Death's Hand (9 page)

“That’s easy for you to say,” Betty said. “You’ve been everywhere at least twice.”

“You like traveling, Elise?” Ann asked.

She shrugged. “It loses its excitement after a few years.”

“It doesn’t hurt you’ve always had a hot dancing witch to come home to.” Betty waggled her eyebrows. “Am I right?”

Elise ignored her. “Five minutes and we’re done.”

“So Elise, why have you traveled so much?” Ann pressed. “I mean, why would you put yourself through something you obviously weren’t enjoying?”

Betty had the sudden urge to strangle Ann. If there was one thing Elise liked less than being friendly and nice, it was invasive questions. Dagger-like looks and stony silence for the remainder of the gym trip was not her idea of a fun afternoon.

But to her surprise, when Elise answered, there was no malice in her voice. “Life has a habit of taking me places I don’t necessarily want to go.”

Ann’s gaze went distant. “I get that.”

About seventy million hours later, Elise’s bike beeped. Betty’s still had several seconds on it, but she immediately hopped off.

“Thank deity,” Betty sighed, rubbing her thighs.

Elise sprayed Betty’s bike with disinfectant and handed her a towel, then set about cleaning her own. “We took it easy today. More lifting next time and less cardio. How’s Sunday?”

Betty groaned loudly. “
Sunday
? I’m not sure I’ll be able to walk, much less ‘step it up’ by Sunday.”

“All you need is a hot shower. Come on. Let’s rinse off.” Elise chucked the paper towels in the nearest trash.

They headed down to the locker rooms once more. Elise and Betty stripped down, grabbing the first two showers. Betty sighed when the hot water hit her muscles. “I think I’m going to have the flu on Sunday,” she called over the barrier. “I’m scheduled to spend the day in bed.”

“I’m not going to force you to work out. You’re welcome to stay home and watch romantic movies with a tub of ice cream if that sounds better than being fit.”

Betty turned her shower off. “Well, when you put it
that
way…”

Elise dressed at her locker. If Betty had been as wiry and muscular as Elise, she would have paraded around naked constantly, but her friend was much more modest. “Stop staring at me, you pervert,” Elise said, toweling off her hair. She had never removed her weightlifting gloves.

“Sorry, I’m just waiting for you to snap in half like a twig,” Betty teased. “Seriously, would it hurt you to eat a little junk food once in awhile?”

Elise snorted. “I’m just not a connoisseur of gas station candy.”

Ann exited the shower, towel wrapped around her own lumpy figure like it was armor in her battle against fitness, and waddled toward a bathroom stall.

“Should somebody tell her that she doesn’t have anything any of us haven’t seen before?” Betty asked in a stage whisper.

“No. You could grow a sense of decency without anyone being too stricken.”

“Are you kidding? I’m a national treasure. Men everywhere would weep,” Betty said, pulling on a clean shirt and flipping her hair over the collar. “Are we going home now?”

“Why, so you can grill me about Anthony?”

“I think I can restrain myself,” Betty said. “I can already tell you’re not going to date him, oh Mistress Dark and Broody. You better let my baby cousin down really gently after the date tonight or I’ll kick your ass.”

Elise frowned. “Who says I’m going to let him down at all?”

“Your long and noble history as Queen Bitch.”

“Gosh Betty, you’re the best,” she said flatly. “Anyway, I have to do a few errands before my date, so I can’t sit around with you tonight. I’ll just drop you off.”

“Why don’t I take Betty?” Ann volunteered, emerging from the bathroom fully clothed. She tore at her tangled hair with a comb, although she didn’t look to be making much progress. “I need to head down to that side of town tonight anyway.”

“Or Betty could get a job and actually buy a car,” Elise suggested.

“I don’t see that happening in the next ten minutes,” Betty said. “Or the next year, for that matter. You sure you don’t mind taking me home, Ann?”

“It’s not a problem at all.”

“Great. See you, Elise,” Betty said. Her friend gave a short wave without looking at Ann.

They headed out into the sprinkling rain. Betty covered her head with her gym bag, hurrying into Ann’s car. Ann strolled through the weather completely unperturbed, turning on the car and pulling out of the parking lot with all the hurry of a cat waking up from a nap.

