Water to Burn (43 page)
Authors: Katharine Kerr
“Could you pour me some water?” I said. “I can see a pitcher on that tray thing.”
When Ari handed me the full glass, my fingers were so weak that I nearly dropped it. He caught it and helped me drink. I gulped water and washed the taste of salt out of my mouth.
“How long have I been out?” I said.
“Just overnight.” He put the glass back on the tray, then paused to glance out the door. “What happened?”
“I was in a coma. Fighting that sleazoid Belial drained every bit of Qi I had. Well, almost all. All and I would have been dead.”
Ari winced and glanced away, then wiped his face on his filthy sleeve.
“You saved my life,” I said. “Again.”
“Keeping you safe is the job I was given.”
“Just your job, huh?”
“Don’t be stupid.” He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “I just never know what to say in these situations.”
“Well, I’ll say thank you, and you don’t have to answer that.”
“I might add that you saved mine. I don’t know what Caleb did to me, but if you’d not stopped him, he might have actually figured out how to use that gun.”
I smiled and took another kiss.
“Which reminds me,” I said. “What about Caleb? Did you—” I had trouble saying it outright. “Uh, is he dead?”
“No. He fired one shot at me and missed so badly that I realized he knew nothing about guns. He was holding the sodding pistol in one hand. The recoil jerked him off-balance.” Ari’s voice dripped contempt. “He scrambled back into the car when I fired. I was only aiming for the tires, to disable it so we could make an arrest.” He shook his head, baffled. “I assume he did something to my mind, and that you made him stop. Just before I fired, I mean.”
“Yeah, that’s it, more or less.”
“I felt like I’d been drinking all day.” His voice shook with sheer indignation. “I missed the tires. I got one shot into his rear door and bounced a third one off the trunk when he drove back onto the road.”
He’d missed his target for the first time in twenty years, I figured. “So he got away?”
“Unless the Pacifica police have him, yes.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself.” I leaned back against the pillows. “Most people would have stayed ensorcelled for hours. You snapped right out of it when I broke up the web of Qi. I’m not surprised you missed. I am surprised that you could stand up.”
“You’re only saying that to make me feel better.”
“No, I’m not. Don’t you remember how Doyle hit the ground? And how he looked afterward?”
He considered this. “Yes,” he said. “I do see what you mean.”
“You’re amazing, Ari. You really are.”
He scowled at me, then suddenly smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “I still wish I’d shot out his tires, though.”
Father Keith trotted back in, followed by a solid-looking nurse with a wonderful mass of curly sandy-brown hair, pulled back into a pair of metal clips. The nameplate on her blue scrubs read “Enderby.” End or be, I thought. Yeah, that was the question, all right.
“Ari?” Father Keith said. “If you’ve got a cell phone, would you call Eileen and tell her that Nola’s back with us?”
“And go out in the hall, both of you,” Enderby said. “I’ve got to take her vitals.”
“Where are you taking them?” Father Keith said.
“Not very far.” Enderby’s tone of voice implied she’d heard that joke too many times. “Out!”
The vitals turned out to be blood pressure, temperature, and other routine measurements. The nurse pronounced me fit to eat breakfast and sent in someone she called Doctor Poulis. I wondered why the doctor looked so familiar, with her deep-set brown eyes, slender face, and pointed chin, until I remembered the Nereid.
“Were you the admitting doctor?” I asked. “In the ER when they brought me in, I mean?”
“I was, yes. I just came back on shift and heard about the miracle.”
“That’s me, huh?” I knew that at times an unconscious person could be aware of their surroundings, but I’d never had it happen to me. The ego’s suppressed, but the animal sees and remembers. “I’m recovering, right?”
“I’d say so, but hypothermia can be a funny thing. How are you feeling this morning?”
“Okay. Can I go home now?”
“I’d rather you stayed for a few tests and some more observation. I want to order blood tests to determine your various levels, like potassium and creatinine.” She caught my wrist and took my pulse all over again. “I’ve got to admit that you look a lot stronger than anyone should after an extreme hypothermia incident, but still, another day here would be a good idea.” She let go of my hand and smiled. “It’ll give your boyfriend a chance to go home and rest. I take it he’s the one who pulled you out of the water.”
It took me a few moments to understand that Ari had planted a cover story. I hid the delay with a sob and a snivel. “Yeah, he was,” I said. “It was really stupid of me, getting that close to the tide line. I know rogue waves happen along there.”
“There have certainly been a lot of them lately.” Poulis was watching the monitor above my bed. “One more thing. You need to gain weight. Not a lot, no, but you had no resistance to the cold because you’re dangerously thin.”
I started to argue, but she stopped gazing at the monitor to fix me with a gimlet eye worthy of Aunt Eileen. “I know, I know. Everyone worries about being fat, but abnormally low body weight is just as dangerous. I’m estimating that you fall in the second or third percentile for your height/ weight ratio. That’s abnormal. Anything under the tenth percentile is dangerous, and under five it’s damned dangerous.”
“How much should I gain? Five pounds?”
“Twenty is more like it.”
“That’s a whole dress size up! Maybe even two.”
“My heart bleeds. One size at your size is nothing. Two would be about right. Do you want episodes like this to keep happening?”
“No.”
“Then eat like a normal person.”
From the hallway I heard applause. Father Keith and Ari had been eavesdropping.
“If you’re really worried about getting fat,” she went on, “join a gym. The extra food will put on muscle, not fat, that way.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
When Dr. Poulis marched out, Ari and Father Keith cheered her on her way.
“Very funny,” I said. “Ha ha.”
