Anita Blake 22 - Affliction (13 page)

‘I have to see,’ Micah said.

Dr Rogers didn’t understand immediately, but I did, and Nathaniel did, because he said, ‘Micah means he needs to see the wound.’

‘Really, I wouldn’t …’

‘Would you really not look if it were your father?’ Micah asked, studying the doctor’s face. ‘I’m betting you would insist on seeing it.’

‘I’m a doctor; I would want to see it from a professional standpoint, to understand what was happening.’

‘I’m not a doctor, and I’m hoping that what I’m imagining is worse than what you’ll show me, but either way I need to see.’

Rogers made a soft, exasperated sound. He got fresh rubber gloves out of a little box that was beside the bed and walked to the far side of the bed with its tented sheet. ‘Anything touching the wound site seems to be extremely painful, so we raised the sheet above it.’

‘Like for a burn,’ I said.

‘For some burns, yes,’ he said. He unhooked the sheet from the metal framework and looked across the bed at us. ‘I honestly don’t recommend this.’

‘Please, Dr Rogers, I just need to see,’ Micah said, his voice low and even. He had a death grip on my hand, and I assumed on Nathaniel’s, too.

The doctor didn’t argue again, just pulled back the sheet enough for us to see the left arm and part of the chest. I couldn’t tell what the original bite had been like, because flesh was missing from the outer part of the lower left arm in a neat oval almost as big as both my fists side by side. The wound placement let me know what had happened. Sheriff Callahan had been attacked and he’d put his left arm up to defend himself and something had bitten him. I had my own share of defensive wounds like that, but none as deep. Even if he lived, I wasn’t sure how much use he’d have of the arm. It was an awful lot of muscle and ligament to lose.

Micah’s hand tensed around mine, his eyes narrowed, but other than that he showed nothing. His stress sang down his arm into his hand, but it showed almost nowhere else. God, he had such control in that moment. It was impressive and made me proud that he was mine.

He started to say something, swallowed hard, tried again, and just shook his head. I hoped I was about to ask the questions he wanted to ask. ‘The edges of the wound look darker than they should, and there’s discoloration in the wound itself; is that from the treatment?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘It’s starting to rot again,’ Micah said, his voice sort of hollow.

‘Yes, there are some bacteria in the mix that we’ve never seen before and they’re not responding to the antibiotics.’ He started refitting the sheet back over the framework without asking if we were done looking. Micah didn’t say anything, so I let it go.

He looked at me and there was such pain buried in the green-gold depths of his eyes. In a voice that was only a little thicker than it should have been, he said, ‘Ask.’

‘Ask what?’ I said.

‘Anything you want to know.’

‘Not as your girlfriend, but as me?’ I asked.

He nodded.

I raised an eyebrow, but I wasn’t going to question it. I wanted to know what the hell was going on. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘what attacked Sheriff Callahan?’

‘We’re not sure.’

‘I heard it was a flesh-eating zombie.’

‘Someone’s been talking,’ Rogers said.

‘I am a U.S. Marshal with the Preternatural Division. This is kind of what I do.’

‘The local police were worried you’d do just that and take the case away from them.’

‘I don’t want to take anything away from anyone, but I also don’t want people to hoard information between different police agencies. That’s a good way to keep the case from being solved and guarantee more victims.’

There was a faint flinching around his eyes when I said that. The other victims had been bad, for Rogers to react like that. If Micah’s dad hadn’t been the latest it would have been interesting, but now … it was scary and interesting.

‘You don’t want other people hurt like my dad,’ Micah said, and I knew he’d seen the flinching, too, and that he’d used ‘my dad’ deliberately. We both wanted more information and we’d sensed an opening; we’d double-team Rogers. Individually, Micah and I could be relentless, even ruthless; together we were more.

‘Of course not,’ Rogers said.

‘Then help us,’ I said.

‘You are police, but right now you are the fiancée of a patient’s son. That means that you are a civilian, as the police like to say.’

I had a thought. ‘Has someone been treating you like a civilian and hoarding information from you, too?’

He looked away from us for a moment. I was betting he was both working to control his expression and debating what to say, or how much to say.