They drove without speaking for awhile. Betty picked at her fingernails, cleaning her thumbnail of the remaining vestiges of pink polish. She wanted to go home and paint her nails candy apple red instead.

“So what’s with all this rain?” Betty asked idly, rubbing loose flakes of polish off on her jeans. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it like this before. It never rains longer than a few minutes on the worst days.”

“I don’t know,” Ann said. “I haven’t lived here that long.”

“It’s definitely going to be a wet winter if this is any indicator. I think those people who talk about global warming must be full of shit, because it only seems to keep getting colder and wetter around here. You know, when it—”

“Do you ever wonder what Elise is hiding?” Ann interrupted.

The topic had changed so quickly she felt like she had whiplash. “What?”

“You haven’t noticed her keeping secrets?”

She laughed. Secrets fueled Elise—Betty could have written her entire master’s thesis on conversation topics that made Elise fall silent. “Sure I have. But I don’t care.”

“Why do you think she always wear gloves?” she pressed.

Betty shot a look at Ann. “That’s personal.” Of course, she didn’t really know why herself. She only knew that it wasn’t an injury—in the four years she had known Elise, she never saw her without gloves.

“And do you really think she was telling the truth about why she and James are fighting?”

“I don’t care,” Betty said, enunciating every syllable clearly. “Listen, Ann. Elise doesn’t talk about herself. I respect that, and if you want hang out with us, you should learn to respect it too.”

Hurt flashed across Ann’s face. “You don’t have to be mean.”

“Elise has been amazing to me, and I do whatever I can to be amazing in return. It doesn’t matter what she keeps to herself. She could be an axe murderer and it wouldn’t change a thing.”

Ann didn’t speak again until they turned onto Betty’s street. Their home was southwest of downtown in a quiet neighborhood with old trees, and her duplex was a brick building halfway down the street with flowers in front of the window and a fence that needed to be whitewashed.

“Do you think Elise is a good person?”

“Aside from her weirdness, yes. Totally.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Why?”

Ann laughed. It wasn’t a natural or comfortable sound. “No reason. Here’s your place—see you later.”

Betty got out of Ann’s truck. She barely had a chance to step away before it peeled out of her duplex’s driveway, whipping around the corner all too fast. Betty stared after Ann, a queasy feeling twisting in the pit of her stomach.

“Ann’s just bizarre,” she muttered. “That’s all.”

It never occurred to Betty that she hadn’t told Ann where she lived.

VI

Elise and James pulled into the parking lot in front of the hospital as the sun dropped behind the mountains, setting the sky aflame. A wet chill lowered the temperature several degrees. She shivered and shrunk into her coat.

“Nice summer we have coming along,” she muttered.

James locked the car. “Let’s get inside.”

They passed through the hospital doors and all sound died. It felt as though the volume on life had been turned down, turning everything to slow motion. Nobody hurried in the hospital. It made Elise feel like they had already given up on their battles.

James pulled Elise down a side hall and glanced down at his watch. “Stephanie said the records room is empty during shift turnover. If we head down now, we should have enough time to get in and out before someone comes down.”

“What happens if we get caught?”

He smiled mirthlessly. “We claim to belong and try to avoid arrest.”

Her forehead throbbed with the first signs of a headache. She shut her eyes and pressed the heel of her palm against her temple. “That doctor of yours better help us out if we get in trouble. It’s her fault we’re here in the first place.”

“But it isn’t her fault Augustin Ramirez refused to cooperate with us,” James said. A sharp pain lanced through Elise’s skull, and she gave a small gasp. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said. “I feel strange. Almost as though...” Almost as though there was something that didn’t belong in a hospital. She let out a slow breath and stretched out her senses, probing the strange presence.

“Elise?” James asked.

“It’s a demon,” she said. “Faint. Weak.”

“An actual demon, or one of the Gray?”

She tilted her head to the side as if trying to catch the faint strains of a distant song. It made her ache from crown to jaw. “Hellborn.”

“What’s it doing in a Catholic hospital?”

“It might not be here. There are Warrens under the city. Maybe they’re close to the surface here.”

