She paused, casting a quick glance in Izzie’s direction and mugging to emphasize her inadvertent pun.
“Literally, if need be,” she stressed, unnecessarily. “But seriously, I’d continue to put myself in the middle of the action if it meant answering some of those questions. But . . . this is still new territory for me, and it’s taking some getting used to.”
“Okay,” Izzie said, stretching out the syllables. What Joyce was saying made sense, but it didn’t seem to follow that it meant that she needed to give Izzie the silent treatment and the cold shoulder because of it.
“I don’t know,” Joyce went on, sighing. “I know that these . . . these amulet things are supposed to keep us safe—” she patted the hip pocket where she had slipped the makeshift copy of the Te’Maroan markings when they’d left the house “—but I’d allowed myself to feel safe back at Patrick’s place, you know? And ever since we left his neighborhood I’ve felt like . . .”
Her eyes darted over to the driver’s side window beside her, and she shivered, like someone had just poured icy water down the back of her shirt.
That’s when Izzie finally understood what was happening. Joyce wasn’t mad at her, or annoyed about the situation, or still incensed about anything that anyone had done or said that morning.
Joyce was scared.
Izzie hadn’t expected that. Joyce had always struck her as fairly fearless, with a self-assured poise and unflappable sense of humor in the face of death. With her precisely sculpted asymmetrical undercut bob, her leather jacket festooned with pins, and her heavy boots, Joyce had always seemed like a woman who was completely in charge of herself and her own reactions. But Izzie had not considered the possibility that the calm and controlled exterior that Joyce presented to the world might not be a form of self-defense, a kind of carefully constructed armor to protect herself from the world around her.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Izzie said, “I’m pretty scared about all of this, myself. And I know that Daphne is, too.”
Joyce glanced quickly in her direction before looking back at the road ahead. “Yeah?”
“Of course. I mean, at Quantico we were trained to handle stressful situations by running through different scenarios and situations, testing out how we apply the tactics and techniques that we’ve studied in different possible scenarios. So by the time we’re sent out in the field as agents, we’ve already run through all kinds of various permutations of the types of situations we might encounter. The specifics out in the real world might be very different from the practice drills, of course, but there’s almost always something from those simulated exercises that we can draw on and use in real life.”
“Okay?” Joyce’s tone suggested she wasn’t seeing Izzie’s point. “And how does that apply here?”
“That’s just it,” Izzie answered. “It doesn’t. Nothing that we trained for at the Academy prepared me or Daphne for dealing with the undead.”
She paused, chewing her lower lip, thoughtfully.
“In fact, the only thing that comes even close to the kinds of stuff we’re dealing with are the stories my grandmother told me when I was a kid,” Izzie went on. “And honestly, that scares me even more.”
The Northside Community Living Center was located in the northeastern corner of the city, at the edge of a network of blocks that included Recondito General, the city’s premier hospital, and Founders Square Medical Park—a cluster of office towers housing oncologists, surgeons, gynecologists, ENTs, and all manner of other medical specialists.
Joyce had parked in a visitors’ spot in an underground parking garage that serviced several of the surrounding buildings, and while they were riding the elevator up to the ground level, Izzie couldn’t help but be reminded of their descent into the darkness of the warehouse subbasement on Friday night, and felt eager to be back out in the daylight.
Izzie had trouble getting her bearings when they reached the street level, but Joyce pointed with her cane at a four-story building with a red brick façade and white trim. They crossed at the light, and made their way to the visitor’s entrance at the front of the building.
While Joyce spoke to the receptionist at the front desk, Izzie stood to one side of the waiting room, keeping out of the way of nurses pushing patients in wheelchairs, families coming to visit their loved ones, and doctors discharging outpatients. Voices were kept low, and sounds in general seeming to be muted and subdued. When combined with the faint antiseptic scent of the warm recycled air, it seemed to Izzie to be very much like any retirement home or elder care facility that she had ever been in. Which, in a way it was, she supposed, except that all of the patients and residents here were veterans of the United States armed services.
Joyce waited at the front desk while the receptionist made a call, and then, with a smile and few words of thanks, walked back over to where Izzie was waiting. Moments later, the elevator doors opened on a fit but somewhat weary-looking man with a neatly trimmed beard, eyeglasses, and an unkempt shock of dark brown hair, wearing a polo shirt and jeans with an ID badge on a lanyard and a stethoscope draped around his neck.
“Joyce!” the man said, smiling warmly as he approached them. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to make it this time.”
“Come on, Hasan,” Joyce answered, moving in for a
