Both her arms.
She was ecstatic. She also had both her legs. And everything else in between seemed to be mostly together. That was always a good sign.
If it weren’t for all the bandages around her head and over her right eye, she would have thought nothing out of the ordinary was wrong with her. It’s nothing they can’t fix, she told herself.
Then she slept again.
“Awake, are we?”
Dully, Leah turned her head to look at the speaker. In her middle thirties, the blonde had shoulder-length hair and green eyes. She was trim and athletic, and if she hadn’t been, the form-fitting black armored suit she wore would have revealed that. A webbing of scar tissue showed at her right temple and cheek.
Her name was Lyra Darius. She’d been the one at the agency who had ferreted out the truth about Lord Patrick Sumerisle. In addition to being a heavy player in the Home Office ministry’s Internal Affairs division, Lord Sumerisle was also the leader of the Templar.
“I’m awake,” Leah agreed.
“Good. I thought you might be. You roused earlier. Excited the hospital staff enough that they called me.”
“Sorry. Don’t mean to be a bother.” Leah intended her response to be subtly sarcastic. Lyra Darius held a lot of power in the organization. After all, she’d been the one who had proved the Templar existed while MI-6 and other intelligence agencies had searched for them.
“You’re no bother,” Lyra said. “I’m just glad that you made it back. A lot of those men and women didn’t.”
For a moment, memory of all the death and destruction claimed Leah’s thoughts. The sights and sounds promised to haunt her for the rest of her life.
Lyra got up from the chair and put away the book she held. She stood at the side of the bed and gazed down with what looked like genuine compassion. It was hard to tell. Compassion was one of the first emotions they’d all been trained to fake.
“I had water brought in,” Lyra said. “And I got permission that, if you felt you were up to it, you could drink it.”
“I’m thirsty,” Leah said.
Lyra poured a glass of water from a carafe and added a bendy straw. She held the cup low for Leah to sip from the straw if she wanted.
“If you would unfasten the straps from my arms,” Leah said, “I could tend to myself. I don’t much care for being treated like a mewling brat.”
After a brief hesitation, Lyra nodded. “All right, but you’re going to have to go slow. The doctors aren’t yet sure how much you’ll be affected.”
“Affected by what?”
Lyra released the restraints. “You lost your right eye, Leah. You also suffered some slight brain damage that may affect motor control.”
Adrenaline dumped an overload into her system. “My eye?”
Lyra looked at her sympathetically. “Yes.”
If the world were a normal place and not stuck in a demon-infested nightmare, Leah would have sworn that she would have been seriously freaking at about that time. She also thought that part of her calm was because she had control over her body now.
Unfettered, she sat in the middle of the bed and sipped water through the straw. Her head still maintained a dulled pulse beneath the bandages. Having the wires and sensors connected to her body made her feel weak and fragile.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” Lyra said.
“It’s better than being dead.” But not much. Losing an eye meant losing more than 50 percent of her vision. It was actually closer to 60 percent. And her depth perception would be gone as well. Better than being dead was going to be her mantra for a time.
“It is better,” Lyra said.
Leah put the cup on the small table by the bed. “Is there anything else wrong?” She asked herself if losing an eye and potential brain damage weren’t enough of a laundry list of problems.
“Other than a rather astonishing collection of cuts, scrapes, and bruises, you’re in fine shape.”
“We did destroy the weapons plant, didn’t we?”
Lyra nodded. “That set the demons back, but they’re already building another plant somewhere else in the city.”
“Do we know where?”
“No. But if we’ve learned anything at all about our adversaries over the past four years, it’s that they’re committed.”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Leah said. “I’m not up on how good our medical technology is these days. I’ve been out in the field.”
“They can’t replace your eye.” Lyra’s voice remained soft, but no sympathy sounded in her words, nothing that Leah could attack. It was just a statement of fact. “Our technology hasn’t come that far yet.”
Barely quelling the nausea that twisted her stomach, Leah forced herself to nod. She wanted to tear the bandages from her head and prove that she could see. All she had to do was open her eye.
One of the machines beeped more quickly.
Lyra glanced at it, then said, “I can summon a nurse back to give you something to calm you down.”
“No.” Leah glared at the machine as she worked on taking deep, rhythmic breaths. The beeping slowed and kept slowing. I’m in control. Not my fear or anger. I can just…be.
Lyra smiled a little. “Very good.”
Controlling the body’s reactions was one of the things Leah had learned early in her career. She’d gotten educated in that at about the same time she was shown how to kill an opponent in hundreds of different ways.
“They replaced your arm,” Leah said.
Lyra wore a black glove over her right hand to mask the metallic surface. She hadn’t opted for a cosmetically more appealing hand. She’d chosen something that was as much a weapon as a pistol or a knife.
“An eye is more…complicated,” Lyra replied. “There is a prosthesis that can be wired into your brain. A helmet, if you will, that will cover that side of your face and provide visual feedback in programming uploads that
