Death Bringer

Chapter Two

“Hey, Jose. This is a colleague of mine, Vadim Morosov. Jose’s the charge nurse on this floor.” Ella waited as they exchanged pleasantries. “Is our boss here yet?”

“Mr. Feehan?” Jose pointed at the closed door of the hospital administrator’s office. “He’s in there.”

“Cool. We’ll go and join him. Thanks, Jose.”

He winked at her and she winked back before knocking on the door, Vadim right behind her. The hospital was its usual busy self, the hallways as crowded as the subway one minute and just as empty the next. She sensed Vadim strengthen his shields and did the same. You never knew what crazy magical shit lingered in a place like this.

Feehan opened the door and ushered them in.

“You found each other, then?”

“We did. What’s up, boss?”

“I’m not quite sure.” Mr. Feehan glanced at the petite blonde female sitting behind the desk. “Ms. Phelps, this is Ella Walsh and her partner, Vadim Morosov. When necessary, Ms. Phelps acts as a liaison between the hospital staff and the university. Perhaps you should tell them exactly what happened.”

“I’ll certainly try.” Ms. Phelps gave them a distracted smile. “Brad Dailey, one of our second-year medical students, didn’t show up for class this morning. As it was a scheduled test day, his professor contacted student-support services to follow up on him. This student has missed quite a lot of school this year, and Dr. Blinz wasn’t happy about it. He wanted to make sure Brad received an official warning.”

“So what happened?”

“One of the junior administrators called his apartment. Eventually Brad picked up and started screaming incoherently into the phone. The administrator alerted the emergency services, and they went to check on him. When the police forced their way into his apartment, they found Brad in the bathroom trying to rip his face off.” She shuddered. “At first the paramedics assumed he’d taken some kind of drug that hadn’t agreed with him, but after he was sedated and brought here, the doctors realized that wasn’t the case.”

“So what do you think is going on?” Ella asked.

“As I was just telling Mr. Feehan, I have no idea. The poor boy can barely form a sentence. The staff has run every test they can think of, and nothing abnormal is showing up. In these cases, we normally contact you.” She looked helplessly at Vadim. “I do so hope you can help him.”

“We’ll certainly do our best, Ms. Phelps.” Vadim said. “Is Mr. Dailey capable of speaking to us yet?”

“I believe so. He’s been restrained for his own safety, but the medication should be wearing off by now. Not that you’ll get much sense out of him. He’s just babbling.”

“What’s he saying?” Ella turned off her cell phone and stuck it back in her pocket.

“Something about that not being him in the mirror. A classic hallucinogenic drug response, but he’s not testing positive for anything at all.”

“Maybe there’s something new on the street. Do you remember the frozen addicts?” Feehan glanced at Ella. “No? You’re probably all too young, but in 1982 in Santa Clara County, right down the street from here, some addicts took a new substance called MPTP that brought on the symptoms of Parkinson’s and literally paralyzed them overnight.”

Ms. Phelps nodded. “That’s a possibility we are aware of, but until we can confirm anything, we’d still like you to take a look at him.”

“Morosov and I would be glad to help, wouldn’t we?” Ella raised her eyebrows at Vadim, who was still smiling at Ms. Phelps. “Can you show us to Mr. Dailey’s room?”

“Sure.” She rose to her feet. “I’ll make certain you aren’t disturbed.”

When Ella came out of the office, Jose handed over her white coat. “Here you go, babe. Are you free for dinner tonight?”

“Sorry, no.” She patted his arm. “But thanks for asking.”

“Ella’s busy.” Vadim added and placed his hand in the small of her back to usher her along. He didn’t say anything else, but she sensed both his sudden alertness and a hint of his magical power wafting around.

“Keep it down, Morosov. You’re like a skunk marking his territory.”

“That guy wouldn’t pick up magic if it bit him in the face.”

“Don’t you mean pecked?”

“You’re hilarious.”

“I know, and by the way, don’t call me Ella at work, okay?”

“As if I would dare.” His smile showed a lot of teeth.

Ms. Phelps stopped at the last door in the hallway. “Mr. Dailey is in here. I’ll ask the nurse to step out of the room, but she’ll be outside if you need her. If you require more urgent medical assistance, just press the red panic button.”

“Will do.” Ella went in first, nodding at the nurse as she passed her in the doorway. Brad Dailey was strapped to a gurney on the far side of the room. His face was bandaged like a mummy’s, and his terrified gaze darted around the space, fixing avidly on Ella as she approached.

She sat on the side of the bed and took his shaking hand in hers. A hint of residual Otherworld magic trickled through her senses. “Hey. I’m Ella Walsh, and this is Morosov. Can you try and tell us what’s wrong?”

His chest heaved and he started to struggle against his restraints, his hands turning into claws. Vadim came up beside her.

“It’s all right, Mr. Dailey. We just want to help you. Take a deep breath and tell us what’s wrong.”

