It was an unnatural sleep. There were no dreams, no sense of time passing. It was less like sleep and more like nonexistence. When I woke, I expected that somehow Niko, Goodfellow, and Rafferty would still be standing in the same positions. They weren't. I was alone. A rustle at the doorway had me amending that. Mostly alone. A wolf stood there, its round yellow eyes fixed unblinkingly on me. The upper lip was raised enough to show a hint of pearly white teeth. Reddish brown fur bristled along its neck and the ears were flat to its skull. It was huge, male, and pissed off.
"What a big furry dick you have, Grandma," I sneered with a voice rusty from disuse. Opening massive jaws, it gave me a silent snarl, turned, and disappeared from my line of sight. With Red Rover gone, I turned my attention to the room and scanned it curiously. It was Rafferty's surgery. Mopping blood from the floor would be easy enough; it was cheap green linoleum chosen for that very reason. There were shelves upon shelves of medical supplies, a squat and ancient refrigerator that chugged on reliably, and no windows. The house was backed up to a nature preserve if I remembered correctly, but better to play it safe. What went on in this room wasn't for the eyes of your average Joe. There were three beds and I was lying in the one closest to the open door. They were all strictly yard sale quality, scarred, stained, and with the occasional kid's name carved into the headboards. "John." "Timmy." "Bobby loves Katie." I was dressed in faded blue scrubs with a threadbare sheet and blanket pulled up to my waist. None of it was in the style to which I'd become accustomed, not by any stretch of the imagination.
I sighed and focused on the ceiling. A crack ran from corner to corner and I followed it idly with my eyes. I'd fucked up. There was no way around that. I'd let two humans and a mutated goat get the best of me. I'd failed the Auphe, who very probably were now no more. Maybe one or two had escaped the destruction of the warehouse, but I wasn't holding my breath on it. No, I was most likely the sole survivor—on our side of the fence anyway. I was the last of the great and grand plan, which to be truthful I'd never much given a shit about. It was only the paycheck that had ever concerned me. But although I'd never cared one way or the other about the Auphe's success, I did care about myself. First, foremost, and always. I wanted freedom and I wanted revenge and it didn't matter in which order they came.
There was no time like the present. I used my hands to push up to a sitting position. Swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, I balanced for a moment and then stood. At least that's the way it ran in my mind. In reality, nothing happened. My arms remained still at my sides, my legs unmoving beneath the covers. The only movement I seemed to have was from the neck up. I could turn my head in either direction, tilt it back, or rest my chin on my chest, and that was the sum total of it. I might have woken up, but that goddamn son of a bitch Rafferty had made sure I wasn't going anywhere. He had paralyzed me, turned me into a temporary quadriplegic. Until he returned and lifted the hoodoo, letting my nerves talk to one another again, I was pretty much screwed. And didn't that seem to be the story of my life lately?
Now I had to wait. Eventually they would have to reverse what had been done. They had already made the decision; they hadn't let me die. It was what I'd been betting on. Niko had missed his window of opportunity. He had the chance and, from what I could tell, the absolute intention of ending my life. But he hadn't. At the last possible moment he'd shifted the angle of the blade to leave me alive, if only just barely. Since he hadn't killed me then, I didn't believe he'd let me rot now. And while Rafferty might have healed me, he wasn't about to become my caretaker, spoon-feeding me Jell-O for the rest of this body's life. At some point he would have to set me free. And then he better run like a cheetah because what I was going to do to him would make this paralysis look like a tropical vacation.
Even the fantasies of a sliced and diced Rafferty weren't enough to keep me from contemplating exactly why I'd let Niko take his next-to-best shot to begin with. However, if the fantasies weren't enough to distract me, the approaching voices were. I was peculiarly grateful. It was a subject I wasn't sure I wanted to study, even from the far corner of my eye. Tilting my head toward the door, I could see into the kitchen across the hall. The three of them came through the back door, bringing in the smells of falling leaves, frost-singed grass, and an icy wind. Niko and Robin sat at the table as Rafferty moved over to the refrigerator. Removing three frozen dinners, he shoved them all into the small microwave on the counter. Goodfellow watched, wincing, as the dinners were stacked on top of one another and the timer was jauntily spun with a twist of the wrist.
"This does not bode well," Robin said glumly, running a hand through wind-tousled curls. "I've yet to see culinary delights belched out by one of those devices."
"O ye of little faith," Rafferty rumbled. He slid a look at me across the distance. "Well, well, the baby's awake. Want me to put him back down?" he asked Niko.