Marked (6 page)

What the hell is she talking about?  “You mean the guy who just helped save my life?  Trouble’s not the word I would use to describe him right now.”

She looks at me thoughtfully.  Maybe a little disdain mixed in there, too.  “My friend didn’t tell me until now that he wanted me to keep you.  I thought this would be a grab and dump and we’d each go on our merry way when the coast was clear.”

“Who wants you to keep me?”  She makes me sound like a stray mutt she found on the street.  I can see her mind working, trying to figure out how to get rid of me without pissing off her friend.

“You must get hurt a lot.  The hospital supply closet isn’t as well stocked in bandages as your bathroom is.”  Roman is picking his way through the clutter again.  His hands are full of bandages and bottles and tubes of antiseptics.  My pain is about to get worse.  I hope he brought the Tylenol™ as well.

 But his appearance isn’t going to distract me from what Brielle just said.  “Who wants you to keep me?” I ask again.

Roman realizes he walked into a tense situation.  “What am I interrupting?”

“Ask her.  She’s the one keeping secrets.”  I sound like a cantankerous old woman.  Amazing what pain will do to you. 

Brielle sighs and rises from her chair.  She comes over and flops down on the end of the bed, causing my body to jiggle painfully.  Roman gently sits down next to me, more conscious of how painful I am when jostled.

“Fine, here’s the deal,” she begins.  “This guy contacted me about a year and a half ago.  He said he knew how my parents died.  Long story short, he told me they were killed by the djinn.”

Roman lifts my arm and sets it on his lap so he can begin to clean my wounds.  I try to distract myself.  “And you believed him?” I ask Brielle.

She shakes her head.  “No freaking way.  I thought he was a nut job.”

“What convinced you otherwise?” Roman asks.  He pours some peroxide on my wounds causing me to hiss sharply.  Peroxide.  Really?  Doesn’t he know it can impede the healing of road rash?  I’m going to assume he didn’t have a better option.

“He sent me information.  Scanned images of ancient texts.  I have no idea where he got them.  He won’t tell me.  But they explained that the djinn live behind a veil and can cross over into our world.”

“Behind a veil?  What does that mean?” I hiss as another hit of peroxide scalds my arm.

“It’s like there’s a curtain separating their reality and ours.”

Not helpful.  “Like a veil.  I got that part.  How is that possible?”

She sighs again.  “That doesn’t matter.  It only matters that they can step through the veil into our world.”

“And nobody notices these demonic looking things just walking through this veil into our world?” Roman asks.

“Did you miss the part about how they can’t show their true form to humans?” she asks this college educated man as if he’s too stupid to understand.  “Besides, they don’t all look like that.  Some of them always look human.”

“Then how do you know they’re djinn?” I ask.  After the peroxide pain, I don’t flinch at all as Roman puts antiseptic cream on and wraps my arm in gauze. 

“He tells me.  He can see the djinn.  And what they’re going to do.”

Roman looks at her.  “You haven’t really explained who
he
is.”

Brielle’s cheeks turn red.  “I don’t really know.  I’ve never actually met him.  But he sends me all kinds of information and he can see into the future.  Not far into the future, only like a few hours, and if something bad is going to happen like what happened to my parents, he contacts me.  And yes, I trust him.  I know you were going to ask that next.  I trust him because he hasn’t been wrong once in the whole time we’ve been together.”  Her face turns a brighter red.  “I don’t mean together together; I mean as long as we’ve been partners.”  If her face turns any redder, she may require amputation from the neck down for lack of blood flow.

Roman takes pity on her.  “What kind of information did he send you about Skye?”  That’s the first time he’s referred to me by my given name.  I don’t know why but a brief, stinging pain shoots through me.  Like being shocked by static electricity.

A flash of anger crosses Brielle’s face.  It’s fleeting, but it was definitely there.  “He’s never asked me to save someone before.  Usually, he tells me where the djinn will be and I catch them, bind them with copper and cast them back behind the veil.”

“You don’t kill them?” I ask.  I’ll admit it, I’m surprised.  Especially considering her arsenal.

She shakes her head.  “No.  You have to understand that when djinn die here, they revert back to their human form.  Some magic thing that was put in place eons ago.  The police would never believe that I wasn’t actually murdering real people.”

Good point.  They’d think she was a whack job and lock her up for good.  “Did you say you bind them with copper?”

“Glad you’ve been paying attention,” Brielle says impatiently.  “Yes, for a human, binding them to copper is the only way to control a djinn.  Things don’t work the same on their side of the veil I guess.  They have different rules and magic when interacting with each other over there.  I guess you didn’t really need to know that but now you do.  The problem for me is that I have to get close enough to them to say the incantation and touch them and the copper at the same time.  It’s a whole lot easier if they’re unconscious.  Hence the weapons.”  She sweeps her arm out towards her armory.

Roman’s having a hard time believing all this even though he had solid proof about half an hour ago.  “How did this person know that the djinn killed your parents?  And why would he contact you to do all this?  You’re small and far from intimidating.  It seems like he would have picked someone with a little more brawn.”

