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I PULLED ON my T-shirt. Agatha and I had a mild argument over Evdokia’s sweater. I wanted to put it back on and she pointed out that it was filthy and smelled of unnatural and very noxious things. We reached a compromise. She would have it washed and dried to get the wendigo guts off it and then I would put it back on. The witches told me to wear it. I saw no reason not to. My side still hurt, but the pain had subsided to a dull ache. I sat next to Doolittle. Agatha had brought us some iced tea and honey. The guards had made the tea, so for once I was safe from falling asleep immediately after medical treatment. Doolittle had a bad habit of lacing his tea with sedatives. According to him, it saved him from arguing with hard cases about taking their prescribed rest.
We sipped our tea. This was the calm before the storm, and I welcomed it. It was selfish, but there was something about Doolittle’s presence that steadied me.
“Who healed Ascanio?” Doolittle asked quietly.
“Hugh d’Ambray.”
“The same man who healed me when my neck was broken?”
“Yes.” The injury had left Doolittle’s legs paralyzed, but without Hugh he would’ve died. I never knew why Hugh did it. He asked me if I wanted Doolittle to live, I said yes, and he pulled Doolittle back from the brink of death.
Doolittle frowned and drank his tea. “Ascanio is seven pounds lighter than his last weigh-in, which was less than a week ago. Hugh didn’t just mend bones. He forced Ascanio’s body to absorb the bone matrix and build entirely new tissue.”
“Could you do that?”
“Yes, but it would take me hours. Possibly days. How long did you say he worked on him?”
“Maybe six or seven minutes.”
Doolittle’s face turned serious. “Let me show you something.”
He looked down. I looked down too, at his feet in white socks.
Doolittle made fists with his toes. I blinked to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. No, he was making fists with his toes.
“You’re getting better.” The relief washed over me. I was drowning in grief and I had no defenses against it.
“It appears to be so. It is possible that in a few years I may even walk again.”
I hugged him.
He hugged me back gently.
Something hot and wet slid over my cheeks. I realized I was crying.
“Oh no,” Doolittle murmured and patted my hair. “No, no, none of that now. If you do that, I’m going to tear up and I’m too old for that.”
I let him go and sat down. He cleared his throat.
“This chair, Kate, it isn’t a bad thing.”
“But you can’t walk.”
He raised his hand. “Hear me out. Before this injury, I had never been seriously ill. I’m a physician who understood what it’s like to be sick but had never personally felt the impact of a life-threatening disease or experienced a significant injury. This chair made me a better physician. It has given me a new perspective. Tell me, when you see me rolling toward you in the hall, do you see me or do you see the chair?”
“I see you.” Of course I saw him. He was still Doolittle.
He smiled. “My point exactly. I’ve come to believe that the word ‘disabled’ is a misnomer. ‘Disabled’ implies that you are broken beyond use. No longer functional. I’m quite abled. I may no longer participate in field operations, but I’m a better teacher now. I require additional arrangements to negotiate a flight of stairs, but I stop to smell the proverbial roses more often. I’m fortunate to have bowel control, and while my bladder requires occasional use of a catheter, I refuse to be defined by which functions my body can or cannot perform well. Quite frankly, I’m more than the sum of my physical parts. I’ve come to terms with my new life and achieved personal happiness. Whether or not I will recover pales in comparison. Does that make sense?”
“It does.”
I poured him more tea and poured myself some.
“I should’ve been dead,” he said. “I have no prior experience with this specific injury on which to base my judgment, so I don’t know if this partial recovery comes because Lyc-V is repairing my body or if this is the result of what Hugh did, an extended residual healing. I believe that every time the magic wave comes, it heals me a little more, but it’s not something I can measure. Ascanio should be dead as well.”
“But he isn’t.” I still couldn’t quite believe it. As soon as I had a free minute, I’d go down to the med ward and beat the shit out of Ascanio for his wendigo heroics. Assuming there was anything left of him after Andrea and Martina were done with him.
Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe all this was just wishful thinking.
“He’s remarkable,” Doolittle said.
“Hugh?”
“Yes. I’m a powerful medmage, but he is truly gifted.” Doolittle looked at me. “He’s a miracle worker.”
“Sometimes. Mostly he’s a butcher.”
“I’m trying to understand why.”
I sighed. “Voron, my adoptive father, found Hugh on the street in England. Hugh was seven years old. His mother died when he was four and somehow he ended up begging instead of being sent through the system. The homeless fed him, because he could cure them. When Voron found him, he was borderline feral.
“Voron took the boy to Roland, who determined that Hugh had an enormous magic reservoir at his disposal. His raw power is staggering, and Roland saw an opportunity. At the time Voron served as Roland’s warlord, but Roland knew he would need a replacement. Voron had no magic power. He was a supreme swordsman and strategist, but his time was at an end. Magic was growing stronger and stronger and Roland realized he would need someone who could use it. Hugh was in the right place at the right time. Roland gave him to Voron and my adoptive father forged him into a general the way one would forge a sword. He did an excellent job and that’s how Hugh became the lovely psychopath we all know and want to kill.”
Doolittle’s eyes widened. “He could’ve been anything. He could’ve saved thousands over his lifetime. The amount of good he could’ve done. What kind of twisted mind would look at that miracle child and make him into a killer?”
“That’s how Roland works. He sees the hidden potential in people.”
Doolittle drew back. “That’s not potential.”
“Yes, it is. Hugh enjoys what he does. He’s frighteningly good at it.”
Doolittle shook his head.
I rose. “Look out the window.”
Doolittle rolled his chair up to the window and looked down at the courtyard for a moment.
“What did you see?”
“People working.”
I turned to the window, glanced down briefly, and then turned my back to it. “Left tower, four people, two men on top working on the scorpio, a woman in the second-floor window with a crossbow, a man on the balcony. Courtyard left to right: two women in the far left corner working on a Jeep; Jim, talking to Yolanda and Colin, who are his trackers; a man and two teenagers carrying beams, probably to reinforce the gate. The man has a knee injury and favors his left leg.”
“Three teenagers,” Doolittle said. “One caught up while you were talking.”
“This is how I was trained. It’s part of the skill set I needed to survive. This is what I do. If I had to, I could go through that courtyard with a sword and cut my way through them. It would cost me, but at the end I would kill or maim all of them and on some deep level I would enjoy it, because I would be doing what I’m good at, what I’ve been trained to do. Hugh is like me. You look at him and see the special child who was diverted from his path. I look at him and see a man who revels in what he does. Hugh could’ve healed thousands, but he would’ve never been as happy as when he slaughtered the Order’s knights in their own chapterhouse.”
“It’s not always about one’s personal happiness. Sometimes it has to be about the obligation we have to others. A duty to pay back for the gift you were given.”
“Is that why you became a physician?”
Doolittle sighed. “I was already a physician, a very freshly minted one, but still a physician, when I realized I had medical magic. It came together with the shapeshifting. That last bit I had kept to myself. I wasn’t sure what to think or how to handle it. At that point, medical magic was new, and to have someone with the capability who already had medical knowledge was very rare. I was one of two physicians with medmage abilities in our graduating class. Jim’s father, Eric Shrapshire, was the other. We both found ourselves in a delicate position. There was a lot of pressure to go into research. We both received offers to go private, catering to a single family on an exclusive basis. A lot of the offers were very lucrative and I was seriously considering some of them.”
“So why didn’t you take them?”
“One night Eric called me and told me that he’d made up his mind. He’d watched a documentary on loupism. It affected him deeply and he realized this was his calling. In the chaos of post-Shift Atlanta, he realized that shapeshifters, with their regeneration and resistance to diseases, would be overlooked. The attention of the medical community would center on human diseases, because regular humans would be the most vulnerable. Normal people saw shapeshifters as monsters, and monsters would be the last on the list no matter how much they needed help. He felt he could make a real difference by working to aid shapeshifters.” Doolittle looked up at me. “He didn’t know I was one of the ‘monsters.’ He saw people in need being neglected and he chose to help them. He felt it was his duty, while I was selfishly trying to select the best combination of benefits and money. I decided then that I could do no less.”
