Stroke of Midnight (Nightcreature #1.5)(73)
"She left something for you and her." The child pointed to Tara's limp body. "Knew a guardian would protect her. Said a bad wind was coming." Then the child ran away.
"Where in Arizona?" he shouted to the old woman before him. Frustration and terror were making his ears ring.
She walked away slowly and met the young boy and took something dangling from his hands. Then she shuf-fled back unhurried and looped a small leather pouch over his neck and one over Tara's.
Rider stared down at what was given him. It was a leather pouch on a long tether that had some type of herbs and sandy-feeling stuff inside it. The outside of the bag around his neck had silver and turquoise pieces interspersed with long eagle feathers, short hawk feathers, and what looked like some sort of animal tooth. On his there was a jade cross, on Tara's there was a silver medicine wheel with turquoise and jade stones set in it. He almost cried. He'd ridden hard for all those miles for an asafoetia bag? This was bullshit. The child gave him a crumpled-up piece of paper with the new address on it and he tucked it away, then brushed Tara's forehead with a kiss.
Without a word, he trudged back to the first house where the old men were sitting on the porch, produced a twenty-dollar bill and pointed to the dilapidated truck in the road and toward his bike.
"Where's the nearest medical center? A doctor?"
One of the old men chewed his pipe, stood slowly and simply walked down the steps toward the truck with a sigh, waving away Rider's money.
"How bad is she, Doc?" Rider said, clasping Tara's hand and brushing her hair away from her forehead, and then looking into a pair of old, wise blue eyes.
"There's probably some type of acid in that thing they put around her neck, the way it's burning her chest," the doctor said with disgust. He lifted it away from her skin with two fingers, exposing a large red blister between her breasts. "Take it off her and give it back to her family. Superstition drives me nuts with these people." He raised Tara's lids and looked at her dilated pupils and roughly took the bag off, thrusting it toward Rider. "What's she on?"
"Nothing. She has a blood disease," Rider said carefully, accepting the bag and putting it in his vest pocket. The wise eyes were failing him; total defeat had a stranglehold on him. This man didn't understand.
The doctor's eyes met his. "Do you think I'm crazy?" he snapped, pointing at the holes in her flesh and then at Rider's wrist bandages. "For the love of Christ, what's she shooting up on with you? If you want her to come out of this coma, you're gonna have to come clean and stop playing games and help us. Time is of the essence, young man!"
"I don't know what it is," Rider told him honestly. "But can you give her a blood transfusion, or something, to bring her back?"
"We're gonna give her a pint, because she's obviously anemic, then run some blood tests to determine what's in her system. She might be borderline OD, or have some sort of viral staph infection, or hepatitis from using dirty needles… but I've never seen injection sites so large. It looks like she was shooting up with a ballpoint pen."
He swished away from Rider, ordering the blood work and telling the nurses to give Tara a blood pint, and to keep her hydrated with an IV drip while on oxygen.
"Why don't you go have a drink and sit this one out?" a nurse said offhandedly, as she came into the room and began studying Tara's chart, but not looking at Rider when she spoke. "If she passes, does she have any next of kin?"
He just stared at the short, squat woman who had cold gray eyes. "I'm all she's got," he said just below a whisper.
"Fine job you did taking care of her." The nurse shut the chart with a snap. "How old is she?"
"Eighteen," he said, staring out the window.
"You two married?"
"No."
"Then you ain't next of kin." The nurse sighed with impatience. "You got insurance?"
He shook his head and dug into his pocket, producing two hundred dollars.
The nurse looked at him hard and accepted the bills, handing him back fifty dollars. "Put some gas in your tank and ride to wherever the hell her family is and go git 'em. That won't even cover the blood work, but by law, since she came in here under emergency conditions, we can't turn her away—even if she's a wetback."
"I'll go make more money and cover the bill. Just give her the best." He looked at the small form lying prone in the bed. "She has a grandmother that I have to go find. The old woman doesn't have a phone." He dug in his vest pocket and thrust the crumpled paper at the nurse. He'd already burned the new address into his memory.
"What's Tara's last name?"
He stared at the indignant woman before him and then headed toward the door. "Ma'am, I don't truly know."
A bad wind was coming, that was no lie. He knew it as soon as he'd put Tara on a gurney and the white coats had taken her away. But they were hooking up blood to her arm when he'd left—that was all he could do. At least she was somewhere safe, where there were professionals, where there weren't dust and rain and things that slithered in the night. Unshed tears stung the back of his throat and mixed with Jack Daniel's as he sat at the local bar, oblivious to the music, the crowd, everything.