Chapter 30: Infirmary Aftermath
The infirmary door exploded inward, wooden shards spraying across the sterile floor. Alyce stood in the wreckage, her chest heaving, blue flame flickering dangerously around her clenched fists. Amber and Leo pushed in behind her, their faces set with panic.
The scene they froze before was nothing like they’d imagined.
Angel lay motionless on a white cot, an oxygen cannula under her nose, her orangish curls splayed across the pillow like a dark flame against the starch. She was ghostly pale, a faint sheen of sweat on her brow. And sitting on the adjacent bed, an IV line trailing from his fully-regenerated arm, was Jack Death. He wore a standard medical tunic, his hair messy, the three white stripes stark against the black.
In the corner, perched on hard plastic chairs, sat Sari and Elis. Sari’s usually bubbly face was drained of color, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Elis stared blankly at the wall, her slender frame rigid.
“What the hell happened?” Alyce demanded, her voice echoing in the sudden quiet.
Jack held up a hand, his movement slow, weighted. “Easy.” His voice was rough, gravelly. “She’s out. They had to put her out.”
“Put her out?” Leo repeated, his gaze darting from Angel to Jack’s perfectly intact left arm. “How? Why?”
“She… did this?” Amber whispered, stepping closer to the bed, her eyes wide. The tattoos on her arm seemed to pulse with her quickened heartbeat.
Jack nodded, a grimace twisting his features. He looked at his own hand, flexing the fingers. “Yeah. She did this. Took the whole… the whole mangled wreck of it and just… rewrote it. From the soul out.” He let out a shaky breath. “We couldn’t stop her. When she was done, she just started screaming. A screaming that wasn’t coming from her lungs. It was in the air. In our teeth. We tried everything—holding her, talking to her—but she was gone. Trapped in the feedback. Her eyes… they weren’t seeing anything here.” He looked at the group, his expression haunted. “One of the orderlies had to put pressure on a nerve cluster at the base of her skull. Knocked her unconscious. It was the only way to shut it off.”
Sari let out a small, choked sound from the corner. “She sounded like she was being unmade.”
The door slid open and a nurse walked in, her shoes squeaking on the polished floor. She gave the shattered door a weary glance, then moved to Angel’s bedside. She checked the monitors, placed a cool hand on Angel’s forehead, and frowned. “Fever’s spiking again. One-oh-three point eight.” She adjusted the IV drip. “It’s a somatic reaction. Her nervous system isn’t built for that kind of soul-load. It’s like overclocking a processor until it melts.”
“Can you fix it?” Amber asked, her voice small.
“We’re trying,” the nurse murmured. She placed both hands on Angel’s temples, closing her eyes. A soft, greenish-gold light emanated from her palms, a gentle, rhythmic pulse. “Just a calming wavelength. Easing the static. It’s all we can do until her own soul settles.”
As the nurse worked, Jack spoke again, his voice low, directed at his weapons in the corner. “The mission was a wipe. They knew we were coming. Tore through us like paper.” He didn’t look at them. “I lost Myles. Good meister. Good man. His weapon, Tania… she didn’t make it either.” He finally glanced at Sari and Elis, his eyes shining with a terrible gratitude. “I’m just… I’m so goddamn glad it wasn’t you two.”
Elis’s blank stare broke. A single tear tracked through the dust on her cheek.
The world came back in soft, blurry stages. The first thing Angel was aware of was the absence of pain. The second was a gentle, rhythmic beeping. The third was a familiar, gruff presence.
She blinked, her eyes gummy. The sterile ceiling of the infirmary slowly resolved. She turned her head, a stiff, aching effort.
Kilson sat in a chair pulled up to her bedside, his gnarled hands resting on his knees. He wasn’t sleeping. He was just watching her.
“Hey, kid,” he said, his voice like stones grinding together.
“How… long?” she croaked. Her throat was desert-dry.
“A while,” he evaded. He poured a cup of water from a pitcher and held the straw to her lips. She drank, the coldness a shocking blessing. “Your friends have been taking shifts. Amber, that Alyce firecracker, the quiet axe-boy. Even the Bacardi sisters popped in. Jack’s been released. He’s fine. Better than fine, thanks to you.”
