Yumiko had all the normal contraptions connected to her: blood pressure cuff, IV drip, heart monitor, oxygen nose line and a finger clamp. Most of them would trigger alarms the moment they were disconnected. If the monitors were simply turned off, then the alarms wouldn’t sound. There remained, though, the problem that all the tubes and wires tied the bed into place. Without stripping off all the miscellaneous medical equipment, they wouldn’t be able to move the bed more than a few feet.
How to do this without getting caught?
Luckily Nigel had drifted to the foot of the bed and focused Talley’s attention on Yumiko’s crow feet by flicking the sheet to one side, uncovering them fully. Taggart shifted, blocking the officer’s view of Jane.
“Brilliant!” Nigel cried. “Her foot is anisodactyly!”
“Hey, hey, don’t…” Talley cried. “What?”
“Anisodactyly. It means she has three digits pointing forward and one back. It’s the most common of bird feet among passerine, or perching birds. And she has scales, just like a bird. They’re made of keratin; it’s the same material as hair and fingernails in humans and scales in snakes. In a bird, it also forms beaks and claws. This form of scaling is cancella. It’s really just a thickening and hardening of the skin to form a protective coating.”
With everyone’s attention firmly on the foot of the bed, Jane clicked off the blood pressure monitor, the oxygen monitor, and some other weird thing that had never been connected up to Hal all the times he’d been in the hospital. She slipped the IV bag off the stand and laid it beside the female’s head.
Out in the hall—finally—there was a startled yelp of pain and fear from Private Tapper.
“Stop, drop and roll!” Hal shouted. “Stop, drop and roll!”
Oh, God, he’d set the private on fire.
There was another scream, louder, and the fire alarm went off.
That was her cue to kick into high gear. She leaned over to pull the nose tube off the tengu.
Yumiko caught her arm and stared at Jane’s left hand.
“Sparrow is coming.” Jane tried to tug her arm free.
Yumiko’s gaze lifted to Jane’s face. Her eyes were the same electric blue as Joey’s. She frowned up at Jane.
“Shit, please tell me you understand English,” Jane whispered and then realized two important things. The first was that the IV needle had already been removed from the back of the female’s hand. The second was that the tengu was no longer shackled. “How the hell…”
The tenor of the screaming changed out in the hall as Private Tapper was blasted past the doorway by the high-pressure spray of a fire hose.
“Turn it off!” Sergeant Talley shouted, trying to swim upstream to reach Hal. “He’s not on fire anymore! Turn it off!”
“What?” Hal shouted back.
“What’s going on here?” A female shouted in Elvish. “Where is the tengu spy? Why are you playing with water?”
Sparrow had arrived.
“Jane, watch out!” Taggart shouted.
Yumiko had produced a scalpel from the folds of the sheet and stabbed at Jane’s hand. The blade sliced down her forearm. A foot-long thin line of blood welled up along the cut.
“Oh, shit!” Jane caught Yumiko’s hand holding the scalpel while trying to jerk free her arm. She realized that Taggart was about to put down his camera to help her. “Keep filming.”
“You’re bleeding!” He stated the obvious.
“Yes, I know.” Jane normally could easily beat any woman and most men at arm wrestling. The skinny female was stronger than she looked. “Give. Me. That. Scalpel.”
Yumiko head butted Jane full in the face.
Jane staggered back, tasting blood. She was, however, free of the tengu. She kept backpedaling, putting distance between her and the blade. Taggart caught hold of her and pulled her even further back.
Yumiko moved with inhuman speed and strength, vaulting from the hospital bed. She rolled across the floor and came to a halt beside the overbed table. The female stood, sweeping up the table, and flung it at the window. The glass shattered.
“We’re on the top floor!” Jane cried as Yumiko leapt to the sill of the broken window. For a moment, the female paused there, glancing back at Jane. She seemed unconcerned that she was dressed only in a bandage about her thigh and a black tattoo across her back. Nor that she teetered sixty feet up from the sidewalk.
She spoke a word and leapt out into the sky. Massive wings appeared on her back out of thin air. The wings swept downward with a loud rustle of black feathers, checking her fall.
For a moment, she hung in the sky, a huge black bird eclipsing the sun.
And then she was gone.
“What the hell? Where did she go?” Jane cried.
“Who cares? You’re bleeding.” Taggart put down his camera and focused on staunching the blood.
Sparrow came through the door like a storm trooper, an assault rifle leveled and ready to shoot. “Where is she?”
“She went out the window.” Jane waved her free hand.
The elf glanced at the broken glass and then pointed the rifle at Jane. “You let her go?”
Jane gripped Taggart’s arm to keep him from shifting in front of her. “No! She’d picked the locks on her shackles and escaped. We came to question her about the river monster that killed all the oni at Sandcastle. Director Maynard asked for our help killing it.”
“She had a knife,” Taggart growled in passable Elvish. “She stabbed Jane.”
“What did the tengu tell you?” Sparrow asked.
“Nothing,” Jane said. “I don’t think she understood English.”
A slight tightening around Sparrow’s eyes made Jane think that Sparrow knew that the tengu was fluent in English and thought Jane was lying. Yumiko did have a California driver’s license, which would indicate that she probably knew enough English to pass a test.
Jane had learned that the best way to stop an attack was to put the person on the defensive. “Do your people know anything about this monster? We’ve never heard of anything like it. Is it native to Elfhome? Do you have it in the Easternlands?”
“Why would I know anything about an oni spellworking?” Sparrow stalked out of the room.
Because she knew that the oni used spells to create the monster.
With Sparrow gone, Taggart turned his attention back to her wound.
“I’m fine,” Jane said.
“I know you’re fine. I also know it’s easier to do this with two hands instead of just one.”
Jane breathed out her annoyance. He was right. “Okay.”
“Let’s wash it first.” He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. He was wearing a quietly elegant, state-of-the-art smartwatch. In Pittsburgh they didn’t do much more than tell time, but most newly arrived people wore them out of habit. The friendship band that Boo and Joey made looped across the watchband.
Jane frowned at the bracelet and then her wrist. Hers was gone. “Damn.” She crossed to the bed and picked through the linens.
“What are you looking for?” Taggart ask.
Jane crouched down and scanned the floor under the bed. “It’s gone. Damn it! Did she take it?”
“Take what?”
“The bracelet that Boo and Joey made.” Jane tossed the sheets again. She was leaving bloody fingerprints on the white linen. “I had it on in the truck. It’s gone now.”
“Let’s bandage your cut before you lose more blood, and then check the video.”
The cut proved to be shallow and only alarming because it ran the whole length of her forearm. Taggart washed it with an antiseptic, applied antibiotic ointment, placed gauze over it and then wrapped her arm with tape.