Pretty Little Lion by Suleikha Snyder
19
Scattered, distant gunfire sounded over the comm receiver in Grace’s left ear. At odds with the various clinical hums of Third Shift’s small medical bay. But none of the ambient and far-from-ambient noises distracted her from the unconscious vampire she’d been tasked with watching over. Finn had pumped Estrada with enough sedatives to keep him out for quite a while. Until he fed and fresh blood flushed his system. Since there were no live takers for the honor at 3S HQ, the blood was being transfused into the vampire’s veins from the packs they kept for medical and vampirical emergencies alike. Estrada was no good to them unconscious. No good to her unconscious while the rest of her team was at Safe House 13. The last thing she wanted to be doing while they were endangering themselves was babysitting a living corpse. Even if Nate had been roped into helping her do so.
“He’ll be ever so thrilled to see you both when he wakes up.” Finn laughs, barely giving the insensate man on the bunk a glance. No, his eyes are on Nate. And her. Filled with the same surprise and delight as when he’d found Nate giving himself a tour of the floor after Jack pulled the operatives in for an emergency meeting in Command.
“I’m not insulted,” Nate had assured Grace when the order came in just as they got off the elevator. “I know I’m not in the club yet—that was my choice—and I think I can entertain myself while you do what secret agents do.”
It turns out watching Tavi Estrada is whatsome secret agents do. While others go on a rescue mission in South Brooklyn. Finn doesn’t look devastated to be leaving his old mentor and lover behind. No, he just grabs Nate, surprising him, and gives him a loud, smacking kiss on the cheek. It preps Grace for when he does the same to her. “Goodbye, my loves,” Finn trills before rushing out of the medical bay.
My loves.Grace could still hear the echo of those two little words, even with all the comm chatter that suddenly burst in—both a relief and an annoyance.
“Is it just me, or does half the shit you guys come up with end up going sideways?” A low, belligerent huff. Already incredibly familiar though the new recruit hadn’t been with Third Shift long.
“Shut up, JP!” multiple voices on the channel chimed in at once.
Across the small clinic area, Neha Ahluwalia let out a crack of laughter, nearly dropping her tablet. JP, formerly Joseph A. Peluso, was her love. He’d left her with the kind of kiss that men gave their partners before going off to war. The sweeping, emotional, almost-too-intimate kisses of big-budget Hollywood movies. And with the added assurance that he was “sure as hell” coming back. Grace didn’t need those assurances from Finn anymore. He knew that if he didn’t come back, she would find him and drag him back. Will him back from the dead if she had to. Like she had in that Brooklyn warehouse last month.
“Pendejo…what did you give me?”
The slurred words drew Grace away from her contemplation of Neha and Joe’s nascent relationship versus her and Finn’s long-standing one. Estrada was struggling to sit up, swatting at the tubes circulating the blood through him. Nate was trying to keep him still, but he was only human. No match for a vampire’s strength. Grace was glad she’d thought to tie him down with restraints.
“You were sedated,” she said, gesturing Nate back from the narrow bed with a sharp tilt of her head. “You’ll get over it.”
In her ear, there was battle. The volley of gunshots. Curses. In front of her eyes was a different sort of war. Emotional warfare. Intellectual. Getting Octavio Estrada to crack. And if he wouldn’t crack… Well, they’d have to break him down into manageable parts.
Estrada scowled, flexing one muscled arm and then the other. To no avail. And then he fell back, his brown eyes hot like the depths of a coal stove. “Was this the plan all along? Why not bring me in last night?” he demanded.
Grace prided herself on not being petty. At least not in her professional life. Over monthly margaritas with her girls from the neighborhood? Sure. She let a little bit of salt slip into her voice anyway. “You know why this had to happen. But I’m sure the board of the Queensboro Community Hospital would be happy to explain.”
Nate’s eyebrows went sky-high. Finn was rubbing off on him already. Grace didn’t laugh, though. She simply acknowledged his reaction with a nod before turning back to their guest. “You made the mistake of thinking you were in control of this situation, Mr. Estrada. You’re not. You shouldn’t underestimate us.”
