A Killing Gift

Five

April's eyes were closed. When she'd gone down like a wet noodle, the back of her head smacked the sidewalk hard. Two explosions went off at once. Her skull, like a baseball connecting with a bat. Her lungs, already screaming for air, further deflated on impact. April was no character out of a cartoon flattened by a steamroller who bounces right back. Uh-uh. All her training went for nothing that night. She didn't fight right. She didn't fall right. And when she fell, an evil dragon snatched the breath right out of her and flew away with it.

Seconds passed. She wanted to say, "I'm okay," get up, find her shoes, and get out of there. But her chest didn't rise. Her lungs didn't fill. There was commotion all around. She also had the sensation of a large animal, some beast from Chinese mythology, circling her body, breathing on her hotly. Marking her. She would have avoided that beast at any cost. But the grip of death held her as strongly as if her attacker still had her by the neck. She could not catch that breath the dragon had stolen.

The weight of defeat crushed her, and she could feel herself letting go. The next thing she knew was the screaming agony of air forced into her lungs. And Mike was talking her back into the world.

"Come on, querida. You're okay. You're okay." He said it over and over. "You're okay. You're okay."

Irritation filled her. What the hell did he know about that? She was not okay.

"You're okay," he said again.

A memory filtered through the black. April had heard those words her first year on the job when she'd been in uniform on foot patrol in Brooklyn. She'd just come on duty when there was a radio call of a shooting nearby. There, at the improbable hour of eight a.m., a young mother and her child on their way to nursery school had walked into a dispute between two males-what cops called a fight. April and her partner had been the first uniforms on the scene. They'd found the woman sitting on the sidewalk cradling her dead child in her arms, crooning, "You're okay. You're okay."

"You're okay," Mike told her in the same voice, then "Mirame." Look at me. As if he needed proof.

She didn't want to look at him. She wanted to float away on the cloud that had come for her. But her mother, the Skinny Dragon, reminded her that the heavens were the territory of angry ghosts and dragons. If she died right now, she would not be so lucky as to fly away with the harps and angels.

Did you get him? She formed the words, but no sound came out. The dragon that stole her breath had kept her voice.

Mike whispered in her ear. "The ambulance is here. We're moving you. You did good, querida; he didn't break your neck. You're going to be fine."

That line they always used finally opened April's eyes, and she came back to the horror of being a vic, lying on the ground. Somebody's jacket under her head. Probably Mike's. Poppy Bellaqua was holding her hand. She may not have a broken neck like her boss, but she knew she hadn't done good, not at all. Chief Avise was standing above them, arms crossed over his chest, shaking his head at her. She'd messed up.