Brielle takes offense to that.  “Kiss my ass.  I can take down the djinn a hell of a lot faster than you could.  We could head back to the hospital and I could prove it to you.”

That’s mature.  The way this conversation is going it won’t be long until the only words spoken are ‘fuck you and your mother too’.  And Brielle’s going to clam up if we don’t keep this civil.  “Okay guys.  Enough.  Can we get back to the point?  How did your parents die?”

Petulance is trying hard to take over but Brielle fights it off.  “They were in a car accident.  Kind of like yours.  Only, they didn’t survive.”

Like mine?  Was their car sliced down the middle by a djinn as well?  “I’m sorry,” seems the only appropriate thing to say at the moment.

Brielle gets up from the bed and walks to the small refrigerator in her tiny, cluttered kitchen area and takes out a can of soda.  “It was a long time ago.”  She takes a long swig from the can she just opened.

I try to ask this nicer than Roman did because she’s about to shut down on us.  “Will you please tell us more about this guy you talk to?”

She leans against the refrigerator door.  “He contacted me because of my blog.  I always suspected that something was off in the police report regarding my parent’s accident.  Things didn’t add up.  The car’s condition after the wreck wasn’t how it should have been for what they say happened.”  She shrugs and pushes away from the fridge.  “I started asking questions and nobody had answers, so I started blogging about my suspicions.  I figured there had to be something supernatural about a car splitting down the middle without a tree or sign post or anything being anywhere near it.  Cars don’t spontaneously rip in half.  The cops said their findings were ‘inconclusive’ of course,” she holds up her fingers in quotations.  “They pretty much told me to let it go; my parents were dead and me asking questions they couldn’t answer wasn’t going to change that.”

Their car crash was just like mine.  That’s quite a coincidence.  Why would the djinn do that if they’re trying to stay inconspicuous?  “What did you say in your blog?”

She comes back over to the bed and sits down again, leaning her back against the wall and curling her feet underneath her.  “I did a bunch of research and found that there were other accidents like that in different places in the world.  One here or there, never happening more than once in the same area.  I figure that’s because the djinn bug out after they’ve killed whoever they were after.  I didn’t know it was the djinn, but I did suggest that there were supernatural hit men out there.  Maybe not an army of them but at least one with a unique killing style.”

“You must have been a wet dream to all the conspiracy theorists and ghost chasers.”  In other words, all the crazies.

Reading my mind, she says, “Yeah, a bunch of crazy ‘tards would contact me daily saying they had proof of this or that but none of them really did.  Until Malik.  That’s his name, the guy that contacts me.”  That really didn’t need to be explained but it’s interesting how her face softens when she says his name.  “He explained that it’s a power thing; a signature kill that some use to create extreme terror in their victims.  They feed off from it.”

At least they feed off from fear and not by eating their victims.  “Why haven’t there been news stories about this?”

“Like I said, it doesn’t happen often and never in the same area when it does.  So the police sweep it under the rug.  I’m guessing they don’t want to divulge to the public that they can’t explain what happened.  So they lie.  They say the car hit a tree or something.”

Which everyone thought I did.  “So, this Malik guy wants you to keep me?  Why?”  I have classes I have to attend or I’ll flunk out of med school.  I wonder how many days I’ve missed already.

Brielle’s lips flatten into two straight lines.  “Until I can get you to him without any of the djinn knowing about it.”

Fuck the pain, that makes me sit up.  “You think I’m going to let you cart me off to some guy who you don’t even know just because he knew djinn were after me?  For all I know he sent them!”

“He did not!” Brielle practically shouts as hatred oozes from her pores like molasses.  “If it wasn’t for him you’d be nothing but a blonde bitch flavored burp coming up from a djinn’s gut!”  Oh god, they do eat their victims? 

I open my mouth to fling an acerbic retort at her, but Roman speaks first.  “Ladies, please.  This isn’t helping the situation.”

He’s right, it’s not.  But that still doesn’t make me trust this Malik guy.  I take a deep breath and after a moment, I say, “What does he want with me?”

 “I don’t know.”  Brielle has become sullen.  Is that jealousy?  I think it is.  She certainly has nothing to be jealous about on my end. 

One thing’s for sure, I can’t sit up anymore.  With Roman’s help, I lay back on the bed again.  When I’m as comfortable as possible, he turns to Brielle and says, “She’s not going anywhere until her wounds are better healed and she’s feeling strong enough to move about independently.”

Brielle gets up and walks back to her computer.  “Fine, whatever.”  I guess we’re done talking for the moment.

As Roman fusses over me, feeling my forehead and such, something dawns on me.  “You don’t have to stay.”  He never should have been dragged into this.  However, I don’t think Brielle would have been able to get me out of the hospital on her own.

His mouth turns up in a half-smile.  “I suspect I don’t have a choice in the matter at this point.”  Trying not to make me feel any guiltier, he says, “Besides, I could never abandon a patient in your condition to fend for herself.  You couldn’t possibly do that in your current state.”