Playing with Fire: A Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)(7)
A gloved hand pressed something gold to my throat. I guessed it was a stethoscope of some sort. It could be a gun, too, something they’d whip out if I started petrifying people.
“Sluggish pulse, semi-conscious, sir. Looks like she collapsed in front of the door.”
Damn. I recognized the man’s voice, although it took me a few moments to force my uncooperative memory into dishing out its secrets. Forensics. He was someone from Forensics. No, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t in Forensics, he just knew everything. Quinn’s… expert guy. The ‘weird shit just happened’ guy. I was fairly certain he had a name.
Bert? No, that wasn’t right. Perky? No. Wait, yes. Perky Perkins. He hated when I called him Perky. Maybe if I stopped giving strangers names they didn’t like, I’d have more friends. “Hey, Perky. There’s gorgon dust in here, and I don’t know if I neutralized it all.” My words slurred. Yippee. I sounded like a drunk.
“That’s why I’m wearing a hazmat suit, Gardener. On the surface scan, you’re showing as clean, but let’s not take any chances.” Perky removed the metal sensor from my throat, took hold of my chin, and tilted my head so I faced him. Behind his clear face shield, he frowned. “Your face took one hell of a beating. What happened?”
My body really didn’t approve of my attempts to move, but I pointed at the trashed cell phone anyway. “Boom.”
“Jesus Christ. Cell phone bomb, Chief. She even bagged it for us.”
“Bathed it in neutralizer first, too.” With Perky’s help, I managed to sit up. “Sprayed down the whole apartment, too, but…”
“Better safe than sorry and having an outbreak. Sprayer,” he ordered, standing and turning to the door. “Nail the hallway while I take care of the interior.”
The other residents of my building were just going to love the mess. It’d get into everything, invade the ventilation system, and coat everything in a pink, glittery residue requiring a great deal of elbow grease to clean up. Someone in a hazmat suit passed Perky a green extinguisher. Pulling out the pin, he took aim and fired, covering everything in my apartment with a pale pink powder. Maybe I was immune to some of the nastiest magical substances known to man, but the purest form of neutralizer could stop the most virulent of plagues dead in its tracks. I tingled everywhere it touched, including my mouth, nose, throat, and lungs when I breathed. It worked its way into my clothes, and within several seconds, I tingled in places I had no business tingling.
It took less than a minute for the itching to kick in. I spat curses at Perky for exposing me to hell. “I thought you said I’m clean!”
“Better safe than sorry, Gardener. Don’t be a baby. It only stings and itches for a little while. Look at it this way: if you were sick with anything, you aren’t anymore. This is the good stuff. It’ll even reverse petrification in a few minutes.”
Even my eyes itched, which didn’t help me look at anything on the bright side. Scratching wouldn’t help; I’d end up spreading the neutralizer into my bloodstream even faster. Within two minutes, I’d be a living itch. “Yippee. I got the good stuff.”
Perky abandoned me to scan my apartment for gorgon dust, the meter in his hand beeping away. It squealed like a stuck pig the instant he approached the destroyed phone. “What ratio of solution did you use on this, Bailey?”
“One part neutralizer, three parts water.”
“Was the batch stale?”
Was he trying to insult me? While I had expired neutralizer lying around, I kept it separated from the active compounds. I only squirreled it away in case of an utter emergency. The state of my apartment counted, but I hadn’t run out of the unexpired formula. “No, it wasn’t stale.”
Asshole.
Perky sighed. “A man can dream, can’t he? Chief, I’m going to need a box. Got a live sample, and it’s strong—I’m getting a reading right through the plastic, and it’s airtight.” Turning to me, the man frowned. “Any symptoms, Gardener?”
A shiver ran through me, and I fought the urge to scratch. The full-body itch could mean nothing. It could mean everything, too. Even with treatment, in a day or two, I might start petrifying people. The human body was filled with inert diseases and bacteria, and the neutralizer killed them all, but it couldn’t reverse the gorgon virus. Nothing could.
To add to my misery, if I stayed exposed to the powder for too long, the neutralizer would fry my immune system, ensuring I’d need a new dose of vaccinations on top of everything else. For the next month, I’d catch every little illness known to man.
But I wouldn’t spread the gorgon contagion, and that was the important thing.
Why the hell would anyone toy around with gorgon dust? I sure as hell didn’t; I knew what would happen if I took a dunk in bile: nothing. But gorgon dust? I’d never breathed in a lungful of it before. Would my immunity hold up? I’d find out soon enough.
I sighed. “No symptoms, but the bomb detonated right in my face. I breathed it in.”
With my words, I condemned myself to quarantine, and I knew it. Judging from the way Perky blanched, he knew it, too. “We’re going to need the mask and the glass coffin, Chief.”
The police chief cursed from his post in the hallway but issued the order. Screaming at the thought of forced hibernation and containment wouldn’t change anything. Like it or not, I’d spend a few days in a coma while the CDC evaluated and monitored my health. Begging and pleading wouldn’t get me out of it, either.