The Midnight Mayor by Kate Griffin Read Free Book Online Page A

become admissible in court. She slid the needle into the skin of my exposed elbow vein without a sound, and pushed. We half imagined we’d see our arteries pop as whatever was in there rushed into our body; they didn’t. “Hold,” said Dr Seah briskly, putting a piece of cotton wool over the entry point. Vera held it.
    “What did you give us?” we whispered.
    “It’ll help with the pain. Well . . . in a way. Well , put it like this - you’re less likely to remember the pain afterwards, which is sort of like the same thing if you’re not too hung up on semantics, right?”
    “There’s . . . I was attacked,” I said. “I was attacked, they found me, I picked up the phone and then they came for me, they found me before, they might find me, I need to stay, to be . . .”
    “You’re as safe as you’re going to be here,” answered Vera. “If they find you here, they’ll find you anywhere, and at least then they can throttle you quickly with your own body parts before you bleed to death.”
    Drugs straight into the vein. I found it hard to raise my head, heard my own words as if they were being hummed through water, felt my lips, huge and someone else’s, flopping fat as I tried to speak.
    Fingers that had been trained how to heal on plastic dolls that couldn’t scream poked the slash down from my collarbone. “You’re a lucky guy,” said Dr Seah at last. “Long and shallow. Looks bad, but from a medical point of view, completely nah.”
    “Yeah,” I croaked. “I’m just lucky.”
    “Ever had morphine?”
    “They gave it to me once. It made me feel sick.”
    “Yeah, I know, crazy like that, isn’t it? Hey, Vera, can I ask you to put some more water on the boil?”
    “You need it for cleaning?” asked Vera with the enthusiasm of someone already anticipating the gratitude.
    “Cuppa tea,” was the reply.
    As answers went, this was disappointing for the almost properly elected head of the Whites, who strutted from the room with the cool manner of someone far too sensible not to be of use, but who was not used to menial.
    Dr Seah waited until she was gone, then leant in close. “Well, what do you want, good news or shiny news?”
    Since we weren’t entirely sure what “shiny” news was, we went for the good news first. “You’ll live,” she said.
    “Terrific,” I mumbled with a tongue made from sodden sponge.
    “Want to know the shiny part?”
    “Sure.”
    “Apart from this” - fingers of steel prodded the slash down my chest, a thousand miles away from my watching brain - “you’re OK. You’re going to need stitches, and while it’d be just so sexy to put you under for that, you kinda need anaesthesiologists and guys with the paddles and you know, things that go ‘ping’ to do a general anaesthetic, so I’m going to do it on local, and it’s going to hurt like ten kinds of buggery. There’s a few odd burns here or there, but they’ll just make you look ugly for a while and I figure, hell, you’re a big guy, you can handle it. The cut on the back of your head is nasty, but keep it clean and tidy and the worst thing that’ll happen is a bit of premature grey and a few banged-up brain cells. The only thing I’m not totally zoomy on is this.”
    It took a while to realise she was holding up the beetroot lump of my right hand.
    “Uh?”
    “I mean, I totally get that you’ve been electrocuted in the last few hours, like, totally . And you know, like I said, if life was shiny I’d have you wired to a heart monitor right now in case anything went pop.”
    “Heard of bedside manner?” I growled.
    “Sure,” she said briskly. “But I figure, you know, fuck it. But see, there’s this.”
    She raised my hand closer to my face so I could see. At first I didn’t understand the problem; the beetroot looked slightly better cooked and less raw than it had a few hours ago, and some of the swelling even seemed to be on the retreat. Then it occurred to me: even in bad cases,