As the Sunrise building faded into the ever present Seattle fog, the adrenaline wore off, and a million nerve endings screamed out in pain. You've been electrocuted, you moron! they told him.
Achak was prattling incessantly in the back, much louder than the low din of activity in the van required. Combat drugs, Mercer surmised. But Achak's voice was grating on him now that every inch of his skin was clamoring for his attention. The windshield wipers took a half-hearted pass at the mist blurred glass of the windshield, but it hardly mattered. The autopilot could care less about the condition of the glass, and even if Mercer were driving, he'd be working more through the AR enhanced display than what he saw through the windshield.
Achak seemed concerned about the Sister. She took a solid blow to the face - probably lost a tooth or two - but from what Mercer could see, it wasn't quite life threatening. Lot of blood, though. It'd definitely need stitches, though magic made even that uncertain. If Rebecca could work her mojo on herself, she might end up with little more than blotchy purple skin for a couple days or so, and he expected that the good Sister could apply some concealer and you'd hardly notice. He could do it for her if needed - he was man enough to admit that squirreled away in the med kit were a number of women's beauty products that had no purpose other than to hide the fact you'd taken a beating the night before. His previous team had included a B&E guy that could not only cook up a disguise with little more than a trip to the makeup aisle at the local Kong-Walmart - or even Stuffer Shack if in a pinch - but could make you look like you won that fight without a scratch for all but the most meticulous observers.
But, he supposed his attitude toward such an injury was rather cavalier. Having been in this line of work for so long against beings with super-human strength and speed, you gain a certain familiarity with the true limits of human durability. Bleeding profusely was frequently dangerous not because of the trauma that caused it, but because the damnable fiends that fed on it had a sense for blood that rivaled a shark. He clamped down on any number of smarmy remarks he was contemplating and instead spoke in that relaxed, soothing voice of command that he had perfected over years of calming fresh hunters coming face to face with the Infected horrors for the first time.
"There's a medkit under the front passenger seat," he pointed. "Top of the line whatsit-"
"Expert system," chimed Nori, having come out of her trance-like trip into VR at some point.
"Yeah, that. Fully stocked. It'll all but heal her itself. Go ahead and get her started and I'll check on her in a moment once I'm sure we're free and clear." He peeked out at the sky using every sense available to him. He was pretty sure no vehicles were following, but the darkness and fog and countless drones crisscrossing the night sky made it nearly impossible to spot a drone tail. He eventually gave up, set the auto pilot to a random Taco Bell ("all restaurants are Taco Bell" his mind told him, though he wasn't sure where that stray thought came from) about 15 kilometers away, and carefully stood and walked to the back where the sister was staring blankly at the streaks of blurry light playing across the windows as the van drove through the darkened city.
Achak had made poor progress as his hands shook, from the coming down off of the combat drug - Jazz it seemed, by the way his eyes were dilated - as well as his general state of panic at Rebecca's condition. Mercer gently took the medkit from him - he'd hardly noticed Mercer approaching, but after being momentarily startled, he gave up the medkit quickly and began muttering rapidly about the orc they'd fought. Mercer remembered him from the parking lot when he'd escorted the woman into the building. Hearing about the magic staff was interesting, but not particularly new - many of the Infected were magically inclined, either because the infection Awakened them or because they were "recruited" for their gift - and so he'd run into such items often enough.
Before starting up the kit's expert, Mercer took a moment to reboot all of his equipment excepting the van and the fly-spys, though he'd do that once they pulled into the Taco Bell parking lot. He was pretty sure he'd taken the decker offline - in the permanent sense - but he'd never denied accusations that he used an over-abundance of caution. Once everything was back up, Mercer followed the AR instructions the medkit fed him and soon the wounded woman begin to focus on the events around her. He also did his best to calm Achak down, but he made little progress until Rebecca showed solid signs of recovery. The rambling mostly stopped, and soon after Achak messaged him privately, filling him in on the adversaries they faced in the building. The mention of a blood spirit made his blood run cold. Not because he'd never met one before, but because he had. Again, once you crossed the line and started feeding on people, the slip into blood magic was almost an afterthought. Probably one in five Infected mages dabbled in blood magic, and the only reason it was just dabbling was because most of the Infected he had the "pleasure" of encountering were young enough that they hadn't yet completed that journey. But even so, blood magic was bad. Magic could be a little scary, but blood magic couldn't be anything but scary.
Once she had snapped back into the world, Rebecca relaxed back into her chair and closed her eyes, willing magic through her body. Seconds passed and the wounds on her face visibly healed. When she was done, she had little more than a fat lip, though the mother of fat lips it was.
-------------------
The next morning Mercer awoke and stepped out into the common area of the small flat that Achak had provided to find him pacing back and forth. He'd been agitated all last night, punishing himself for failing to dispatch the ork, and Mercer assumed that this was still the case.
"Coffee's on" Achak said, and pointed to the coffee machine in the small nook that passed for a kitchen. Mercer poured himself a cup and reflected. Eventually, the team had convinced itself they weren't being followed and so they had pulled into a parking lot and bid farewell to Nori. She was uncharacteristically muted in her tone as she said her good-byes, and Mercer suspected she was practically bursting with excitement, but was showing as much decorum as she could muster on account of the wounds the team had sustained. He expected he'd receive a suitably rapturous message from her later, but for now she tried but failed to not say "wiz" every other sentence.
When they got home they discovered that the contents of the briefcase were encrypted. That was when the conversation turned to recruiting a computer expert. Achak had floated Nori, but Mercer wouldn't consider it - he'd been wary of involving her as much as they already had, he certainly wasn't going to encourage her. They'd discussed it for about five minutes before calling it quits on account of the Sister having passed out.
Speaking of which...
"Where is Rebecca?" he asked Achak.
"Said she had to meet with her guy. A car picked her up about fifteen minutes ago."
He slept in way too late these days, he decided. "Well, when she gets back, we can pick up where we left off. If we can't come up with someone we trust between the three of us, I can dip into the Grotto1 well again. Gonna be tough to do without alerting Nori, but there's a couple folks I know by reputation only that I can reach out to."
