Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(21)

I dug my fingertips into the table until I felt a splinter bite into the soft flesh of my thumb. Malina let out a choked sound and shoved away from the table, her chair squealing against the floor as she sprinted toward the bathroom. We could hear her retching, and Jovan lumbered after her, shooting the detective a poison-ivy look over his shoulder.

I swallowed, forcing down bile. “So what are you saying? Is she dead? I thought I saw—I thought she might not have been all the way gone. . . .”

Mirko dragged one hand wearily over his face, his pitted features distorting. “I know how it sounds. I’m sorry to even have to describe it to you, but . . .” He glanced up as Malina slid back in next to me, still breathing hard and wiping at her mouth, Jovan’s hand landing firmly back on my shoulder. “The problem is that we’re still not sure whether to treat this as an assault or a murder investigation, or if the distinction even matters. Your mother—the doctors don’t understand what’s happening to her. None of them have seen anything like this before.”

A surge of static buzzed through my head. My tongue went dead and heavy in my mouth. “What do you mean?” Malina said, voice wavering. “What’s wrong with her?”

He steepled his stubby fingers, looking at us over them. “She is dead, miss. Or she should be—she has no vital signs, no heartbeat, no blood pressure. Yet she also isn’t dead. She opened her eyes several times in the ambulance, and she has detectable brain activity, that of a living person in a coma. It’s as if . . .”

He worked his jaw a few times, as if trying to release pressure with a click. “Listen, sine. I’m not a religious man.”

Sine. Son, a pet name for a younger person, boy or girl. Somehow hearing it made me feel even worse, the boundless sense of how baffled and sorry for us he was, this man who was supposed to solve things and protect us and neaten the world. Behind us, ?i?a Jovan let go of my shoulder to cross himself.

The detective’s bloodshot eyes snagged mine. “And I haven’t been since I was younger than you both. But if I still were, and if I believed in such a thing as the soul, I would say that your mother’s was trapped, tied to a broken body that simply can’t sustain life. I don’t understand how that’s possible; none of the doctors do, either. They forbid us from even telling you about it for fear that it would get out, start a religious panic, people mobbing the hospital and shouting miracles and sainthood. But you girls go to school with my Goran. I couldn’t keep a thing like this from you, not about your own mother.”

He rubbed the back of his neck and worked his jaw again, and I could see again how much this pained him. “But she’s quarantined now, and until they have a theory of it—what kind of disease might mimic life this way, maybe, some genetic defect your mother might have—they can’t run the risk of letting you near her.”

I could feel myself expand with rage, boiling from me like a solar flare. “No.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me?”

The chair legs screeched as I pushed away from the table, my palms slick on the varnished wood, knees locked to keep me upright. “You can’t keep us away from her, not if she’s still alive. Or whatever she is. Even if she were . . . fully dead”—everything was insane—“you’d still let us see her one more time, have her body for a funeral at least. So you’ll take us to her. Now.”

His mouth tightened into a grim line. “I can’t do that, miss. I shouldn’t even have told you to begin with. As far as the police are concerned, your mother is dead. I can’t bring you to the quarantine, much less let you loose after.”

Certainty flooded over me, pounded against my insides like a rain-swollen tide. I could do this for us, for me and my sister. “You can. Because if you don’t, we’ll tell everyone what you just told us. Our friend Nevena Stefanovi?—she was our mother’s apprentice. She’s also the councilman’s daughter. Even if you detain all of us, you can’t lock her away somewhere. And she’ll do it for us, she’ll tell everyone, and whatever happens then will fall on you.”

I bit off the last of the words, forced them through chattering teeth. My entire body was trembling with just the effort it took to keep myself standing. Beside me, Malina rose and slid her arm around my waist, letting me lean invisibly against her.

“You wouldn’t have said anything in the first place, would you, Detective?” she asked softly, her voice warm as a hand to the nape of the neck. “If you hadn’t meant for us to force you to take us to her. You know what the best thing to do is, the kindest thing. I can tell you do. So just do it for us, will you? Please.”

He watched her silently, a hint of something like awestruck fear glinting deep in his pouched eyes. Finally he rubbed his chin with one hand, fingers rasping over the bristle of his stubble, and gave a single nod.

“Just the two of you, then.”

Jovan heaved a harsh-edged sigh. “Mirko . . .”

“No, sir. Not even for you. Even this could ruin me, end my entire career. I have Kristina to think of, and my boy. I’m sorry, but it’s the best I can do. It’ll have to be just the two of them.”

ALL THE HOSPITALS I’d ever seen had been grim, communist affairs, reeking of antiseptic and floored with curling linoleum or chipped tile. Like Mama, Lina and I had always been healthy enough to avoid everything but vaccines when we were little, so hospitals made us both nervous with the memory of the childhood fear of needles sliding under skin and the surrounding miasma of illness swampy in the air.