Ivy hated hospitals.
Hospitals, it would seem, hated Ivy in return. She’d never been inside one as a patient – the Avicen took care of their own, not to mention that it would be something of a colossal disaster for Ivy to be dissected because a human doctor had discovered her and decided to find out how she ticked. She’d avoided them at all costs, knowing that nothing good lay within. Human medicine seemed barbaric to her; how they made do without the aid of magic was a mystery.
She stared up at the imposing bulk of Lenox Hill Hospital – where, according to the evening news, the survivors of the attack on Grand Central had been transferred after their condition had stabilized – and wished that she’d paid more attention to Echo’s particular brand of deviancy. Turns out, only half watching someone else pick a pocket didn’t actually teach one how to do it oneself. Until that morning, Ivy had been perfectly content to allow Echo to be the resident criminal mastermind in their little group of friends, but now she would have given her left arm – or at the very least, a kidney – to have Echo by her side.
It wasn’t the first time Ivy had found herself missing Echo since her best friend had departed New York on a mission to find Caius … if there was anything left of him to find. Ivy kept that thought to herself. The fragile hope she’d seen in Echo’s and Dorian’s eyes had been too delicate for her to shatter with pessimism. This time, though, the pang of Echo’s absence was less sentimental and more pragmatic. There was a pickpocket-shaped hole in Ivy’s life, and she felt it keenly as she watched doctors and nurses and security guards walk in and out of the hospital’s main lobby, ID cards dangling from lanyards, pockets, and lapels. If she could only get her hands on one of those, she wouldn’t need to worry about finding an alternative way to get inside. Echo had it right: being an upstanding citizen was a giant waste of time.
As it stood, Ivy had vials of bloodweed elixir burning a hole in her bag and she needed to get into that hospital. And the only way she could think of to sneak past the guards, and the nurses, and the patients, and the patients’ families, and the people who were basically everywhere, all the damn time, was to go to a place she had absolutely zero desire to visit. It would be far less glamorous than using an ancient spell to break into the Louvre, that was for sure.
Movement in Ivy’s peripheral vision attracted her attention. Beside her, Helios fidgeted in his borrowed clothes – a charcoal wool sweater and a pair of black jeans – although “borrowed” was perhaps a bit of a stretch. Ivy doubted that Rowan would have voluntarily loaned his clothing to a Drakharin, even one as nice as Helios, so she had cut Rowan from the equation. Helios needed something to wear besides the armor he had left Wyvern’s Keep in.
Helios had fidgeted all the way to the hospital, occasionally scratching his arms and squirming in his seat. Ivy had assumed at first that the wool was itchy and hadn’t thought much more about it. But when Helios had slid his sunglasses down to read the subway map, Ivy caught sight of an expression she’d grown familiar with in the first few months of living in Jasper’s London hideout. The stiffness of his shoulders, the darted glances searching for threats that weren’t there. Dorian had been like that, living in the middle of London. Caius, too, to a lesser extent. Helios’s fidgeting had worsened in the crush of bodies on the southbound 6 train, confirming Ivy’s suspicions. He was trying valiantly not to show his discomfort, but it was written in the tense lines of his body, in the way he flinched from the jostling elbows and knees as the subway rumbled over the tracks. In the wake of the attack on Grand Central and the shuttering of the Agora, shadow dust reserves were strictly rationed. The Ala had requisitioned enough for Ivy to get into the hospital, but getting to the hospital had called for a slightly more mundane method of transportation. Hence the subway and Helios’s unseasonal sweating.
The Avicen had lived in close proximity to humans for centuries, but the Drakharin were an insular race. They secluded themselves in remote areas, buried themselves beneath layers upon layers of protective wards, and let the inexorable march of modernity pass them by. Human invention was treated by the Drakharin with a carefully cultivated disdain that was equal parts superiority and superstition. Why invent a microwave to pop corn kernels when you could toast some with magical flame summoned with a flick of the wrist? The Avicen tended to shy away from human technology, but only on a surface level. Just about everyone Ivy knew had their own little vices, from radios to hot pots and even the occasional cell phone. But the Drakharin were fastidious in their avoidance. Humans, with their technological shortcuts and their short, fleeting lives, were other and to be dealt with only when doing so became absolutely unavoidable. Being a lower-ranked Firedrake prior to his defection, Helios had likely never spent much time around humans. Now he’d been thrown into one of the most populous cities in the world. The belly of the beast, as it were.
