The fingers of my right hand were bandaged-all of them, one two three four five.
Thank God.
I lay back in a fuzzy haze. Bright lights shone in my face. A man was asking me to count. I looked aside, and a doctor was talking to a nurse. I asked, "What?"
They looked at each other. "She won't remember any of this."
Now my knee was itching something fierce. I picked up my hand again, staring at the bandaged fingers. I seemed to see Andre Rand through them, hunched over the edge of the bed, praying, but when my hand fell to the bed, I saw Special Agent Philip Davidson.
"What?" I said again, looking around. It was a hospital room. Emory Hospital.
Philip sat up abruptly. "You're awake before me," he said, blinking sleep from his eyes. "Good. That's promising."
He'd been sitting backwards in an armless hospital-issue guest chair, hunched over the backrest, staring at my knee. I reached down, cautiously, with my bandaged hand-it hurt, but I could move it- and pulled the sheets aside to reveal a white bandage on my right knee.
"What?" I asked again, then marshaled myself. "What the hell?"
"That's my Dakota," Savannah said.
I gasped. Savannah stood there in the sunbeams in a red leather dress-the red leather dress, the one I liked, simple and asymmetrical, peaking high over her right breast and sweeping down over the curve of her left. The bottom hem was cut at a similar angle, exposing her right thigh and sweeping down, mirroring the angle of the sunlight shining down on the bare flesh of her delicate bare calf and ankle.
"Savannah," I said, caught with sudden horror. "The sun-"
"S'alright," she said, smiling, adjusting her bomber goggles. "I'm a daywalker. Besides, the glass soaks up a lot of the UV." She held up a light monitor she carried around her neck-and if I knew Savannah and the red dress, the monitor and the goggles were the only other things on her curvy body. "As long as I keep an eye on the levels, I'm safe."
"You look… spectacular," I said.
"You look like crap," she responded. "Just this shy of Roadkill."
'Roadkill' had been my costume at the last Halloween we'd spent together-layered makeup and printed tire tracks that had actually made Savannah nauseous-and now that she'd pointed it out I winced, feeling what must be stitches on my forehead and some crusty crap on my cheek. In fact, aches and pains were popping up all over my body, there was a gap where two of my back left molars should have been, and my left eye didn't want to open all the way. No wonder I reminded her of 'Roadkill.'
"So this really is your girlfriend?" Philip said, a half smile on his face.
"Ex-girlfriend," Savannah and I said simultaneously.
"Your ex here used a little social engineering to waltz straight through our police barricade."
"I didn't lie," Savannah said, scowling but embarrassed. "I said I was here as her girlfriend. There's no statute of limitations on girlfriendiness, is there?"
"I'm not going to give you shit," Philip said, chuckling, smiling at me. "I completely understand your desire to be beside Dakota-"
"Not for the reasons you think," Savannah said coldly. "She was under my protection. Kotie, I'm so sorry-"
"Don't blame yourselves. I fucked up," I said. I felt so ashamed. "I provoked him. It's all my fault-"
"Do not talk like that," Philip said calmly. "No one had the right to do this to you."
I shook my head. "I-I know that," I said, struggling for words. "I'd like to kick the little fucker's teeth in. It's just-earlier, at the werehouse-"
At which I trailed off. Davidson was a Fed, an X-Files-grade Fed with his own spooky black helicopter, and here I was spilling the guts on an Edgeworld werehouse. What was wrong with me-did they have me on some kind of painkillers?
"Werehouse?" Davidson said, arching an eyebrow. I kept looking out the window, and he asked, "What aren't you telling me?"
"Kotie," Savannah said. "Talk to us. What happened at the werehouse?"
I glared at her, but she was just scowling, red bangs and goggles hiding her eyes. But if she didn't seem worried talking to Davidson.
"Transomnia was on guard," I said, looking at Davidson briefly before staring back at Savannah. "He called you a dirty name, and I. .. I punched him in the face, knocked him down in front of Lord Buckhead. During the attack on me he said he was… punishing me."
"You decked a vampire?" Davidson said, astonished.
"Transomnia," Savannah said icily. "I'll remember that."
"Now, now," Davidson cautioned. "Don't go trying to be a vigilante-"
"I'll do as I please," Savannah replied. "I am a daywalker."
Davidson scowled. "Daywalker or no, you don't know what you're getting into-"
"If you two are going to fight, could you do it outside?" I said.
Davidson raised his hands, and Savannah looked away, embarrassed.
"Look, I know you just came to," Davidson said. "But I want to warn you. Doctors are going to appear and hover over you. The police will want to take a statement. We've got a police detail on you-all off-duty volunteers right now -"
"Volunteer?" Savannah asked, putting a hand on her hip. "She just had an attempt on her life, and you have to use volunteers?"
"Welcome to policing," Philip said. "Many storm the gates, but few man the walls. We're lucky Dakota has family on the force; it was easy to find volunteers-"
As if on cue the door opened, held by Horscht, one of the officers who had picked me up earlier. He winked at me, then stepped back to admit a group of doctors and nurses. There was an older man who looked like he might be in charge, but he deferred to an impossibly young doctor with a broad smile and parted black hair.
Davidson and Savannah stepped back to give the doctors room, but the youngish man looked at them sharply. "We need to speak to Miss Frost about her medical condition," he said, clearly about to give my visitors their walking papers. "Are you with the family?"
"I'm here as her girlfriend," Savannah said.
"I'm here on behalf of her father," Davidson said, "and the police detail is my doing. If I'm not here, someone from the detail needs to be with her at all times."
