time.
“You mean to tell me your bullet wound healed up that fast?”
“I mean to tell you to give me one of those oxygen masks and get me out of here. And this sword comes with me.” I patted Fragarach and the paramedic looked down, noticing it for the first time. “Doesn’t leave my side.”
“What? We cannot allow weapons in the ambulance.”
“It’s sheathed and it’s incredibly valuable. Look at my shop.” I gestured toward the broken door. “I can’t leave it here.”
Hal, who had been hanging back silently watching the proceedings, loomed suddenly over the paramedic’s shoulder. “Are you refusing to transport my client in a medical emergency?”
“No,” the paramedic replied, squinting up at him. “I’m refusing to transport his weapon.”
“You mean his priceless Celtic art? That’s not a weapon, sir. It’s a family heirloom of intense sentimental value, and the trauma he would suffer by being separated from it would be greater than any physical pain he currently feels. Which, I notice, you’ve done absolutely nothing about since you arrived.”
The paramedic clenched his jaw and exhaled sharply through his nose as he turned back to me. “Effing lawyers,” he muttered quietly, thinking perhaps Hal wouldn’t hear it. But werewolves tend to hear things like that.
“That’s right, sir, I am an effing lawyer, and I will effing file suit against you if you don’t effing get my client and his art to Scottsdale Memorial right now!”
“All right, whatever!” huffed the paramedic, who could not stand to be bludgeoned with lawsuit threats for long. He and his partner went to get the stretcher, and shortly I was being loaded into the back of the ambulance, Fragarach clutched in my right hand. Jimenez and the other cops were so busy worrying about what the press would do when they found out that a Phoenix detective had shot a Tempe detective stone dead that they completely missed the fact that the sword Fagles had been hollering about actually existed.
“I’ll see you there soon,” Hal said with a wave. “Snorri will take good care of you; he knows you’re coming. And don’t worry about these guys,” he said, indicating the paramedics. “Leif will pay them a visit tonight and they won’t remember a thing.” Since the paramedics had finally put an oxygen mask on me, I couldn’t answer, so I just gave a weak nod.
‹Hurry back, Atticus. I’m going to be bored. These werewolves can’t talk to me. And this camouflage stuff still kinda tickles.›
I’ll probably see you by lunchtime tomorrow, I said back to my dog.
‹Will there be sausage?›
Only if Hal tells me you’ve been good.
‹I’m going to hold you to that,› Oberon said, his mental voice fading as the ambulance put some distance between us.
Okay, be good, then, I projected, and hoped he heard it. We warbled up Mill Avenue and doubtless gave the stoners loitering on the corner outside Trippie Hippie a quick jolt of paranoia. Sirens just harsh on their mellow, man.
Drives in the back of an ambulance are simultaneously boring and stressful. I needed relief from both. Paramedic Man wasn’t about to talk to me anymore, so I decided to mess with him a bit, since Leif would make sure he wouldn’t remember anything later. Am I above immature trickery? No. It keeps me young.
Using a bit of power recently banked in my bear charm, I bound a few of the natural threads in the elastic band of his underwear to the fine hairs in the center of his back about five inches up. The result was an instant wedgie. Those have been funny for two thousand years, but they’re even more hilarious when your victim is sanctimoniously trying to behave like he knows more than you.
I really shouldn’t have done it, though, because his reaction-a girlish squeal followed by a high-octave “Ahh! What the fuck?!?” and an abrupt attempt to stand up, which cracked his head on the ceiling-got me laughing too hard, and that brought on a serious case of bloody hacking and a heaping spoonful of pain. Served me right, I suppose. I messed up the inside of the oxygen mask, then released the binding so he could calm down and help me.
He never saw me laughing, so the poor guy thought his antics had caused me to become upset, and he was very solicitous as soon as he was able to reestablish some room in his shorts. Best ambulance ride ever.
When we got to the hospital and his partner came around to help unload me from the back, he noticed that Mr. Wedgie had a flushed face.
“What happened?” he asked.
“He had a bit of distress during the ride, but he’s stable for the moment,” Wedgie said as they put my rolling stretcher on the ground and started pushing me toward the sterile electric doors of the emergency room.
“But you look like something happened to you,” his partner replied. “Are you okay, man?”
“I’m fine,” Wedgie snapped. “Nothing happened. I-ahh, Jesus Christ!”
Well, I couldn’t resist when he was lying like that, could I? Besides, there’s that saying about laughter being the best medicine. Whoever said that didn’t have blood in their left lung, though, I feel certain.
Dr. Snorri Jodursson got his first look at me while I was in the midst of another hacking fit. He appeared to be in his forties, though of course he was older than that, like all the members of the Tempe Pack. He was dressed in blue scrubs, which drew attention to the startling blue ice of his eyes and the blond eyebrows furrowed above them. His sharp nose and chiseled jaw made him look like a thunder god, though considering his pack’s antipathy for Thor, that wasn’t a compliment I would think of paying him aloud. He had his blond hair cropped fairly close along the sides, but it was tousled and teased on the top after the fashion of frat-boy douche bags-and I wasn’t going to tell him that either.
“Atticus, I’ve seen you looking better,” he said, as he kept pace with the gurney being wheeled into pre-op by a couple of nurses. “Tell me what you can when you feel up to it.”
“Am I able to talk freely?” I asked, tilting my eyes toward the nurses rolling my gurney.
“Oh yes, they’re part of my team,” Jodursson said.
“You can count on their discretion as long as you pay for it.”
“All right, I need blood removed from my left lung, then,” I said, “and use a local anesthetic. I can’t afford to go under.”
“If that’s all you need, we don’t need to cut you open at all. We’ll insert a tube down your throat, charge the liquid, and then use magnets to draw it up out of there. We do it for pneumonia patients all the time. You’ll still need a local, because it tends to hurt like hell, but you’ll remain conscious. Good enough?”
“Perfect. Treat this whole thing as outpatient, because I need you to let me go right afterward, and you should bill full costs to Magnusson and Hauk, no insurance. Include in your records whatever tests and exams you’d do for a normal human. You know the drill, I’m sure. Make sure you mention the bullet hole and what a good job you did patching it up, because this is going to get looked at by the cops. No way around it.”
“Am I removing a bullet?”
“No, it passed through me, and they’re digging it out of my shop somewhere.”
“So you’re sure it traveled cleanly between your ribs? I don’t have to worry about any bone chips floating around?”
“As certain as I can be. I’m just half drowned.” We entered an elevator and paused until the doors closed.
“Would you mind if I did a chest X-ray to be sure? The cops are going to want to see one anyway. Kind of a standard procedure.”
“Well, I’ve already plugged up the holes in my lung and the entry and exit wounds too, so it’s going to look a bit odd.”
Jodursson scowled for the first time. Until then, he’d been conversing with half a grin on his face. “That was probably more efficient than you should have been.”
“Well, you’re going to charge me thousands for chest bandages I’ll never use, so I figure we’re even. You and your team will just have to lie convincingly on the stand when you get called up.” The elevator bell dinged and the doors opened, and the nurses rolled me into a busy hallway lined with surgical bays.
“You’re going to sue the cops, then?” Jodursson asked.
“Sure, why not? Somebody has to pay for all this, and I’d rather it not be me.”
“You’ve got a solid case?”