The memory crashed back—the blood, the screaming, the overwhelming flood of another’s agony. She flinched.
“Don’t,” Kilson said gently. “Don’t recoil from it. What you did… it’s a myth. A bedtime story meisters tell their kids to make them feel safe. A genesis wavelength.” He leaned forward, his old eyes intense. “It hasn’t been seen in thousands of years. The last ones recorded in the old scrolls… they didn’t die in battle. They burned out. They’d take on too much, try to heal wounds that were soul-deep, and their own light would consume them. They’d just… fade.”
Angel stared at him, the words not quite computing. “My mother…” she whispered, remembering their talk in the tool shed.
“Your biological mother has a healing wavelength. A strong one. Rare. But it’s mending, kid. It’s stitching. What you did? That was creation. You spun a new arm out of pure soul-stuff.” He sighed, a heavy, worn sound. “I reached out to her. Told her you were here. Told her what happened. She’s… she’s going to come. When she can. Wants to meet you.”
A tumult of emotions—fear, longing, anger, hope—twisted inside her, but exhaustion was a weight on her chest. Her eyelids grew heavy again.
“Sleep,” Kilson said. “It’s the best medicine for what you’ve got.”
She didn’t have a choice. The darkness pulled her back under.
This time, the dream wasn’t hers.
She was looking through eyes that weren’t her own. Feeling a despair so profound it was a physical sickness, a cold stone in the gut. A desire for oblivion, sharp and sweet as a blade. And underpinning it all, a fear. A towering, monstrous fear that dwarfed anything she’d ever known. It wasn’t a fear of death. It was a fear of what was coming. Of what was already here.
The vision pulled back, impossibly far. She saw through a haze of tears—great, churning grey seas, vast continents of shadow and mist, a desert of black glass under a bruised sky. The perspective raced across this shadow realm, homing in on a point of sheer terror.
A dilapidated building. Stone walls crumbling. The smell of damp earth and decay. Inside, on a rusted cot, a figure lay cradled in a lap.
A woman. No—a witch. Her features were obscured, but scales glinted on her arms, and the feeling of her was cold, sinuous. A snake witch. And in her lap, held not with tenderness but with a possessive, despairing clutch, was him.
Who was he?
His lilac eyes were open, staring blankly at the rotten ceiling. His chest, bare and bandaged, rose and fell in ragged, shallow hitches. The shapes on his skin seemed to writhe. The madness in his skin, was a visible black miasma seeping from his pores, coiling around the witch’s fingers. The witch was crying. She bent over him, her long hair curtaining his face, and her shoulders shook with silent sobs. The sorrow in the dream was hers. The desire to die was hers. The all-consuming fear… it was for him. Medusa.
Angel woke with a violent start, a gasp tearing from her raw throat. She was drenched, the thin hospital gown plastered to her skin with cold sweat. The room was dark, the only light from a dim panel over the door.
“Angel?”
Alyce was there, slumped in the chair Kilson had occupied. She jolted upright, her freckles standing out on her pale face. Her eyes were red and puffy.
“You’re awake,” Alyce breathed, scrambling to her feet. She grabbed a cloth from the bedside and dabbed at Angel’s face, her hands trembling. “You’ve been out for twelve days. They had to put a tube in your nose to feed you.” Her voice hitched. “We didn’t know if you were coming back.”
Twelve days. The dream felt more real than the room. “Crow,” Angel rasped, the dream’s cold terror still icing her veins.
Alyce’s face crumpled. The tears she’d been holding back spilled over. “He’s worse. Way worse. He stopped showing up for classes last week. Maria’s been covering them. She’s frantic. She went to his quarters today because he wasn’t answering any coms. He’s not there, Angel. The place is empty. It’s like he just… vanished.”
The black miasma from the dream seemed to fill the room. The snake witch’s despairing grip. The vast, empty desert.
Crow was gone. And the thing he feared most had finally found him.
The thing he feared most had finally found him. The thought wasn’t a whisper; it was a cold, solid fact that settled in Angel’s bones. She pushed herself up on her elbows, the muscles in her arms trembling with the effort. Twelve days in a bed had made her body a foreign, weak thing. “Get this out of me,” she rasped, plucking at the nasal feeding tube.
