Postmortem Read online

  There was no pressure on my palm, and Tony shook his head.

  “Please, you’ve got to figure out what happened. Can’t you run some tests?”

  I went into the cupboard and riffled through the supplies until I came out with a syringe top. I pulled it from the wrapper and turned back to Tony. “Just a few more tests that I need to perform to determine whether or not you have any sensation.”

  “Sensation? I’ve told you I can’t move my legs.”

  “But you also said you couldn’t feel me touch you on the bottom of your feet.”

  “What are you doing with that?”

  “It's called pinprick testing. I'm just going to…” I poked gently on the bottom of his foot, and he screamed, jerking his foot back. “Well. Look at that.”

  Tony's eyes went wide. “You poked me with a needle!”

  “I was performing part of the examination necessary to determine whether or not you have any neurologic dysfunction. It appears that involuntary withdrawal is intact.”

  Tony's leg slid back down and he looked up at me. “I still can't do it on my own.”

  The intensifying chill remained running along my spine and I watched Tony for signs he was using magic. Nothing came. Maybe it was only Derek. He probably didn't know I could detect him doing that. I hadn't made it clear to very many people. Only Aron and my grandparents really knew. Considering the possibility that my father might have given me something worse than dark magic, I preferred to keep that part of myself secret.

  “Why don't I run a couple tests and we can see what we come up with.”

  As I was talking, Tony began screaming.

  It was a piercing scream, so much like the kid with appendicitis I’d just left, only his was faked. It had to be.

  God, I wanted this shift over.

  “What hurts?” I asked.

  “Everything,” Tony managed to utter. “My head. My body. Everything! You’ve gotta help me.”

  I glanced over at Derek. He looked down at Tony, always the good nurse. “I’ll order a few tests,” I said before stepping out of the room and closing the door, at least muting the scream.

  Derek came out of the room while I was documenting on the nearby computer. “Are you going to order a CT?”

  “I wasn’t until he started screaming,” I said. “Psych is going to want it before they'd be willing to take him.” I looked along the hallway. The few people in the hall were far enough away that I could speak openly. I lowered my voice anyway. “Were you using magic in there?”

  Derek frowned and shook his head. “I don't use it around the hospital. I know better than to do that. Why?”

  “It's probably nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing? It must be something for you to ask.”

  “It's just a feeling.”

  “Were you using magic in there?”

  “I don't have that kind of control over mine. I don't know if my grandparents told you that when they asked you to keep an eye on me.”

  “Kate, I was only—”

  “I know what you were doing. I understand. It's not that I'm angry.”

  “It sounded like you were.”

  “More at them than at you. If they wanted to keep an eye on me here, they could have told me what they were doing.”

  “They care about you.”

  “That has never been a question.”

  Derek frowned for a moment before looking up at me. His deep blue eyes were piercing. “I haven't really asked you how you've been after everything that happened.”

  “How much do you know?”

  “Not a whole lot. Most was kept quiet by the council. They don't want anyone at my level to know.”

  “And what level is that?”

  “Look. I chose to work on this side of the Veil, but I keep a foot on the other side. I don't want to abandon that part of me completely. You have to understand that.”

  I didn't have the same feeling about the magical world and keeping a foot on one side. My preference was to avoid the magical world altogether. That was the reason I had gone into medicine, abandoning my connection to magic, not wanting to deal with it—or the council—at all. People like Derek didn't really understand. Most of them wanted to be a part of the magical world, wanting to exist on the other side of the veil. Most of them didn't understand why I wouldn't. Even my grandparents didn't really understand, and they recognized the need for my anonymity.

  “Well if it wasn't you, someone was using magic in there. Is there any chance Tony can?”

  “I don't know. I don't have enough talent to detect whether or not somebody is using magic, let alone determine where it comes from.”

  I didn't want to tell him that it had more to do with my other half than any sort of talent. The fewer people who knew that, the better it was for me—and for them.

  I look back at the door leading into Room 7. If it wasn't Derek and it wasn't me, then the only other possibilities were that it came from Tony or somebody else, but for me to feel it, they would have to be close.

  Unless his symptoms were magical in origin.

  I shook that thought away. That would only lead me down a different pathway, one that forced me back into the magical world, and I had tried so hard over the last few months to stay as far away from it as possible. I didn't want to have anything to do with the other side of the Veil. The closest I was willing to come to it was working with Derek, and I might even be willing to give that up if it meant I didn't have to deal with magic.

  “What is it, Kate?”

  “It's nothing,” I said.

  “It was something. I saw it on your face.”

  I sighed. I needed to at least test whether or not his symptoms were magical, didn't I? I might be the only one who could.

  “Maybe there’s another test I need to perform on Tony.”

  2

  The monitor beeped, and I glanced up at it. His screaming had cut off, which was good, but now he was basically unresponsive. Tony was young—young enough that he shouldn’t have any cardiac issues, so I suspected the monitor was nothing more than a blip. Strangely, there were a few extra ventricular beats. That could be common, but I didn’t expect to see it in someone his age.