Jim’s father had died for what he believed in. One day he was brought a child who’d gone loup and committed multiple murders. Despite this, he had hidden her rather than euthanizing her, as required by law. The crime was discovered, he was convicted, and in the first week of his jail sentence, another inmate stabbed him to death. Years later Jim had tracked down his father’s killer and made him pay.
“I had joined the Pack,” Doolittle said. “Took a new name. Beatrice, Aunt B, had vouched for me. She and my wife had been best friends.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“She passed away a long time ago. In another life.”
“If you hadn’t become the monster doctor, would you still practice medicine?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Hugh and I would still practice murder. We’re two sides of the same coin.”
“Exactly,” Doolittle said. “The opposite sides. Why did you choose to work for the Guild?”
“Partially because I was hiding in plain sight.”
“And?”
It was my turn to sigh. “Because I wanted to be happy with what I did with my life. I had done some things when I was a child. I don’t blame myself for them. I did them because the adult in my life directed me to do them and praised me when I succeeded. But when I grew up, looking back at what I had done became difficult. I wanted to help someone for a change. The Guild let me choose which jobs I took, and I got to be ‘the good guy,’ if only for a while.”
“And that’s the crucial difference between you and Hugh. He’s an aggressor, and you’re the protector.” Doolittle leaned forward. “You could’ve been a hired killer or someone’s private weapon. Instead you chose to protect everyone around you. It’s as natural to you as breathing and I selfishly count myself to be very lucky to benefit from that, even if that urge sometimes takes you too far.”
The way he said “too far” threw me right back to a few months ago, when he had come to after Hugh had healed him. I sat down so we would be on the same level. This had to be said. I just didn’t know how to say it. I decided to just barrel right through it. “You don’t have to worry. I know how you feel about my particular brand of magic. I hope it never comes to that, but if it does, I won’t pull you back from death like I did Julie.”
What I had done to Julie wasn’t healing. She didn’t know it, but it made her unable to refuse a direct order from me. I remembered the fear in Doolittle’s eyes when he regained consciousness and thought I had taken away his free will with my magic. Sometimes I dreamed about that, too.
Doolittle froze for a painful second. His voice was quiet. “Was I that easy to read?”
“You had just come back from death,” I said.
“I meant no offense. When I spoke about going too far, I meant that your urge to protect sometimes ends with you being hurt. You take on too much. But we might as well get this out in the open. I appreciate everything you’re willing to do, but I won’t live as anyone’s slave. My family has been legally free since 1865 and I won’t surrender my freedom no matter how benevolent of a master I’ll get. I would rather be dead.”
“I understand,” I told him.
We sat quietly for a few long moments.
Doolittle reached over and touched my hand. “Your brand of magic is . . .”
“Evil?”
“I was going to say frightening. I don’t fear you. I don’t fear who you want to be. I do fear who you might become in spite of yourself. But you don’t need to be defined by your magic or an old man’s fears. There is a good word for the kind of person you are—honorable. It might be old-fashioned, but it fits. I’m glad I have the privilege of knowing you.”
I forced a smile. “Even if I don’t follow your prescriptions and you have to drug me with your iced tea to keep me off my feet?”
Doolittle smiled. “Even so. Speaking of prescriptions, you are to stay off your feet for as long as you can.”
“Absolutely.” I got up. “I’ll open the door for you.”
Doolittle growled. “At least have the decency to wait to ignore me until I leave.”
“Ehh, sorry.” I held the door open for him.
“My life would be much easier without so many hard cases in it,” he grumbled.
“You love us, Doc. You know you do. We keep you busy. Without us, there’s no guessing what sort of trouble your idle hands would lead you into.”