Alyce blinked, her tears stopping abruptly. “You can’t be serious. You just woke up.”
“Now, Alyce.”
There was a new tone in Angel’s voice, one that brooked no argument. It wasn’t loud. It was flat, final. After a moment’s shocked hesitation, Alyce nodded and went to find a nurse.
The removal was a blur of mild discomfort and overwhelming relief. The nurse, a stern woman with kind eyes, warned her about trying to stand too fast. Angel listened, waited for the room to stop tilting, then swung her legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold against her bare feet.
“Where are you going?” Alyce asked, hovering by her elbow.
“Headmaster Death summoned me. While I was out.” Angel’s voice was distant, her mind already racing ahead, past the office, past the academy walls. She remembered the dreamscape: the crumbling stone, the witch’s scaled hands, the black miasma seeping from his skin. A map had been burned into her soul.
She walked, one shaky step after another, through the quiet hallways. Her body felt light and insubstantial, but the purpose inside her was leaden and dense. The grandiose Tori gates leading to Death’s personal chambers loomed ahead, their red lacquer stark against the grey stone. She pushed through them.
The candy throne room was just as absurd and intimidating as she remembered. The scent of spun sugar and ozone hung in the air. But the scene before the throne was not one of ceremonial order.
Maria had Regir by the front of his shirt, her knuckles white. Her beautiful face was twisted with a fury so pure it was almost clean. “You poisoned me!” she snarled, her voice echoing off the hard candy walls. “You let that witch use you to get to him!” She shook him, his lanky frame offering no resistance. “You knew what she was doing to Crow!”
Headmaster Death observed from his throne, one bony finger tapping against a jaw made of licorice. Kilson stood to the side, his massive arms crossed, his expression unreadable.
Regir’s face was a sickly grey. “I didn’t… I didn’t know it would hurt him. She said it was just to track him, to study the madness.” His voice was a thin thread. “She said she’d leave me alone after.”
“And you believed her?” Maria’s laugh was sharp and cruel. She released him with a shove, sending him stumbling back. “You’re a fool. She used you as a carrier. Your tainted blood, your proximity to me… you were the vector.”
Death’s voice cut through the tension, calm and utterly cold. “The arrangement stands, Maria. Medusa has provided actionable intelligence on the Kishin’s potential vessels. In exchange, she and her assets are granted temporary immunity from academy sanction.” He gestured toward Regir. “Including this one. His banishment from Death City is the extent of our penalty.”
Angel hung back in the shadow of the gateway, her breath caught in her throat. Why would Medusa give information… if she’s the one holding the Kishin? The question screamed in her mind. It was a diversion. A feint. She was buying time, or worse, leading them into a trap.
Maria turned to face Death, her golden hair swinging. All the fury drained from her posture, replaced by a weary, steely resolve. “Then I resign my position, effective immediately. I am no longer a professor at this academy. I am no longer bound by its rules of engagement.”
She looked down at Regir, who was cradling his smacked cheek. “You’re coming with me. You know where she is. You’re going to take me right to her door.”
Regir’s lilac eyes widened. “She’ll kill me.”
“Maybe,” Maria said, her voice dropping to a lethal whisper. “But you’re going to die helping me get him back, or you’re going to die right here, right now, by my hand. Your choice.”
Without waiting for a response from Death, Maria turned on her heel and strode toward the exit, grabbing Regir by the arm as she passed. He stumbled alongside her, a pale shadow.
Kilson took a step forward. “Maria, wait—”
Angel moved. She stepped out of the shadows and into the garish light of the throne room. Her eyes met Headmaster Death’s hollow sockets for one fleeting second. She saw no surprise there, only a deep, calculating curiosity.
“I’m going too,” she said. The words weren’t loud, but they carried.
“Angel, no!” Kilson barked, starting toward her.
She didn’t look back. She ignored him, ignored Death, ignored everything but the retreating backs of Maria and Regir as they shoved through the main doors. Her legs, fueled by adrenaline and the lingering image of Crow’s vacant eyes, found strength she didn’t know she had. She ran.
