“Be glad your friends were so insistent,” the older doctor said. “Any other patient would have been stapled closed.”
“Metal might have interfered with her healing,” a voice said.
I blinked a dozen times, clearing my eyes, and tilted my head. Occam was standing at my right side. He was wearing his gobag clothes, thin and insufficient to the cold, but his hand holding mine was feverish, heated with the warmth of his cat. His face was inflexible, as if he held tightly to himself and his emotions. His eyes contained some feeling I couldn’t name, anintractable, obstinate, purely pigheaded something. And in his eyes was both a knotty problem and a stubborn solution. I could read all of that and more. I could see his cat energies, a boiling, golden overlay of power, like a tornado, whirling and spinning, forceful, dominating, violent, and yet controlled, like a tornado made of sunlight. The energies were something beyond my understanding, but were harnessed to him. Part of his skin and bones and, perhaps, even his soul.
To his side stood T. Laine and Soul. T. Laine looked like moonlight on frozen tree branches, her witch energies sparkling and deadly, far more deadly than I expected. A moon witch on the last day of the full moon.
Soul... Soul was a blazing dragon, light and movement and intensity, with glistening scales and horns and claws, wings tightly furled to her. As I watched, the dragon saw me looking and swiveled its head on its neck to look back at me. Eyes the colors of moonlight on ice clouds, the tints of moonbows, focused and pierced me.
“You can see me,” Soul said.
“Yes,” I said.
“That is unfortunate.”
“I don’t think it’ll last.”
“One hopes not.”
Beside me, the doctor said, “Now that you’re awake, we’ll need to administer lidocaine to close the larger lacerations. This will pinch.”
It didn’t pinch. Ithurt.
***
I had to hobble to the van. Had to be helped inside. Occam had to belt me in before he slid in beside me. He buttoned my coat. And made sure the faded pink blanket was arranged carefully over me. I let him do all that because I had one hundred eleven tear lacerations on my body. Some were small, needing only a single stitch to close them and help them heal. A dozen needed ten or more. Some looked burned. All of them were in bruised and damaged flesh.
But mostly I let Occam take care of me because he needed to do something for me. And because my hands were bandaged. There was that small problem. Of the overall damage, my hands and wrists had taken the brunt of the attack. They were in prettybad shape, with twenty-two lacerations on the left and twenty-seven on the right. They hurt. Even the smallest movement hurt. The van making a turn onto the main road hurt. Breathing hurt.
I needed to sit in my yard and commune with Soulwood. That would help me heal. I hoped.
If Soulwood had been protected from theBreakspell.
If the witch magic hadn’t killed it.
I didn’t know.
Because I couldn’t feel my woods right now.
Soul climbed into the van with Unit Eighteen. Well, the unit as it existed now, without Paka and with Rick in a cage on my land. Soul said, “You missed the case summary.”
I turned to study her. She was dressed in new clothes, silver gauzy stuff that caught the slightest breeze. Her platinum hair was swirled into a long curl that rested over her shoulder and down to her lap. She no longer wore her dragon form, the effect ofBreakhaving worn off, thankfully. Occam started the unit’s van and pulled away from the hospital. I had seen entirely too much of UTMC over the last few months and I was more than happy to see it vanish behind us.
“All through Knoxville, the molds fell apart and dusted away,” Soul said. “We don’t know why or by what mechanism. The patients in the paranormal unit are, one and all, making swift and amazing recoveries.”
“Oh. Okay. I guess,” I said, knowing that I sounded as if I was hiding something. Which I was. “Um. What about Rivera?”
“Rivera Cornwall is in custody at PsyLED. Lidia Rosencrantz is now at FBI, awaiting further interrogation. Irene and Lidia Rosencrantz and Daveed Petulengo confessed to working with Kamines Future Products to be paid for stealing the research and development. At this point they are each blaming the other for the murder of Colleen Shee MacDonald.”
At my blank look, Soul added, “JoJo said you told her to follow the money. She traced additional wire deposits from the Cayman Islands to Rivera Cornwall. All the witches’ money originated from the same account as the funds that were wired to the COO, Daveed Petulengo. And when JoJo did some tracking back, she discovered that the account was owned by Kamines Future Products. While corporate espionage wasn’t the sole reason for this fiasco, it played a large part. I understandthat Kamines was on your short list of companies interested in self-perpetuating energy?”
I nodded, trying to figure out what I had missed. Where this was going.
T. Laine said, “The Rosencrantzes were working under the table for the CEO of Kamines to gain access to and control of the testing results. So were Rivera Cornwall and Petulengo. Kamines was hedging its bets. The Cayman accounts payed for the assassins who shot at you and Occam at the pond, and Petulengo himself was responsible for the shooting at the Cornwalls, hoping to hit Rivera, who had changed her mind about being part of the conspiracy.”
“Not crime? Not terrorism?” I asked.
“No. Wendy and Aleta figured out that the German coven’s working had created slime molds, secondary toInfinitio and Unendlich, and they feared the working might injure the earth, so they sabotaged it. Taryn and her coven began a different form of sabotage to keep the working from success. The two opposing forms of sabotage twisted the working, and the result caused the workings to turn against the Old One, trying to drain the power of the earth.”
