M.L.N. Hanover - Vicious Grace

“Sorry,” I said.

“ You ,” he said, and then, “What the hell is your problem?”

He was red-haired and freckled, his jaw wide and starting to sag a little at the jowls. He stood a head and a half taller than me, which put him on the large side, even for a guy. His scrubs were powder blue, and an ID tag much like Kim’s hung from his neck. The rage in his eyes unsettled me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about some—”

He moved in front of me, blocking my way with an out-thrust chest. A red flush was climbing up his neck.

“You were thinking?” he said. “You’ve got to be shitting me. That’s you thinking ?”

I looked at Kim looking back at me. I had hoped—expected, even—outrage and maybe an echo of my own sudden fear. Instead, she was considering me like I was an interesting bug. Everyone at the nurses’ station had turned toward us. All the conversations had stopped. A nervous glance over my shoulder, and I saw the patients in the fishbowl rooms staring at me too. I lifted my hands and took a step back.

“Look, I said I was sorry. I just bumped—”

“You piece of shit.”

His voice was low and shaking with rage. I felt the cold electricity of adrenaline hitting my bloodstream. Kim didn’t say anything.

“You piece of shit ,” he said again.

The fear didn’t leave me—nothing simple as that—but an answering rage started to bubble up alongside it.

“Hey!” I said. “I don’t know what your problem is, but I’ve had about as much—”

The red-haired man drew in a long, rough breath.

And so did everyone else.

Each nurse at the station. Patients watching us through the open doorways of their rooms. Breath is a small thing, a subtle thing, until it’s coordinated, and then it’s devastating. A moment ago, I’d been having a surreal encounter with the poster boy for steroid rage. Now, that soft, vast sound made me something very small in the middle of an unexpected battleground. I felt myself go suddenly, dangerously calm. It wasn’t quite the I’m-not-driving experience of being in a fight, but I could feel myself leaning in toward that. The man’s breath quickened, and the other people matched it. I took a step back. His hands were balled into huge fists.

“Kim?” I said, but her breath was keeping time with the sharp panting that rose up all around me. Whatever this was, it had taken her too. I licked my lips and pulled my qi—the vital energy that fuels magic and life—up from my belly and into my throat.

“Kim,” I said, pushing the power out into my voice. “Wake up.”

I didn’t take my eyes off the red-haired man, but in my peripheral vision, I saw her fall out of the pattern. She put a hand to her head and looked around. The red-haired man was trembling now, shaking with barely restrained violence. Two of the nurses behind the station put down long gray folders and stepped out into the hallway behind him. A blond woman in a business suit came out of one of the patient care rooms, her hands at her sides like claws. King Mob, closing ranks. Their synchronized breath filled the space: a single, huge, animal sound.

“Jayné?” Kim said.

“Just stay cool, and when I tell you to run, run,” I said. And then, “Okay. Run! ”

We bolted.

Behind us, the mob roared with a single voice. Kim and I burst through the doors at the ward’s entrance hard enough that my arm stung. Kim took a sharp left, and, only skidding a little on the traffic-polished linoleum floor, I followed her. She ran like a sprinter, her body straight and aligned, her arms pumping along with her stride, her hands flat. She’d kicked off her shoes.

Just as we reached the wide, triangular space before a bank of brushed steel elevators, the red-haired man caught up. He surged up behind me, swung a wide arm, and pushed Kim’s racing body into the wall. The impact sounded like a slap, and she fought to keep her balance before she fell. Between one heartbeat and the next, I found myself quietly behind my eyes while my body took over. I ran toward the elevators, the red-haired man hard behind me. Like something out of a Hong Kong action flick, I ran up the closed metal door, pushed off, and flew for a second, backward and down. I landed on both feet and one hand, our opponent’s broad back in front of me. He tried to turn, but I jumped forward, driving the heel of my palm right about where his left kidney was.

He grunted once and went down like a sack of flour.

Kim was still getting to her feet. I tried to call out to her, to ask if she was all right, but my throat didn’t respond; the wards and protections were driving, and my body was not yet my own. It took half a second to understand why. The red-haired man had been the fastest, but the others were coming. The low rumble of their feet was like a small earthquake. From the opposite direction, an older man in a white lab coat walked toward the elevators, saw me, saw Kim and the groaning man on the floor. His eyes widened, and he backpedaled fast. Smart cookie. The mob rounded the corner.

Seven of them ran toward me, mouths in square gapes of rage. When they saw me, they started screaming together, one voice from all their throats. The blond woman who’d come out of the patient’s room leaped for Kim. I shifted forward to protect her, but the others were on me. I kicked hard into someone’s knee, feeling it give way. An elbow got me in the ribs, but not hard enough to break them. A man in a nurse’s uniform lifted me by my shirt and the waist of my jeans like he was going to throw me. I brought my knee up into his jaw and my palm down on the bridge of his nose. His blood spattered my belly, and he dropped me.

I caught a glimpse of Kim wrestled to her knees by the blond woman. A dark-skinned man with a salt-and-pepper beard drove his shoulder into my gut, pushing me back by main force. I dropped my elbow into his neck, and three new attackers rounded the corner. Watching from the still space behind my eyes, I was afraid for Kim, I was afraid for the men and women boiling out of the cardiac ward with murder in mind, but from the moment the red-haired man fell, I wasn’t worried about myself. I’d fought riders before, and they didn’t go down this easy.

A man threw a clipboard at my face, and I knocked it away as I dodged one of the new women’s kicks. I sank my foot into the soft of a fat man’s belly, his breath gusting out as he collapsed. Someone grabbed me from the back. When I dropped, turning into them, and brought my foot down on their instep hard enough to crunch, the grip at my neck went slack.

They were fighting, but they were fighting like people: fragile, untrained, inflamed with anger, but not technique or supernatural power. I put my faith in Eric’s protections, and my body danced around the blows as I worked my way toward Kim. More of the mob’s reinforcements came, but each group that arrived seemed weaker and slower than the last. The people who couldn’t run as well catching up. I started to wonder if the cardiac patients would show up too, throwing IV stands and catheter bags at me.

I got to Kim’s side as the elevator behind us chimed, a red down-pointing arrow glowing. My fist sank deep into the blond woman’s throat, and I lifted Kim up. Her hair was tangled, and a trickle of blood marked her hairline.

“I’m okay,” Kim said. The elevator doors slid open. An elderly woman in a wheelchair and a girl who must have been her granddaughter started to come out, then hesitated. There were a dozen bodies on the floor, either unconscious or incapacitated and groaning. I pushed Kim into the elevator car past the wheelchair and turned back. Five of the mob were struggling to their feet, chests rising and falling together, and none of them coming close enough to make a real attack.