Holy moly.
If that many people were down, and a Knight of the Cross had been sent to deal with it, even if that Knight was me, it meant that there was a supernatural predator of some kind at work. A genuine Grade A monster. That was all mine to deal with.
Just me.
I guess maybe this wasn’t a beginner’s quest.
I slipped out of the room and into the next one in the hall, and found Stan. He’d been restrained as well as being sedated, which, dammit, should not have been happening in his condition. He should have been on saline and close monitoring until his body had a chance to process whatever combination of street drugs he’d been on that nearly killed him. He was in the same condition as the little girl, or worse—out of it, obviously suffering from some terrible dream and unable to escape it. His pulse was thready, his breath erratic, and his monitoring equipment had been jiggered—it was showing numbers that could not possibly have matched up to his respiration and heartbeat.
Someone had done this to him.
“Jesus, Stan,” I said. “I sent you into this. I’m sorry. I should have listened to you.”
He didn’t respond, though his head kind of twitched in my direction. There was something desperate in the little movement. I bit my lip and put my hand on his head. “Hang in there, buddy,” I told him. “Whatever power is given to me, I’ll use it to help you. I promise.”
If whatever had done that to Stan and the kids found me snooping around, it would be happy to do exactly the same thing to me.
My heart started beating faster. It took me a second to realize that it was pounding in time with rapid footsteps coming down the hall. Women’s heels. Click, clack, click, clack—firm and purposeful.
I had a couple of seconds to realize that my fear and the footsteps were connected, and then, just in case that hadn’t been enough, an open square, maybe four by four feet, made of red light, appeared on the wall, evidently tracking the movement of something hostile coming down the hall toward the door to Stan’s room.
I eyed the ceiling and muttered, “I get the point.” I looked around the room and weighed my options as my terror increased, and then ratcheted up more, and I panicked. I stepped into the bathroom and shut the door until it was almost all the way closed, and held very still.
The monster stepped into sight. She wasn’t much of a monster as they went—maybe five-four in the low heels, a woman of slender build with dark hair. She was of Asian extraction, and her name tag read DR. MIYAMUNE. Behind the thick, dark rims of her glasses, her eyes were absolutely crystalline blue.
As she came into the room, she paused, and her eyes swept back and forth, right past me. She didn’t look old, maybe mid-thirties, like a doctor who had finished her internship and was a few years into a specialist’s residency. Those blue eyes fastened hard on Stan, and suddenly she wasn’t just a woman in a white lab coat anymore. She changed, right in front of me.
It wasn’t a physical transformation. I mean, a camera wouldn’t have shown you bupkes. This was something deeper, something intangible. Her posture changed slightly, from rigidly proper into a more relaxed, looser-limbed tension. Her eyes narrowed. It was her mouth that was worst. Her lips just sort of lifted away from her teeth. The expression was damned creepy, and I felt a little sick to my stomach.
Monster is a subjective word. But the thing that was hiding inside a human shape met the definition. I held absolutely still.
Miyamune stalked from one side of Stan’s bed to the other, focused on him, then turned and paced back, like a restless lion at the zoo. For a moment she did nothing else, but Stan reacted. His soft sounds increased in pitch, and as they did her eyes seemed to brighten. She put one hand on the bed and ran it over his bedclothes, not actually touching him, dragging her fingertips along as she went, and Stan’s breathing became ragged, desperate.
She was feeding on him. Maybe on his fear. Drawing the life out of him.
Stan was getting close.
Well.
Time to saddle up.
I moved one arm toward the bag at my side, cloth making a soft whisper as it slid across cloth.
And she heard it.
I had my fingertips on the smooth wooden hilt of Fidelacchius when her hand and arm smashed through the wooden bathroom door in a shower of splinters, seized me by the lab coat, and flung me out of the bathroom and into the opposite wall.
I couldn’t believe the force of it. Miyamune’s arm tore through the rest of the door as if the wood had been damp cardboard, ripping the sleeves of her coat and shirt to ribbons while leaving the skin beneath untouched. I dimly registered that I was up against a being with supernatural strength as I flew, relaxed, and hit the wall as flat as I could, my arms slapping back as if taking a fall in judo, one of the other things Charity had taught me.
It worked. I spread out the impact enough to keep it from shattering any bones, and came down on my feet, more or less, hand fumbling for my bag.
Miyamune stared at me for a second, facing me from the far side of the bed, over Stan’s knees. Then, without taking her eyes from me, she reached behind her, as if she knew exactly where to move her arm, and calmly locked the hospital door.
Which did not, at all, send part of me into a gibbering panic. My hands shook so hard that I could barely feel the hilt of Fidelacchius as my fingers closed around it.
“One chance,” I heard myself say, my voice a pale ghost of itself. “Leave. Leave them. All of them. Do it now. And you have my word that you get to walk away alive.”
Her mouth curled up in pure contempt at one corner. “And who is it you think you are, little man?”
“All you need to know is this,” I said, and drew out the Sword.
There was a sound too musical to be called a shriek, too fierce and furious to be called a chord of music. From the old broken wooden hilt in my hand sprang a blade of light, three feet long and shining white. The sound of the blade’s birth settled into a humming musical chord, something low and ominous.
Miyamune faced me without any reaction at all. The Sword’s light reflected in two bright bars from her crystalline blue eyes—and the shadow that the Sword’s light cast on the wall behind her was not shaped at all like her. It was something hulking, with a leonine mane and a writhing tendril of some kind whipping around its head. Her skin, too, became semitranslucent in the Sword’s light, showing shapes that moved and shifted beneath the surface, some kind of grey-and-gold mush of colors, as if something far too large for it had been forced into Miyamune’s tiny form.
“I make you an offer, little man,” she said in calm reply. “Leave this place. Leave what is mine to me. I will permit you to spend the rest of your days exposed only to the nightmares you have created for yourself.”
“Sorry, lady,” I said. “I can’t do that. Step away from that man.”
I moved the Sword to emphasize my words. The chord bobbed and changed with the Sword’s motion, rising to a higher, tenser pitch as it edged closer, and lowering again as it backed away.
The only other time I’d drawn the Sword in earnest, the guy I’d pulled it on had panicked.
Miyamune kicked Stan’s bed at my legs.