Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (13 page)

“Sure is,” I said, giving a forcefully cheery wave.

She looked at me as if I were the dog that had just talked, then turned back to her cousin. “Thought he’d be better looking.”

“That does seem to be the consensus,” I noted wryly. Suzume just looked amused.

“Sorry, I know you probably have places to be,” Yuzumi said, and then rattled off some quick Japanese. I had no idea what she’d said, but both kits suddenly made similar hacking coughs, shuddered from the tips of their noses to the last hair on their tails, and then shifted into
a pair of redheaded little girls whose only hint of their Japanese heritage was the shape of their eyes. They weren’t identical, but they were very naked, which immediately resulted in a crash course in how surprisingly difficult it is to get a pair of three-year-olds dressed for winter temperatures. Suze and Yuzumi turned practiced hands to the basics, but I ended up helping Riko into her shoes and mittens.

By the time Yuzumi and her brood were fully loaded into her station wagon and Suze and I were in the Fiesta and heading to the doctor’s address, it was just past three o’clock.

“You realize that if I can’t talk to this guy today, we have to call up the one in Vermont? I really don’t want to drive up to Vermont today, Suze.”

She just gave me her best foxy smile. “Much as I love maple syrup candy and eco-friendly co-ops, Fort, I don’t think we’re going to be hitting Vermont today.”

There was something altogether too smug and knowing in her voice. “
Do
you know anything about this guy?” I demanded.

Suze lifted her hands up with a laugh. “I don’t, really and truly. Just observing the situation, that’s all.”

I peered at her closely as we sat at a traffic light, but I could tell from her expression that she wasn’t lying on this one. I shook my head, the light turned green, and I concentrated on shifting the Fiesta smoothly through its gears.

*   *   *

The office of Dr. Valentine Sassoon, doctor of sports medicine and orthopedic surgery (as we were informed by the sign beside his door) was, by doctor standards, lushly opulent. Located in one of the more upper-tax-bracket neighborhoods of Providence, it was a beautifully maintained Victorian house that at some point had been retrofitted to suit the needs of a medical practice rather than a private residence, yet at the same time it
retained all the beauty of hardwood floors, original crown molding, and two incredibly elaborate stained-glass windows.

As we walked into the waiting room that in some prior age had probably been a front parlor, the first thing I noticed was that every available inch of wall space was packed with a very interesting style of artwork. While most doctors’ offices featured framed prints that were mainly picked with all the daring interior decorating instincts of the average hotel chain, each frame on these walls contained the same set of items—one newspaper clipping detailing an athlete’s near-career-ending injury, a second clipping extolling the athlete’s incredible comeback, and a picture of the athlete in question with an arm wrapped around the shoulders of one smiling man in a white doctor’s coat.

“Typical witch,” Suze noted quietly as I eyed one of these little collages in the place of pride above the old fireplace. I was no sports aficionado, but I would’ve had to be a hermit living under a rock not to be able to recognize Curt Schilling. Just to make sure that no one was missing the implications, this one even included a close-up picture of the famous bloody sock.

“Not a fan of subtlety,” I agreed. Not that witches could really afford to be. The first time I’d visited the late Dr. Lavinia Leamaro, who employed a witch, I’d noticed a similar decoration style. Since she’d specialized in women’s infertility, she’d covered the walls with pictures of the children that her practice had produced—and Suzume had explained to me at the time that intense emotions fed into a witch’s magic and made it stronger. I wasn’t exactly clear on how that worked. I knew a bit about what witch magic could do, which was manipulate the body and coax it to do things that it normally wouldn’t, like allowing an infertile woman to conceive, or, judging by Dr. Sassoon’s wall of triumph, enable a man with a torn tendon sheath on his ankle to pitch a successful Game Six of the ALCS.
That put magic firmly in the category of things like my iPhone; I was completely unclear on
how
it worked, but I could identify its results.

The receptionist immediately recognized my name, and did something I’d never seen before in a doctor’s office, which was get out of her chair herself to lead us out of the waiting room and down a hallway. She knocked on a closed door softly, and when she heard “Come in,” she ushered Suzume and me into a completely occupied examination room.

