Untouched The Girl in the Box

Chapter 14



“You!” I awoke to the sound of Dr. Perugini’s less-than-dulcet tones. I stared up at her when my eyes opened. Her dark complexion was flushed, her eyes on fire as she glared down at me in the hospital bed. I took in the medical bay around me and saw Clary in the bed next to me, a bandage over his eye. Scott Byerly was across the way, Kat at his side, casting the occasional furtive glance at me.

The doctor poked her thin index finger in my face. “You keep causing me so many problems!” She let out a string of curses in her native Italian. “I used to have a nice, peaceful life! Since you get here I have nothing but bodies all the time! Before, I work on my novel and clean my instruments. Since you show up, all I do is fix hurt people!”

I coughed and tried to sit up. “Your job description includes that, I believe.” Her eyes blazed and she pulled her finger out of my face and grabbed a tongue depressor out of her jacket pocket. Without a word she poked me in the side. “OW!” She did it again. “OW OW! What the hell?! Were you absent the day you were supposed to take the Hippocratic Oath?” My fingers found my wounded side where she had poked me. “Pretty sure it includes something about not doing harm.”

“Not doing harm?” She thrust the tongue depressor in my face and wagged it at me. “You are a fine one to talk! All you do is harm—to yourself and others! All I do is clean up your messes! You are a menace!” The way she said it made me chuckle, which did not improve her mood. She whirled and marched away from me, back to her office. She slammed the door and dropped the blinds, giving me one last glower before her face disappeared.

“You awake, girl?” Clary’s stupid drawl drew my attention to him. He was laying on his back one bed over, a bandage over his eye.

“No, I’m talking in my sleep.” I tilted my head to look at him. “What do you want?”

“That was a cheap shot, blowing me out the back of the building. Hurt a lot too, when I woke up.” He blinked with his one good eye.

“Oh, yeah?” I adopted a disinterested tone. “I’m so not sorry.” It took a minute for him to register what I’d said.

“Yeah, well, I’m not sorry I busted your guts.” He guffawed. “That was the best tussle I’ve had in a long time. Cojones. Girl, you got ‘em.”

“Actually, I don’t.” I turned away from him and stared straight up. “But it doesn’t surprise me that you wouldn’t know that about women.”

He looked at me, blank. “That was a good fight, you hear me? That was good.” He put his hands behind his head and leaned back and smiled like he’d just won a prize.

I was about to tell him just how dumb I thought he was when the door clicked open. “I can assure both of you that what you did in the cafeteria was not good.” Ariadne stood silhouetted in the entry to the medical bay, a paper in her hand and a fury in her eyes that was only a couple degrees shy of what I’d seen from Dr. Perugini. “Thirteen people with minor injuries, Byerly—” she seemed to be flustered, searching for a word, “—soul drained or death touched or whatever, Clary lost an eye, Sienna with a host of broken bones and severe blood loss, and OH, let’s not forget! Over a million dollars in damage to the cafeteria!”

She made it across the medical bay and slapped the folder in her hand down on Clary’s tray. “She’s not even eighteen, Clary! Did it not even occur to you that she might have made a rash decision—a mistake—in attacking Byerly?”

“Well, no,” the big man said. “She was draining him pretty hard. I just wanted to put her down, you know—”

“Rhetorical question, Clary!” She thumped her hand on the tray, stunning him into silence. “Try to pretend you’ve never assaulted anyone before! It’s not your job to break up a cafeteria altercation by bludgeoning the offender to death; it’s your job to pursue the dangerous metahumans we send you after.” She pulled back after delivering the last directly to his face, causing him to flinch. “Get it straight. You’re not a four-year-old. Keep your damned hands to yourself and stop looking for a fight everywhere you go.”

“But—”

“If the next words out of your mouth are anything besides ‘Yes ma’am, I’ll never do anything like it again’ then I will personally have Bastian come down here and deal with you.” She faded. “He wanted to, desperately.” Clary shrank away, almost seeming to recede into the bed.

I snorted and instantly regretted it. Ariadne turned her withering stare on me. “Don’t get me started on you.”

I coughed and tried to look contrite. “I’m sorry. I...overreacted when Scott put his hand on me.”

She continued to stare for a second longer then shook her head in disbelief. “Overreacted? You nearly killed him. How is that an overreaction?”

I thought about it for a moment and shrugged. “Because it sounds better than the way you put it. He wanted to see what I could do in the worst way. So I showed him. In the worst—”

She let out a noise of disgust. “Is that how you’re going to operate if we train you to be an agent?”

Clary looked up in surprise. “You’re gonna make her an agent?”

“Shut up,” Ariadne spat at him and whipped her head back around to me. “You wrecked the cafeteria and blew up the kitchen. You could have killed somebody.”

“Um,” I shook my head, “I believe that the persons most likely to have gotten killed today were myself and Byerly, in that order.”

“What about me?” Clary’s face was puckered, as though he were insulted by what I said.

“You don’t count.” I looked to Ariadne, who was steaming. “He was trying to kill me! I just repaid the favor.” I looked down. “If it’s going to be a...um...an insurmountable obstacle—”

“It’s not an insurmountable anything.” Ariadne’s withering stare turned to a simmer. “But if this is what we can expect from you as an employee—”

“I didn’t mean to.” I said it low, almost under my breath. “It just got out of hand, I’m sorry.” An ugly thought occurred to me. “Oh, God. If I take the job, does that mean you’ll be my boss?”

She folded her arms in front of her. “Yes. Why?”

“I think that might be a dealbreaker.” I tried to sit up. “There’s no way I’m going to be able to not make insubordinate wisecracks about you.”

“Tell me about it,” Clary said, nodding his head.

“I said wisecracks, not dumbasscracks.”

“I think we can typically overlook incidents of...” she paused, “...over-exuberant verbal witticisms. However, failure to follow orders is looked down on, as is destroying campus property.” She frowned. “Or in your cases, the whole damned campus.”

I stiffened and wondered if she was accusing me of blowing up the science building. It didn’t seem fair, since I was being held responsible now for two incidents which were started by the houseguest in my skull, that mongrel that still needed to be housebroken and taught not to play with other people’s bodies.

“Be that as it may,” she looked daggers at Clary and then turned back to me, “we can overlook this, but any further incidents would provoke our full displeasure.”

Clary looked at me. “They’re gonna let you skate!”

I looked over at him. “Yeah. Awesome.” I turned back to Ariadne. “Anything on my mother’s stuff yet?”

“What?” She took a step back. “Oh. That. Our forensics lab was in the science building.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So it’s gone.”

“Yes.” She wavered, looking as though she wanted to offer me some sympathy, but thought the better of it. “I’m sorry.”

“Bummer.” Clary was nodding his head, then he brightened. “When do you start training? Cuz that’ll be fun.”