It turned out he did not need to worry. The man dropped them off in front of the hospital, muttering and squeezing the steering wheel as he leaned over it to peer at the nightmarish traffic. They were still half a mile from the emergency room doors and the traffic had been at a complete standstill for the fifteen minutes since they arrived. Jeremy imagined it might just be a standstill permanently, cars locked together in some traffic pattern that they could not possibly undo.
“We can walk from here.” He assured the driver. The man sent him a harried look through the rear-view mirror.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” Jeremy nudged Caleb to open his door, “You probably won’t get out of all that for days if you manage to squeeze this car in there. You’d probably end up in a fender bender, too.”
The man’s eyes widened in horror. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” Jeremy held the door for Moira, then leaned down to thank the guy for driving them. He shut the door, gave the roof a few slaps, and turned to assess their path through the cars.
“There is no way that they are going to see you for your back,” Caleb said as they began to walk through the lines of traffic.
“I already knew that.” Jeremy said, “I just want to get our stuff. Plus, I wanted to go along with these guys for the moment because I think it’s a good idea to learn some more about the council.”
“I think you boys are forgetting my last name.” Moira splayed a hand out on her chest and tossed her ponytail over her shoulder, “There is an entire Feldman Wing at the hospital.”
Caleb made an offended face, lips curled up and eyes all squinted. “That’s privilege for you. Thinking it's okay to muscle your way past people bleeding out and having heart attacks for some measly little cuts just because you own half the hospital.”
“Well, they wouldn’t have half the hospital in the first place if my family hadn’t sponsored it!” Moira defended. Jeremy rolled his eyes and sped up to get away from their nonsense. They kept bickering behind him, Moira insisting she could get them in, and Caleb pontificating about societal constructs. His back did hurt, and he was sure it was probably getting massively infected after being in that water, so he really should be seen by a doctor. Plus, he would need to talk to some actual practitioners if he was going to learn anything about healing magic. If Moira could get them there faster, he was all for it. Otherwise, he had Leon’s number, and they could just get the stuff and patch him up later.
There was an actual line of people stretching out from the emergency room doors around the side of the building. A few people in scrubs floated around with clipboards, assessing people’s injuries, and assigning them to tiers of urgency. Nobody looked happy.
Moira marched right up to the doors. The eyes that followed her were a mix of glares and looks of resignation. She probably wasn’t the first person who thought her problems were more important than everyone else’s. A guard barred her entry. Jeremy and Caleb stood awkwardly beside her. Caleb had his arms crossed. Jeremy held Atticus close to his chest. Moira smiled sweetly at the guard, then pulled out her wallet.
“I’m Moira Feldman.” She chirped, showing him her ID, “And my friend of here is injured.”
The guard’s eyes slid from the ID to Jeremy, looking him up and down. Saw that he was standing, breathing normally, perfectly fine aside from looking like a drowned cat. He looked at the actual cat and frowned.
“You can’t bring animals into the hospital.”
“That’s fine!” Moira said brightly. She waved a hand at Jeremy without looking back, “Give Atticus to Caleb. He can wait outside.”
“Are you serious?” Caleb muttered.
“That’s fine.” The guard said, “Go ahead and see one of the people with a clipboard, and they will give you an estimate of your wait time.”
Moira sighed a little, “Well, I was hoping we might not have a wait time. My parents sponsored half this hospital, you know.”
Jeremy wondered if this ever actually worked for her. If she went around to fancy restaurants and demanded a table even though they were all reserved. He bet she did.
“Doesn’t matter who you are.” The guard said firmly.
Moira’s smile sharpened a little and no longer reached her eyes. She fluttered her eyelashes. “Can you perhaps call the…director of the hospital? I’d like to speak with him.”
“Jesus,” Caleb muttered under his breath.
“Sure.” The guard said blandly, “Let me just buzz on up to him and see if he is available.”
His hands did not move from where they rested on his belt.
“Oh,” He said a moment later, “Sorry, he’s not available. He’s too busy dealing with all the other patients who got here before you.”
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Moira bristled. Jeremy grabbed her arm and dragged her away. They went and stood below one of the lights in the parking lot. Bug buzzed in the glow above them, drawn to the light. Jeremy thought about the Kelpie and shuddered. He pulled out Sean’s phone.
“Look,” he said, “I’m just going to call Leon.”
“But,”
“Just trust me.” He cut her off, flipping through Sean’s contacts to find Leon. He tapped on his name and put the phone to his ear. Moira looked all upset, cheeks red and arms folded over her chest. Even her tangled, damp ponytail looked more disheveled somehow. Caleb grinned at her.
“Don’t worry.” He said, “Jer’s the man with the plan. I’m sure he’s got another way to get us inside.”
Jeremy almost hated that he was right. Leon picked up immediately. He told Jeremy that they were waiting for Sean to go into surgery to relieve some pressure on his brain or something along those lines. It sounded terrible, but apparently, they were using magic for that kind of thing now, so maybe it wasn’t so bad. Leon said Sean would be able to leave as good as new in a couple of hours at the most. The hospital was only letting a certain number of people in with each patient, so he offered to let them into the truck if they wanted to wait with their stuff in the meantime.
