said more than her words. “But I don’t think we got lucky.”
Miranda got up and punched the wall, the plaster and parts of her crumbling to the floor.
“I was afraid of that,” The Captain said, ignoring the gory scene in the other chamber. He crossed his arms, looking down at his friend. “We found a lot in that warehouse. All of Graves’s research into the potion intended to give fae Divine blood.”
“What does that have to do with Devin?” Miranda snapped.
The Captain raised his hands in surrender, but kept talking without a change in his demeanor. “Just that what we learned so far is that the potion isn’t permanent, the effects wear off after a few hours, a day or two at most. There’s a high risk of death, though. Even after they got the potion stable, it still risked killing the subject when first injected.”“Again. Why the fuck does this matter?” She took a threatening step toward him.
He sighed. “Apparently, that first injection accelerates everything. Cell growth, metabolism, a bunch of other shit I can’t remember the name of. It’s like adrenaline, but times ten. That’s the part that kills you, but if you survive it then you become the strongest race in our world. And there was one case,” Now, Captain Blair addressed Miranda directly, with a mixture of pleading and despair in his dark eyes. “Onesubject was recorded to have healed, very quickly, during that phase.”
Miranda felt like her heart could finally beat again.
“Why are we waiting? Did you bring any?”
“Because it’sonecase in hundreds of trials,” Captain Blair said, “And it could kill him faster.”
“I don’t think it matters,” she tried not to sob mid-sentence, but she had not expected hope to enter into this so easily. There was a chance. A real chance. “Either he dies without it, or he maybe dies with it.”
Captain Blair turned to Rachel. ““Is that it? Do you see any new angle or are we down to untested psycho lab potions and nothing else?”
Rachel was trying to wipe her hands clean with a napkin from the food tray. “I’m afraid so. Unless you want to wait till a doctor gets here to confirm.”
“I don’t think he has that kind of time. We can’t sit around discussing this!” Miranda yelled.
“She gets a say, Gideon,” Rachel said, both of them completely ignoring Miranda.
“Says who? We barely know her. We don’t know what their relationship was. For all we know, she wants him dead and this is just a convenient way to keep her hands clean.”
Had this been a different situation, Miranda might have responded to the accusation reasonably. After all, Captain Blair had known Devin first. They were friends. He did not know Miranda or her intentions.