The doctor twitched a little, and I said, "Let them stay. I'm half out of it anyway. Someone with memory needs to be here."
The doctor laughed. "Very well. Do you prefer Dakota or Miss Frost?"
"Dakota," I said.
"Dakota, your leg has some of the most wonderful tattoos I've ever seen," he said, smiling, sitting in the chair that Davidson had just been in, patting the bed in a friendly way that made me feel like he was touching my leg, without ever actually touching it. "I saw them when I was patching up your knee this morning. I've never seen colors so alive, so vibrant. Maybe I caught a whiff of the anesthetic, but it almost looked like one of them moved out of the way while I was working."
"That would be the dragon," I said. "He's pretty mobile."
The doctor raised an eyebrow, and looked briefly back at Savannah and Davidson.
"Miss Frost is a magical tattooist," Davidson said. "Her tattoos do move."
"Well, I'll be," the doctor said, turning back to me. "Dakota, my name is Doctor Blake. I'm an orthopedic surgeon. Doctor Hampton called me in to work on your knee because it was torn up inside. You may not remember everything that happened-"
"A vampire beat the shit out of me and kicked me in my knee when I was down."
He smiled, a wry, boy-I'd-like-to-get-that-fucker smile if I've ever seen one. "Well, Dakota, when he did that he tore the ligament on the inside of your knee-what we call your MCL. It was on the edge of what we call a grade four tear, with some collateral damage, so I had to go in to your leg, do some minor arthroscopy-but it looks good. If we can keep you off the leg for a few days, we can have you up on crutches within a week. We've got to watch it, of course, but with some rest, ice, and therapy, I think you'll regain full use of your knee."
"Oh fuck," I said. "How the hell am I going to pay for all this?"
"Don't you have healthcare at the tattoo parlor?" Davidson said.
I lifted my head to look at him. "Are you kidding?"
"Don't worry about it," Savannah said. "You were under our protection. The Consulate will pay for everything."
"The 'Consulate?'" the doctor asked.
"The Vampire Consulate of Little Five Points," Savannah said. "That collar of hers is a sign of our protection." Her voice grew icy. "It should have been enough of a warning."
"Well, I'll be," Doctor Blake said, smile a little more forced. "When she said vampire I thought she was just being metaphorical."
"Doc," I said. "About my hand-"
"Well, you had a lot of bruises and scrapes, which is common when some son-of-a-bitch kicks you when you're down. And I won't lie to you-you're going to get some ugly looking facial swelling over the next few days. You'll get even prettier than you are now."
"Hard to believe," Savannah said. I laughed, halfheartedly.
"But, on your hand, there were… cuts," he said. "Do you remember what happened-"
I looked up, saw my fingers in the curved beak of the pruner, and his unsmiling face. "I can walk away from here with ALL your fingers and leave you with stumps. I'll put them in the blender when I get home, one by one, and think of your stumps. You'll never tattoo again."
"He-he had some pruning shears," I said, eyes tearing up, unable to catch my breath, feeling my heart race and a charge of adrenaline tingle up my spine and churn my gut. "He got my fingers in them. He got my fingers and he squeezed-"
"Lord have mercy," Savannah said.
"He said he could take them any time," I said. I didn't bother to hide the tears leaking out of my eyes. "My fingers. All of them. That he'd leave me with meat flippers if I crossed him. That I'd never tattoo again-"
"The police will take a statement later, I think," Davidson said, in his supremely calm voice, stepping forward to put his hand on the bed in a way that made me feel like he'd put his arm around my shoulders. "You don't need to go into all the details now-"
"That's right, Dakota," the doctor said, reaching out to touch my bandaged hand. "I've heard enough. Your hand is fine. You will tattoo again. And you have good friends. They're good people. I don't think they'll let anyone hurt you again."
He squeezed my hand very gently, emphasizing it, as if to let me know everything would be all right. I winced a little, but I could feel my hand was still whole. The doc was all right. He was all right. But the effort to smile made my head hurt, and I reached up to rub my temple.
My Mohawk was gone.
My forehead, cheek and temple were bandages, scrapes and bruises, but beyond that there was no 'hawk, just a ragged brush of hair. I tore my bandaged hand out of his grip and raised it to my head, groaning, afraid to touch it. It was almost completely shaved in front, and behind that only tufts of hair were left, like someone had weedwhacked the front of my head. Only the hair at the back of my head had been wholly spared. "Awwwww-"
"You were like that when I saw you," Doctor Blake said, embarrassed. "But I think they did that in the emergency room when they were treating you. They needed to clean your wounds, but your head and face were covered with some kind of paint -"
With a tremendous CRACK the world went black, leaving me choking for oxygen through a sludge of white sticky goop. A splintered five-gallon paint barrel lay splattered around me, and my hands were covered in a thick layer of white paint. "Let's see you use your marks now," Transomnia said, eyes twin red coals.
"Oh, God," I said, hands cradling my bruised, plucked head, hovering over it, afraid to leave it, afraid to touch it. "That bastard got me good, he got me good-"
Savannah came to my side, patting my hand, saying something soft and bracing.
"Leave me alone." I said, eyes squeezed shut. God, what a horrible way to find out how vain I really was. Someone's hand touched my shoulder, and I shook them off. "I don't want anyone to see me like this. Just-please. Leave me alone."
Philip said a few quiet words, and I let my face fall into my hands. After some time the door closed, and when I looked up, I was alone.
I fell back against the bed. I stared at the ceiling. And then, I cried.