  That wasn’t why I was here.

  “What sort of spell do you intend to do?” Derek asked, looking down at Tony.

  For his part, Tony laid generally motionless, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, making me increasingly nervous about what was happening to him. As I focused on the sense of the magic, that chill I felt along my spine, it drifted to the back of my mind. Was the sense real or had I only imagined it?

  It was real enough. I was certain of that.

  But now I had to figure out who was using magic.

  That wasn’t necessarily my strong suit. I had a connection to mine, but my connection wasn’t the same as others’, and certainly not like my grandparents’. Now that Gran had been promoted to the council, I had an in—and was more protected than I had ever been—but I still didn’t have the same connection to magic.

  “I don’t know what I can do. It’s not like this is a specialty of mine. And I have to go quickly before they come for that CT. I don’t like using it, but…”

  Derek glanced up. “Don’t you? It seems the reason you’re even here is because you don’t want anyone to know about your magic,” he said, lowering his voice with the last. I was thankful that he had the presence of mind to do that. Who knows who might be wandering through the halls at this time of day? It was all we needed for someone to hear the word magic and pop their head in and ask questions. “But I’ve seen what you’ve done. I might not be an expert, but I know enough to recognize power.”

  Yeah. I had power. That wasn’t the problem. What was the problem was that the source of my power came from my missing father, a man—or whatever he was—I had never known. When I was younger and still discovering my magical connections, I had thought my father was a dark mage. They weren’t so uncommon as to be unexpected, bu
t I had figured that if he was a dark mage, I was in danger. Anyone with dark magic had it burned out of them by the council, their way of preventing someone foolish enough—and powerful enough—from ripping through the Veil. What did it matter to the council that I had never even used dark magic?

  Or hadn’t until recently.

  And now I didn’t know whether my father was a dark mage at all. After what I’d seen—and done—I wondered if it weren’t possible for him to be something else entirely. It was something I tried not to put into words, but hiding from it didn’t make it less real. it only made me scared, and I hated being scared of anything.

  “Like you said, you’re not an expert,” I said.

  It was harsher than what Derek deserved, but the last thing I needed was someone poking around and trying to understand my sort of magic. The moment he did… well, I might have to disappear. There would go my chances of having a normal life, if they weren’t gone already. There would go any chance of becoming the physician I had studied so hard to become. Those in the magical world wouldn’t understand. To them, there wasn’t any reason for those with power not to stay connected to magic. Why avoid using it when you could access it?

  Leaning over Tony, I pressed my stethoscope against his chest, ignoring Derek’s pointed look—and the hurt in his eyes. Pretending to examine the patient at least gave me a chance to be close to him and see if there was anything that I could detect about the possibility of magic having been used on him. Nothing obvious radiated from him, and with his eyes closed the way they were, it seemed unlikely that he was the one using it.

  “Can he perform a spell while unconscious?” I asked Derek without looking up.

  “You’re asking me now? You agreed that I’m not an expert.”

  I flicked my gaze up to him. “Come on, Derek. Is there any way for him to perform a spell when he’s like this?”

  He watched me, and I could see the question behind his eyes. Derek still didn’t know what to make of me. Most within the magical world struggled to know what to make of me, at least those who got close enough to realize my magic wasn’t the same as theirs.

  “If he was really powerful, it wouldn’t matter if he was asleep or not, but power like that would draw the attention of the council. Hell, power like that sits on the council.”

  That couldn’t be it, then. I didn’t have the sense that Tony was some spectacularly skilled mage. He might be, but kids his age weren’t the typical candidate for that kind of magic. That left someone else performing the spell. For them to do so would require them to be close by, wouldn’t it?

  Then again, maybe they wouldn’t. These were the times when I wished that I had more than a passing knowledge of magic. I had grown up around it, but that didn’t make me an expert. Far from it.

  “If you think it’s magic, call your grandparents,” Derek said.

  I looked up. “Call them and tell them what?”

  Derek met my eyes and shrugged. “That you detected strange magic.”

  There was an accusation in the statement. I’d heard it before, but the last time, it had come from a more powerful mage. Aron had recognized that I had this ability. It wasn’t a common trait among mages, and those who had it didn’t usually hide from their magic, not the way that I did.

  I turned back to Tony, pressing the stethoscope against him. As I did, I reached for my connection to my magic.

  It was a deep-seated sense that burned within me, so different than the cold I felt when magic was used around me. My grandparents had ensured I knew how to reach for it, even though they didn’t want me to do so. Protection, or so they had said. Even though it wasn’t safe for me to use it, they hadn’t wanted me to be unprepared were I to have the need.

  But there had been limits to what they could teach. The way they used magic was different than me, and though there were similarities, there were enough differences to make it so that I had never been able to learn. I had always believed the reason to be because I had dark magic, and it still might be, but it was looking increasingly likely that the real reason was because I had a quite different heritage than I had ever known.