He smiled then. The kind of smile that probably made other people drench their underwear. “Only a fool would underestimate a woman like you,” he assured her, thinking charm would get to her when anger hadn’t. “I trust your other job is secure?”
She hadn’t spent years working with Finian Conlan without learning how to resist charm. And there was no point in answering the question. They didn’t have time for trivialities. Not while her friends and colleagues were putting themselves at risk. Grace muted her comm. She shut out Nate and Neha and the fluorescent lights and the medical equipment. And she leaned forward. Then she yanked the transfusion needle out of Estrada’s arm.
“Is whatever you’re doing for Mirko Aston worth your life?” she asked softly. “Because I hold it in my hands. Not because I’m a supernatural but because I’m a doctor. I can hurt you or I can heal you. That’s your choice.” She was lying, of course. “First do no harm” was sacred to her. But her poker face, her carefully neutral tone, had been honed from decades in medicine…and decades living in brown skin. She’d learned, at too high a cost, how to hide how she really felt.
Maybe Estrada knew that, as a brown man if not a vampire. He nodded, like they’d achieved some kind of accord. “I hear you,” he said softly. “I understand you. But, Grace, understand that there are bigger things at work here than just you or me. Or our connections to Finian.”
“What bigger things?” Nate interjected, ever the lawyer. He perched on the edge of the hospital bed like it was his table in a courtroom, eyes narrowed with speculation.
Grace appreciated the assist. A competent closer for her operation. “Yes, what bigger things?” she echoed softly. “It’s of no use to us if you talk in generalities, Estrada.”
“Who says I want to be of use to you?” He looked down at the already closed hole in the bend of his arm, from where she’d pulled the needle. “I’ve lived nearly two hundred years, Dr. Leung. Your threats don’t scare me, and neither does death.”
“Then what are you afraid of?” Nate asked.
Tavi didn’t look at him. Didn’t look at Grace. He stared off somewhere past the clear glass walls of the tiny clinic. “Not finishing what I started,” he said eventually. After what felt like eons. “Not making right what I did wrong.”
They were vulnerable answers, but as much as they told her, they also withheld. He was like Finn that way. She could see how and why the two had come together…and what had torn them apart. Like seeing a bleed she needed to tie off. “We can help you with that. Why won’t you let us?”
“Because I can’t.” Estrada was paling, his eyes growing heavy. He hadn’t been given enough blood yet to flush out the sedative, enough to put him at full fighting strength. He’d used up his small burst of energy already. But before he slipped back into the eerie, inhuman coma of the underfed undead, a single sentence slipped from his cracked lips.
“Because I promised her.”
Her?Grace met Nate’s eyes across the vampire’s still form. He nodded, seeing the opening they’d both need to explore at the next available opportunity. “It’s always a ‘her,’” Neha observed dryly from her spot on the other side of the room. “Even when it’s a ‘him.’ There’s a ‘her’ somewhere in there.”
Grace wasn’t about to parse what that meant. Maybe that everyone had mommy issues on top of their daddy issues. She just went for another blood bag and hooked Estrada up again. First do no harm. That was the oath she’d taken. The oath she believed in. But there was so much harm in this terrible world. Harm that Estrada was aiding and abetting by virtue of his associations with Mirko Aston. Were they supposed to just let him? In the interest of allowing him to play out whatever his personal agenda was?
The white noise of the comm turning into an urgent hail saved her from addressing those tricky questions. “Hey! HQ!” JP barked. “Incoming! Prep the med bay for one! Two GSWs!”
“Go!” Nate said, shooing her toward the sinks and scrubs in the adjacent room. “Neha and I will keep our eyes on Estrada.”
It could be any member of the team. It could be Finn. That was the way of emergency hails. Of all these missions. Of being a part of Third Shift. Grace put away the thoughts of doing harm and let her mind flood with her next priority. Healing whoever came in. Taking out the bullets. Sewing up the incisions. So they could go back out and be a hero all over again.
Octavio Estrada wanted to be a villain.
Maybe the best thing they could do was leave him to that.
