Malichai groaned and repositioned his leg. It shouldn’t be hurting the way it was. It alarmed him how much it hurt. If the bone was broken and not set, he could see having that ripping, persistent pain, but it wasn’t broken. Something was happening that was bigger than anyone understood.
Both Rubin and Amaryllis had just spent hours working on it after Mills had kicked the shit out of it. They’d done a very meticulous psychic healing, closing every fracture, knitting them back together. His leg had been kicked, so sure, it was going to hurt. Mills was a big man. He might have delivered a kick strong enough to break the bone, but Malichai doubted it. Something was happening internally and whatever it was, that nagging alarm in his gut told him the consequences to him were going to be very bad.
Trap slipped inside. He looked around. “Your woman wasn’t in the kitchen.”
“She wanted to look around the place. I sometimes get these weird feelings, like I’m hearing whispers of conspiracy. I like to take a last walk through the halls just to see if I can get a better handle on whether or not I’m going crazy.”
“What’s the general consensus?” Trap crossed the room and flipped back the blanket covering Malichai’s leg.
“So far, coming down on the side of crazy.” Malichai rubbed the bridge of his nose. “When is Cayenne actually due, Trap? Give me a date. Or at least how far along she is in her pregnancy. She doesn’t seem to show, so it’s impossible to tell. It makes no sense that she doesn’t show when she’s so small.”
Trap waved that assessment away dismissively. “She’s got armor, silken armor, like a thin layer between her skin and the rest of her. Once she was stabbed and the tip of the knife nearly broke off. It didn’t go in. That shield isn’t going to allow her womb to push out. The baby has to be displacing her organs.”
Malichai closed his eyes over the casual way Trap spoke. It was clear, to keep from panicking over Cayenne’s pregnancy, Trap had distanced himself. It was a classic Trap maneuver. He allowed his brain to take over.
“You have to have an idea when she’s due. Did she get regular checkups? Did she take prenatals? Wyatt must be out of his mind.”
“Wyatt talks to her often and has her take the vitamins. He didn’t want her coming on the trip, of course, but I’m not risking another Cayenne silence. I sent her away to safety when we were working on the hemorrhagic virus, and I’m not sure she’s forgiven me yet. I needed to come to make certain you lived through this crap, so that meant she was coming too. I promised her, and I don’t break my promises to her. I can’t ever do that, Malichai. Not to her. Breaking trust with Cayenne would end us.”
Again, Trap spoke without looking at him, casually, as if they were discussing the weather, but Malichai was totally shocked. The man had to come to ensure Malichai was all right. That choked him up. Trap didn’t express emotion often. Malichai thought Trap tolerated him but wasn’t very fond of him. This said something altogether different.
“Thanks, Trap. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but I want my woman safe as well. It makes me feel better knowing you’re here. I still want to know when Cayenne could go into labor.”
Trap shrugged. “She’s under a month out, but she’s showing signs. At first I thought she might be carrying more than one, but she can’t be because they would be totally squished in there. I couldn’t get her to let me take a look. She’s very resistant to any kind of exam. Too close to all the experiments they did on her. Cayenne’s capable of taking off if she feels too threatened. You all have to leave her be. Don’t ask her too many questions.”
“You’re a doctor. Multiple births? Seriously, Trap? There could be complications.”
“There won’t be,” Trap snapped. “There’s no way there’s two in there. You see her. She’s too small.”
“You’re not thinking straight. How could you possibly know there won’t be complications if it’s a multiple birth when little is known about the pregnancy or the woman giving birth? Damn, Trap. Why did you think at first there was a possibility?”
Trap always considered odds. He wasn’t someone to casually say or think multiple births. If he’d considered it, it was because the possibility was real. Malichai wanted to shake him.
“There can’t be complications, Malichai.” Trap ground the declaration out between his teeth. “I can’t live without her. Do you understand? No Cayenne, no Trap. She can’t leave and she can’t die. So that means everything will go smoothly. She’s fucking terrified. She’s terrified of exams and too close to running off. You know her. We’ll never find her if she goes. She thinks she can give birth by herself. I’m walking on eggshells with her. This all just has to go the way it’s supposed to go.”
