“Somehow,” I said, “I just knew there would be. What sort of problems are we talking about?”
“To overcome a condition as severe as yours,” Benway said carefully, “and a poison as malignant as yours, will require a really massive accumulation of life energies. And it’s not like we keep it here in bottles. It has to come straight from a suitable donor. And they don’t just hang around here, waiting to be needed. We’ll have to put a call out to as many of them as possible, and pay over the odds to get them to come in as quickly as possible. Rounding them up will take some time . . .”
And then he broke off as the phone on his desk rang. He smiled reassuringly at me, excused himself, and went to answer it.
“Benway. Yes. He’s here with me now. I’ve just been telling him . . . Oh. Are you sure? Well, if you’re sure, go ahead and start the procedure. I’ll get the patient ready.”
He put the phone down and came back to smile at me some more.
“It seems you’re in luck, old man. Apparently we do have sufficient donors to hand, after all. The transfer of life energies is being prepared, even as we speak. Lots of money really does talk very persuasively. Your partner, Ms Metcalf, has already sorted things out with my colleague, Dr Raven.”
“So, what do you use?” I said. “Some kind of alien or future technology?”
“Hmm? Oh, no, we use a leech.”
“What?”
“I know!” said Benway. “It does sound like a terrible step backwards, doesn’t it? But this is a genetically engineered, really big leech. Originally created by a very secretive group called the Immortals. Whoever they were. All but wiped out now, I understand. We bought the leech at an auction of their effects. Got it for a really quite reasonable price too, because no one knew what it was, or what it could do. Neither did we until we started experimenting with it and had a few . . . accidents. But we know what we’re doing now.”
“I’m very pleased to hear that,” I said.
“Oh yes . . . ,” said Benway. “All very simple. We just slap the leech onto the donor, let it suck up some life energies, and then take it off again. Repeat as necessary. Once the leech has accumulated enough energies, we just slap it on the patient and persuade the leech to transfer all it’s stored.”
“How do you do that?”
“Hmm? Oh, we just zap it with a cattle prod. Look, stop asking questions if the answers are going to upset you so much. All you need to know is that this process will give you many years of extra life. Trust me; I’m a doctor. This has all been very thoroughly tested. Dr Raven is in the next room right now, getting ready to acquire the necessary energies. Shouldn’t take long.”
But something in that didn’t feel right. Benway said he needed to call in volunteers, and then gather enough energy from them to save me. It couldn’t be happening already. Benway must have seen something in my face, because he gave me his best reassuring smile.
“Just lie back on the couch, think of the bill, and go Aaaargh! A little private medical humour there.”
“Just how expensive is this going to be?” I said.
“Oh very,” Benway said cheerfully. “That’s what happens when you have a monopoly on the market and everyone wants something only you can supply.”
“So basically,” I said, “you’re drug dealers.”
“You’re the one in need of a fix,” said Benway. “Remember, old man; you came to us. But you don’t need to worry about the cost. Your partner, Ms Metcalf, has already taken care of everything.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “She must be very fond of you.”
Something in the doctor’s voice didn’t ring true. I can always tell when I’m being sold a bill of goods. I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the couch. Benway made vague motions with his hands, as though he wanted to push me back down again but knew better than to try to force me. I looked at him, and he fell back a step.
“I want to talk to Molly,” I said. “Before we start this.”
“But you can’t!” said Benway. “I’m sorry, old man, but it’s just not possible. I can’t allow you to . . .”
That was it. Something in his face, in his voice, was setting off major alarm bells. I was up and off the couch in a moment. I grabbed two handfuls of his jacket front, forced him all the way back across his office, and slammed him up against the wall. He cried out in shock and then broke off abruptly as I shoved my face into his.
“Where’s Molly?”
“Don’t hurt me!” he said immediately. “It wasn’t my idea; it’s not my fault!”
“What’s not your fault?” I said. “What have you done? Where’s Molly?”
I realised I was slamming him back against the wall with each question, and stopped to let him answer. He looked terrified of me, and he was right to be.
“She’s next door! I told you; she’s right next door! But you can’t go in there . . .”
I threw him to one side, hauled open the door, and stormed out of the consultation room. Patients and visitors looked at me in surprise, took in the expression on my face, and quickly looked away. I tried the door to the next room, but it was locked. I called out Molly’s name, and beat on the door with my fist, but there was no response. I armoured up. Cries of shock and alarm filled the waiting room as golden strange matter swept over me. I didn’t care. I hit the door with my shoulder and it burst open, slammed right off its hinges. The next room looked just like the one I’d left, only Molly was lying on the red leather couch with another doctor leaning over her. A large fleshy sort in a baggy suit, with cold eyes and a professional smile, he was holding a really big leech with a pair of long silver tongs. It was the size of a bean bag, jet-black with pulsing scarlet veins. The doctor was holding it over Molly’s neck.
