wouldn’t. They should see the effort. They should know what it costs, what freedom costs. That you pay the price for it, too.”
She gave Fallon’s hand a squeeze, then moved on. “Hey, Mr. Barker, let’s go back, have a look at you.”
He rattled, wheezed. “I can wait for the doctor.”
“Why don’t we go back to an exam room, just have a look? I can get you started for Rachel.”
Soothing, cajoling instead of insulted, Fallon thought. That was Hannah—Hannah who’d been studying, training to be a doctor, essentially since her childhood, and who’d served as a field medic on rescues for years.
Patience, Fallon realized, was just one form of Hannah’s magick.
She saw the girl in the office, working briskly on a computer—a skill she herself had yet to fully master. April, she remembered. Faerie, about her age. Wounded in the attack in the gardens two years before.
An attack instigated by Fallon’s own blood, her cousin, the daughter of her sire’s brother and his woman. Dark Uncannys who wanted her death above all.
The girl looked up, beamed a smile. “Hey, hi. Are you looking for Lana?”
“I wanted to see the wounded—any who are up for it.”
“We have the freed prisoners who were treated and cleared holding at the school auditorium, and the troops treated and cleared sent home or to the barracks. The rest are in the ward. Jonah and Carol are doing rounds, and Ray’s monitoring the ones we released medically. It’s been kind of an all-hands-on-deck morning. And right now?” She smiled her bright, faerie smile. “Rachel and Lana are delivering a baby.”
“A baby?”
“One of the prisoners—”
“Lissandra Ye, wolf shifter,” Fallon finished—she’d read every report. “She’s not due for nearly eight weeks.”
“She went into labor in the mobile heading here. They weren’t able to stop it.” As some worry leaked through, April pressed her lips together. “They’ve got a kind of NICU set up for it, as best they can. But I could tell Rachel was worried even though Jonah said he didn’t see death.
“He’d see it, right?” April reached out for reassurance. “Jonah would know.”
Fallon nodded, stepped out.
“Death’s not the only consequence.” She spoke softly to Simon. “Lissandra Ye was in that prison for fourteen months. She was raped inside there, and they kept right up with experiments on her after she got pregnant.”
“You need to trust your mother and Rachel.”
“I do.”
She walked down another corridor. Classrooms converted to exam rooms, treatment rooms, surgeries, storage for supplies, another for medications and drugs.
Labor and delivery. She laid a hand on the door, felt the power simmering. Her mother’s power. Heard Rachel’s calm voice reassuring, and the moans of the woman in labor.
“I do,” she repeated, and because that fate was in their hands, continued to the sprawling cafeteria set up as a ward for patients who needed continued treatment or observation.
Curtains—scavenged or fabricated—separated the beds and made an oddly festive show of color and patterns. The monitors beeped. Not enough, not nearly enough for so many patients. They would rotate them as needed, she knew.
She saw Jonah looking as weary as she felt hanging a fresh IV bag.
“Start on Jonah’s side,” Simon suggested. “I’ll start on Carol’s.”
So she walked to Jonah, and to the stranger with her eyes closed in the hospital bed. Under her eyes circles spread dark and deep. Her skin had a gray cast, and her hair—deep, deep black—had been shorn brutally short, like a skullcap.
“How is she?” she asked Jonah.
He rubbed tired eyes. “Dehydrated, malnourished—that’s common throughout. Burn scars—old and fresh—over about thirty percent of her body. She’s had her fingers broken and left to set on their own. Your mother worked on that, and we think she’ll get the use of her hands back. Her records show she was in there for over seven years, one of the longest in the facility.”
Fallon glanced at the chart. Naomi Rodriguez, age forty-three. Witch.
“The records listed an elf she’d taken into her care.”
“Dimitri,” Jonah told her. “He doesn’t know his last name, or remember it. He’s twelve. He’s okay, if any of them are. He finally agreed to go with a couple of the women we were able to release.”
“Okay. I want to—”
She broke off when the woman opened her eyes, stared at her. Eyes nearly as dark as the shadows dogging them.
“You’re The One.”
“Fallon Swift.”
When the woman groped for her hand, Fallon took it. Not physical pain, she realized—the medicals had taken care of that. But they couldn’t touch the mental anguish.