I glanced at Nadisu’s face to see his reaction, but he’d passed out.
Tires screeched as the Suburban arrived, and Yasha leapt out and picked up the goblin like he weighed next to nothing, laying him out on the middle seat. I jumped up beside him and started buckling him in, and Yasha shut the door behind us. The Suburban had a second set of seat belts mounted like on a stretcher.
The passenger door opened and Ian all but dove into his seat. His face was flushed and grim, and looked about as angry as I’d ever seen him.
“Get us home,” was all he said.
15
JESIN Nadisu was going to be in surgery for at least two hours.
In addition to an infirmary, SPI had a fully staffed and equipped trauma center and ER, albeit on a much smaller scale than most New York hospitals. When you fought monsters and powerful mages and supernatural criminals, your people could get injuries that would do more than raise eyebrows at the neighborhood ER. Vivienne Sagadraco valued her employees, and made sure that we had only the best medical care available to us.
Jesin Nadisu was presently on the receiving end of that expertise.
We couldn’t question him until he was out of recovery, and then it would be up to the trauma surgeon as to when and for how long. Not that we thought the young goblin was guilty of anything other than having a kilo of Brimstone on him. Heck, we were grateful that he had.
While the doctors were working on Jesin Nadisu, the lab down the hall was working on the Brimstone. The analysis would probably take longer than the surgery. But we wanted to be close to get word on both.
I was standing in the hall outside the main lab, looking through the glass wall.
I’d never asked the reason for a glass wall in a lab, but I guessed that privacy was less important than someone outside seeing if something went very wrong inside—and then getting help. Fast.
After hanging out in the ER waiting room for a while, I’d walked down the hall to the lab. Ian had gone to make a few phone calls. I hadn’t asked him about what had happened in the chase to catch Jesin Nadisu’s shooter. All that Ian had volunteered was that he’d gotten away. Something important was going on here, but I’d learned that when my partner needed me to know, he’d tell me. I was learning to tamp my curiosity down until that happened. I didn’t say it was easy; I said I was learning.
The elevator door dinged.
Ian.
“Anything?” he asked, indicating the lab.
“If so, they’re not acting like it.” I glanced back into the lab to make sure none of the white-coats had gone all giddy in the past ten seconds. “Nope, no high fives or group hugs.”
My partner sat in one of the chairs lining this section of wall and put his head in his hands.
I sat next to him. “Want to tell me about it yet?”
Ian didn’t move for another handful of seconds, then he sat up, thunked the back of his head against the wall, and stared at the ceiling with an expression of “Why me?”
I didn’t take any of that as an indictment on my curiosity, but rather frustration at the situation we were neck deep in, so I leaned my head back and helped my partner look at the ceiling.
“Nightshades,” he finally said.
“I’m assuming you’re not talking about the plant.”
“I wish I was. You could get rid of those with weed killer. We rarely see these, let alone get a chance to eradicate them. They just come back. Then again, maybe they are like the plants.”
“Then they’re a who, not a what.”
“Nightshades are basically elven black ops mercenaries. They’ll do whatever they’re paid enough to do. Today one of them was paid to get Jesin Nadisu.”
“He didn’t do a very good job.”
“It’s lucky we were here so he couldn’t finish the job. If we hadn’t been watching—”
“He wouldn’t be here and alive getting stitched up.”
“Yeah.”
“But you saw the shooter, and I take it you recognized him.”
“He’s one of their best marksmen.”
“And he only got Jesin in the side?”
Ian gave me a flat look.
“He didn’t kill him on purpose?” I guessed.
Ian nodded once. “There was an ambulance parked around the corner.”
I knew where this was going and it wasn’t anywhere good. “A fake ambulance to fool anyone who saw them. They wanted him alive.”
“And afraid and in pain. They hired Nightshades to make it happen. And if he had died . . . there are necromancers who sell their services to the highest bidder. The Nightshades keep two on retainer.”
Cripes.
“Jesin doesn’t look like the drug-runner type.”
“The best runners arouse the least suspicion, and neither one of us would have suspected the manager of an exclusive, high-rent apartment building to be running drugs.”
“He does dress well,” I admitted. “Do you think he knew who was gunning for him?”
“Maybe, maybe not. We won’t know until we can talk to him. In the meantime, I’m having Ord Larcwyde brought in for questioning, though the agents picking him up have been told to go with ‘protective custody.’”
I grinned. “Ord does value his safety.”
“I thought it’d go over better. Whoever was pulling that demon lord’s strings was worried enough that Ord had damaging information to send a demon assassin after him. I want to know what that information is.”