Between Worlds

Chapter 10

They'd given Malyn oxygen, x-rayed his chest, shoved a tube down his throat to take a look at his airways, taken a sample of his blood for testing, x-rayed his chest a second time, and for each of these things, he'd had to wait in between.

At least Finch had been there the whole time, telling whatever lies he'd needed to in order to stay at Malyn's side. Though, maybe they mostly hadn't been lies. Yeah, technically Finch wasn't Malyn's brother by blood, but they'd grown up together and were closer than most biological brothers, so what difference did it actually make? He'd also told the doctors Malyn had a medical phobia and if he was left on his own, he'd probably freak out and leave, and while Malyn had scoffed at that in his head, it wasn't actually untrue. Finch had just made it sound extra dramatic. Malyn was more incredibly bored and annoyed than he was afraid.

Finally, a doctor with a thick manilla folder took them into an office to talk about Malyn's test results.

"Well, to start off with, your lungs look fine," the doctor said as she opened up the folder.

"Great," Malyn said. "Can I go?"

"You're in a hospital, not a prison. You can leave whenever you want. The confusion we're having, though, is that we have your medical records from when you were a child and your lungs weren't fine then. You had permanent scarring on them." She pulled a chest x-ray that Malyn was pretty sure had been taken when he was a child out of the folder and set it on the table between them.

"Yup."

She set another x-ray alongside the first, this one presumably taken that night. "And now you don't."

"Oh." Malyn leant forward to examine the x-rays, but he had no idea what he was looking at. "Well, that is interesting. Maybe a bit of smoke inhalation was just what my lungs needed."

"I don't think..."

"He was bitten by a breach creature a couple of days ago," Finch interjected. "Bite healed completely, practically overnight. Guessing the two are related."

"That seems extremely likely," the doctor said. "Do you know why the bite healed so quickly?"

"No," Malyn said. "Do you?"

"No."

Malyn leant back in his chair. "See, I knew going to a doctor wouldn't be helpful."

"We were considering whether the bite itself might have caused this," Finch told the doctor. "We've also got someone staying with us who moved in around the time this all started, but honestly, I don't think he has any way of doing something like that. And then a few of days ago, we handled the seeds of a plant that came through the breach, so maybe that's something?"

The doctor nodded as she took notes.

"We send everything to the lab here in town, so I'll give you our reference number if you want to chase any of it up," Finch said

"That's not exactly part of my job, but I will do that," the doctor said. "If something came through that could completely heal injuries, both old and new, that would be incredible. Do you have a contact number I can take down?"

"Nah, I already tossed my phone into the fire after the fire fighters got there," Finch said. "A crazy vampire's trying to kill us, so I think we're going to have to go into hiding."

The doctor's eyebrows lifted. "A vampire? Luther is trying to kill you?"

"No, there's another one now. Much worse. Luther's okay, I guess. You can probably email Adin and he'll get to it once he's got a secure device to work on."

"I..." the doctor said as she struggled to process all of that. "Okay."

Malyn held his child x-ray up to the light. There were some blurry spots. Was that lung damage? "So can we leave now, or is this one of those things that kid's TV shows always warned me about where if you have a special power, the government will lock you in a lab and do experiments on you?"