Dragon Kin 2

23

Carmen

I woke jostled, by a bump... My eyes flash open to the dim but not quite dark, and inches away from Oma Lavinia's narrowed sapphire eyes. The matron leaned back, puffing on her empty pipe as if mind were forge enough to produce smoke.

"I believe you got it right this time," she croaked, jabbing the long blondwood shaft of her thin pipe at me as I cringed a yawn. I was trapped against the ...

"You fainted fair and proper," she continued, "Impressed the hell out of Mike the Cat."

What was I trapped against? I tried to look around but, "Is the world moving?" I asked.

Oma shook her head, "No, you're in the back of a van..."

Maybe she saw I really felt worried, and she chucked the glare-eye routine and said clearly. "Alicja felt him fall as well. Not hard like you got. Not direct like you. How you feeling?"

I moved to sit up but she pressed me gently back, "Not yet. We're way wide of my cunning here so let's just take it easy. We in the Big Easy, ain't we?"

"I suppose," I said and, settled back down.

She laid her hand on my forehead, concentrating, "I hear you're a doctor so you know the tests I'm going to run you through. Let's start with following my finger and work up to the exciting ones, ookie?"

She ran me through the basics to check for concussion, stroke, and balance issues. Then eye-hand tests. She took my pulse and blood pressure with considerable grace. I mentioned this to her.

"I would hope so. I've been a doctor all my life, of one thing or another."

"One thing or another? Do you mean like whales or something?"

While placing her scope in her case at the time, she glanced over to me with the purest wan grin of nostalgia, "Do dolphins count?"

"No way," I said, feeling hero worship of the boldest nature flush in my cheeks. "Please tell me you're not joking."

"She's not joking," Alicja told me, as she poked her head around the side of her front seat.

"She has great stories too. We might want to wait on those, however. Out here gators might actually try to eat him. Right?"

Mal sat behind the wheel, driving with both mastery and waves of terror, "Do you sense a disturbance in the force?" he asked. Looking back over my shoulder I found Sean stretched out on the seat bench behind me.

"Oh," I said, "hello."

Alicja said, "We're getting close. Don't mean to rush you, but how are you feeling?"

"Well doc?" I asked Oma. "What's my status?"

"Cheeky," she said, and adjusted the stem of her pipe between her teeth. "Nothing brainy messed-up in'ya that I can tell. Eyes and hands are working together and not trying to kill you. No blood. Usually there's blood if it's something's bad. Really wish we had some. Blood clarifies things."

"Now you can be joking," I murmured,.

Brainy ... in'ya?

Looking out the window, I searched the darkness, feeling for Vlad — and shocked to find it easy to locate him. He was alive but unconscious. I could feel him dreaming but not what his dreams were. The connection wasn't clear or anything, like I had him on cable now or something. It was like walking through a large group of people with occasional bursts of laughter or gasps of denial, and hearing his voice within that fog of bore.