There was a young woman in her late teens sitting on the examination table with her left pants leg rolled up to her thigh, revealing a long, muscled leg. Her knee was sporting a number of long pink surgical scars and a line of black sutures that looked disturbingly fresh. Sitting beside her on one of those stools with rolling wheels was the man who’d been sporting a doctor’s coat in all of the collages in the waiting room. It was always hard to judge height when someone was sitting, but it was easy to judge clothing, and his shirt and slacks would’ve earned a nod of approval from Chivalry and probably paid for half my month’s rent. He was African American, with his hair trimmed very closely to his head, and he had the type of features that made him look like a TV actor playing a doctor—namely, he looked like the kind of guy who could’ve been strutting catwalks rather than sweating through medical school. I couldn’t help but resent him a little on sight—he was all too reminiscent of the football quarterback in my high school who had
also
been at the top of all the AP classes. Seeing someone attractive, popular,
and
intelligent had always made me feel like they’d just gotten a few too many of life’s gifts.

Fortunately my resentment was offset by the incredible awkwardness of walking in on someone else’s medical appointment. “I’m sorry, we’re interrupting. We can wait—”

“Not at all,” Dr. Sassoon said in a rich baritone that
made me immediately think,
Of course
. Was it too much to wish that this Nubian god would end up sounding like Gilbert Gottfried? “I left instructions that you be brought in. Please, do sit down.” He gestured to the wall, which had two chairs, one of them occupied by an older man with a luxuriant white mustache and a slight similarity to a walrus. Valentine’s eyes noted Suze, and I was interested to see that he suddenly looked more cautious. The expression quickly vanished when he realized that I was watching him. “I’m sorry, I hadn’t expected you to bring company. Bill?” The walrus man looked up, and Dr. Sassoon smiled politely. “You won’t mind waiting in the front, will you?” It was phrased like a question, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was clearly a command. The walrus cleared his throat and stood up.

Now I definitely felt like we were crossing a line, and I held up a hand to Bill and spoke to the girl on the table. “No, no, we aren’t going to kick out your dad.”

The girl never glanced away from her knee, and responded flatly, “He’s my coach.”

“Well, then we don’t mind kicking him out at all,” Suze said, and gave the man a dismissive nod. “Bill.” He cleared his throat and slipped around us with a muttered apology, closing the door behind him without even a glance at the young woman he was leaving behind. Suze and I exchanged glances, then sat down in the vacated chairs.

Dr. Sassoon gave us another of those polite smiles, but his eyes were clearly sizing us up. “If you’ll just give me a moment.” He turned his swivel chair around and returned to his examination of the girl’s knee.

I looked over at Suze, who gave a small shrug and then turned her full attention to the doctor. We watched as he probed the girl’s damaged knee, carefully running his hands over it, and at one point he straightened the leg entirely. The girl didn’t make a sound, but her face whitened and sweat showed at her forehead while her
hands gripped the side of the table hard. But despite her obvious pain, she didn’t protest or even flinch back from what Dr. Sassoon was doing. I was amazed at her control, since in her position I would’ve at least been bitching up a storm, if not shrieking in pain.

After a long minute, the doctor carefully let the leg return to its original position. “Thank you very much,” he told the girl, then looked back over his shoulder and addressed his next words to us. “I’m not sure if you recognize her, but Crystal here is the fourth-best gymnast in the United States, according to the last round of Nationals.” He glanced back at the girl inquisitively. “And you probably would’ve placed higher if it hadn’t been for the knee troubles, correct?”

Crystal nodded, and I was struck by the intensity on her face as she continued to stare down at the sutures covering her knee.

“Well, Bill is out of the room, so we have a chance for a bit of an honest chat,” Dr. Sassoon said to her. “According to what your trainer told me when he scheduled this appointment, you’ve been a gymnast since you were five, and training seven days a week since you were eight. You missed the age requirement for the last Olympics by one month last time, and now if you want to compete, you have to stay at the top of the sport for another two years. How am I doing so far?”

“You’re right,” Crystal replied.