Not that they heard me, I suppose, since they were still out in the hall. But what if I’d been a bit heavier? I wondered. Would I have had more Qi at my disposal to fight off Belial? That interesting thought made me remember my insight about the ocean: water to burn. No wonder he’d managed to overwhelm me, if he’d been drawing upon that vast reservoir of Qi. I could draw upon that reservoir myself—but I wondered if I could ever best him, even though I knew his secret now. Man or alien, whatever he was, he had power.
Out in the hallway, Nurse Enderby returned and began to talk to Ari. I heard her suggesting politely that he go home and clean up.
“No,” he said, less than politely. “Not until Nola leaves with me.”
“Sorry,” Enderby said. “In your present condition you’re unsanitary. I’m not letting you near her.”
There was a silence that could be described as strained. I suspected that the eye contact between them was less than pleasant. I was betting on Ari, but the impossible happened.
“Oh, all right!” Ari snapped. He appeared in the doorway and blew me a kiss. “I’m going to go home and clean up. I’ll come back in a few hours.”
“Get some sleep first,” Enderby said. “And a good breakfast.”
Ari muttered something in Hebrew and left. I heard him stalking off down the hall. Father Keith slipped back into the room before Enderby could send him away, too, though he was doubtless clean enough to pass muster.
“I’m wondering if we should tell your mother,” he said.
“No.” My blood pressure raised itself a couple of points. “I’m not going to die, so she doesn’t need to know.”
“Is that the only condition you’d see her under?”
“Yeah, but don’t tell her that. She might arrange it.”
He opened his mouth as if to argue, then merely sighed.
Father Keith left when Aunt Eileen arrived a few minutes later. Came down a second time, she told me—she’d been there the night before, but of course I hadn’t known it. When Enderby brought me a high-calorie breakfast on a tray, Aunt Eileen helped me eat it. My fingers showed an alarming tendency to drop forks and spoons.
“I’m very glad they’ll be doing more tests, dear,” Aunt Eileen said. “And you really do need to rest. Either Keith or I will be here on guard, so you won’t need to worry.”
“On guard?” I said. “What happened when I was out?”
“An invisible fiend tried to come into the room. Fortunately, I had the rosary from the Holy Land with me, and I chased it away.”
She said all this in the calm, everyday sort of voice that she would have used to tell me that she’d dropped a tissue but picked it up again. I stared. Goggled at her would be more like it.
“Well, I don’t know what else to call it,” Aunt Eileen said.
“Uh, that’s fine, yeah. Invisible fiend, huh?” I leaned back against the pillows. Belial, probably. “Maybe I do need to have those tests done. The Agency will pick up the tab, after all.”
“You’re going to need your strength.”
“Yeah. My thought exactly.”
At that point I realized Nurse Enderby was standing in the doorway. “Invisible fiends,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice that matched Aunt Eileen’s, “are not allowed to mess with my patients in my ICU. Don’t worry about it.”
If she could make Ari do something he didn’t want to do, I figured that she’d have no trouble with fiends, invisible or not.
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t.”
She gave me a smile—an oddly impish smile considering her strength of character—and left. The meaning of her acronym hit me. I was in the Intensive Care Unit. Intensive Care generally meant “you could die,” as far as I understood the label.
“We were all so worried,” Aunt Eileen said. “You do look much better today.”
“Good. You know, I was kind of worried, too.”
During the rest of that boring day, filled with tests that mostly involved making me uncomfortable with various machines or drawing blood the old-fashioned way, Belial never dropped by. I had plenty of time to think over our battle. I made a few notes about the encounter on a pad of pink notepaper that Aunt Eileen found in the gift shop. Each sheet had a cartoon kitty printed on one corner, but it was better than nothing.
The first note I made concerned Reb Ezekiel. When he’d talked about the flying saucer people getting him wet and chilled, he must have meant a similar attack to the one on me. The flying saucer people most likely meant Brother Belial, I figured, but the water and chills had been real enough. Either the rebbe had fought him off before Belial could drain enough Qi to put him in a coma, or something had interrupted our murderous little friend’s attack. I was betting on the interruption, but I’d probably never know which.
The how of these attacks baffled me until I remembered Michael’s critter, Or-Something, picking up its liquid mess and dumping it onto another deviant level. I was willing to bet that Belial had a similar talent, strong enough in his case to transfer seawater by the gallon. I wondered if the skill Belial shared with Or-Something meant they came from the same world. Small details added up to indicate that his species lived underwater: the single “leg,” the tentacles, his skill with aquatic Qi, his need of a psychic mechanism to interact with creatures of the air, the Cryptic Creep’s remark about calamari. Belial’s ability to drain Qi, however, was a common Chaos weapon. So was Caleb’s ensorcellment attempt.
One other detail came clear in my mind. I remembered the strange chilly premonitions I’d had when we went to see Reb Zeke in San Francisco General. They’d been warning me that I could end up in the hospital myself if I met the same being who had sickened Reb Ezekiel.
Toward the end of the afternoon, Ari brought me my Agency laptop in its canvas tote to replace the kitty notepaper. He was wearing the pinstriped suit and a clean white shirt. Aunt Eileen tactfully excused herself to go find the coffee shop. Ari leaned over the bed rail and kissed me. He was shiny clean and smelled only of witch hazel.
“Thanks so much for this.” I patted the laptop. “I see you’re going to consult with the Pacifica police.”
“Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”
“What you’re wearing. No psychic powers involved.”
Ari smiled. “I’ll be meeting Jack Donovan and his lawyer there. He’s going to press charges.”
“Wonderful! That means they can issue a warrant for Caleb, right?”
“A second warrant, actually. He’s a convicted felon, and he has a gun in his possession. That’s illegal even in gunmad America. They’ve already put out an all points bulletin on him.”
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