Burden of Solace Read online

  “Aye, there’s that.”

  That brought her to the part she’d come for.

  “It starts with you. I’m going to heal you, GranDa.”

  Without waiting for his response, she moved her hand to his chest and looked deep, feeling for the mental pathways she’d identified in herself. His anatomy opened up in her mind as she zeroed in on the tumors. In her mind, they were a sickly yellow-green. She could see the voids where lung tissue had been removed only to have their place usurped by the unripe, lemony masses. She focused her thoughts on the tumors, willing them to shrink. They did, but not by much. She tried harder, her brow creasing with effort. They refused to budge. She tried another spot, with the same results. Then she watched as the missing pulmonary lobe grew back, sprouting from the cut edges. The regenerated lung tissue was clean and healthy, but she could already sense that the disease was slipping tendrils into it, moving slowly to reclaim territory. All she had done was repair some of the damage done, not fix the root cause. Her voice cracked as she strained to battle the out-of-control cells that were ravaging his body.

  “It’s not working. Not like it did with the others. I can fix some of the damage, but the cancer cells, they won’t die.”

  Riley gently took her hand and lifted it from his chest, to his lips and kissed it. Her sight returned to her normal eyes and she realized they were filled with tears. She hugged him fiercely, willing her new power to take away all that was wrong with him. Her misted eyes filled with green as he patted her back. Her mind went back to times as a small child when she had run to him with a skinned knee or a bee sting, and he’d held her and patted her back the same way. When he spoke, it was with a stronger voice than before.

  “I have to say, I do feel loads better. Don’t fash yourself, love. You’re not God.”

  “But why was I given a gift if I can’t use it to save the person I love most?”

  “Caiside, this thing inside me - it’s alive, isn’t it? It’s a part of me that’s just gone haywire? So maybe what’s wrong is what’s always been right with you.”

  She scrubbed at her face. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve never in me life heard you wish for anything to die. It’s not in ya. This new thing, this power you’ve been given, it’s just more of what you already were. And you’d not so much as step on a spider.”

  Cassie realized every case where she’d tried her power at the hospital had been an injury, not a disease. She could heal cuts and broken bones, like she’d regrown his removed lung tissue, but she hadn’t cured any diseases. Diseases weren’t damage; they were living things.

  “It’s not fair. I don’t want to lose you, GranDa. You’re all the family I’ve got left.”

  “But don’t you see, it’s my time. We all have to go sometime. I’ve lived a long life, seen and done so much. But my time here is coming to an end. I’m packin’ me bags for a new journey. It’s the way of the world, love.”

  Cassie buried her head in his chest, listening to his heart beat.

  “You’re so like your Granny,” he said. “She’d go into a funk when she lost a patient, especially one she’d gotten to know. But she knew she couldn’t end all the suffering in the world, not even the little bit that came into her care. All she could do was lessen it as best she could. And you can’t stop a body from dyin’, sweet girl. All you can do is delay it. Sometimes that’s enough.”

  She hugged him, trying not to think about the day when she wouldn’t have his wisdom and support to guide her. She pushed the thought away and focused on what she did have right then.

  Something else that makes me different, and it still isn’t enough.

  “By the by, did ya know your eyes glow when you’re doin’ your trick?”

  CHAPTER 13

  The Emergency Room was a maelstrom of controlled chaos. To an outsider, it probably looked like everyone was running around crazed, but in truth there was a reason for every frantic move.

  Actually, there were two reasons. The first was something they were far too familiar with - a gunshot victim. The second was something they didn’t see as much of - the shooter.

  From the radio traffic between the police, the paramedics and the hospital, it appeared that the attacker was another one of those crazed women who had been cropping up recently. The news media, ever eager to slap a label on something they didn’t comprehend, had started calling them Zombies after a loose-lipped investigator let slip their tendency to attack by biting, and a preference to target faces. This zombie-ette had opted for the much more expedient method of simply shooting her victim. The good news was that the APD had subdued the woman before she could hurt anyone else. It was simply a bonus that they wouldn’t have to sew someone’s face back on tonight.

