It was raining inside her skull.
“Wha . . .”
Fingers turned her head so she could look at that terrible face with its terrible smile.
“Wha . . . are . . . you?”
Tess stared at her, then breathed in deep and sighed as if she’d just tasted something wonderful. “You monkeys have no word for what I am.”
Her face was turned again so her eyes stared out the windshield that showed her nothing but snow. The car door closed.
Asia’s mind continued to break. Her body continued to break. Nerves finally screamed their warnings of pain, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.
And inside her skull, it continued to rain.
Tess squeezed through the door at the back of the parking lot, then pushed it closed.
In ancient times, there had been a name for her kind. But the naming attracted the named, so the word was said to be cursed. As races and languages changed, the symbol of the word, still recognized in the primal part of the human mind, was never translated into newer languages. Which was why, beyond a few whispered myths, even the rest of the terra indigene no longer knew about Namid’s most ferocious predator.
Long ago, there had been a word for her kind. Then, as now, it meant “harvester of life.”
CHAPTER 28
A car was stuck in the intersection, blocking traffic in every direction.
“No,” Louis said as a man got out of that car and walked away. “No. You can’t do that.”
Monty watched the man and instinctively braced himself. “Louis, he’s trying to run from something.”
Lightning struck the intersection, thunder shook everything on the street, and a gust of wind shoved the car out of the intersection as a sleigh raced by, heading for the hospital.
“Follow the sleigh.” Monty’s heart slammed against his chest. He could think of one person in the Courtyard who, if injured, would need human help. And if Meg Corbyn was in that sleigh, everyone in the hospital was at risk if the terra indigene reacted badly.
As if the blizzard wasn’t a bad enough reaction.
Louis didn’t ask questions. He turned right on Main Street and went after the sleigh, driving down a street that was suddenly cleared of all obstacles.
As they approached Lakeside Hospital, Monty pointed and said, “There.”
Nodding, Louis started to make the turn into the emergency-care entrance.
The sleigh was parked right in front of the emergency-care doors. The horses—one black and one white—tossed their heads and stamped their feet. Lightning cracked the sky while thunder shook the car right off the pavement. It ended up packed against the snow mounded beside the emergency-care entrance.
“Damn it,” Louis said softly, looking at the wall of snow against the driver’s side of the car. “You need backup?”
Monty pushed his door open. “Don’t know. You get the car out of the way of the ambulances first.”
“Right.”
Monty struggled to walk up the slight incline to the emergency-care doors, keeping his head down in an effort to see—and breathe. Whiteout conditions. Killer wind chill. And there, suddenly standing between him and the doors, were two females.
Not human, he thought as they watched him approach. Not Other in the way the shifters and vampires were Other. Elementals. He swallowed fear and refused to think about which ones he was dealing with.
“I’m Lieutenant Montgomery. I’m a friend of Ms. Corbyn.” Maybe that was stretching the truth, but right now he’d stretch the truth until it broke if it got him inside so he could find out what happened.
“Our Meg is inside,” the white-haired one said.
“She’s hurt?”
“Yes.”
He heard the rage in her voice, her hatred for the human race.
“I would like to help.”
She stared at him with those inhuman eyes. Then she stepped aside. “Tell the monkeys that this storm will not end until Simon Wolfgard says our Meg will get well.”
Monty bolted inside, intending to grab anyone who might know where Meg Corbyn could be found. Seeing a nurse, he reached for his badge. Before he could say anything, he heard a yip, a startled yell, and an enraged voice roaring, “She needs human medicine, so we brought her here. Now fix her!”
Monty ran toward the commotion. He slammed into a fur-covered but otherwise naked Simon Wolfgard, breaking the Wolf’s clawed hold on a pale but angry doctor.
“Mr. Wolfgard!” Monty shouted. “Simon!”
Something wrong with the eyes, Monty thought. More than being neither human nor Wolf in form.
Someone whimpered nearby. He glanced at another terra indigene who was crouched on the floor, cradling a blanket-wrapped Meg Corbyn.
“Mr. Wolfgard, let me talk to the doctor. Let me help,” he said firmly when Simon snarled at him. The Wolf didn’t lunge at any of them, so Monty took the doctor by the arm and led him a few steps away.
“I’m Lieutenant C. J. Montgomery, Lakeside Police Department.”
“Dr. Dominick Lorenzo. Look, Lieutenant, we’ve got ambulances fighting to get here with people who need our help. We can’t be indulging them just because—”
“Sir, I understand your feelings. But she’s human, and she’s their Liaison. They came here for help. Unless she gets the very best care you can provide, this city will never see another spring. I’m sorry to place this burden on you, but the lives of everyone in Lakeside are now in your hands.”
Lorenzo glanced toward the entrance. “You can’t know the storm won’t end.”
“Yes, sir, I can, because the fury driving this storm was standing outside this hospital a minute ago and told me flat-out that our lives depend on their Liaison getting well.”
“Gods above and below,” Lorenzo muttered. Squaring his shoulders, he strode back to where Simon Wolfgard stood trembling with rage.
“Do you know what happened to your friend?” he asked.
“She fell through the ice when she was running from the enemy,” Simon snarled.
“Most likely hypothermia, but we’ll make sure nothing else is going on,” Lorenzo said. “Let’s get her into the exam room at the end.”
Snatching Meg from the other terra indigene male, Simon followed Dr. Lorenzo. Monty followed them, and the other male trailed after him.
Monty half listened to Lorenzo’s rapid instructions to the nurses who were getting Meg out of her wet clothes. Before the doctor could close the exam-room door, Simon muscled in, leaving Monty with little choice except to go in with him and hold him away from the doctor and nurses.
Turning his face to give Meg that much privacy, he whispered to Simon, “What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?”
The question brought back some of the thinking intelligence in Wolfgard’s eyes. “I feel . . . angry.”
“Did you take anything before you started feeling angry?” Any drugs? Not likely, but it was possible Simon had ingested something without realizing it.
Simon shook his head, his eyes fixed on the people touching Meg.
Then a nurse sucked in a breath. Turning his head, Monty looked at Meg Corbyn’s bare arms and saw the evenly spaced scars—and the crosshatch of scars on her left arm. Answering the unspoken question in Lorenzo’s eyes, he said, “Yes, she’s a cassandra sangue.”