your help. Please call me back at this number if you can. Or better yet, just come to the camp. I know I told you to stay the hell away, but this is important. I’ll leave your name at the main gate and tell them to have all the gear waiting for you. And . . .” He hesitated. “Well, please come if you can, or at least call. I don’t know who else to ask.”
After that, there was a moment of silence in the grove, broken only by the sounds of the rain forest, which didn’t give a crap about a weird-assed phone call coming in the middle of a ghost town.
Myr turned to Anna. “You gave the xombi doctor your real number?”
She flushed. “I meant to have JT change it. Guess I forgot.”
“I guess.” Myr seemed amused. “Well? You going to go?”
“I . . . damn it. It can wait until we’re done here.”
But Rabbit shook his head. “Go ahead and go. That’s the guy Dez wants to liaise with right? And it sounded important.”
“So is this.”
“Yeah, but—and no offense intended—whatever happens here, either Myr and I will be able to handle it on our own, or else we’re going to need the whole freaking team. Since we’ve got Strike and the others standing by for our Mayday”—he lifted his wrist, where his comm device was primed and ready to transmit—“we’ll be covered. So go. See what the xombi doctor wants.”
Anna’s gaze went from him to Myr. “That okay with you?”
Myr hesitated, but then nodded. “We’ll be fine. And if there’s anything you can do to help with the outbreak, you should do it.”
Rabbit didn’t let himself take that as a sign of faith. It was more a sign of just how close they were getting to D-day, which was forcing the Nightkeepers to split up, spread out and do their best.
Anna put in a call to Skywatch and got Dez’s okay for the change in plans. She looked a little flustered as she moved away from the fire pit and gave herself a once-over to make sure she was dressed down enough to pass in the human world. Then she fixed her eyes on Rabbit and Myrinne and said, “Behave yourself.”
Knowing damn well she was talking to him, he nodded. “Scout’s honor.”
“Right.” To Myr, she said, “Call me the second you think you might need me. Or, better yet, sound the general alarm. These days it’s better to overreact than play hero.” Then she disappeared, leaving behind only a faint handclap as air rushed in to fill the vacuum her bodyprint had left behind.
When even that noise had faded and the normal rain forest chatter had resumed, Rabbit took a breath and turned to Myr. “Ready to check out what’s left of Anntah’s hut?”
It was where he’d found the first eccentric, after all. Maybe they’d get lucky and find something else there. He hoped to hell they would, because otherwise they were going to have to go to plan B. And Myr wasn’t going to like plan B. At all.
Chichen Itza, Mexico
As Anna slipped into the quarantine zone, shielded from human view by the faint distortion of a chameleon shield, she wasn’t sure which was worse: forgetting to have JT change her cell number, or jumping to answer Dr. Dave’s page.
Sure, she had sent him what little she’d managed to put together on the virus, along with Sasha’s suggestions on herbal remedies that borderlined on spell territory. Dez had approved it, though, wanting to foster the relationship. Which was all she was doing now, she told herself as she slipped into what looked like a main tent, following right on the heels of a laundry-laden volunteer. But it didn’t take an inner “yeah right” for her to know that was bull. She was here because . . . well, she was here. And she needed to make it snappy before Rabbit and Myrinne got into too much trouble.
She checked her wrist, but there was no sign of the yellow flasher that would signal an emergency recall. So she took the few minutes to find a supply area and snag the thin, disposable safety gear she’d seen the others wearing, which was consistent with the xombi virus’s tendency to transmit through bites rather than by air. The Nightkeepers weren’t susceptible to the virus—or any other germ they knew of—but she wanted to blend. More, the pause gave her a few seconds to breathe, and remind herself that she was okay. She wasn’t the patient this time, wasn’t coming out of a spell-cast coma to discover that Dick had divorced her and sold the house, Strike had given up the throne, and the others were expecting her to step up as a Triad mage and an itza’at seer, do not pass go, do not pay two hundred bucks.
That had been another hospital, another time. Practically another lifetime.
You’re okay, she told herself, then closed her eyes and counted to five, breathing deeply through the full face mask. Then she dropped her shield spell and stepped out into the busy hallway.
A sea of humanity surrounded her in an instant. Or maybe it just seemed that way because she spent so much time alone. Either way, she found herself adrift in a hustling mass of scrubs, gloves, face masks, sterility, filth, sickness and health. This, she thought, tempted to take a moment to feel the energy, this was what the Nightkeepers were fighting to save. This anthill-scurry of humanity—overcrowded and hurry-hurry-hurry.
She stepped in front of a clipboard-carrying nurse, summoned an authoritative I-belong-here voice, and said, “Dr. David Curtis, please. He sent for me.”
“Back there,” the woman said, gesturing over her shoulder. “Just follow the noise.”
“Thank—” Anna didn’t bother finishing, because the woman had darted around her. Then again, this wasn’t exactly a polite chitchat sort of place. So she followed the high-pitched, babbling howl coming from the hallway the woman had indicated.
As she got closer, Anna distinguished a single voice, female, speaking Spanish with an edge of hysteria. “She’s a blue-eyed devil, an abomination! She did this. She’ll kill us all!”
Her breath caught as she edged around the door to find a small room crammed with four beds, all occupied. Three held the restrained, motionless bodies of two men and a woman in the final stages of the xombi virus—at least the final stage when they weren’t allowed to feed on human flesh, and thus starved to death. Their faces were ruddy and dark, the skin sunken over their bones, pulled so tight that their lips had pulled back over their teeth, making them look like mummified corpses.
Or screaming skulls.
A shiver rippled down Anna’s spine. Then an unearthly cry yanked her attention to the fourth bed, where three protective-suited figures were struggling to contain a thrashing woman who was early enough in the disease to still be able to screech and fight, and cast curses and threats sprinkled with the words “demon” and “possessed.”
“Hold her, for the love of God,” said the guy in the middle. “She’s going to hurt herself.” His accent was Australian, his cuffs rolled up to reveal tanned forearms, in defiance of sterile protocol. David.
“Or one of us,” puffed the beefy guy on his left as he struggled to get a strap on one of her wrists. “Or, more likely, the kid.”
“Bless her little soul,” said the third—a smaller figure, female but still plenty tough as she wrestled with an ankle strap. “Where are the meds, damn it?”
“On their way,” said Dr. Dave, followed by, “Got her,” as he pulled the last strap snug across the patient’s chest. Then, flattening his palm on her sternum, he leaned in and switched to Spanish. “You’re sick, Mrs. Espinoza. You’re in the hospital, and we’re going to take care of you.”
Her eyes flashed suddenly, going the telltale red of a xombi as the demon spirit pushed the human soul further and further toward death. But there was human terror in her expression as she howled, “You can do nothing as long as that thing lives.”
The doctor straightened. “Christ. I don’t . . . I need the translator.”
Anna stepped into the doorway. “She’s here . . . I think, anyway.”
He spun, hazel eyes lighting behind his plastic face shield. “Good. You got my message.” He gave her a quick once-over, checking that she was protected. “No trouble getting in here? I left word with the security guys, but you never know.”
“It was fine.” Telling herself there was no reason for the low-grade shimmy in her stomach, she added, “I’m not sure why you need me to translate, though. Your Spanish is excellent.”
Sobering, he glanced back at the patient, who had sunk deeper beneath the virus, until she was barely tugging at her bonds and taking halfhearted snaps at her attendants while muttering disjointed epithets and