He spun round at my sudden entrance, took one look at me in my armour, and immediately fell back from Molly. He retreated all the way across his office, not taking his eyes off me for a moment, until he banged up against his desk. He dropped the leech into a handy steel bowl, dropped the tongs onto the desk, and then held up both shaking hands so I could see he was no threat to anybody. Molly looked at me, and turned her head away. I turned to the doctor.
“What were you doing?”
“I’m Dr Raven,” he said, trying to retrieve some of his dignity. “Ms Metcalf arranged with this Clinic to give up all her life energies to the leech so they could be given to you. To save your life. She volunteered! She agreed to a price for the service, and signed a contract!”
“Get out,” I said.
He ran for the door. He thought I might kill him, and I thought I might too. I armoured down, and sat on the couch beside Molly. She didn’t want to look at me. I didn’t know what to say. Except . . .
“No.”
“Please, Eddie.” I could barely hear her, with her face pressed into the leather of the couch. “Let me do this. I want to. I need to do this, for you.”
“Give up your life to save mine?” I said, working hard to keep any trace of anger out of my voice. “You think I want that? You really think I’d want to go on living, knowing I’d bought my extra years at the cost of your life? I can’t let you die, Molly, because then I’d die anyway.”
She finally turned her head to look at me. Tears were coursing down her cheeks. “You think I want to go on living, without you?”
“This isn’t the answer,” I said. “This way, only one of us lives. I won’t settle for any solution that doesn’t involve both of us, and I won’t give up till I find it. Don’t you give up hope, Molly. I haven’t.”
“Really? I wasn’t sure.”
“Neither was I. Till now.”
She sat up and wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. She wasn’t used to crying.
“You knew about the leech all along,” I said. “You knew what they do here.”
“Yes.” Molly looked at me defiantly. “I
sabella told me, ages ago. She told me and Louisa, so we’d know what to do, if it ever became necessary. I’ve been thinking about the leech ever since the Drood doctors told me you were going to die.”
“Why not just let the doctors here do their job?” I said. “Draw off small amounts of life energy from volunteers, until they had enough to save me?”
“That was what I expected,” said Molly. “That was the plan. I’m not stupid! But when I explained the situation to Dr Raven, he said they’d need hundreds of volunteers to amass enough energies to save a Drood. And that would take so long . . . the odds were you’d be dead before they could put enough together. And then he suggested . . . that I could save you. My life forces are so much stronger than most people’s because of my long exposure to the magics. Enough to save a Drood, all on my own. So I volunteered. I really did, Eddie. I agreed to this. No one forced me into anything.”
“Bad idea,” I said as calmly as I could. “I’m not even sure it would have worked. The more I think about this, the less I believe anything we’ve been told. Even after giving me all your energies, they could still have insisted I needed more. They could have kept me hooked on that leech forever, always telling me I needed more energies to keep the poison at bay. Leeching more and more money off me for each treatment. Bleeding me dry, and then my family . . . Until they decided money wasn’t enough, and they wanted the Droods to do them a few little favours . . .
“Or they could have just lied to me. Told me they were saving my life, when they knew they’d never have enough energies to do it. They could just keep taking my money until I died. This whole life-energies-transference thing doesn’t strike me as an exact science. This isn’t a medical clinic, Molly; it’s a con job.”
Molly looked at me, thunderstruck. “They conned me! Me!”
“Just goes to show how upset you were,” I said. “You weren’t thinking straight. I’m flattered; I think.”
Molly was up on her feet in a moment, her whole body shaking with rage. She mopped at her face with a handkerchief until she had her composure back, and when she finally spoke to me, her voice was calm and steady and extremely dangerous.
“Let’s get out of here, Eddie. Before I decide to kill a whole bunch of people, just on general principles.”
“Sure,” I said. “Want to smash the place up and burn it to the ground before we leave?”
“You always know the right thing to say to cheer a girl up,” said Molly.
She grabbed hold of me, kissed me fiercely, and then held me tight. And I held on to her. Because I’d wanted this to work so badly. Now, more than ever, all we had was each other.
* * *
Alarms started ringing out in the reception area. Loud, strident, and quite petulantly upset alarms. Molly and I let go of each other, and exchanged a smile.
“They’re playing our song,” said Molly.
“Time to go,” I said. “I think we’ve worn out our welcome.”
I moved over to the open doorway, and looked out into the waiting room. And then I beckoned for Molly to come and join me. She crowded into the doorway beside me, and slowly began to smile. All the patients and visitors had been herded off into a far corner, along with the reception staff, under Dr Raven. Who was looking very unhappy. Dr Benway was standing in the middle of the great open space, glaring at Molly and me. He looked like a small child who’d just had his favourite toy taken away. And then he smiled nastily at me and at Molly, as though he knew something we didn’t. I looked around the reception area, but there didn’t seem to be anything in place to stop us from just walking out. Until I heard slow, heavy footsteps approaching from a side corridor behind Benway. I looked to Molly.
“Could be security.”
“What could they have that could stop a witch like me and a Drood like you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Presumably . . . that.”
