NATHAN CROSS STRIKE BACK..

Chapter 9

At that moment when he came outside the hospital he spoke quietly to the empty street. 

“Serena.” He said her name first. “Derek. The Shaw family. Every single one of you.”

He paused.

“I am going to crush all of you, properly. The way an excavator crush something so completely that it can never be put back together again.” 

He looked at the his phone one last time. 

“You threw me away like garbage. I am going to make sure you spend the rest of your lives wishing you had finished the job.”

He turned away from the hospital and walked.

Not long after he found an ATM machine from one of the bank outlets three blocks away.

He took the card out of his pocket and stood at the machine for a moment. Two million dollars that did not belong to him. Money left by a woman whose face he could barely picture and whose name he did not know.

He wasn't going to touch it. Not really.

But he needed something to operate on until he could build his own resources back up. A place to stay. Basic necessities. Clothes that did not smell like a garbage yard.

He told himself he would pay back every cent with interest.

He meant it completely.

He withdrew thirty thousand dollars. Enough to rent a decent apartment for a few months and cover basic costs while he figured out his next move. Enough to stay invisible without being uncomfortable.

He pocketed the cash and the card and started walking toward the train station area where the cheaper apartment listings tended to cluster.

His mind was moving fast.

He had things inside him now that he needed to understand. The d******d from the darkness. The ancient knowledge sitting in his mind like a library he had not had time to explore properly. The spiritual energy moving through the meridian pathways in his body like a quiet river that was slowly growing stronger as he recovered.

He needed somewhere private to sit with all of it.

He needed time.

He was thinking about this — walking with his hands in his pockets, working through the logistics when on instinct he raised his right hand and made a small gesture with his fingers. A motion he could not explain. It came from somewhere in the downloaded knowledge. A basic technique. Something foundational.

The air around his hand moved.

Not a breeze. Not random air movement.

The air moved with his fingers. Followed the gesture. A small controlled current that bent and turned exactly where his hand directed it, carrying a little swirl of dust from the pavement in a perfect arc.

Immediately Nathan stopped walking, he looked at his hand.

He did it again.

Same result. The air moved. He could feel it could feel the spiritual energy reaching out from his palm and connecting with the atmosphere around him, pulling at it gently, redirecting it.

“What the hell.”

He stared at his fingers.

“What the hell is this?”

He closed his hand slowly and put it back in his pocket and stood very still on the pavement for a moment.

Then he started walking again because standing on the street staring at his own hand was not going to help him understand anything, people might even think he's going insane.

He had a lot to figure out.

He was going to need that quiet apartment more than he had initially thought.

The area around Creston Central Train Station was always busy even in the early morning.

Commuters. Street vendors. Taxis and buses moving in and out of the wide drop off bays. The particular organized chaos of a major city transit hub that never fully slept.

Nathan walked through it with his head slightly down, moving toward the board where apartment listings were sometimes posted on the far side of the station building.

He was not paying attention to the cars.

There were always expensive cars near the station. Creston City was full of money and money liked to move in expensive cars. He registered them on the edge of his awareness and kept walking.

Seven of them.

That was what made him glance twice. Not one expensive car or even three. Seven. All parked in a loose formation that blocked off a section of the pavement near the station's north entrance. Black vehicles. The kind with dark tinted windows and the quiet power of very serious money.

And the men.

Fifteen at minimum. Possibly more. All in dark suits. All large. All moving with the particular controlled alertness of people who did this professionally. They were arranged in a rough circle around something  someone  on the ground, and they were very actively preventing anyone from getting close.

Phones. That was what they were blocking. Anyone who raised a phone to record or photograph was immediately stepped in front of by one of the suited men. Calm. No shouting. Just a large body between the camera and the circle.

At that moment Nathan glanced at it and looked away.

Whatever rich person was having a medical episode in a train station was not his problem today. He had enough of his own.

He kept walking, and then it hit him.

He stopped, the perfume.

Faint. Coming from the direction of the circle of bodyguards. But completely unmistakable  the same rich complex fragrance that had been on his torn shirt all morning. The same scent that had stopped him in the hospital room when he picked up his clothes. Rare and layered and not like anything ordinary.

Without wasting anymore time he turned around slowly.

He looked at the circle of suits.

On the ground in the middle of them he could see between the moving bodies a woman. On her side. Curled into herself. She was dressed well. Her hair was dark. He could not see her face from here.

Immediately he took a step closer.

The fragrance was stronger.

“This perfume. This is the same one.”

He took another step.

The woman on the ground shifted slightly and her hair moved and for just a moment just a half second  he caught a glimpse of her face.

He stopped completely.

He was not certain. He had no clear memory of her face from last night. The memories he did have were fragments impressions rather than pictures. But something in him recognized what he was looking at. 

The perfume. The hair. The quality of the clothes.

“If I am not wrong. If I am not completely wrong. That is her.”

And something else.

Even from this distance he could see that something was wrong with her beyond just being on the ground. The people closest to her were keeping back. Not out of respect for her space out of something else. He could see it in the way they positioned themselves. Close but not touching. Like they wanted to help and were afraid to make contact.

He had the ancient medical knowledge sitting in his mind like a library.

The Extreme Cold Condition.

A rare biological condition affecting people born under specific circumstances. The body's core temperature regulation failed entirely. The person generated almost no internal heat. In a stable state it was manageable with medication and care.