  When I tapped into the magic, I let it flow through me and into the stethoscope. At least this time I wasn’t using the stethoscope as a weapon.

  The magic hit Tony and bounced back at me.

  I gasped, jerking back.

  Derek was there, his hands on my elbow, supporting me. A worried look flashed across his face and he quickly released his grip on me.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  “I… I don’t know. It bounced back at me.”

  “Bounced back?” He frowned. “Why would someone place a protective spell on him like that?”

  “Is that what you think it is?”

  Derek glanced toward the door and I looked over to see two nurses talking softly out in the hall. I leaned over, pretending to continue to examine Tony, but not using any magic this time. If there was some sort of protective spell on him, then it could be dangerous for me to do so, especially without understanding the nature of the spell.

  “I don’t know,” Derek said, grabbing the IV tubing and pretending to manipulate it. “I saw a flash as you did… whatever it was you did.”

  I paused. “You saw it?”

  Derek looked over at me and nodded.

  There might be a lot of things that I didn’t know about magic, but one thing that I did know was that it wasn’t common for someone to see a spell. They might feel the effects of it, and if they were like me and able to attune to it, they could even feel it, but seeing it was something different entirely.

  Why would Derek be able to see it?

  I might wonder whether it had something to do with him, but then I knew better. It was my kind of magic that was unusual, not Derek.

  “If there’s a protection on him, then there has to be a reason. Either someone doesn’t want us to reach him and help him or—”

  “He’s dangerous,” Derek said.

  “What? No, I was going to say that they were trying to prevent his recovery. Why would you suggest that he’s dangerous?”

  Derek shook his head. “Someone comes in here without the ability to use his legs. A spell is on him, powerful enough to make him think he can’t walk, and there’s a protection in place that prevents you from getting to him? That tells me he’s danger… Oh.”

  I looked up. “What?”

  Derek took a step back from the cot, dropping the IV tubing. “We should leave him, Kate. I don’t think this is someone either of us should be working on.”

  “Why?”

  Derek glanced down, his eyes wide. Scared.

  “Derek?”

  “Knights use magic like this.”

  “Knights? As in—”

  “Dark magic knights,” he said, looking over at me. “They use spells like this to prevent someone from getting hurt. And that protection you detected?” I nodded. “That’s the work of the council.”

  I blinked, trying to work through what Derek was telling me but struggling with it. “Are you saying that he’s a dark mage? Look at him, Derek. He’s too young to have that kind of magic.”

  “Age doesn’t matter, not with something like that. I don’t know much about dark mages, but I do know that they gain power before they gain control. That’s part of the reason the council doesn’t want dark magic out in the world.”

  It looked as if he knew more than that, but I wasn’t about to argue with Derek over it. The council believed dark mages would destroy the Veil and, in doing so, they would allow demons or worse to cross over. Even the Veil hadn’t fully prevented demons from crossing, though it did slow them.

  Could Derek be right? Could this guy have had his dark magic burned out of him? That would explain why I had detected magic around him—and powerful enough magic that it left a chill rolling through me. And it might even explain why the magic had rebounded against me. If there was some sort of spell placed on him to burn off his magic, it
would make sense for the council to try to prevent some idiot mage—like myself—from using magic to detect it.

  I would have to be more careful.

  Using the stethoscope, I pressed it against his chest and once more reached for my connection to magic. It slipped out from me and through the stethoscope. This time, I was more careful with it, not wanting to simply slam it into Tony. I might not have much control, but I had to focus and use every ounce that I could muster. Power eased from me, sliding slowly into Tony.

  As before, the power bounced away from him.

  This time, I was ready.

  Using my magic, I caught the reverberation and pushed it back.

  I didn’t know what I was doing, and the chances were good that whatever it was that I tried wouldn’t even work, but I wanted to know whether there was anything that could be done. Mostly, I wanted to know whether there was a signature to the magic.

  In the time since chasing demons with Aron, I had learned that each magical practitioner had a distinct signature to their ability. That shouldn’t be surprising. Everyone had subtle differences that added up over time, ultimately creating each individual. Small differences became large when taken altogether. What I wanted to know was whether I could determine who might have placed this spell on Tony.

  But why?

  It wasn’t that I knew all that many mages, so even if I was able to detect the signature, I doubted that I’d be able to discover which mage had placed it. But knowing gave me something that would possibly be helpful later on. If I could know which mage had placed the spell, I might learn which mage on the council was the one to avoid. Gran and Gramps might want to protect me, but they also felt a desire to protect the council, and so far they hadn’t been willing to share with me the identity of any of the members of the council.

  Pushing the magic back into Tony took power, and I began to draw on more and more of my own to try and do so. As I did, I started to think I could do this, and if I managed to succeed, Tony might be able to walk out of the ER. As it was, if this wasn’t in his mind, and this was magic, then the possibility of him walking out went down significantly.