She caught up to them in the cavernous main hall, her shoes slapping against the stone. Maria whirled, her war hammer already half-formed in her grip. “What are you doing?”
“You heard me,” Angel panted, coming to a stop. “I’m coming.”
Regir stared at her, his expression one of pure confusion. Maria’s eyes narrowed, sweeping over Angel’s hospital gown, her bare feet. “You are a child who just woke from a coma. Go back to bed.”
“He needs me,” Angel said, simply.
Maria’s laugh was short and bitter. “You are the reason he’s in this state! Your little stunt distracted him, clouded his judgment!” She stepped closer, her voice dropping. “Do you remember my warning?”
Angel held her gaze. The memory of the office, of Maria’s disgust, was a cold stone in her stomach. It didn’t matter. “I don’t care.”
She pushed past Maria and took the lead, heading for the giant, reinforced doors that led out of the academy, out into the Wastes beyond Death City. Maria and Regir exchanged a glance of sheer exasperation before sprinting after her. They gave her the courtesy of waiting for her to change into something combat worthy.
“You have no idea where you’re going!” Maria shouted as they burst out into the hazy, perpetual twilight of the borderlands. The air outside was cooler, smelling of damp earth and something faintly metallic.
“Yes, I do,” Angel said, and she did. The dream-map unspooled in her mind’s eye—a sense of direction, a pull. She struck out across the rocky plain, leaving the gleaming spires of the city behind.
For three hours, they hiked in tense silence. The rocky ground gave way to a foul-smelling, mist-choked swamp. The path was not a path at all, but a series of faded, rotting wooden arrows hammered into half-sunken trees, pointing in contradictory directions. It was a maze designed to disorient.
“This way,” Angel said, pointing left where an arrow indicated right.
“No,” Maria snapped, striding ahead toward the right. “Regir said the entrance was east of the black-water sinkhole.”
“The arrows are wrong. They’re meant to confuse,” Angel insisted, her head throbbing with the effort of parsing the true direction from the false one. It was a feeling, a nausea that lessened when she faced the correct way.
Maria ignored her, slogging through knee-deep, stagnant water. Regir followed Maria, casting anxious looks back at Angel. They wasted twenty minutes in a looping thicket of thorned vines before emerging exactly where they’d started.
Angel waited, arms crossed, on a relatively dry hummock. “It’s this way,” she said again, pointing firmly southwest.
Maria’s clothes were soaked, her hair plastered with slime. Frustration radiated from her. “You’re going to get us killed.”
Regir, shivering, looked from Maria’s stubborn set jaw to Angel’s calm certainty. “Maybe…” he ventured quietly, wincing as Maria shot him a glare. “Maybe we should listen to Angel. My… my mother’s magic is all about misdirection. Illusion.”
Maria stared at him, then at Angel. The defiance in her eyes warred with pragmatism. She cursed, long and vicious, under her breath. “Fine. Lead.”
Angel moved without hesitation. She navigated the swamp not by sight, but by feeling—avoiding patches that felt sickly, turning toward a subtle, malignant pull that called to the residue of Crow’s madness still haunting her senses. The arrows became irrelevant. She was following a scent of despair only she could detect.
Finally, the swamp trees thinned. The ground rose into a low, rocky hill. Set into its base, nearly hidden by crawling, black-barked vines, was a rough archway of stacked stone. It looked ancient and utterly abandoned.
An eerie quiet descended, the constant buzz of swamp insects falling away completely. The air grew still and cold, carrying a faint, acrid smell like burnt hair and ozone. It whispered across Angel’s damp skin, raising goosebumps and sending a violent, primal chill down her back.
This was the place. The lair from her dream. The source of the weeping.
Maria transformed her hand into the massive head of her war hammer, its weight settling with a soft thud against the damp earth. Regir swallowed hard, his hands trembling at his sides.
Angel took a step forward, then another, her bare feet silent on the cold stone. She peered into the absolute darkness beyond the archway. She could feel it now, a palpable wrongness seeping from the earth itself.
And beneath that, fainter than a heartbeat, she felt him. A flicker of familiar silver, buried deep under layers of suffocating black.