Healer's Choice (8 page)

Even with the ever-present smell drifting in from what Rebekka imagined must be extensive gardens, she knew the moment they’d arrived at their destination. Sickness tainted the air, the scent of medicine and age, and something else—the unexpected smell of reptile.

She’d healed only a couple of them before, women with exotic scales on sections of their bodies instead of skin. Snake outcasts were rare. Rebekka guessed they were probably as rare as those who could shift purely between two forms—at least here in the United States with its lack of rain forests.

It explained the secrecy. She would never have imagined a Were among Oakland’s elite. Then again, despite the association with the Iberás and the drive, they could just as easily be in a vice lord’s home or that of a magic practitioner who didn’t dare live outside the red zone.

Behind them a door closed firmly and a lock clicked into place. “Can you heal without having the blindfold removed?” Annalise asked.

“I don’t know. I need touch at least. I need to know the nature of the injury.”

“May I?” Annalise asked, her question directed to the left, telling Rebekka they were positioned at the unknown person’s torso or lower body.

The answer was given silently, revealed in the rustle of bed clothing.

Annalise guided Rebekka’s hand to rough, ridged, and creviced skin. “You’re touching a woman’s leg. The other is the same, covered in what looks like alligator skin. Until days ago she had a severe infection, something like gangrene. Are you familiar with it?”

“Yes.”

“She was under a doctor’s care, a man who would never think to seek help from the gifted. Some combination of the drugs he used in his efforts to combat the infection compromised her immune system. When that happened, genetics lying dormant in her were triggered. It is not so rare an occurrence as you might think. The Last War and what followed created millions of orphans and erased knowledge of their heritage.

“Amulets used to detect shapeshifters would not have reacted in her presence before this happened. Now they will. The amulets can be countered, but only you can restore her to a completely human form.”

Rebekka’s mind spun with the implications. She wondered how many of the brothel prostitutes had started out life fully human, only to have something happen to change them, trapping them in a nightmare of shape and a life no one would freely choose.

Beneath her hand the leg moved, drawing her back to the task she’d come to perform. She gathered her will, but even knowing the details, her gift remained dormant. “I need to see.”

In response there was the sound of a sheet being pulled up. It was followed by the feel of Annalise untying the blindfold and removing it.

Rebekka blinked against the brightness. Sunlight glinted off fragile crystal flowers, a vast collection that sparkled in rainbow hues of light and artistry.

Nothing of the woman who owned them was visible, save for where human skin turned into dark alligator hide at the thigh, and human feet became reptilian claws.

One glance was all it took. Rebekka closed her eyes, her will and gift combining, tugging at the exposed skin, pulling it downward and forcing the retreat of anything nonhuman in its path.

When it was done Annalise replaced the blindfold and they retraced their steps, taking a circuitous route until they were once again parked near the brothel entrance and the strip of cloth covering her eyes was removed.

“You have a choice of payment,” Annalise said. “Between gold coins and the favors we can call in, enough to buy the freedom of several prostitutes, or this.”

She lifted a leather-bound book from her lap and offered it to Rebekka. “Take a moment to examine it before deciding. It was written toward the end of The Last War, after chemical and biological weapons had been widely used. It belonged to a healer who was also Were. He didn’t have your gift, nor was he a medical doctor. He treated any who came to him regardless of whether they were human or his own kind.”

Rebekka carefully opened the book and scanned the neatly printed index. The script was small and concise, written by a man who lived in the days before the supernaturals made their existence known.

There were entries for salves and potions that aided in healing, as well as those used to reduce pain—and worse, to counter the effects of weapons she prayed no longer existed.

Her hands tightened on leather, instinctively resisting the urge to touch the hated tattoo. The Last War had been started by religious zealots, by people determined to cleanse mankind of sin. When terror and mayhem didn’t achieve their goals, they let loose a virulent strain of a sexually transmitted disease.

Millions had died as result, and with countries fighting for their survival and governments descending into chaos, there was no money for research or cure. Only time and the mutation of the virus had ended it. But even so, for years afterward, any human who was labeled a whore or a prostitute was marked, not just as a warning to those they lay with, but so they could be gathered up and exterminated like vermin should the engineered disease return. All this, when the weapons let loose in the name of ending war had nearly destroyed the world.

Rebekka forced her thoughts away from a past that had played out well before her birth. She paged through the book, reading the healer’s accounts of his work. If they were to be believed—and she did—then many of the salves and potions he’d discovered and recorded were better than what she left in the brothel for those times when she wasn’t there.

“Have you reached a decision?” Annalise asked.

A fist tightened around Rebekka’s heart at the choice between helping only a few, Feliss among them, versus easing the suffering of many, of gaining knowledge that could be shared and passed on and didn’t depend on her presence or her gift.

For long, agonizing moments she tormented herself with remembered images of the horrifying damage done to those prostitutes she called friends, the repeated healings. But in the end, despite the raw, jagged ache in her chest, she said, “I’ll accept the book in payment.”

 

THE mewling sounds of acute distress reached Aryck as he cleared the weed-covered metal fence and collapsed walls of what had once been an exclusive residential development. He shifted form, urgency making the change so fast and smooth that between one leaping bound and another he went from four-footed to two.