Malichai took a deep breath before responding. Trap was right about Cayenne. She was capable of taking off on her own, and if she hid somewhere in the swamp, they wouldn’t find her. She was terrified of examinations and with good reason. He could see why Trap was trying to walk a fine line with her.
Malichai nodded. “We’ll make it happen.” He didn’t know how. What he did know was, Trap hadn’t been casual about her pregnancy, he was trying to make certain she didn’t panic and run.
Before Trap could answer, Rubin and Ezekiel slipped into the room and with them was Joe Spagnola, their team leader. Malichai wasn’t shocked to see his older brother had come, but he was rather surprised and even more apprehensive to see Joe. Rubin and Joe came straight to the bed, nodded to Malichai and both held their hands inches from the leg.
“Looks like a bit of swelling,” Rubin pointed out, hovering his palms over several nasty bruises already turning several shades of purple and blue. “What’s it feel like, Malichai, and I need the truth, not some bullshit tough-guy response.”
“At least you acknowledge that I’m a bullshit tough guy,” Malichai said. His heart pounded and for the first time in a very long while there was no controlling fear. His mouth went dry. He glanced toward the door, needing her, understanding a little bit of what Trap felt when he said he needed Cayenne.
As if on cue, as if she was so connected to him, Amaryllis slipped into the room and without looking at the newcomers, came right to his side and took his hand. “You all right, honey?” She bent toward him and he leaned down to feel the silk of her lips brushing his.
His gut settled a little. “You going to stick with me if they have to cut it off?” He tried to make a joke, but his voice wasn’t right.
Ezekiel glanced at him sharply. Trap did as well.
Amaryllis nodded. “Absolutely. I’m not that in love with your leg. Maybe if it was other body parts, I’d have to think about that.” She squeezed his hand and then angled her body closer to watch Rubin. “Do you mind if I see as well? Maybe I screwed something up.”
Malichai’s heart contracted hard. She was hoping she missed something, willing to take blame if that would be the cause of whatever was happening. He knew that was impossible. Rubin had worked right alongside her. Even though they’d taken different parts of the bone, Rubin would have overseen her work.
“You didn’t screw anything up, Amaryllis,” Rubin assured. “This is Joe Spagnola, a healer like you.”
Joe nodded to Amaryllis. “Get up on the bed and come in from the other side.”
Malichai would have laughed if he hadn’t been the patient. He felt like an experiment with mad scientists gathered around him. Amaryllis crawled up on the bed and lifted her palms up in the same way the others had.
Rubin barely acknowledged her request with more than a slight nod. There was pure concentration on his face and a little frown that boded ill for Malichai.
“Talk, you two,” Trap said. “I have to know everything to figure this out.”
Trap was the brain, the one Malichai could count on. If there was a puzzle to be solved, Trap was the man to do it.
Light blazed under Amaryllis’s palms. Heat increased a
gainst his skin, through it, straight to the bone. Malichai felt it like a blast from a laser. He kept his leg still, but it was difficult. The cool stream coming from Rubin was a counterpoint to Amaryllis’s heat.
“When you want to power down the energy, you have to breathe from your chi, your life force, feel it move through you into him, and your breath directs how much energy you use on your patient,” Joe said unexpectedly.
Immediately, Amaryllis changed her breathing to slow and even, following Joe’s instructions, and almost at once, Malichai could feel the difference in heat.
“Do you see how the light is bright, illuminating the bone and all the injuries? The heat and light are two separate things. You have to divide them in your mind. The fridge can continue to run when you turn on the stove.”
Amaryllis again followed Joe’s tutoring and the heat decreased by several degrees. Joe cleared his throat, his frown going to a scowl. Rubin’s face was absolutely inscrutable. Malichai switched his attention from Joe to Amaryllis. Her face had gone very pale.