* * *
A severed limb went flying past her. Maybe it was an arm. Maybe it was a leg. Meghna was too disoriented to identify anatomical parts. It felt like Elijah had been fighting for hours. Like the trek to their exit point, to safety, was miles away. Gunfire and screams echoed in her ears. But nothing touched her. No more bullets. Elijah made sure of that. There was a Hindu legend of one of the avatars of Vishnu. Half man, half lion, Narsimha had vanquished a “demon” king unable to be killed by any human. Swimming in and out of consciousness, jostled like a passenger on an airplane experiencing turbulence, Meghna thought of that avatar now. Elijah was no supposed god in disguise. His foes weren’t portrayed as demons. There was no violent and virulent casteist baggage framing his story—at least not of the Indian variety. But he felt like a warrior of old. Snarling. Lashing out. Shielding her as best as he could against what seemed like countless gunmen fanning out across the grounds. Had Elijah said there were only six? She couldn’t remember. But this was more than six. This was a mini army. She was clearly out of her mind with pain. Useless to him in a fight. It was a problem. Inconvenient.
“Let me.” She shoved ineffectually at Elijah’s shoulder somewhere between the main clubhouse and the parking lot, eventually slipping from his grasp and onto her own unsteady feet. There were two shooters right on their heels, gaining. She pulled the blades from her hair, from her belt, and turned, nailing one pursuer in the throat and the other through the eye of their balaclava. They fell like dominoes. Black clothing splashed with red.
And Meghna could feel herself following suit. Her head swam. Her knees jellied. The brief burst of action had drained what little energy she still had. Before she passed out—before strong arms caught her up again—she had only one thought: Where did they even come from?
The question was still with her when she came back to consciousness, however brief, in the back of an SUV. “We rescued your stuff from Jack’s place. No bugs, no tags,” she heard a vaguely familiar voice rasp from somewhere beyond her immediate vicinity. “No fucking clue how these bastards found you.”
“Well, someone better get a fucking clue,” Elijah growled. “I don’t want a repeat.” He was close. Near her ear. His thigh was warm beneath her head. And that was all she knew for a while.
When Meghna awoke again, it was indoors. Under bright fluorescent lights. Safe. There was no way of knowing that except she did. And the feeling of security was…uncomfortable. Worse than the throbs of agony in her upper arm and her thigh. She wasn’t supposed to let her guard down. Couldn’t drop her defenses. “Stop,” she heard herself say, though she couldn’t have said what precisely she was trying to stop.
“Shh.” The rumble of Elijah’s voice anchored her to a now, to a here. “We’ve got you, love. Gracie’s got you. Just hang in there. You’ll be right as rain soon enough.”
No.No, she wouldn’t. Meghna was never going to be right again.
The room is dim. For security as much as ambiance. She can’t see her superior clearly. Just a sense of dark hair and dark eyes. Of supernatural light—what some might call an aura. “Are you up to this, Meghna?” the hypnotic voice asks. “This will take months, perhaps even years, of your life. And you will be entirely on your own.”
“I can do it,” she says without even pausing for breath, for debate. “I’m perfectly positioned. My quasi-celebrity status will be an irresistible lure for this mark. To waste this opportunity would be foolish.”
“What’s foolish is underestimating the toll this will take on you. We are supernatural, but we are still vulnerable, Meghna.”
“We’re Vidrohi,” she counters. “That’s all that matters.”
Her superior laughs. For a long time. Uncomfortably long. Until Meghna, with all her media training and poise, is squirming in her seat. “That’s not all that matters, betiya. Maybe you’ll learn that before I did.”
She recognizes her mother then. In the dimness. In this anonymous room in the middle of nowhere. And she wants to flip over the table between them. Almost as much as she wants to cry and scream. “You don’t get to say that to me,” she says softly, shoving down any other wild impulse. “Not when you walked away.”
The first slice of the scalpel brought Meghna back to where she needed to be.
The second let her scream like she’d wanted to that day.
The third…she didn’t feel the third. And she told herself she didn’t feel Elijah’s hand in hers either.
Then she felt nothing.
Nothing except the purpose she’d almost forgotten.