  “Tina, let’s get our zombie to exam 6 and draw for a tox screen. We need to figure out what she’s on before we try to bring her down.”

  A skinny cop stood by the gurney, eyeing the thrashing woman warily.

  “Ma’am, she’s pretty nuts, tried to bite me several times. I’ll need to stay with her.”

  She sensed the officer’s worry against a background of frenzied, mish-mashed feelings coming off the drugged-up attacker. She had come to realize that sensing other people’s emotions was part of her new abilities. She was having trouble controlling it, and sometimes couldn’t distinguish her feelings from others.

  “Works for me, Officer. Just try not to get in the way.”

  Cassie turned to examine the young man who had been on the receiving end of the gunshot. Her diagnostic sense showed her that the bullet had passed through cleanly, missing all the vital parts. He’d be fine once they patched him up and gave him something for the pain. Cassie was more interested in exploring how her powers dealt with a drug problem. Fortunately, Ari Zacharias was completely focused on the victim. The one and only time he even spared a glance at their female patient, she could sense his disgust like a sour fart in the room. Cassie was reasonably certain that, given his druthers, he’d probably have let her die.

  “I think this guy got lucky,” Zacharias declared. “Through-and-through, no organs hit, no major blood vessels. I’ll get him patched up. Whelan, you take the woman.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ugh, I liked him better when I didn’t know what he was feeling.

  Her irritation with Zacharias occupied her thoughts as she pushed into Exam 6. If it hadn’t been for her preoccupation, she might have sensed the fear pouring out of the room before she entered.

  “Okay Tina, let’s see what--”

  She skidded to a stop as soon as she saw the cop on the floor. Only when the door clicked closed behind her did she notice the patient, backed into a corner and holding a scalpel to Tina’s neck.

  “Lock it! Nobody comes in. They might be one of ‘em.”

  Cassie held out her hands, careful to show no aggression. The woman’s eyes were bloodshot and crazed, pupils dilated so wide that her eyes looked almost black. She sensed terror mixed with rage coming from her. That wasn’t good - frightened people were capable of anything. Cassie’s eyes fixated on the open handcuff hanging from the hand holding the scalpel.

  “Take it easy. Nobody’s going to hurt you. We want to help.”

  “I said lock it! And stuff something underneath, in the crack. The tentacles are how they get you.”

  Cassie reached back with one hand to flip the lock. She shifted her attention to Tina, who was also filled with fear and barely-contained panic. In her left hand, a restraint strap dangled. They had probably been in the process of moving the woman from the gurney to the examining table when she broke free. Cassie spared a glance at the cop. His revolver lay discarded on the floor near his attacker. Cassie hoped he was only unconscious.

  “I need to get something to stuff under the door, you know, for the tentacles. There’s some sheets in the cabinet over there. Is it okay if I do that?”

  The woman’s eyes raced between the door and the cabinet, and Cassie felt her fear spike. She adde
d paranoia to the list of demons running around in this woman’s head.

  “Okay. But no funny stuff.” She waved the scalpel at Cassie. “This is a +3 Dagger of Wounding, forged by the Dark Elves. So, no funny stuff.”

  Cassie crossed over to the cabinet, which brought her next to the unconscious policeman. She opened the storage and pretended to rummage around. She tried to look over at the cop, but he was too far out of her line of sight to do it without drawing attention to it.

  Can my x-ray vision see something I’m not looking at?

  She closed her eyes and thought about the cop. In her mind, she saw him lying on the floor. His heartbeat was strong, his breathing slow but regular. The only thing that drew her focus was a bruise to his head. No concussion, but he’d have a hell of a headache when he woke up.

  Okay, she thought. I can fix that.