“Now, you suffered a stress fracture in the knee a year ago and had surgery to repair it. You continued training and competing on it, and the knee got worse. Another round of surgery, more training, and competition. You got out of surgery three days ago, and the surgeon informed your coach that your career is over.”

The young woman was absolutely stone-faced during this recital of facts. “Yes,” she responded bluntly.

“Well,” Dr. Sassoon said, giving her an odd smile, “do you want your career to be over?”

She blinked, and looked completely thrown. “What?”

“Let’s put a pin in that question,” he said, that smile still firmly fixed on his face. “Why don’t you explain to me what your plan is for the next two years—assuming I could make that knee last for you?”

Crystal started talking, and it was a terse, focused monologue of training plans and competition schedules. She would graduate from high school next year, then take a gap year before college in order to train full-time in order to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team, then head out with the team and win gold. Everything was detailed and thought out—this had clearly been the plan she’d gone over in her head for years, and she had a focus and intensity that honestly made me a little uncomfortable. At one point I glanced away from her, and I noticed something that I hadn’t before. In the corner of the examination room was a large ceramic pot that housed a jasmine plant. I’d caught the scent upon entering, but the thought of growing plants in an examination room was so far outside my own experience that I had subconsciously attributed the scent to an overenthusiasm with an air freshener. As Crystal continued to detail exactly how she intended to bring home an Olympic gold medal, I realized that the delicate white flowers were shifting and taking on a strange tinge—while a moment ago they’d been milky white, now they gleamed a sickly and disturbing green, tinged with a putrescent yellow and a bruising red. Then I blinked, and the colors were gone. But I thought that there were more blooms on the plant than there had been a moment ago, blooms that struck me as growing with an almost eerie vigor. I glanced over at Suzume, but her eyes had never wavered from Dr. Sassoon, and from where her chair was located, I wasn’t sure she could see the pot of flowers.

Crystal’s chronology of intended glory had wrapped up, and now Dr. Sassoon was speaking again. “Sounds like quite a plan. Now, I can fix your leg.” Her poker face
shattered, and Crystal flushed with excitement. But just as her mouth started opening, Sassoon held up one cautionary finger. “Ah. Let me clarify what I mean, because you have a choice in what I do. In one treatment, I will help the surgery that you just underwent. It will turn out to be much more successful than the surgeon originally thought, and your knee will heal. You’ll have some stiffness to it, and some loss of flexibility, but it will function well enough that you will be able to get through a perfectly normal life for the next sixty years. But your gymnastic career will indeed be over.”

Crystal’s face fell. Clearly that was not the kind of
fixing
that she’d thought he meant. “And the other treatment?” she muttered.

“You will have full function back.” He put one hand on her knee, and while there wasn’t anything remotely sexual about the gesture, there was something about it that made me uncomfortable watching it. It was the way that he looked at her knee, as if his eyes could see through the skin, down to the tendons and the bone, and he was pondering all the things there that he could reshape. “Full flexibility, strength, all those things that you haven’t had for the last year, and honestly probably a bit longer before that, given the state of your tendons. This knee will make it to the Olympics, and you will compete on it with no fears that it will crumple and betray you.”

Crystal was beaming. “Y—”

Sassoon cut her off again, firmly. “Not yet, Crystal. This path has a cost.” He lifted his hand and raised her knee one precise inch. It clearly didn’t hurt her, but it focused her attention on the joint in question almost as if it were separate from the rest of her body. His voice shifted, and this time when he spoke again, there was almost a brutality to it. “Your knee will be ruined. The cartilage will wear too quickly, your bones will grind, tendons will snap like old rubber bands, and the knee will fracture like poorly fired china. Before you’re a year
past the Olympics, you’ll be walking like an old woman, and you will need total-knee-replacement surgery by the time you are twenty-five.” He was completely focused on her, and his incredible voice was deadly serious. “This is not an estimate, Crystal. This is a promise.”

“But . . .” I knew just from the look on her face which path she had already picked, and my heart sank in my chest. “But I’ll get to the Olympics, right?” Valentine nodded, and then there was nothing on her face except raw drive and ambition. “Then that’s what I want. Fix the knee, make it work. I need to be back in the gym as soon as possible.”