Gunlaw

Gunlaw 17

Chapter 8

When Mikeos woke consciousness came sudden as a gunshot. He jerked up, almost standing before settling back in the chair that held him.

"What?" The pain had gone, his strength returned. The Doc sat behind his desk, Jenna in front of him, her head bowed, the veil of her hair hiding her face. "How?" Mikeos patted his shoulder. No tenderness, nothing.

"Blood magic." Jenna growled it. Always angry – the thought returned to him.

"I feel great." Mikeos stood, pushing the chair backward. He flexed his arm, wriggled his fingers. "Fast." Perhaps it was just contrast, having been so far gone along that last trail, and now whole and fit all of a sudden, but he felt he could run to the Five-Oh-Seven and beat the train there. He turned to offer the doc his thanks, then the words caught up with him. A shadow with them, the sudden feeling that he'd been caught in the middle of some shameful act.

"Blood magic?" He touched his forehead, half thinking for a moment to find a hex wound there. "You did it, Jenna?"

She looked up at him, hair streaked with grey falling to either side. A fine tracery of silver scars marked the place where her own wound had once gaped. Her flesh held a healthy glow, the faint beginnings of crowsfeet wrinkling at the corners of her eyes.

"She drank your blood, Mr Jones," the woodkin seemed to find great amusement in the fact. "And cured you both."

"Ignore him." She shot the doc a poisonous glance. "I set a drop of your blood here." She tapped the hex scars. "That's all. My powers will return in time."

Mikeos grinned. "I like you better this way."

Jenna offered him a dark look. Again that feeling of being somehow exposed, dirty. He pushed it away.

"But why? You said you wouldn't." Mikeos remembered her refusal, back in the shade of the sandthorn tree. "I guess I asked you to." He pursed his lips at that not liking how it tasted. "But getting killed is part of the trade – you didn't have to take me seriously."

Jenna rose from her seat too, fixing Mikeos with a level stare. "I mean to find Eben Lostchild, and you, son of Daveos, are going to take me to him."

"And what is it that you think Mr Lostchild can do for you, Jenna?" The kin's question made Mikeos flinch, Jenna's eyes had drawn him so far in he'd forgotten the doc was even there. The fact Jenna startled too made him feel better about it. Together they turned toward the doc, slowly, both hearing the change in the kin's voice, now a curious multi-tone as if a hundred spoke in close harmony.

"Eban is humanity's warrior, a hero who can defeat the sect," Jenna said with grim satisfaction.

It seemed to Mikeos that the kin's eyes were a lighter shade now and more grey than green. "Eban had his own magic," he told the doc. "Something all his own. Not hex-work. More powerful. That's how my Pa told it."

"Had?" The kin tilted its head in question.

"Has," Jenna said.

"And is it worth so much to you? This magic?" the doc asked. "Enough to upset the balance of a thousand years? To throw aside the gun-law, the protections our sister set around you? Do you so hunger to meet the Stranger?" None of his homely ways, no Ansos accent now, or jokes, just a curiosity somehow more distant than any corpser's hunger.

"How long have you lived, doctor?" Jenna asked.

"Five hundred and—"

"And in all that time you never took a name, doc? You were just the doctor."