I felt Micah tense beside me, and I touched him, letting him know we needed to wait. This was the first tipping point, and it could lead to spilling all the information we needed, or to nothing; if we rushed it Rogers would clam up, I was almost a hundred percent certain of that. It was like hunting; you needed to be patient and move carefully or you’d step on a stick or a rock and scare the game away.

Nathaniel moved slightly beside us, but I didn’t warn him. I trusted him to let us work and not to push.

He looked from one to the other of us, then looked at me and Micah, very hard. It was a good look, not a cop look, but maybe a doctor look. He was looking at us as if we were a mystery illness and he was trying to decide if he could figure out what we really were. ‘Are you really his fiancée, or even his girlfriend, or is that just an excuse to butt in on this case, because the local cops would never have asked you in? One of the other doctors suggested you come in for a consult, because no one knows zombies like you do, and you would have thought she asked them to invite the devil in to help. They seem convinced you’ll take over.’

‘First, I
am
Micah’s girlfriend and lover.
Fiancée
is a little harder, because you read the papers, see the news, and you know I’m also dating our Master of the City. I can’t marry everybody.’

Dr Rogers looked at Nathaniel standing with us but being so quiet. ‘And who are you, Mr Graison? I wouldn’t normally pry, but if I help these two then the local police may make my life harder, and before I risk that I want to know who I’m talking to and why.’

‘Who do you think I could be that would hurt you with the local police?’ Nathaniel asked.

Rogers shook his head. ‘No, we’re not playing the game where questions get answered by questions. Answer my question, or we are done.’

‘Do I look like a cop?’ Nathaniel asked.

‘No, but neither did Mike here, until he started asking questions and then the energy coming off Marshal Blake and Mr Callahan was very similar. I know he’s the son of a cop, so maybe he learned it by osmosis, but your energy feels like hers, too, somehow, and I want to know why.’

Just from his asking the question I knew that Rogers was psychically gifted. He was probably an amazing diagnostician, one of those doctors who came up with leaps of intuition that were right about mystery illness and treatment. It could be luck, but in that moment I was pretty certain it was more than that. He wasn’t just seeming to look right through us; in a way he was. It made me feel better that he was treating Micah’s dad, but it also meant we couldn’t play him. He’d feel the lie, the games, and he’d shut us out. Truth was our only option.

‘You must be an amazing diagnostician,’ Micah said, making the same logic leap that I had.

Rogers frowned at him, eyes narrowing. ‘I am, but flattery is not a good idea on your part.’

‘Tell him the truth, Nathaniel,’ I said.

Nathaniel moved up and put an arm around both of us. We both put an arm around his waist, so that the three of us faced the doctor entwined. ‘The three of us live together and have for nearly three years. I’m an exotic dancer at Guilty Pleasures and a wereleopard just like Micah.’

‘That explains why your energy feels like Mr Callahan’s, but not Marshal Blake’s.’

‘I’m their Nimir-Ra,’ I said, ‘their leopard queen. It’s on record that I carry multiple strains of lycanthropy; one of them is leopard.’

‘I read the paper that Dr Nelson did on you. You are a medical anomaly. One, multiple strains of lycanthropy, which is impossible since one strain protects you from all other diseases including lycanthropy. Two, you don’t change shape. You have all the symptoms and many of the benefits, but you don’t shift. I heard the military was very interested in that.’

‘So the rumors say; no one’s talked to me,’ I said.

‘Rumors,’ he said, softly.

I nodded. ‘Yes, rumors.’

‘Maybe you’re as good as you think you are, Marshal Blake, but I have to live here with the local police after you go home. I’d like someone’s okay for talking to you about this.’

‘Federal badge means I don’t have to have an okay to see the bodies.’

‘And talk like that is why the other cops don’t like you, Marshal.’

‘I’m not here to be liked, I’m here to get things done.’

‘I thought you were here to be with Mike and his family.’

‘I am, but I’m a cop and no one knows zombies like I do. It would be a bad use of resources for me not to at least consult.’

‘I’ll ask our local guys about you seeing the bodies in the morgue. Beyond that, talk to the cops.’