“So.” Caleb said when Jeremy hung up, “What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know if it will work, so I don’t want to say yet.”
Caleb rolled his eyes, “Ah,” He sighed, “You are such a perfectionist.”
They waited for Leon to come out and followed him to the truck parked almost a full mile away on the street. He was not much of a talker, so the entire walk was spent with Caleb muttering nonsense softly at Atticus. Leon let them into the truck but did not seem inclined to leave the keys with them. He told them they could lock the truck up after themselves if they had to go anywhere.
“Not much of a talker, is he?” Caleb commented as they watched his hulking figure walk away.
“He doesn’t trust us,” Moira muttered.
“Well, I don’t trust him.” Jeremy told her, “Can you grab the first aid kit out of your backpack?”
She huffed but yanked her backpack out of the pile of bags and smushed to one side of the cab’s backseat. They had shoved everything aside earlier to make room for Sean. There was a wet stain on the seat were he’d been sitting. Moira pulled out the first aid kit and shoved it at Jeremy, upsetting Atticus in his arms.
“Caleb, since you lost the carrier, see if her leash is in any of this stuff. I think I put it in with the clothes earlier.” Jeremy ordered, dumping the cat into his arms. He unzipped the first aid kit and pulled the little notecard with Abel and his wife’s numbers on it. Then he leaned into the truck to turn on the overhead light so he could read the number of the wife, Mary.. Moira watched curiously as he dialed.
Nobody picked up. He waited through her voicemail, then left a message. “Hi, Mary. We’ve never met, but Abel gave us your number in case we needed help. This is Jeremy, the guy he patched up the other night. If you could give us a callback, that would be great thanks.”
He hung up and stared down at the phone. “Damn, I really hate leaving voicemails. I feel like I always sound so stupid.”
“Don’t worry,” Caleb emerged from the bags to pat him on the shoulder, “It’s cause you do sound stupid.”
“Thanks.” Jeremy curled his lip at him.
“Seriously, though, man.” Caleb squeezed his shoulder, “Good on you for reaching out to other people for help. And somebody you don’t even actually know! Use that networking. I’m proud of you.”
He grinned at Jeremy so big that his smile got all gummy, and his eyes wrinkled into little crescents. Jeremy grumbled and shoved him off. “Believe me, if I could just hole up in my apartment and ignore all this crap, I would.”
“Oh,” Caleb rolled his eyes and looked entirely too smug for his own benefit, “I doubt you would or you would already be at your parent's house by now. I am surprised, though, that you are cool with just going along with this whole council thing.”
Jeremy shrugged. “It’s not like I trust them, but I want to know what they know.”
“Hey, look,” Moira shoved her phone under Jeremy’s nose. He winced as the light stabbed into his pupils and pushed her hand down so he could look at the screen. It was a blog post someone made about doing healing magic. “It’s all about how to heal cuts.”
The details of the post seemed pretty vague. It sounded like Sean had written it with all his individualistic visualization talk. Jeremy doubted that medical procedures were up to that much interpretation. He pushed the phone away.
“No thanks.” He said, “What if one of the cuts is infected or you visualize my skin growing back together and something weird happens, like my bones start growing or something random? No thanks.”
Moira shrugged at him and went back to scrolling around, “It’s cool that the internet still works. I’d have thought that magic would fry it or something. People are sharing all kinds of spells. I wonder if we could, like, crowdsource their info instead of messing around with the council.”
“You are the person who is actually on the council.” Jeremy pointed out. Moira huffed. But it was not a bad idea. Maybe the instructions in that blog post would not seem so vague if they were compared to a million other people’s healing methods and a pattern emerged. But, with the resources they had at the moment, Jeremy was more willing to put his money on the dusty old book in his bag that contained some of the symbols he’d seen floating around with his own eyes. Hopefully, the council had a whole bunch more books like that. Hopefully, they would let him look at them.
Sean’s phone rang.
“Hello?” Jeremy asked.
“Hey, kid.” The voice that came through was low, like the pitched-down rumbles of a lion. Or someone who’d smoked a pack a day for years, “You caught me at a good time. I’m heading outside to take a smoke break. This is Mary, by the way.”
“Mary!” Jeremy smiled, “Hi! I don’t know if Abel told you about me.”
“He did.”
“Great, well, we are at the hospital, and it’s pretty busy, as I’m sure you know.” Jeremy gently smacked a hand to his head because that was a dumb thing to say to a nurse who’s been on shift for god only knows how long. He blamed it on his fuzzy head and the exhaustion. Now that he thought about it, they had been awake for over twenty-four hours. His circadian rhythm was screwed at this point. He wondered exactly how people’s circadian rhythms were going to cope with the extra-long days and nights. Caleb patted him on the shoulder and made a soothing noise. Jeremy blinked and turned his thoughts back to the phone call.
“Anyway, those cuts on my back are not healing, and I don’t really want to take the doctors away from somebody who needs help more than me, so I hoped you might be able to give us some pointers for doing a healing spell.”
“Sure. I’m starting a break right now. Why don’t you come meet me by the meditation garden to the left of the emergency room? I can’t actually perform a healing spell because our breaks are to give us time to recover energy from doing spells, but I can tell you how.”
“Sounds great, thanks. We’ll be right there.”