  That started a train of thought in her head. How could she use her powers to get them out of this? Could she ‘heal’ what the drugs were doing to this crazed woman? Could she calm her down? She hoped that her senses would show her what needed doing. This was all new territory for her. She started to formulate a plan. The first step was to keep anyone else from coming into this room. The locks were designed to be easily overridden by the staff. If one of the nurses tried the door and found it locked, their first thought would be to unlock it. Sad to say, but medical personnel generally didn’t show a lot of respect for patient privacy.

  She pulled out a couple of bed sheets, along with a red plastic bio-waste bag tucked between and out of sight. She held them up for the drug-addled woman to see.

  “I found these. You want me to seal the door with them? So they can’t get in?”

  The woman stared for a second before nodding her approval. Sweat was pouring out of her and her movements were becoming more twitchy and nervous. She shifted her weight back and forth, from one foot to the other and back again. Cassie could only hope that this lunatic kept it together long enough for Cassie to try and fix whatever was wrong with her.

  Cassie knelt at the door and unfolded the first sheet, using it to cover the red bag. She slid most of the bag under the door, then laid the unfolded sheet across the door bottom to cover it. She repeated the procedure with the second sheet, wedging it in tight to make sure the bag wouldn’t be easily dislodged. If she had done it right, the red bag was sticking out into the hall like a giant tongue. It should be hard to miss. At least that was her plan.

  She stood up and turned to their captor, pointing out the sealed door for her inspection. The gurney and bed blocked her view, so the woman had to crab-walk Tina along the wall to the opposite corner. Cassie took advantage of her concentration on the move to shift her own focus to her inner sight. What she saw there was disturbing.

  The woman’s nervous system was lit up like a Christmas tree, with her brain showing up as the brightest hot spot - the star at the top of the tree. There were so many chemical imbalances and messed-up neuroreceptors. Cassie felt confident that she could fix whatever this was, but it was going to take some doing. It wasn’t going to be like healing a cut or re-fusing a broken bone. Whatever this chick had taken had done a lot of complex damage all through her nervous system. The drug was insidious in its scope. Cassie might be able to calm her - those pathways were apparent to her - but first they would have to be in contact.

  “The door’s sealed. We’re safe from them now. You can let her go.”

  The woman looked around, trying to wrap her addled mind around the situation. Cassie tried to put herself into the woman’s position, to empathize with her. She must be trying to come up with some sort of plan to escape whatever it was that had chased her into this room. The woman was young and skinny with bleached hair. Her heavy eye makeup was smeared by sweat. She reminded Cassie of a group of goth-inspired nerds who had shared an exile from popularity in high school similar to her own.

  … a +3 Dagger of Wounding, forged by the Dark Elves.

  Her mind went back to one evening trying to fit into that unusual sub-culture, a night spent in a dark basement with several shy, black-clad geniuses playing Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe that was an avenue into this woman’s mind. Realizing that she was treading on shaky ground, Cassie tried to work her way into the fantasy.

  “By the way, Tina’s only a half-orc. And she’s a thief. You know, the kind that can pick locks and detect traps. We might need her to get out of here.”

  Tina looked at Cassie like she’d lost her mind. She probably had no idea what an orc was, much less if being half of one was good or bad. Either way, her colleague had clearly joined ranks with the lunatic threatening to cut her head off.

  Lucky for her, Cassie’s approach struck a note of resonance in their captor’s mind. She wondered if there wasn’t some similarity between what she could read from a person’s emotions and what the mentalist Etienne had perceived from his audience’s thoughts. She set that aside to consider another day, assuming there was another day. She pressed forward with her ploy.

  “I’m a cleric. I can heal you. You’re the fighter, obviously, since you have the magic dagger.” She spared a glance for the cop on the floor. “The ranger is down, but he was chaotic-neutral so we couldn’t depend on him anyway. You’re lawful-good, practically a paladin, so we trust you. Especially if there are...”

  She searched her memory for some monster in the D&D Bestiary that had tentacles. She, or rather her magic-user character, hadn’t gotten past the Beholder Beast in that particular basement adventure. Still, she’d stuck around to watch her fellow outcasts and science wonks as they acted out their imaginary exploits. There was one monster, described by the teen Dungeon Master as “a humanoid creature with four tentacles by its mouth that it uses to strike its prey.” The creature had given the most valorous of dice-wielding warriors pause, daunting even the high-level wizard.

