M. Hanover - Unclean Spirits

Power radiated from Coin like heat from a fire. His face was set in an expression of cold concentration. Bubbling panic rose up in my throat. He was here. He was waiting for me. I smelled something like burning.

“What?” Kim murmured. “What is it?”

I hoped Midian had been right when he’d said I was hard to notice. I took her elbow and angled her down a side hallway. I didn’t dare look back, but no one seemed to be coming after us. We passed a gift shop full of stuffed animals and snacks, the cashier looking at us incuriously as we passed.

“Do you think they’ve spotted your car?” Kim asked.

“Probably,” I said.

“My things are in it.”

“Yes, they are.”

We turned left. Signs offered us paths to the emergency room, the bathrooms, security. I walked toward the emergency room and slid through a set of doors marked HOSPITAL PERSONEL ONLY. Curtained cubicles lined the wide room, the sounds of crying and pain making a hellish background. No one challenged us. We weren’t an obvious problem, and we were in the land of great big obvious problems. I peeked past the intake nurse and toward the lobby.

The big man from Aubrey’s room was sitting by the emergency entrance, his expression deathly grim, black eyes still starting to form where I’d kicked him. Two men and a thin-faced woman were sitting with him. I backed up. The trap was sprung, and we weren’t getting anywhere. A soft chiming sound announced the arrival of an oversize elevator. I was trembling.

The wide steel doors slid open, and four paramedics pushed out a gurney. The woman being wheeled past was drenched in blood, her neck encased in a stabilizing collar like something from an Egyptian tomb. The shreds of her jeans trailed after her like rags. Her eyes were blank. The paramedics moved quickly, professionally, into the emergency room. The doors clapped closed behind them even before the elevator began to close. The feeling hit my gut, a fist of fear and hope that tried to take my breath away.

“Come on,” I said, pulling Kim into the elevator.

“What are…”

“That one,” I said, nodding to the injured woman. “She came from upstairs.”

The doors hissed closed and I slid my fingers over the worn plastic buttons until the numbers stopped getting higher. There was one unnumbered button at the top. It was marked H. I pushed it.

“Medevac,” Kim said.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s a helicopter up there.”

The elevator lurched, dropped a few inches, and then started to rise. I willed it to go faster, but the numbers continued their stately progress.

“He’s your lover, isn’t he?” Kim asked.

“What?”

“Aubrey? He’s your lover.”

“We went out once,” I said.

“I still care for him,” Kim said. Her chin jutted out, but her eyes were all apology. I stared at her, and a floor later she looked down. “I haven’t told him that since…since we split. He doesn’t know.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I thought I should tell someone. In case we’re about to die.”

I didn’t mean to take her hand. It just seemed the right thing in the moment.

“I can see that,” I said, and then, “I was really hoping to have a little more time before we got into the heavy emotional intimacy thing.”

“Me too,” Kim said, and shrugged. “Sorry.”

“It’s a fallen world. You do what you can.”

The elevator lurched again, stopped. We turned toward the doors together, our hands still clasped. When they opened, the helipad was before us, the beacons burning red in the darkness. The transport helicopter was still there, two men in uniform standing before it in obvious conversation. No wizards descended upon us. No sense of riders pressing in from Next Door assailed us.

I didn’t know what I was going to say, but as we walked forward, Kim dropped my hand, squared her shoulders, and stepped forward.

“You,” she barked as we came near. “You’re the pilot?”

The nearer man’s head snapped straight. His companion edged away as if hoping to avoid the conversation.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Kim dug in her purse for a moment, then handed the man an identification card. I saw her picture on it and the words Grace Memorial Hospital . The place she worked in Chicago, I thought.

“I’m here consulting on a very delicate transplantation,” she said. “I need you to take us to the airport.”

The pilot glanced down at the identification card, back over Kim’s shoulder at me, and then down at the card again. He was shaking his head even before he spoke.

“I can’t do that, ma’am. We’re a medevac unit, not a transport. I’m not allowed.”

“It’s important. A child could die,” Kim said, and I felt something when she did. A prickling on my skin like someone had brushed me with a feather. Even with the August heat still radiating from the tarmac, I had goose bumps. The pilot shuddered, nodded, and turned to his helicopter, then paused.

“There isn’t room for you in the cockpit, ma’am,” he said. “We’re gonna have to strap you two down.”

Kim paled, but nodded. I saw her swallow. The pilot waved to his companion, and the two trotted to the helicopter’s sides to prepare little fiberglass pods, just big enough for a dreadfully injured person.

“Magic?” I asked. “That was a cantrip?”

“It isn’t hard,” Kim said. “People want to do what they’re told. Men especially want to help women, and God knows you’re pretty enough that he wanted to show off. I just…nudged him a bit. It’s not like telling him we aren’t the droids he’s looking for.”

I laughed, relief giving the sound a warmth I was surprised to feel. Her smile was less wintry.

“I don’t think I’ve said thank you,” I said. “For coming. For helping me with this. For helping Aubrey.”

Her expression went thin and brittle. It would have been as if the moment’s vulnerability in the elevator had never happened, except that I saw something softer in her eyes.

“If we survive all this, I’m going to kill Aubrey myself,” she said. “Or at least wound him seriously.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Of course, we’re not out of here yet. The helicopter could still get shot down by the Invisible College.”

“Cheerful thought,” Kim said, and the pilot waved us over.

They strapped me in first, wide canvas bands with industrial steel buckles cinching me in against the aluminum frame. A fiberglass pod closed over me like a coffin; a small clear space let me look out and up at the swimming stars overhead. The pilot climbed into the cockpit and started up the engines. I could feel it through the frame of the helicopter when his companion closed the pod on Kim’s side. The engine whined, and the rotors began to turn. The noise was so overwhelming it was like silence.

Like a balloon with its string cut, we rose into the sky.

Where’s the minivan?” Midian said.

“We lost it,” I said.

“You lost it?”

The taxi was pulling away from the curb. I closed the door and put my backpack on the coat hanger. The house smelled like old laundry and popcorn. Kim stared at Midian and then, shaking her head, excused herself and headed down the hall toward the bathroom.

“How do you lose a minivan?” Midian said as I walked into the living room.

“There we were running down the highway, and I said ‘Holy shit, Kim, I think I know why we’re getting so tired.’ Look, if it’s important, I’ll buy us another one.”

Chogyi Jake emerged from the back. It might only have been that I’d been out in the world or that I was still coming off the adrenaline overload of my time in the hospital, but I thought he looked worse than when I’d left. The strain of holding up Eric’s protections was showing in his face. I remembered a news program I’d seen when I was a kid with men in yellow rain slickers piling sandbags against a flood. They’d had the same exhausted eyes.