Ella shivered as she felt Vadim push some kind of calming magic through her and into Brad. Whatever it was, it seemed to be having the right effect, as he slowly relaxed against the gurney and his breathing evened out.

“It wasn’t my face in the mirror. What the fuck happened? Who the fuck am I?”

“When you say it wasn’t your face, do you mean you saw someone else’s reflection in there with you?”

“No, it was just supposed to be me.”

Ella glanced at Vadim, who was listening intently.

“And it wasn’t your face.”

“No. That’s why I tried to pull it off.”

“You thought it was, maybe, a mask of some kind, a practical joke?” Vadim asked. “Did you get drunk last night?”

Brad nodded eagerly. “Yeah, yeah, that’s what I thought, that some of the guys had gotten into my room and stuck stuff on me to scare me, like, you know?”

“Medical students love their pranks.”

“But it wouldn’t come off.” Brad’s voice rose. “It was me, but it isn’t me!”

“Since you damaged your face so badly, it’s hard to tell what you looked like before this happened. Do you have any recent pictures of yourself?”

“Sure, on Facebook and my cell.”

“Would you object if we looked at them?”

“You can look as much as you like, but you won’t ever see me with brown eyes and black hair. I’m fucking blond like you.”

Ella checked out the thick black hair sticking out from the top of his head. It didn’t look dyed, either.

“Okay, so if we accept that you woke up this morning with someone else’s face, how do you think that happened?”

He went silent, his gaze fracturing, his whole body caught up in some internal struggle Ella could only guess at.

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.” Tears slid down his face. “What’s going to happen to me now? Who am I? What am I going to do? My girlfriend dumped me last night for being too immature, I sat and had a few drinks with some guy and that was it.”

“Did the guy come home with you?”

“Don’t think so. Although I’m not sure how I made it home.”

“Perhaps he helped you?”

“And took my face?”

“Maybe. Do you remember what this man looked like?”

“Not like me.”

“Like you now, or before?”

“Neither. He was like kind of older than me.” He glanced at Vadim. “About your age, but sort of average looking. You know, unremarkable?”

“Can you tell me the name of the bar you went to and your girlfriend’s name?”

“It was the Blue Flamingo in Little Italy, and my ex’s name is Penny Jordan. She’s a student nurse here at the hospital.”

Vadim was busy recording the information, so she focused on Brad. Part of her wanted to reach into his mind and extract the terrible memories, but she couldn’t do that yet. They needed more information from both him and his associates before they could make any firm decisions as to how to deal with his horrific recollections.

“Listen, Brad, will you concentrate on getting better while we go and gather more information for this case? It’s possible that something or someone did steal your face. We’ll do our best to get it back for you.”

“You believe me?”

“Somebody has to.” She held his gaze. “We work for the SBLE, and our specialty is solving cases like yours.”

“You’re like the X-Files.”

“Kind of, but keep that to yourself.” She squeezed his hand. “All we need you to do is hang in there. Something is very wrong, and we’re going to do our best to fix it, okay?”

He took an unsteady breath. “Okay.”

She stood up and Vadim walked to the door and held it open. Ella gave Brad a brisk nod. “We’ll be back. Stay strong.”

He nodded and they went out past the nurse. Ella kept going until they reached the sanctuary of the administrator’s office. Feehan and Ms. Phelps weren’t in there. She shut the door and turned to face Vadim, who was already firing up Brad’s cell phone and investigating his wallet.

“That poor kid.” Ella shook her head.

“He’s hardly a kid. According to his driver’s license, he’s twenty-three.”

“Don’t split hairs. Would you like to wake up and not recognize your own face?”

“Some days, yes.”

“Morosov...”

His smile was brief. “I agree that this is a difficult situation. Did you get a sense of Otherworld from him?”

“Yes, but that was pretty much a given, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. There have been some pretty inventive human serial killers.”

Ella perched on the corner of the desk. “You think the guy in the bar drugged Brad’s drink and brought him home, intending to carve up his face and kill him?”

“It’s possible.”

“Apart from the fact that we both felt Otherworld magic around him.” She chewed slowly on her gum and blew a big pink bubble. “It’s got to be Otherworld.”

“Why, because you can’t imagine a human doing such a terrible thing?”

“Of course I can. I’ve seen those movies with Anthony Hopkins.”

“Who plays a fictional character.”

“I know that.” She glared at him. “Why don’t you want it to be Otherworld?”

He put down Brad’s phone and met her gaze. “Because there aren’t many beings like that even in Otherworld, and those are usually incredibly powerful and well connected.”

“Damn.” She blew another bubble. “So we’re going to have a hard time finding this guy and executing him.”

“Oh, I think he’ll come back.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I just do. I’m going to suggest to Mr. Feehan that we restrict access to Brad’s room and that he’s monitored 24/7.”

“And I’m going to get hold of Liz and see whether she has any data about similar crimes.”

