Eyes to the Soul (13 page)

He purged that trail from the apartment, leaving her space clean and renewed.

Then he shifted to the hospital. The energy buffeting against him shot his guards into place. Damn. He hated hospitals. He closed in his energy, zipped up his aura, and moved cautiously through the hallways. He floated above the moving throngs of people. This place was always busy. He wasn’t sure what the drive had been to come here, given that it was the last place he wanted to be. Yet he couldn’t shake the connection from the orchestra incident to the warning message in Celina’s apartment, and that meant checking out the driver of the truck that had slammed into the pub. He had hoped to speak with him, but as the man hadn’t survived the crash Stefan hoped to gain some insight from his corpse. Nice thought. Not. First he needed to see the surviving orchestra members.

He drifted through the various rooms, seeing the energy, the healing, the disease, the sickness, and the thick blanket of heavy emotion. Grief, sadness, and bright flashes of anger dominated.

All normal. All to be expected. He reached the floor where the injured orchestra members were and moved through the hallway, seeing the little bits of connecting energy between several rooms. They were there. He stopped at one doorway, recognizing the energy. Interesting. He sent a mental note to Brandt. Heard the other man’s shocked denial and then closed the mental door. He needed to concentrate here.

He popped into another room to find a woman sleeping, bandages on her head and her right arm in a cast. Nothing was amiss in her room or energy – at least in a negative way.

Going from room to room, Stefan was unable to shake the feeling that he was looking for something and would recognize it when he saw it. But he wasn’t finding it. Frustration rode him as he zipped through the massive building.

He closed his eyes and saw the morgue in his mind’s eye. When he opened them he found himself in the right place. Techs worked in systematic fashion in the large room with several full tables, autopsies in progress. He shifted his gaze to the large wall of cabinets at the end of the room. He drifted closer, searching for links to the orchestra. There were two here. At least two.

Stefan studied the energy coming from the cold, clinical room. Instead of it being empty of color and form, the place seethed. With anger, pain, loss, denial, grief, and most of all that sense of regret. Regret that they hadn’t had time to say goodbye, regret for all the loved ones left behind. Regret for the things they left unfinished. There were so many that they rolled in together, creating a morass of seething turbulence.

He had seen many a person pass on and just leave. Those were the easy cases. More often than not the ones he saw – and he’d admit it was his affinity for violence that likely kept the natural selection this way – were full of unresolved issues.

Many people couldn’t leave when death came to them. And that was too bad. No one was ever prepared for death when it was their time. Unless they’d been dying for a long time or had made peace with their death. He’d heard of people crossing the river that divided the two planes of existence and coming back, but he wasn’t one of them. He walked the gray area between those planes and could often speak with those that had crossed over and somehow came back, or those that had never left and were even now grabbing for a foothold into the craziness of life that they weren’t ready to leave.

He wished he could tell everyone to let go and let death be your friend. But he couldn’t. It wasn’t his place. Nor was it his truth. He hadn’t been there, so it couldn’t be. And he could only speak his truth.

He slipped closer to the big metal drawers on the one side with computerized door locks. The morgue was more advanced than many. Anything that dignified those in death made it easier on everyone. He shifted along the wall, searching for anything that would make sense of this. He strengthened his barriers against the energy vibrating at a level he’d prefer not to access. It helped dim the noise somewhat. He wasn’t sure why the energy was so extreme today. Two men entered the room. He eased his barrier slightly to hear their conversation.

“Man, what a night. Talk about gang wars. What have we got – seven dead and three more upstairs? The ones out on the street are rioting even worse now.”

That explained it. Young anger, anger of the righteous, vigilant anger, and the anger of losing in that war were all clearly flying around him. A gang fight had sent many members from both sides to lie in a relative calm side-by-side in the morgue. There would be no more fighting in here. At least not against each other. Hopefully. He shifted his focus and took a moment to separate the energy, and realized a half dozen screamed louder than normal. If these young men had fought this loud and this strong while on the streets, they’d probably done a fair bit of damage to innocent bystanders as well.

He shook his head. Talk about bad karma. When would humanity learn? One paid for every misdeed – if not here and now, then later. And he’d met enough of those people to know that fact for sure. No one ever took heed because payback could take decades.

He shifted back again, drifted around the two men who were shuffling carts full of bodies. Some into drawers, some lined up to go to autopsy, and some needing paperwork. He wondered at the human capacity to deal with death every day. Did it affect these men? Or did they see it as a necessary service that they could do for mankind? He’d likely never know.

As he turned to drift toward the autopsy room, he caught a tiny thread of… something. Something odd. Something off. Again.

He followed the faint thread of energy out to the autopsy room, to where a man lay nude on the table, a big Y incision on his chest, his ribs open, while someone in a gown muttered over him.

