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Welcome to Earth, Boss, I thought with a sigh.
Chapter 11
I’d have downed more coffee if I’d known the day was going to descend into chaos so thoroughly. Now I had to figure out a way to clean up this clusterfuck.
“Zack.” I kept my voice low, but I knew he could hear me. “Maybe you should get hold of Ryan to help take care of—” I grimaced, lifted a chin toward the corpse. Under other circumstances Mzatal could have disposed of the body with a potency-fueled cremation. Yet I felt his reserves through our connection, and I knew he didn’t have the strength to do so and still have a chance of saving Thatcher.
Zack remained silent and still for several heartbeats, but finally gave a slight nod and pulled out his phone. He thumbed in a text message, sent it, then moved over to the dead man, crouched and laid a hand on his chest, face filled with a look of such unbearable sadness that I had to turn away. I heard him murmuring something over the body, but I was too far away to make out the words. The rhythm and lilt of it led me to believe it wasn’t English, though it didn’t sound like demon either.
Thatcher drew a steadier breath. Paul still clung to his friend’s hand, his eyes red and puffy in a face wracked with shock and desperation.
“What were you two doing here?” I asked.
It took a few seconds for Paul to realize I was talking to him, and another couple for him to focus on me. “It . . . it was my stupid idea,” he said, voice cracking. “This is all my fault.” His eyes dropped to Thatcher again. “I’m sorry, Bryce. Oh god, I’m so sorry.” His face twisted, and I reached out and seized his arm.
“Stop it,” I ordered. “He’s going to be all right.” I filled my voice with as much absolute certainty as possible. It helped that I truly did believe Mzatal would save the man’s life. “Why did you come here?” I pressed.
Paul’s eyes flicked up to Mzatal, and a whisper of hope crept into them. He swallowed, visibly struggled to be strong. “It was going to be at ten-seventeen a.m.,” he said and cast a worried look over to where his tablet lay where he’d dropped it. “There was going to be a wiggle in the feeds at ten-seventeen.” His lower lip quivered for an instant before he firmed his mouth and regained a bit of control. “I told him I wanted to come check it out. Made him bring me.”
I look at him in bafflement. “A what? A wiggle in the feeds? What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s, uh . . .” The grief on his face melted away as he focused on finding words to describe whatever it was. He opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head. “I do stuff with computers,” he explained, apparently giving up on providing details. “Lots of, er, deep level stuff. And I’d noted some, well, wiggles, shifts in the data patterns and streams. Always after the fact though. I figured out some of the parameters and extrapolated to predict one for today right here. I just wanted to be here to see what happened.”
I struggled to parse his explanation. Data patterns? Streams? “You do stuff with computers?” I echoed. “That’s it?”
A trace of insult crossed his face at the slight. “Yeah. That’s it.” His brow furrowed as he looked around, rea
lly looked around at us all for the first time. Zack and I probably looked normal enough, but Eilahn crouched shirtless near Thatcher’s feet, and there was no mistaking Mzatal for ordinary. And, of course, there was that pesky dead body not all that far away.
His attention returned to me. “Who are you people?”
“We’re . . . ” Shit. Now I was the one at a loss for how to explain things. “We’re the good guys, trust me,” I finally said lamely. “So, you don’t do any, er, arcane or ‘magic’ type stuff?” I even did the quotey marks with my fingers, which didn’t at all help how silly I felt asking him if he did magic.
Paul turned wide eyes to Mzatal again, and it was clear he knew something “magical” was happening to save his friend. He shook his head slowly, voice dropping to a rough whisper. “No.”
“What about him?” I asked, jerking my head toward Thatcher. “What’s he do? Does he do anything arcane?”
Paul looked back over at me. “He’s my bodyguard.” The sudden look of stunned realization that swept over his face was almost comical in its unabashed extreme. “Oh my god. He saved my life.”
I sat back on my heels and processed all he’d told me. According to Paul, neither of these two were arcane practitioners, though I knew he could easily be lying. Fortunately, I had a Mzatal-shaped lie detector, and as soon as he wasn’t otherwise occupied in major tissue and organ repair, I’d ask him to assess Paul and find out for sure.
But if Paul was telling the truth, and Thatcher wasn’t a summoner, then why on earth did Tracy have a bodyguard’s name in his journal? Maybe he’d planned on hiring one? Maybe Thatcher had actually worked for him at one point? Only the man bleeding on the floor could answer those questions.
I abruptly noticed that the blood on Paul wasn’t all Thatcher’s. “Your arm is bleeding,” I gently pointed out. Looked like the bullet had scored his left upper arm after exiting Thatcher’s chest.
Paul blinked and looked down at the shallow wound. I fully expected him to freak a bit at being shot, especially after being so upset about Thatcher, but to my surprise he simply gave a somewhat distracted frown. “Oh. Yeah. Guess it is.”
I took a closer look at him. Now I saw that his nose was slightly crooked, with a bump on one side that told me it had been broken. A thin scar ran along one cheekbone, and another one cut through an eyebrow. He’d taken damage before, I realized.
Falling silent, I continued to weave support while I wondered about this pair. Why did a computer nerd need a bodyguard? And how the hell had he used a computer to trace what he called a “wiggle” to this precise spot and time if he didn’t know about the arcane? Sure, Tracy—and obviously Tsuneo—had tracked it, but they were summoners. More questions to be answered.
“Enough,” Mzatal said after a while, voice drawn and lacking its usual resonance. He lifted his hands from Thatcher’s chest. Raw, angry tissue sealed the ugly wound, and though Thatcher’s skin still held a sickly pallor, he breathed slowly and with relative ease.
Blue-green potency flared on Mzatal’s hands as he burned the blood cleanly away. I felt his profound exhaustion, but there was no more I could do for him at this point except worry. I reached for his hand. He took it, gave it a soft squeeze, conveying reassurance, affection, and gratitude in the simple gesture.
“Is he going to be okay?” Paul asked, face twisted with concern.
Mzatal met the young man’s eyes, remained silent for several heartbeats before answering. “He will recover, Paul Ortiz,” he told him. “Now breathe.”