I started to try to persuade him to talk now, but the door opened without a knock. I turned automatically, giving myself room to draw my gun if I needed to; I hadn’t done it for the doctor, but the last few minutes had made me tense, and I gave in to that tension. Logically I knew that nothing would get through Nicky and Dev at the door, or the cops outside, that I needed to shoot, but sometimes it’s not about logic, it’s about habit. I was habitually paranoid, like most police.

‘I’ll let you talk to your brother,’ Dr Rogers said, and he left, passing the man who was Micah’s brother.

The man who came through the door was five-nine, five-ten, with short curly hair the same deep brown of Micah’s, but the hair was even curlier so that cut almost military short there was still tight curl close to his scalp. Large gray-blue eyes dominated his face, so that was what you saw first, and I had to look twice to see he had Micah’s full lips and a skin tone only a few shades darker, but that was where the resemblance ended. The man’s features were clean and handsome, but there was no hint of the delicacy of Micah, his dad, or Cousin Juliet.

‘Mike, so you are here,’ he said in a voice that was deeper than I thought it would be.

‘Hello, Jerry,’ Micah said. Unless there was a cousin Jerry we didn’t know about it, this had to be his brother, Jerry.

‘Beth said you’d come. I said you wouldn’t.’

‘She was always the hopeful one,’ Micah said.

Jerry stood just inside the closed door looking at his brother. ‘Little sisters are like that, I guess,’ he said.

The two men just looked at each other. Nathaniel and I stood on either side of Micah, but we might as well have been on the moon for all we mattered in that moment.

‘I don’t know about all little sisters, but Beth was always kind.’

‘Softhearted, you mean.’

Micah shrugged. ‘Either way.’

I wanted to tell them to hug or something, but I’d never met his brother, and I didn’t know enough of their history to push.

‘Why’d you come back, Mike?’

‘To see Dad.’

‘If he wasn’t good enough to see while he was … before he got hurt, then why the hell do you care now?’

‘Jerry …’

‘What? You expected to come home like the prodigal son and we’d all forgive and forget?’

‘No, I didn’t expect you to forgive me.’

‘Yes, you did. You thought you’d get your Hallmark moment where everyone cries and says nice things, and you get forgiven before he dies. That’s why you came home, to be forgiven. Well, if he wakes up and forgives you, remember, I won’t.’

‘I’ll remember,’ Micah said, his voice low and even. His face was as blank as he could make it.

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?’

‘I didn’t think you wanted to be introduced.’

‘I don’t hate them, big brother, only you.’

Micah did a long blink, and then without any change of expression turned to me and said, ‘Anita Blake, this is my brother, Jerry.’

I did the only thing I could think of under the circumstances; I went forward and offered my hand. He could ignore it and be utterly rude, or he could shake it. He looked surprised for a second, and then he took my hand. He didn’t seem to know how to shake hands with a girl, or maybe it was me being the girl with Micah. Either way it was a step forward from him just refusing.

‘This is Nathaniel Graison,’ Micah said.

Nathaniel followed my example and Jerry shook his hand, too. He gave Nathaniel a firmer handshake; maybe he was recovering from the surprise of us being polite?

Micah came up behind us, closer to his brother. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come home sooner.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I thought you’d hate me, so there didn’t seem to be much point.’

Jerry’s eyes were shiny. ‘Well, you’re right, I do hate you. You said terrible things to Mom and Dad.’

‘I know I can’t explain it, but I didn’t feel I had a choice.’ Micah’s voice was a little thick now, as if Jerry weren’t the only one whose eyes were shiny. I fought not to look at him, not to move too much, as if moving would ruin things.

‘Dad’s friends with a Fed. He said that he saw files about what would have happened to us if you hadn’t convinced some bad-guy shapeshifter that you hated us.’

Again, I wondered how in the hell any Fed knew that and where the information had come from. But now wasn’t the time to ask, and Jerry wouldn’t know anyway. I wasn’t sure if I was looking forward to meeting this friendly Fed or dreading it.

‘I saw him do terrible things to other families. I couldn’t risk it.’

‘You did a good job of making us think you hated us. Mom cried for weeks, and Beth didn’t hear it, so she didn’t believe you’d said it, any of it. She thought we were lying, because we thought you being a wereleopard made you too dangerous. She thought we’d kicked you out for years.’

‘I don’t know if I could have said all I needed to say if Beth had been there.’