Stefan couldn’t hear him clearly, but there was something wrong. He slid down to the far end and tried to see the name on the chart. Owen Dugar.

“Poor bugger. You didn’t know what had happened, did you?” the doctor said. “Looks like your heart just cooked itself. Beyond weird. Well, let’s take a closer look.”

As Stefan lifted his gaze to study the heart in the man’s hand, he realized he’d never seen anything like it. The heart looked like a hunk of oozing, burnt meat. How the hell had that happened?

The doctor stared.

Stefan stared.

That was when he realized something else. Even though dead, there were foreign energies on this man’s heart.

He studied the dead man’s open chest. There were scars on the man’s belly, but with the chest open he couldn’t see if there were other scars to indicate earlier surgery, like bypass surgery. Although Dr. Maddy would likely be able to get the information for him, he didn’t want to wait. He continued to listen, hoping for more.

“Even with everything they’d done to you, you still didn’t make it,” the doctor said to his dead patient. “I’ve never seen anything like this one. I’m going to speak with your cardiologist. See what he might have done different with you, and if he had any idea what might have caused this.”

With that he placed the heart on a scale to weigh the blackened mass.

Armed with that information, Stefan closed his eyes and retraced his pathway home. All he could think about was how long a surgical team’s energy would stay in a body after surgery.

Thankfully he had someone he could ask.

*

“You know, I
don’t think I have a conclusive answer for that,” Maddy said thoughtfully. “There are too many variables, such as the level of caring in the surgeon, if there were any type of complications that would require multiple people to step up, or if the patient died and had to be brought back. Depending on what the surgery was there could be any number of other people involved in the process.”

Maddy shifted in the straight back desk chair, wishing she were back in her own comfy office rather than in Dr. Jorgenson’s office and rubbed the back of her neck slowly to ease the tension.

As for Stefan’s current question she added, “Give me a day or so and I’ll see what I can find out with my own patients. Several have other surgical issues. I can check and see.” As she thought about it she had to wonder. “You know, one of the first things I do is clean out the energy, release the blockages, and work on any of the system’s imbalances. I don’t care who or what or why the problem exists, I just go and clean them out.”

“Meaning?” Stefan’s tired voice slipped through the phone. “Meaning you don’t have anyone on your floor with a recent or old surgery that you haven’t cleaned out yet?”

“Exactly. But…” she let her voice trail off as she thought about it. “There will be many of them at the children’s ward.”

“Right.” Stefan’s voice perked up. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“If it was anyone but Celina involved you’d have been all over this,” she said warmly. “There’s nothing like a personal involvement to throw your thinking off.”

“Ha, my thinking has been off for months,” he growled.

She smiled, remembering the concert they’d all gone to where they had seen Celina for the first time. “Actually about a month. As long as you help from a distance and give her some space…”

“She’s got big trouble riding her back. She gets a day or two and that’s it.”

Maddy couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “But you have to let some things happen as they were meant to. The road to heaven and all that…”

“Hell,” he said in disgust. “At the moment there isn’t a road going anywhere but into the nearest sewer.” And he hung up.

*

“Eric?” Lilliana Moore
walked over to her eight-year-old son and bent down to him. He lay curled into a tight ball on the hospital bed. His face was scrunched in pain with beads of sweat rolling down his forehead.

“Honey, can you tell me what’s wrong?”

He shook his head and tugged the covers higher.

She settled on the side of the hospital bed and reached out a hand to gently stroke his shoulder. “It’s the leg again, isn’t it?”

He still wouldn’t speak. She frowned, thought about it, then understood. “No, not the leg – the new bone piece, right?”

His head barely moved, yet it was enough. He’d started protesting about the cadaver bone implant as soon as he’d woken up from surgery. She didn’t know who had told him that bone had come from a dead body, but because of the wild imagination and fearful mind of an eight-year-old it was the worst thing anyone could do. She’d like to wring that person’s neck. Eric hadn’t been the same since he’d woken up. He said odd things, hated to be alone, and now had a horrific fear about the boogeyman – even worse, he had a morbid obsession with death.

And he wanted that damn bone out. Something that wasn’t likely to happen – especially given that the surgeons were delighted with the results of their handiwork.

She didn’t know how to help her son. He needed to talk to a counselor, but she was hesitant to bring another stranger into her son’s world. She wished there was someone here who could help.

She didn’t even know who to ask.

G
iven the traffic
in Portland on a Saturday afternoon, it was nothing short of a miracle that Celina made it on time. Breathless, she made her way to the specialist’s office, her walking stick a reassuring tapping tool as she strode down the hallway. Third doorway on the left. She dragged her stick along the wall until it hit the first door, then the second, and then a third. Standing outside for a moment, she tried to control her ragged breathing. This was too important. She needed this visit. Needed to find out if there truly was something else wrong with her eyes or…