“We don’t have time to find out,” James said, steering her toward the elevator. “We have to return Stephanie’s key when she takes a lunch break from her meeting.”

Elise punched the down button and tried to ignore the increasing pressure in her head. “Is the story of how you coerced her to give us those keys one of those stories I don’t want to know?”

“Perhaps,” James said. The elevator doors opened. A woman and a little boy with a cast on his arm exited, and James and Elise took their place.

The elevator began to lower, and Elise’s sense of the hellborn grew stronger by every inch they dropped. She covered her eyes with the heels of her palms, pressing gently, as though she could squeeze the uncomfortable itch out of her skull.

“You can wait while I take care of this,” he said. The elevator chimed, and the doors opened. A pair of nurses boarded, pushing the basement button again.

“No, it’s fine,” Elise whispered. “I’ll get it.”

The nurses chatted amongst themselves, gossiping about a particularly promiscuous coworker and his latest exploits. Elise leaned against the wall and tried to relax, but the sensations only grew stronger and stronger, like a vice on her temples.

The doors opened on the basement level, and the nurses exited. They followed a second later, waiting outside the doors as James consulted a map Stephanie had scribbled on the dance studio’s stationary.

“The medical records office is over here,” James said, peering through a door with a window. “There should be a fax machine inside.”

“Okay,” Elise said. “You watch the hall. I’ll go in.”

He nodded. “Be quick.”

She slipped into the records room. It was a long room full of shelves, and at the far end stood a desk and plastic chair. A fax machine rested beside a computer that probably remembered the days before the internet. It clearly wasn’t designed to be comfortable for human occupation: the walls were concrete and water-stained, and the carpet was hardly in better condition. The only lights were harsh and unsteady, flickering on when Elise flipped the light switch.

She went along the side of the room, searching for the records that began with R. She found them quickly, but locating Lucinde’s records in particular was much more difficult. There were so many folders all over the place—she couldn’t imagine how the hospital hadn’t moved to digital records yet.

“How Smithsonian,” she muttered, thumbing through the names. Reynolds. Reginald. She skipped a few. Rand. Randall.
Ramirez
. Success.

She skimmed Lucinde’s records. There were many pages, and many visits to the hospital, including one trip to the emergency room for a broken ankle. Every extended stay had to do with her heart condition.

She set half of the pages on the top rack of the fax machine and began feeding them through. She continued to skim the second part of the stack, which contained duplicate records from Lucinde’s general practitioner. Chicken pox, a case of the flu, referrals to several cardiologists over the years. Elise didn’t see anything about psychoses.

Each sheet of paper seemed to take forever to feed through the fax, and slow inch by slow inch she grew more nervous. She strained to detect any noise from the hallway, half-sure she would hear James failing to ward off a nurse outside. With David Nicholas’s bounced check, she definitely couldn’t afford an attorney.

The fax kicked out the rest of the papers and beeped. She put them back in the folder.

A pulsing noise throbbed between Elise’s ears. The pit of her stomach dropped, and a familiar nausea crept through Elise’s body. She slid the folder into place and headed for the door, holding her stomach.

And then the pulse
burst
.

She staggered, slamming against the wall. Her dinnertime snack of yogurt and granola rose into her throat. She took slow, shallow breaths, trying to hold off the urge to vomit—and failed. The sour tang of bile flooded her mouth.

There was something in the hospital, and James was alone outside.

She spat into the trash can, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and threw open the door.

James was not waiting for Elise outside.

For a second, all she could do was stare at the naked man standing where her aspis should have been. Every inch of his old, wrinkled body was bared to the cold hallway.

Then it occurred to her he wasn’t breathing. In fact, he didn’t look like he was alive at all. A toe tag dragged on the ground beside him. She would have been sure he was a corpse, except that he was standing, and staring, and drooling. Corpses couldn’t drool.

Someone whispered behind Elise. “
Take care of her
.”

She spun, but the hall behind her stretched empty. A light flickered several feet down.

A heavy weight slammed into Elise’s side, and all the breath rushed out of her body. She struck the floor an instant later. Pain exploded in her shoulder.