I shied away from staring at her lest I make eye contact for too long- but that smile, at least, was something I wouldn’t mind remembering. Rosie was another story.
The physical Rosie was a small, slight, pale young woman with thin, frail features. The Rosie my Sight revealed to me was entirely different. Pale skin became a pallid, dirty, leathery coating. Large dark eyes looked even bigger, and flicked around with darting, avian jerks. They were furtive eyes, giving her the dangerous aspect of a stray dog or maybe some kind of rat-the eyes of a craven, desperate survivor.
Winding veins of some kind of green-black energy pulsed beneath her skin, particularly around the inside bend of her left arm. The writhing strings of energy ended at the surface of her skin, in dozens of tiny, mindlessly opening and closing little mouths-the needle tracks I’d seen the night before. Her right hand kept darting back and forth over the other arm as if trying to scratch a persistent itch. But her fingers couldn’t touch. There was a kind of sheath of sparkling motes around her hands, almost like mittens, and she couldn’t actually touch those mindlessly hungry mouths. Worse, there were what looked almost like burn marks on her temples- small, black, neat holes, as if someone had bored a hot needle through the skin and skull beneath. There was a kind of phantom blood around the injuries, but her eyes were wide and vague, as if she didn’t even notice them. What the hell? I had seen the victims of spiritual attacks before, and they’d never been pretty. Usually they looked like the victim of a shark attack, or someone who had been mauled by a bear. I hadn’t ever seen someone with damage like Rosie’s. It looked almost like some kind of demented surgeon had gone after her with a laser scalpel. That pushed the weirdometer a couple of clicks beyond the previous record.
My head started pounding and I pushed the Sight away. I leaned my hip against the wall for a second and rubbed at my temples until the throbbing subsided and I was sure that my normal vision had returned.
“Rosie,” I said, cutting into the middle of one of Murphy’s questions. “When was your last fix?”
Murphy glanced over her shoulder at me, frowning. Behind her, the girl gave me a guilty look, her eyes shifting to one side. “What do you mean?” Rosie asked.
“I figure it’s heroin,” I said. I kept my voice pitched to the barest level needed to be audible. “I saw the tracks on you last night.”
“I’m diab-” she began.
“Oh please,” I said, and let the annoyance show in my voice. “You think I’m that stupid?”
“Harry,” Murphy began. There was a warning note in her voice, but my head hurt too much to let it stop me.
“Miss Marcella, I’m trying to help you. Just answer the question.”
She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Two weeks.”
Murphy arched a brow, and her gaze went back to the girl.
“I quit,” she said. “Really. I mean, once I heard that I was pregnant… I can’t do that anymore.”
“Really?” I asked.
She looked up and her eyes were direct, though nothing like confident. “Yes. I’m done with it. I don’t even miss it. The baby’s more important than that.”
I pursed my lips and then nodded. “All right.”
“Miss Marcella,” Murphy said, “thank you for your time.”
“Wait,” she said, as Murphy turned away. “Please. No one will tell us anything about Ken. Do you know how he’s doing? What room he’s in?”
“Ken’s your boyfriend?” Murphy asked in a careful tone.
“Yes. I saw them load him in the ambulance last night. I know he’s here…” Rosie stared at Murphy for a second, and then her face grew even more pale. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.”
I was glad I’d gotten a gotten a look at her before she found out about her boyfriend. My imagination provided me with a nice image of watching the emotional wounds open up as though an invisible sword had begun slicing into her, but at least I didn’t have to see it with my Sight, too.
“I’m very sorry,” Murphy said quietly. Her voice was steady, her eyes compassionate.
Molly picked that moment to return with a cup of coffee. She took one look at Rosie, put the coffee down, and then hurried to her. Rosie broke down in choking sobs. Molly immediately sat on the bed beside her, and hugged her while she wept.
“We’ll be in touch,” Murphy said quietly. “Come on, Harry.”
Mouse stared at Rosie with a mournful expression, and I had to tug on his leash a couple of times to get him moving. We departed and headed for the nearest stairwell. Murphy headed for ICU, which was in the neighboring building.
“I didn’t see the track marks on her last night,” she said after a minute. “You pushed her pretty hard.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it might mean something. I don’t know what, yet. But we didn’t have time to waste listening to her denial.”
“She wasn’t straight with you,” Murphy said. “No one kicks heroin that fast. Two weeks. She should still be feeling some of the withdrawal.”
“Yeah,” I said. We went outside to go to the other building. Bright morning sunlight made my head hurt even more, and the sidewalk began revolving. I stopped to wait for my eyes to adjust to the light.
“You all right?” Murphy asked.
“It’s hard. Seeing someone like that,” I said quietly. “And she’s probably the least mangled of the three.”
She frowned. “What did you see?”
I tried to tell her what Rosie had looked like. It sounded surreal and garbled, even to me. I didn’t think I had conveyed it very well.
“You look terrible,” she said when I finished.
“It’ll pass. Just got this damned headache.” I shook my head and focused on taking steady breaths until I could force the pain to recede. “Okay. I’m good.”
“Did you learn what you were hoping for?” Murphy asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “I’ll need to look at the others, too. See if the injuries on them give me some kind of pattern.”
“They’re in ICU.”
“Yeah. I need to find a way to them without getting too close to someone on life support. I can’t stay around to talk. I’ll need maybe a minute, ninety seconds to look at them both. Then I’ll get out. Let you talk.”
Murphy took a deep breath and said, “You sure you should do this?”
“No,” I told her. “But I can’t help you if I don’t get to look at them. I can’t do that any other way. If I can stay calm and relaxed, it shouldn’t hurt anything for me to be there for a minute or two.”
“But you can’t be sure.”
“When can I?”
She frowned at me, but nodded. “Let me go ahead of you,” she said. “Wait here.”
I found a chair, and took it down the hall and sat down with Mouse and Rawlins. We shared a companionable silence. I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.
My headache finally began to fade away just as Murphy returned. “All right,” she said quietly. “We need to go down a floor and then use the back stairs. A nurse is going to let us in. You won’t have to walk past any of the other rooms before you get to our witnesses.”
“Okay,” I said, and stood up. “Let’s get this over with.”
Chapter Seventeen
I wasted no time. We went up the stairs, and I was already preparing my Sight. A nurse opened the door to the stairway, and I simply stepped into the first door on my left-the catatonic girl’s, Miss Becton’s. I stepped into the doorway and raised my Sight.