I pointed to the inhumanly good-looking, almost godlike figure that had just stepped into the reception area. His face had that cold, handsome quality you normally get only on the faces of classical Greek statues, and his body had the musculature to go with it. The man positively bristled with strength and vitality. He wore a simple white jumpsuit, and his every movement was full of unnatural grace and power. Dr Benway laughed out loud. It was an ugly sound.
“If you take donated life energies and pump them into a perfectly healthy person over and over, this is what you get! Someone who’s stronger, better, than human! We call him Adam, because he’s the first of a new kind. And as long as we keep recharging him, there’s no telling how strong he’ll get, or how long he’ll live.”
“And as long as you control your little lab rat’s access to the leech, you control him,” I said.
Benway shrugged. “You don’t get anything for free in this world. Adam, take those two captive. I want them alive but not necessarily undamaged.” He was still smiling at us. Not his professional doctor’s smile; now it was the smile of a con man who’s been found out and is looking for revenge. He’d also stopped calling me old man, for which I was grateful. He grinned savagely. “Your turn to be lab rats! I can’t wait to see just how many life energies I can drain from a Drood and the wild witch of the woods. We can probably sell it at a premium rate. Bound to be extraordinarily potent . . .”
“To attack one Drood is to take on the whole family,” I said.
“And I have sisters,” said Molly.
“None of them will ever know,” said Benway. “This is the Shade, remember? No one ever sees what goes on in the Shade.”
“Enough talking,” said Adam. “I’m hungry. I’m always hungry.”
His voice was utterly lacking in anything human. What emotions I could see in his perfect face made no sense at all.
“Somehow,” said Molly, “I don’t think he’s hungry for a cheeseburger.”
“He’s looking at us like we’re the cheeseburgers,” I said. “And he looks like he thinks he can take us.”
“He doesn’t know us,” said Molly.
“This is just another variation on the Accelerated Men,” I said.
“Let’s mess him up,” said Molly.
“And then do something really unpleasant to the two doctors?”
“Why not?”
I armoured up again, and Molly surrounded herself with crackling magics. The watching patients, visitors, and staff cried out, and huddled together. Dr Raven tried to quiet them, but he didn’t look nearly as confident as his colleague. Adam didn’t look like he gave a damn.
He came straight for me, and when he was close enough, he hit me in the head. A sudden blow, so fast and so strong, I couldn’t react fast enough to block or avoid it. His fist slammed into my featureless golden mask, and my armour made a dull booming sound, like a struck bell. I didn’t feel anything inside my armour, but the sheer impact sent me staggering back into the consultation room. Adam looked at his fist. It seemed entirely uninjured, though by rights it should have been smashed to a pulp. He started forward, to come at me again.
Molly, who’d just been standing there nonplussed, got her act together and hit him with her strongest transformation spell. Probably something to do with frogs or toads; she’s always been a traditionalist in such matters. Wild energies crawled all over Adam, spitting and hissing like living lightning, but he just shrugged them off. The magic fell away, frustrated by his unnatural perfection. Molly hit him with a dozen different spells in swift succession, each one nastier than the one before, and none of them had any effect. Perhaps because Adam was so perfect now, nothing from this imperfect world could touch him. He moved to go into the consulting room after me, and Molly blocked his way. He raised an arm to strike her down. Molly didn’t flinch, didn’t move. I charged past her and slammed into Adam.
I hit him hard with a lowered golden shoulder, caught him off balance, and sent him staggering backwards. The shee
r weight and impact of my armour were more than a match for his perfection. He quickly recovered his balance, and the two of us went head to head, exchanging blows so powerful they would have killed anyone else. We rampaged back and forth across the reception area, smashing up the fixtures and fittings. Two godlike beings in a paper world. I grabbed a vending machine and broke it over his head. He threw me into a wall so hard, I cracked it from top to bottom. The onlookers were screaming now, terrorised by the sight of what happens when godlike beings go to war.
And then Molly jumped onto Adam’s back, and slapped the giant leech onto his bare neck. He cried out in shock and revulsion, and reached back with one hand to tear it free; but every time his hand got near, it just slipped aside, as though it couldn’t find it. The leech had its own built-in protection. No wonder Raven had to use special tongs to handle it. Adam grabbed hold of Molly and tried to haul her off him, but although she cried out at the vicious strength of his grip, she had both arms and legs wrapped tightly around him.
Adam lurched and almost fell, while the leech pulsed hungrily. He didn’t look perfect any more. I hit him hard on the side of the face, and his head snapped right round under the impact. I heard bones break. He dropped to one knee. I hit him in the head again, putting all my armoured strength into it, and he collapsed unconscious to the floor. Molly rode him all the way down, just to be sure, and only then released her grip. She rose elegantly to her feet, and kicked Adam hard in the ribs. He didn’t wake up. Molly nodded, satisfied. The leech pulsed and quivered on his neck, still draining the life energies out of him. Adam was looking less perfect by the moment. The bloom was off the rose, and humanity was setting in. His face showed clear signs of ageing.