Sike put her forms away and walked across the floor. I could leave now, my escorting job done, but my stupid, foolish curiosity wouldn’t let me. I followed her in.
Doctors barked orders and nurses swarmed the room like ants: finding IV sites, hanging meds, setting up sterile surgical trays.
“Did anyone find the fingers?” a doctor asked aloud. “Any of them?” he went on, his voice rising. No one answered.
The patient sat on the bed in the middle of everything, arms exposed, face bound up in gauze, seeping bright red blood. A nurse stood beside the bed, clamping her gloved hands over the gauze where his ears would be, to apply pressure.
“And not a drop to drink,” Sike murmured, then strode into the room. “The Rose Throne demands recursion.”
The doctor stopped where he was, Betadine staining his gloves and his patient’s hand orange-brown. The doctor was willowy, too tall, folded over the bed like a number 3. When he looked over at Sike, his face was stern. “You can’t take him—he needs profound medical care.”
Sike took off her lab coat and folded it over her arm. “Gideon Strand is the Rose Throne’s property.”
I blinked. The man underneath all the gauze was Gideon? The daytimer from my kitchen, with Anna? I couldn’t tell. With all the gauze, I couldn’t see much of anything.
“We demand recursion. I’m here on behalf of Anna Arsov, the near-ascended.”
“I don’t care who you are, lady. You’re not taking him.”
“Gideon,” Sike said, addressing their patient. The gauzed man groaned in response. “Come with me.” She snapped her fingers.
And like King Kong on the Empire State Building, he started to swat staff away like tiny planes.
“Restraints!” the doctor ordered, and a nurse ran off to get them. Technically—I should have. Or could have. But I didn’t know whose side I was on just then—“Ten milligrams of Haldol stat! And get me a trank gun!”
There was an isolation cart right outside the door. I took a step back outside and made my choice—I put the code into the isolation cart and hauled open the top drawer. It unlocked, freeing the trank gun. I grabbed and loaded two of the sedative darts.
I went back into the room with the trank gun ready, even if I wasn’t sure whom I was going to shoot. Sike and the doctor were in each other’s faces.
“I have every right to take him. He belongs to my Throne. We are responsible for his care.”
“You can’t possibly care for him. He’s staying here.”
Gideon was wrestling with the nurses beyond. One of my P.M. shift co-workers yelped as he made contact with her ribs.
“Nobody get injured!” said the doctor, and the nurses stopped trying. Gideon pulled himself out of bed and stumbled, unable to see where he was at or where he was going.
“I promise he will be better off once relinquished into my care,” Sike said. “I have all the official paperwork.” She presented her papers again, folded neatly in two. “It’s signed in triplicate, in her blood. You have to comply.”
“He’s covered in wounds. Infection is a given—”
“He’ll get blood.”
We all knew she didn’t mean merely human. “Do it here then,” the doctor challenged her.
Sike frowned. “Fine. Leave the room. Now.” Sike turned toward me and handed me her lab coat, then pushed Gideon back to sitting. I made to follow my co-workers but she called after me. “Edie—stay.”
My curiosity had curdled to guilt and horror, but I did as I was told.
Sike sat beside him on the bed and blotted away the Betadine distastefully with the corner of a sheet. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a makeup compact, flipping it open to reveal what appeared to be a creme blush.
“Gideon, give me your hand.”
She smeared her right thumb in the substance, then ran it along the edges of his wounds. One knuckle at a time began to seal. Only the first knuckles remained on that hand. I wondered with a sick fascination what was left of the other one.
“Sike—what happened?” I didn’t want to see what was under the bandages covering his face. “And why?”
“Becoming a member of the Sanguine is not without trials.” She continued to paint what was clearly a vampire-blood-based substance onto Gideon’s hand, like a salve.
The enormity of his situation settled in. He had no fingers. Lord only knew what the gauze around his face was concealing. “Who did this?”
“If I knew that, I’d be killing them right now. Anna was asleep when he was damaged, and he did not see his attackers.” Finishing with his nearest hand, she reached up to unwrap his face. “He was her first daytimer. Her eyes, her ears,” she said, as his face was uncovered—his eye sockets were empty, hollow, and the shells of his ears were gone. “And now he is as helpless as a baby bird.”
“But why?”
“Because she chose him.”
“I thought they revered Anna?”
“Our kind buys reverence with fear.” She loaded up her thumb with the salve again and pressed it into the moist concavity of his eye sockets. I breathed deeply to keep my stomach straight.
“So the Rose Throne isn’t all one big happy vampire family?”
“The words
“Who? And why?”
“I’ll be trying to figure that out as soon as I leave here.”
I swallowed. I didn’t want to think of myself just now, but—“Whoever did this—could they come for me?”
Sike paused in her ministrations. “I suspect that this was done for show. Harming a daytimer’s much more of an affront than killing a mere human. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said. “Somehow, your explanation doesn’t make me feel any more safe.”
“You don’t understand, Edie. Even without your badge, you wouldn’t. She can hear him inside her mind, crying.” Sike unwound his other hand and started to treat it. “Not killing him is worse than death, in this case.”
“Make him into a vampire then—” I prodded. It was what he’d wanted—what all daytimers did.
“With a human, vampire blood can only heal so much. And there are some things that becoming a vampire will not heal. You cannot regrow lost flesh—things lost in life, unhealed, stay gone. Would you want to live forever, like he is now?”
And I remembered Dren, eternally pissed at me for the loss of his hand, and his task for me tonight. I shook my head, and she nodded. “You see my point.”
Sike flipped her compact closed and pocketed it. Then she rewound the gauze around him, still bloody from the first time through.
“I can get you clean gauze, at least.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” She stood. “Gideon, follow me.”
Gideon stood and hobbled forward, like a stiff but obedient dog.
“Where will you take him?” I asked her, stepping out of their way.
She smiled cruelly. “Home.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
