Hell Has a Succession Problem

Two Doors

Mercy General looked wrong from the parking lot.

The ER sign glowed red. The ambulance bay sat empty. Every light inside was on, and nothing moved behind the glass.

"No ambulances," Raven said. "It's almost five. There should be six."

"Slow night?"

"It's never a slow night."

Trigon had not spoken since the lamppost. Now he turned from the passenger seat, grim as a gravedigger.

"Listen to me, both of you. Kessa's court holds whatever it reflects. Mirrors, windows, screens, chrome. If a reflection moves wrong, look away."

"It's a hospital," Raven said. "Everything in there is glass."

"Then watch the floor."

"You're not coming?" Marcel asked.

"Someone must keep the girl breathing." Trigon glanced at Cass in the back seat, then at the brand on her wrist. "And I do not walk into rooms where Kessa has an audience."

"Coward."

"Alive," said Trigon. "It is a hobby."

Raven was already out of the car.

Marcel caught up with her at the doors, his ribs screaming. "Stay behind me."

"No."

"Raven."

"I know where the crash cart is. You know where the demons are." She did not look at him. "We go together, or I go alone."

He swore under his breath and let the doors slide open.

The chime was the only sound in the world.

The lobby was packed. A man with a bloody dish towel around his hand. A mother holding a sleeping toddler. A teenager in a hoodie, an old woman with an IV pole, a paramedic with a coffee halfway to his mouth.

Every one of them stood perfectly still, facing the dark glass wall, eyes wide open.

None of them blinked.

"Marisol," Raven whispered.

The charge nurse stood at the desk with a syringe in her hand and a smile on her face, like someone had paused her mid thought.

Raven pressed two fingers to her neck. Checked her pupils. Went very pale.

"Pulse sixty. Steady. Pupils fixed and reactive." She swallowed. "They're not hurt, Marcel. They're parked."

Marcel looked at the floor.

It was waxed linoleum. It shone like a chrome rim.

He looked at his own shoes in it, and they were wrong. They were walking on their own.

"Fuck," he said softly.

"Good morning, Marcel."

The voice came from everywhere. The wall glass. The vending machine. The chrome on the IV pole, the lens of the security camera, the screen of a dead monitor.

Kessa Thorne's face bloomed in all of them, pale and lovely and patient, like a woman who had all the time in the world.

"You do not look well," she said. "Your throat. Your ribs. You should have taken my offer on the radio."

"I was thinking about it."

"You were stalling. I admire that. Truly." She smiled in forty reflections at once. "But the sun is rising, and I am bored of waiting."

"What did you do to them?"

"I borrowed them. Thirty one people, Marcel. Gently, with no harm done. They will wake the moment you sign."

"And if I don't?"

"Then the mirrors keep them. A very pretty collection." Her voice dropped, almost kind. "Glass does not need to breathe."

Raven's hand clamped on his sleeve.

"Two doors, little heir," said Kessa.

Down the corridor, two sets of doors lit up at once.

The first was the ambulance bay. Beyond it, parked at the curb, a black car idled with its door open. A folder lay on the back seat, thick and cream colored. A pen sat on top.

The second was the trauma bay.

Through the narrow window in its door, Marcel could see the beds. A boy about nine in a hospital gown, an asthma mask on his face. An old man. A woman in labor. All of them frozen. All of them smiling.

And behind the boy stood Walt.

He wore the gray suit again. His coat was singed and his skin was gray. The pads of the defibrillator had burned two black circles into his shirt.

In one hand he held a scalpel. It rested against the boy's throat.

"Walk through the first door, and sign," Kessa said gently. "Or walk through the second, and watch."

"You absolute bitch."

"Flattery."

Marcel's mouth was dry as dust.

He checked every trick he owned.

The stall. The bluff. The loophole. The joke that bought him thirty seconds.

There was nothing. Not one thing in his whole stupid toolbox that could cut a child away from a scalpel across forty feet of hallway.

"Marcel," Raven said. Her voice was very quiet.

"Don't."

"I'm not asking you to sign."

"Then what?"

"I'm asking you to look at me."

He did.

She was crying. She hadn't made a sound. Tears ran down her cheeks and she let them, steady as a surgeon.

"That's Theo," she said. "He has asthma. He comes in twice a month. He's nine, and he's scared of needles, and he always asks me if I'm a real doctor." Her voice cracked once. "Whatever you do, you do it because it's right. Not for me."

"Raven..."

"Don't you dare sign that for me."

Down the hall, Walt pressed the scalpel in a fraction of an inch.

A bead of blood welled on the boy's neck.

"Time," Kessa said. "I do hate to be rude."

Raven moved.

She did not even decide to. She took one step toward the trauma bay, then another, with her hands raised and her voice level.

"Walt," she said. "Walt, put it down."

The thing in the gray suit smiled with a mouth that had too many teeth.

"Stay there, Doctor."

"He's a child."

"He is leverage." The scalpel left the boy's throat. It swung, slow and deliberate, toward Raven's chest. "So are you."

Marcel stopped breathing.

He had lost his father's approval at nine. His mother at fifteen. Every friend he'd ever made, he'd kept at arm's length, so no one could take what he'd never held.

Four years. One woman with takeout who never once did what she was told.

And a nine year old kid he had never met, who was afraid of needles.

He was not going to lose them.

Not one. Not the kid, not the old man, not the nurse, not the woman in labor. Not her.

Not for Kessa. Not for the throne. Not for the Devil's pretty speech about destiny.

Something in his chest turned over.

It felt like an engine catching. A cold bolt of something old slid down his spine and ignited, and the whole world went quiet.

Then the fire came.

It did not come the way fire should. It was black at the heart, with gold bleeding through at the edges, like a sunrise seen through a burning house.

It rolled out of his hands, up his arms, across the floor in a slow, hungry tide.

"Marcel!" Raven yelled.

He barely heard her.

Every reflection in the room began to scream.

Kessa's face cracked in forty panes of glass. The windows shattered outward. The vending machine burst. The dead monitor bloomed with fire and went out, and the faces in all of them twisted and clawed at their own edges.

"What are you?" Kessa shrieked. "What is that?"

Marcel didn't know.

He knew it hurt. It hurt worse than anything, worse than the burned throat, worse than the broken ribs. Each flicker pulled something out of him, a thread at a time, like unraveling a sweater.

He knew it was taking something he would never get back.

He walked toward the trauma bay anyway, and the floor burned black behind him.

Walt's grin was gone.

The scalpel had dropped from his fingers. He was backing away, one hand raised against the light, the gray suit blistering on his shoulders.

"Stop," the thing said.

Marcel kept walking.

"Please." The voice was different now. Smaller. Hoarse. A voice that belonged to a tired man with a granddaughter and a photo in his wallet. "Please stop. You're burning me. I'm still in here."