“Just say it.” Ezekiel was the one who ordered it. Malichai couldn’t find his voice.
“The bone appears to be disintegrating into hundreds of fractures,” Joe said, giving the information to them without softening it in the least. Just straight business, as if Malichai could take knowing his bone was falling apart while they could be in the middle of a very real homegrown terrorist plot.
15
There was a long silence in the room. Malichai feared everyone, with their enhancements, would be able to hear his heart pounding. Ezekiel moved closer to him as if he could somehow protect him from what was happening. He leaned both elbows onto the mattress, up close to Malichai’s head, partially shielding him from the others’ sight.
“Joe, that isn’t helpful information,” Trap declared, sounding annoyed. “That doesn’t give me a fucking thing to work with. Describe what you’re seeing. Is it a fungus causing this? Is the bone weak? Is it brittle? What’s happening? The best I can do is look at it and it’s not up close like you two see. I get an impression at best.”
That was just what Malichai needed. Trap was always going to be that person in the room who took everything back to science. It didn’t matter that two people in the room were psychic healers and one was a psychic surgeon. Trap would come up with a way to explain it. Right now, he was Trap being annoyed and short with everyone because they weren’t giving him the data he needed to solve the mystery. Malichai was also very aware Rubin hadn’t said one word. Not one. He hadn’t looked at Malichai or Ezekiel. To Malichai, that was worse than anything Joe could say.
“What we see are hundreds of very small hairline fractures running from his ankle up to his hip. The entire bone is covered. All started from the original wounds. Not all of them, but where the bullets penetrated. Could the bullets have had some kind of coating—”
“Don’t speculate,” Trap snapped. “Give me facts. The fractures started around the original wounds, but not all of them. What does that mean? I’m sending to Wyatt as well. He might have some questions after.”
Malichai found that he could breathe again, and his heart slowed. He wanted to hear as well. Trap reduced everything to possibilities. Rational ones. Ones that meant things could be fixed given the mind of the man working the problem. Wyatt too. Wyatt was at home, guarding the fortress, but he still took the time to be in on the consultation in order to try to save Malichai’s leg.
He had good friends. Good family. He looked at his woman. Her expression was every bit as focused as those of the men around her. He had a good woman, a partner, as well. He let out the last of the fear and relaxed into the pain. He had to do his part without freaking out at the thought that like so many other soldiers, he would lose a limb. Like Jerry, who had thrown himself at a grenade to protect his squad, losing both an arm and a leg. So many good men, and he was about to join those ranks.
Ezekiel put a hand on his shoulder but wasn’t looking at him, just moved even closer, half sitting on the bed with his hip, his concentration seemingly on Rubin, Joe and Amaryllis.
“The fractures seemed to begin around the larger, deeper wounds, the ones that originally did the most damage, the ones that should have killed him,” Rubin said. “His artery was torn. I had to go in while I hauled his ass to the helicopter and hold it together to keep him from bleeding out. At that time, I observed that the wounds were reacting strangely, almost bubbling blood from each of the sites. I had a hell of a time keeping him alive just on that run to the chopper.”
Amaryllis gasped and jerked her hands away. She breathed deeply, looking as if she might faint.
“We need that light,” Joe snapped.
Malichai opened his mouth to protest the way Joe was talking to her, but Amaryllis simply opened her palms over his legs and whispered a soft apology, shedding that heat and that burning light right through his skin and muscle to his bones.
“What do you mean by bubbling? There was no mention of that, Rubin.” Trap sounded more annoyed than ever.
“I was running with Malichai on my shoulder, trying to hold his artery together to keep him from bleeding out and observing the wounds all while running up a very rocky hill. I didn’t have much time to observe each wound individually, Trap. I just noticed that the way the blood was coming from several of the wounds was different from normal. It stuck somewhere in the back of my brain.”
Rubin sounded the same as always, unruffled, but Malichai knew him. There was just a small underlying warning note, so low one might not hear it, but Ezekiel and Malichai had grown up with him. They exchanged a long look. He was upset, and that meant he was upset on Malichai’s behalf. Malichai’s stomach did another slow drop. This was bad. His alarm had gone off for a reason.
