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Against all Gods

The heart monitor showed a silent trace, a green line with a bump for every heartbeat. The chart hanging on the foot of the bed showed that the patient was getting better, slowly.

On the bed, like a ragdoll, lay the form of Indra Gillespie. Her white hair was cropped closer now, and its red roots had gotten nearly a quarter-inch long. Her tattooed face showed incongruously above the neck of a hospital gown, and her intricately inked arms lay atop the covers, inert.

A tall man quietly entered the room and closed the door. He was blonde, with watery blue eyes, and wore a five thousand dollar suit. “Well, Ms. Gillespie,” he said, looking at her sadly through his gold-rimmed glasses. “Here we are.” He circled the bed slowly and finally stood looking at the IV bag.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it wasn’t your fault. But …. contro tutti i dii, sweetheart. This is the twenty-first century, and we just can’t have real live Goddesses running around anymore.” He shook his head sadly, withdrew a syringe from his pocket, pulled back the plunger, and reached for the IV tube.

“Air embolism’s a hell of a way to go,” Mitch said conversationally as he came out of the bathroom. “I’d been hoping you weren’t exactly that kind of a bastard.” He had his pistol out. “Step away from the bed, Dover. Or whatever your name really is.”

Dover had whirled, startled at hearing Mitch’s voice. But then he straightened up. “Think about this, Flanagan. We have to deal with things like the Hook, and we have to deal with things like Aphrodite.”

Mitch shook his head. “Not if it means murder.”

“Damnit,” Dover snarled. “Indra Gillespie’s dead already. She committed suicide in that club when she let the crowd make her into this thing. This isn’t her; this is a Goddess, and if you let it live it’ll spread chaos, superstition and blood. You want to go back to the ages when humans were the playthings of petty Gods and Goddesses with the morals of spoiled brats? Because that’s what you’re looking at here!”

“We could debate what she did,” said Mitch. “But it doesn’t matter. You’re not going to kill her in cold blood.”

“Damnit, Mitch, it’s not about what she did. It’s about what she is! This woman glows in the dark now, she’s never going to be able to get away from it.” Mitch could hear the Italian accent coming out now that Dover was under stress. It went with his Italian suit.

“She still glows,” Mitch said. “She glows so bright you can’t read me, doesn’t she? You didn’t know I was there. And she glows so bright you can’t do shit to my head while we’re in here, too, doesn’t she?”

Dover glared at him. “Mitch. This has to happen.”

“I heard you,” Mitch said. “I never studied any Italian, but contro tutti i dii is pretty clear once I understood what the hell you’re doing. Against all Gods, right? There’s a bunch of you guys, isn’t there? You’re not the only one.”

Dover frowned. “That’s what people like me put to a stop a thousand years ago and that’s what I’m here to stop today. Who else there is, I have nothing to say about.”

Mitch sighed. “I wouldn’t let you kill her even if you were right,” he said. “But you’re wrong. She’s not Lost anymore. And she’s not Aphrodite. There’s nobody in her head now but her.”

“Mitch, you’re not one of us,” said Dover. “You can’t possibly know that.”

“Everybody is, a little bit,” Mitch said. “Or at least that’s what Rose tells me. I was down here with Rose one of the times she regained consciousness, and she was Indra, not Aphrodite. Rose can’t hear her anymore. Says she has what you call glow, but it’s like a thing – doesn’t change with her moods and thoughts, doesn’t respond to other people’s. The doctors said she has a brain hemorrhage and they were all impressed how little function she’d lost. Of course, they didn’t know what kind of function she’d had, did they?”

Dover looked skeptical. “You’re sure about that?”

Mitch nodded.

Dover stuck the syringe back into his pocket. “So what happens now?” He gestured at himself, at Indra.

“Well,” said Mitch. “If I was still a cop, I would have to take you in for attempted murder and maybe conspiracy to commit. But I’m a private investigator now, and nobody’s paying me to take you anywhere. What happens now, I figure, is you go back to those others you have nothing to say about, and you tell ’em Aphrodite and the Hook are both dead. Mission accomplished for you. And Indra, well, maybe she’s always going to glow in the dark a little bit, but she’s never hearing the voices again. She gets to live out her own life.”

Dover gave Mitch a long, unreadable look, then asked, “When did you figure it out?”

Mitch shrugged. “When I ran your story back against the FBI, it didn’t hold up. Then I thought you were a pawn for the Hook,” he said, “But when Lucy got Lost after talking with you, she wound up back in New Orleans. And if you were with the Hook, you wouldn’t be getting innocent bystanders out of harm’s way, now would you?”

“Impressive,” said Dover. “Next time I need to work with a numbsk — um, someone without the gift, I’ll call you.”

“Did you call Mike too?” Mitch said.

“Who?” said Dover.

“Get out of my sight,” said Mitch.

Dover walked past him out the door without another word.

Mitch holstered his gun and went to stand next to the bed. “Well, I feel better now,” he said, picking up Indra’s hand. “Now all you have to do is get well.”

Her eyelids fluttered, and weakly, her hand grasped his. “Thangs…” she slurred. “Won’… vorged this.”

“Hey, girl. They got you on a lot of sleepy drugs. How long have you been awake?” Mitch asked.

“Szinze he zaid … gondro … thad thing,” Indra slurred. “Vigerred … wanded do hear.” But then she faded again. Her hand went limp and fell back to the bed.

Mitch looked up at the green trace of the heart monitor’s line, going bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump. “Get some rest, Indra,” he said gently. “I saw Philo in the parking lot waiting for regular visiting hours. He’s got flowers and a little jewelry box with him, and he’s actually dressed in a suit. And however bad you wanted to hear about Dover, it may be best if you don’t remember.”

Quietly, he turned out the lights and left.
 

This is one chapter of The Hook, a novel which is being published serially on this site. This page links to all chapters so far serialized.

The complete novel is available from Amazon.