  “Especially if there’s a Mind Flayer out there,” Cassie said.

  She didn’t need her new ability to sense other people’s emotions to know that she’d scored with that reference. The woman’s eyes went wide, as if she’d finally found someone that understood the horror she was living, someone who didn’t think she was crazy.

  “You’ve seen him, then,” the woman said. “You know what he does. He slides those slimy feelers into your skull and eats your brain. And that’s if you’re lucky. Because sometimes he leaves eggs in there, and those eggs take over your body and you become one of them.”

  Cassie nodded enthusiastically, desperate to gain the woman’s confidence. Her first priority was to get this maniac settled down, calm enough to release Tina. Cassie briefly considered offering to trade places with Tina, but it might reinforce the idea that holding a hostage was necessary. No, she would rather get the woman to lower her guard. If Cassie was completely honest with herself, a part of her balked at the idea of placing herself in danger. She might have powers like one of those exohuman Guardians, but being heroic was something altogether different. She was surprised by this selfish side of her, but this was hardly the time to dwell on her personal failings. Right now, she was playing out a dangerous fantasy game in real life.

  Over the hospital PA system, there was an announcement. The voice was pre-recorded by a soft voice, calm and innocuous.

  “Code Silver, ER 6. Code Silver, ER 6.”

  “Code Silver” was the hospital’s way of alerting security that an armed patient had taken a hostage. Help was on the way. All she needed to do was keep the situation calm, but Cassie was becoming increasingly worried by the scalpel at Tina’s throat.

  “What if we put the thief near the door? She can hide and if the Mind Flayer gets in, she can do double damage with her backstab attack, right?”

  The woman blinked sweat out of her eyes, struggling to think through the haze. She shook her head, quick twitchy motions as if a gnat were hovering close to her eyes.

  “No, I don’t trust her.”

  “But you trust me, right? I’m a healer, ummm...” Cassie dug dee
p in her memory for the right gaming terms, a phrase that might connect to this delusion. “I’m a cleric, yeah. I’m bound by my oath. And I sense that she can be trustworthy in the face of this, uh, common peril.”

  Cassie needed Tina to play along with her ruse, but the nurse’s panic was on the verge of overwhelming her. Cassie could see it in her eyes. The blade pressed against her neck had drawn a small drop of blood, a single bead of red that crept downward. If Tina could see that, her mind would likely implode in on itself. Cassie needed to do something, and quick, before this normally steadfast woman did something stupid.

  But, when push comes to shove, stupid will always win - especially when a drug-crazed maniac has the sharpest thing in the known world pressed against your jugular.

  Tina bolted.

  In her mind, it was probably the best decision amongst a field of lesser options. On the one hand, there was the nutjob with the knife. On another side, there was the doctor who was spouting gibberish and apparently had joined forces with the aforementioned nut. And on still another side, there was the door - a portal to the world of sanity where she had so recently lived. The only clear course of action was to make a break for it, so she did.

  The cut was clean and quick. A trained swordsman couldn’t have done the job any more efficiently. Razor-sharp blade met resilient flesh with predictable results. Cassie’s anatomy training told her that the blade passed through skin, superficial fascia, platysma, and deep fascia. None of that knowledge stopped her from gasping in horror as blood gushed from Tina’s throat, because under all of that was the nurse’s carotid artery. The major vessel that carried blood to her brain had been laid open and her life was coming out in powerful spurts.

  The woman released Tina, staring at the bloody blade as if it was a living thing beyond her control. Tina collapsed, clutching at her throat as she toppled toward Cassie.

  Cassie rushed forward, catching the nurse and easing her to the floor. It would occur to her later that she had taken a chance moving so abruptly, that she could easily have alarmed the knife-wielding woman and risked provoking another attack. But in the moment, all she could think of was that she had only seconds before Tina died.