“Can you tell me how it appeared differently to you?”
“Blood can spray, or ooze, or just leak, pour, stream, but actual bubbling is something I’ve not really witnessed, not like that, where it was copious amounts.” Rubin, again, sounded matter-of-fact, but Malichai knew he didn’t want to talk about it.
“Interesting,” Trap said. “Did you get that, Wyatt?”
“Yes, and it was as much blood as you would expect from a bullet wound of that size, Rubin?” Wyatt asked. “Even with the field dressing?”
“More. And presenting in a very strange way. Almost like a fountain of blood bubbles.”
“You would have thought you would have mentioned that to me,” Trap groused.
“He told us when we asked,” Wyatt pointed out. “Joe, keep going.”
Joe didn’t hesitate, sensing the brewing volcano in Rubin. Rubin was a man who was extremely quiet, but if he exploded, he could take the entire team down with him. “There are no fissures starting from any of the lesser wounds. The cracks certainly are throughout the bone, including where those wounds are, but they didn’t originate there. In the larger damaged areas, where the bullets tore everything up, there are the beginnings of the fractures in the pitting—”
“Stop,” Trap said sharply. “You didn’t mention any pitting.”
“Sorry, Trap. Around each of those wounds in a large circle—”
“How large,” Trap interrupted again.
“Four inches on each of them. A diameter of three inches. Maybe a little larger.”
“I have to know exactly. At each wound does the diameter vary? Is it exact?”
Joe was the team leader and respected at all times, but Trap didn’t ever seem to notice or pay attention to protocol. He lived in his head, in his research. When he was on the battlefield or running a mission, he was entirely focused. He wasn’t a man who would ordinarily ever be part of a team, but he fit with them, and all of them understood his brilliance.
Amaryllis startled everyone by replying. “It’s exact. It’s a circle of pitting that is three inches out circling the original wound. It doesn’t vary, although on
two of the five larger wounds where the circle is, it’s off, meaning two inches above and one below instead of being exactly centered.”
“Damn it,” Trap burst out. “Can you fix what’s happening to the bone, Rubin?”
Malichai’s heart accelerated and he knew everyone in the room could hear it. He willed his brother not to look at him. He couldn’t look at any of them. Everyone had a secret fear. A dread that loomed over them. Since he’d been a child and he’d seen a man, clearly a veteran soldier, begging in the street, one leg gone, just a stub showing, he’d been terrified that he’d end up that way.
“The fracturing is clearly accelerating,” Rubin said. He looked down at his hands and then at Malichai. “With Amaryllis and Joe working with me, I believe we have a chance of healing this, but we have before. Amaryllis and I cleared every one of those fractures earlier today after Mills kicked his leg. They should have stayed gone but the time of return seems to be accelerating. Everywhere the pitting is, the fissures in the bone begin, and there’s a lot of pitting. We need to find the cause of the return. With the three of us, we can keep the bone clear, but it’s imperative to find the actual cause for the fracturing.”
“Is his bone brittle? What does he have in him? He has great eyesight. Bird? He swims like a fish. I need to be able to pull up all the data on him.” Trap was clearly frustrated.
“His bones aren’t hollow,” Rubin said. “They’re dense. Very dense. More than a normal human, which is why we’re careful about taking him to a hospital. We need our own doctors.”
“Penguin,” Amaryllis guessed. “If he swims like I do.”
“Can a regular surgeon fix what’s happening to his bone? One of us?”
Malichai closed his eyes. He already knew the answer to Trap’s question and he desperately needed comfort. At the same time, he didn’t want anyone to touch him. He wasn’t going to break down in front of his teammates. How many other men had lost limbs and had to face loved ones? Ask their woman to live with that loss? Ask their children to be okay with it? He was a GhostWalker and the government would spend any amount of money to get him back in the field, so he would have a prosthesis very fast, but he would have to come to terms with his worst fear.