“That’s certainly a good place to start. Do you want to go ahead and leave me to talk to Feehan and Ms. Phelps?”

“No, I’ll wait. They’ll probably be back in a moment, and we need a ride from the boss, remember?”

Vadim subsided into one of the chairs. “I’d forgotten.” He passed Ella Brad’s cell phone. “He definitely doesn’t have black hair.”

While she waited, she flicked through Brad’s photos and then checked out his social-media pages. “Gawd, I hope his parents haven’t seen these pictures. If I was paying for my kid to attend medical school, I certainly wouldn’t appreciate seeing him grinning, drinking, and fondling women in every bar in the city.”

“I’m sure your parents felt the same way.”

“They never saw a thing.” She tossed him the phone. “That was one good thing about the empath college being in Otherworld.”

The door opened and Feehan came back in with Ms. Phelps.

“What did you think of the patient?”

“Well something’s not right, is it?” Ella slid off the side of the desk. “We’re going to talk to his ex-girlfriend and visit the last bar he was in.”

Feehan hesitated. “Ms. Phelps has a request.”

“What’s that?” Ella turned to face the administrator, who’d taken up her original position behind her desk.

“Brad Dailey’s grandfather is a retired senator for the state of Michigan.”

“So?”

“His father has political aspirations too. The family has requested that the information about Brad is kept between the hospital, the Dailey family and the SBLE.”

Ella cast a sidelong look at Vadim. “Like we’d gossip to the media about a case.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t, Ms. Walsh, but we’d just like to make certain we’re all on the same page. Brad’s parents are flying in later today to see him.”

“Do you think that’s advisable?” Feehan followed Vadim to the door. “If he’s obviously unstable, that might complicate things.”

“We’ll make sure he’s sedated.” Ms. Phelps stood too. “I hope to hear from you as soon as possible.”

“We’ll do our best.” Feehan held open the door for Ella and Vadim and closed it behind him. “She seems like a nice woman.”

“For someone who’s desperately trying to protect her ass. She’s got an influential political family breathing down her neck, which might affect future hospital funding, and she’s got to stop any stories leaking to the media about Brad’s stolen face.” Ella turned to Feehan. “I bet she’ll have Brad sedated. She won’t want him talking about any of this.”

She walked right into Vadim, who had stopped in the middle of the hallway. Feehan kept moving. “What’s up?”

“I think I’ll go back and see Brad and make absolutely certain he won’t wake up and scare his parents.”

“You can do that?”

He smiled. “Haven’t you ever heard of Fae who can make humans sleep a thousand years?” He turned toward Brad’s room. “Don’t worry, I can bring him out of it too. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”

Ella watched him walk away and followed Feehan down the stairs to the staff parking garage. Could Vadim really put people to sleep? What else could the man do? Sometimes it seemed better not to ask.

Vadim knocked softly on Brad’s door and waited until the nurse answered him. He gave her his best smile and she preened.

“I’m sorry to bother you—” he glanced down at her name tag, “—Delia, but I need to return Brad’s phone to him. Is that okay?”

“Sure. Do you want me to give it to him?”

“I’d rather give it to him myself. I don’t want him to think I can’t be trusted.”

“That’s fine. Go right on in.”

When he approached the gurney, Brad’s eyes were half-closed, but they opened when Vadim took his hand.

“Hey. Did you find out something already?”

“Not yet. I’m just returning your phone and wallet. I’ll put them on the side here, okay?”

Even as he replaced the items, Vadim concentrated on tracking that small and ever-eroding stream of Otherworld magic that clung to Brad like cologne. One taste was enough for him to identify a creature’s magical genes, his family, his connections and his power. After a moment, Vadim pushed more magic through Brad and waited until he fell asleep.

The nurse hovered at the end of the bed and Vadim nodded to her.

“Thanks for letting me see him.”

“You’re welcome.” She walked him to the door. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No, I’m originally from Russia.”

“How cool is that?” She widened her eyes and leaned against the doorframe, arching her back. “I’d love to go there one day.”

“You should. It’s a wonderful country.”

She glanced around and closed the door behind them. “I don’t normally do this, but can I give you my number? Just in case you ever need someone to show you around town.”

“That’s very sweet of you, but—”

“But you’re already taken.” She sighed. “All the nice ones are.”

“It was still a pleasure to meet you.”

“Same here.”

Vadim nodded and headed back down the hallway toward the bank of elevators, his thoughts focused on deciphering the myriad of messages from the Otherworld magic he’d sensed. When he first identified the power through Ella, it had felt vaguely familiar, and now he was sure of it.

He pressed the button and watched the lights of the elevator flicker downward to his level. He sensed Ella in the parking lot below him and concentrated on screening his thoughts from her. Of course, if he was right and the creature returned to seek his prey, he’d blown his cover completely, because like knew like.

The elevator arrived and he stepped in, his stomach sinking along with the descent. The magic stemmed from his bloodline.

From someone who was supposed to be dead.