Ivy sympathized. She’d seen how long it had taken Dorian to acclimatize to life in London, and she didn’t want Helios to put himself through any unnecessary stress – gods only knew their lives were stressful enough as it was – but her insistence that he didn’t need to accompany her to the hospital had fallen on deaf ears. He seemed determined to be her knight in shining armor, minus the armor, even if the majority of their trip involved her subtly watching him for signs of an imminent panic attack on public transport and him pretending that he didn’t need to be subtly watched for signs of an imminent panic attack. So far, everyone had played their roles admirably, if Ivy did say so herself.
No one went out alone. That was the rule Caius had laid down in London, and that was still the rule. That was why Rowan, despite the little regard he held for the Drakharin, had accompanied Echo on her hunt for Caius. And why Ivy and Helios stood on the sidewalk across the street from Lenox Hill Hospital’s main entrance, close enough to a hot dog stand to look like they were innocently waiting for food. Ivy knew every minute she stood on that sidewalk was a minute lost, but she really, really, really didn’t want to break into the hospital via the morgue. Honestly, what had her life come to?
“Why do we need to be here?” Helios asked. He was eyeing the hot dog vendor with a curious stare. She wondered if he’d never seen a hot dog before. Did the Drakharin not have street meat? Maybe Ivy would buy him one if their plan succeeded. Provided he still had an appetite after the morgue. She knew she wouldn’t.
Ivy patted the vials of bloodweed elixir in the side pocket of her messenger bag. “To save people,” she said. “We’re the good guys. It’s what we do.”
It was something Echo liked to say often. She was not wrong.
Helios tore his gaze away from the hot dog stand to make a face at Ivy as if she’d said something distasteful. Even more distasteful than processed meat stewing in dirty water on a sidewalk in Manhattan. “But they’re human,” he said, as if that explained everything, and to him, perhaps it did.
“Yes,” Ivy said, fighting the urge to roll her eyes. He probably wouldn’t notice on account of her sunglasses, but she would know. And she’d probably feel bad about it later. “But they’re people.”
“Human people.”
“Still people.”
He grunted, not quite acquiescing to her point, but apparently unwilling to argue it any further. It would take longer than a few weeks to cross that cultural divide.
“They may be human, Helios, but it’s sort of our fault they’re in the hospital,” Ivy said. Our being the Avicen, the Drakharin, and their associated monstrosity: the kuçedra. “From a purely strategic standpoint, we’re not entirely sure how the kuçedra operates, but we think it’s drawing power from the people it puts into comas, using them as a sort of battery. If we cut off its tie to those people, then maybe it won’t grow quite as fast, which would make it easier for us to kill it … you know, when we figure out how.” And if such a thing was even possible, but Ivy didn’t feel the need to speak that thought aloud. It was entirely too fatalistic for her liking. She patted the vials again. Touching them was a comfort. So far, the elixir’s creation was one of the few victories they’d earned, and Ivy had played no small part in it. “What’s more important, avoiding humans or severing the kuçedra from a potential power source?”
Helios sucked his bottom lip between his teeth, another nervous tic Ivy had noticed. She didn’t quite mind this one. Helios had a very nice mouth. “Severing the kuçedra from a potential power source,” he said.
“That’s right. If we administer the elixir, hopefully those humans will wake up and the kuçedra will be short a few meals. And if we can do that while helping a bunch of people whose only crime was being caught in the cross fire of our war, then everybody wins. Well, everybody except the bad guys. Let’s not help them win.”
“Fair enough,” Helios said. He looked away from Ivy, turning his head toward the hospital. Through the revolving doors, Ivy could make out at least two guards and a dizzying array of hospital staff and patients, all standing between them and their objective. “But how are we going to get in?” he asked.
Ivy grimaced. “I have an idea,” she said, pulling the small pouch of shadow dust from her jacket pocket. She’d spotted a supply closet on the subway platform they could use to access the in-between. From rats to corpses. Lovely. “But you’re probably not going to like it.”