"07 - Burnt Offerings 4.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Laurell K)

Chapter 4



My second emergency room in less than two hours. It was a red-letter day even
for me. Good news was that none of the injuries were mine. Bad news was that
that might change. Alpha or not, Zane was a shapeshifter. They were able to
bench-press medium-size elephants. I was not going to arm-wrestle him. Not only
would I lose, but he'd probably pull the arm out of my socket and eat it. Most
lycanthropes liked to try and pass for human. I wasn't sure Zane sweated little
details like that.
Yet I didn't want to kill Zane if I didn't have to. It wasn't mercy. It was the
thought that he might force me to do it in public. I didn't want to go to jail.
The fact that the punishment worried me more than the crime said something about
my moral state. Some days I thought I was becoming a sociopath. Some days I
thought I was already there.
I carried silver-plated bullets in my gun at all times. Silver worked on humans,
as well as on most supernatural beings. Why keep switching to normal ammo that
only did humans and a very few creatures? But a few months ago I'd met a fairie
that had damn near killed me. Silver didn't work on fairies, but normal lead
did. So I'd taken to keeping a spare clip of regular bullets in the glove
compartment. I peeled off the first two rounds of my silver clip and replaced
them with lead. Which meant I had two bullets to discourage Zane with, before I
killed him. Because, make no mistake, if he kept coming after I'd pumped him
full of two Glazer Safety Rounds, which hurt a hell of a lot even if you could
heal the damage, the first silver bullet was not going to be aimed to wound.
It wasn't until I was going through the doors I realized that I didn't know
Nathaniel's last name. Stephen's name wasn't going to help me. Damn.
The waiting room was packed. Women with crying babies, children racing through
the chairs belonging to no one, a man with a bloody rag around his hand, people
with no visible injury staring dully into space. Stephen was nowhere in sight.
Screams, the sound of breaking glass; metal clanked to the floor. A nurse ran
out of the far hallway. "Get more security, now!" A nurse behind the admittance
desk punched buttons on the phone.
Call it a hunch but I was betting I knew where Stephen and Zane were. I flashed
my ID at the nurse. "I'm with the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team. Can
I help?"
The nurse clutched my arm. "You're a cop?"
"I'm with the police, yes." Prevarication at its best. As a civilian attached to
a police squad you learn how to do that.
"Thank God." She started to pull me towards the noise.
I pulled my arm free and took out my gun. Safety off, pointed at the ceiling,
ready to go. With normal ammo I wouldn't have pointed at the ceiling, not with a
hospital full of patients above me, but Glazer Safety Rounds aren't called
safety rounds for nothing.
The back area was like every emergency area I'd ever been in. Curtains hung from
metal tracks so you could make lots and lots of little individual examining
rooms. A handful of curtains were closed, but patients were sitting up, staring
through the curtains, watching the show. A wall divided the room down the middle
to the corridor, so there wasn't much to see.