Pearl

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Weak

"Well, it looks to me like it's healing really well," the ENT doctor said as she examined Takeda's tongue. "The stitches and everything are looking really good."

It turned out that he had bitten off about a dime-sized chunk along the side edge of his tongue in his efforts to fend off whatever it was that the inmate had tried to feed him a week ago. At the time he had barely noticed, but now it hurt like hell.

"Just keep doing the saltwater rinse after each meal, keep up with the antibiotics, and try to limit how much you talk. Other than that, I want to see you again in two weeks unless anything weird starts up," she continued.

A cold sweat broke out over Takeda's hairline as the doctor finally extracted her hands from his mouth.

"Anything weird?" he repeated hesitantly as he sat up from the examination table.

There was no way – he was sure he'd gotten all of it. The acrid taste of adrenaline flooded his mouth as his mind's eye flashed back to those long, brown filaments that had stretched across the open wounds of the inmate's body. 

"Yes, for example, if it starts swelling up again or if your mouth begins to taste funny. Signs of infection or anything like that."

He huffed a quick sigh, still unaccustomed to the strange scrape of stitches across the side of his gums. 

When he had arrived to the ENT originally with a dripping mouthful of blood and a chunk of his tongue missing she had't even blinked, quickly offering to try to reattach the missing section. He, for his part, hadn't bothered to try to explain that he had chewed it to pieces, and had simply declined.

He tipped a nod to the receptionist as he exited the office, somehow unsurprised to feel the sudden buzz of the phone at his hip. It wasn't his usual phone – it was the sleek but still surprising flip-phone that Agent O'Lane had given him when he'd joined the team.

About damn time, too. Takeda had been trying to get ahold of O'Lane since he'd been cleared to talk again.

He flipped the phone open.

"Takeda," he said simply by way of greeting.

"Officer, it's good to hear from you. How are things on your end?"

"Not great," he said around the dull pain in his tongue. "Things've gotten pretty weird over here," he sighed as he sank into the driver's seat of his cruiser. He wondered how much to say over the phone, how much he even could say at the moment. 

A snorted chuckle came over the line. "Yeah, things've gotten pretty weird over here too. It's a good sign that we're on the right track."

"How's the young lady?"

"She's very much a part of the weird. But it seems she's well enough. And how are the witnesses, the ones who turned themselves in after I left?"

"One dead. The other...I just don't know." Takeda leaned back, pressing back against the headrest in the parked car. "You should have seen it. He took four bullets right to the torso and stood back up. Patched himself back together like it was nothing."

Silence across the line. Then, "where is he now?"

"Still in the jail, but in isolation. No one allowed in."

"Good." A deep sigh. "There's too much going on over here for me to leave. And it'll keep up like this for a while, it looks like. Takeda, I'm going to need you to keep pressing on this guy, see if you can't get a location out of him."

"I'll see what I can do, agent. But this one, he hasn't seemed right in the head since. I don't know what we can expect to get out of him at this point."