All of the cubs were in jaguar form. One lay still while the crying of the other three grew more piteous when they realized help had arrived.

Great patches of fur had been consumed, just as Caius’s skin had been. The scent of raw muscle and blood was heavy in the air, and, underneath it, infection.

A glance told Aryck what had happened. Debris had shifted, fallen, creating a pit and tumbling the cubs into it.

They’d struck a canister left over from the days of war, crushed through rust, and let loose a portion of the contents. Small, bare footprints and drag marks revealed Caius’s presence, probably emerging from a hiding place to help the others since Aryck doubted the older cubs had invited him to explore with them.

“Don’t touch them with your bare skin,” Aryck reminded the Jaguars shifting into human form around him. “Wait for the blankets and gloves to arrive.”

He crouched next to the still form of the oldest cub, hands clenching into fists to obey his own orders and keep from using them to determine the extent of the damage. Along the mental link with his father he sent images and a request for instructions.

It would mean taking the boys farther from camp, extending their suffering before it could be relieved.
Are painkillers being sent?

His father’s mental voice held no inflection, but it still conveyed a truth Aryck already knew. There was no guarantee any of the cubs would survive.

The Jaguars who’d followed with blankets and gloves arrived. Aryck felt his horror mount when the unconscious cub was lifted. The entire side he’d been lying on, including the fur on his face, had been eaten away.

He must have been first to fall into the crater, and if not the one whose body landed on the rusted canister and opened it, the one who’d been closest to it, with the others following him into the pit, perhaps landing on top of him so when it came time to drag him out, Caius’s strength had been drained.

There were teeth marks on the cub, indicating at least one of those wearing fur had helped. But given the damage Caius had sustained, and the fact he was in human form, with hands to grab and lift, he’d done much of the work.

Shock could account for the unconsciousness, as could concussion. Or there might be more serious injuries.

Aryck wrapped the blanket around the cub before scooping him up and standing.

Thanks to whatever painkiller they’d been given, the other cubs were now silent bundles in the arms of pack members.

“They need to be bathed as quickly as possible. We’ll go to the place were the stream pools in the cedar grove.”

“And the Tiger cub?” one of the Jaguars asked.

“He remains alive.”
For now.

PROPPED up by pillows on her bed, Rebekka became engrossed in the journal. It was more than a healer’s collection of cures. It was a window into his soul, a view of a world where bombs might just as likely hold contaminants capable of slowly eating a person alive as be constructed to kill anything living while leaving buildings untouched.

She shivered, glad she hadn’t been alive in the final days of The Last War. And when reading about them became too much to bear, she closed her eyes, preferring a fantasy where she healed the Weres fully, allowing them to
shift
and escape the brothels and the red zone.

Sleep came, leaving her defenseless. It held her under with an unnatural awareness, a disjointed sense of being awake even while dreaming.

In that state she looked up from the journal and saw the urchin standing next to the bed. He was thin and scabbed and pale. His clothing nothing more than grubby rags.

Her heart raced in terror at the sight of him, its frantic beating beyond the fear of seeing a stranger in her room. He smiled then, making his face beautiful as he reached out and touched her before she could scramble away.

“Tag, you’re it,” he said, laughing, his voice following her as she tumbled into a nightmare she’d suppressed since she was eight years old, his touch ripping away the shield hiding the memory of her first encounter with him.

It was before Oakland, when her mother was a caravan prostitute. They were in the San Joaquin, sweltering in the heat, as nearby the drivers and guards worked on the broken bus.

She was hot and sweaty, but curious, so curious about a world she never got to explore. When they camped her mother made her stay in the old bus that served as a bedroom for the prostitutes.

At eight she already knew to stay out of sight of the men who snuck away to visit the brothel trailer. She’d already learned she’d be beaten, or her mother would be, if she let herself be found when the policemen came around to collect sin taxes.

With the bus broken down, the prostitutes sat under shade trees, some of them beading jewelry to sell, others sewing clothing or, like her mother, sleeping, while a couple of the teenage girls splashed happily in the deeper portion of a wide stream.

No one complained about the delay. They were all content to miss a day’s work underneath sweaty farmers and self-righteous businessmen.

Rebekka hoped the bus stayed broken. So far she’d seen a rabbit with a little white tail, two black squirrels, a deer with a spotted fawn, and five lizards.

She stepped into the stream and crouched down, turning rocks over and squealing in delight when a tiny crawfish darted away. A yellow salamander followed, then a frog, which she gently scooped up in her hands.

The joy of each new discovery made her unaware she’d wandered out of sight until she felt someone watching her. She looked up then and saw the urchin.

He stood on the bank, gaunt and ragged, a rat perched on his shoulder. With amusement dancing in his eyes he reached up and stroked his pet. His smile and her own curiosity held her in place despite the trembling of her limbs.

“Looks like I found your hiding place,” he said, his voice beautiful and terrible at the same time. “Welcome to the game.”

The rat jumped, sailing across the distance to land on her bare arm. Its claws and fur were ice-cold and the feel of it touching her skin filled her with nameless dread.

In her sleep, Rebekka’s heart sped up as visceral terror swept through the younger version of herself, so strong it freed her from the spot she’d been rooted to and sent her running back to where the prostitutes were rising, returning to the bus so they could be under way.