Page 94 of Ruled By Fate

Of course they are, you lunatic. What the hell is going on?

If the situation had been any less urgent, if it had been anything less than a helpless child lying on the bed, she might have come up with some reasonable explanation. But there was no time.

Brie turned desperately to Denise. “It’s poison.”

Denise looked at her for a moment before nodding curtly. “Alright, you heard her. Cut those clothes off. Open that window, and pump air into this room. Make sure you’re wearing gloves to handle her. Somebody wash her face and eyes and try to swab her nasal passages. I need a tox screen ten minutes ago. Someone call the lab and tell them they have an incoming priority one. Get a vial of blood to Dr. Botha in the morgue.”

She rattled this off in a single breath, then turned back to Brie. “Weldon, get me ten ccs of diazepam, split into ten one-milliliter doses. Push every two to five minutes. Marcus, as soon as she stops shaking, you find a vein and run fluids right through this kid. We are not losing this little girl today, people.”

“What’s going on here?” Dr. Matthews stood in the door, a shocked expression on his face. “What have you done to my patient?”

Brie didn’t miss a beat. She turned directly to the mother. “Tell him you refuse his care. Tell him you demand a different doctor, and he needs to leave.”

The poor woman was lost in a storm of emotion, but when her eyes met Brie’s, they seemed to clear. She nodded swiftly and turned to Matthews. “I demand a different doctor. I refuse to allow you in this room. Get out, and bring me another doctor. Right now.”

Matthews stared at her, his face a mask of disbelief. He didn’t move.

Fortunately, that’s when the rage kicked in. “Get out of my little girl’s room,” the mother screamed, two inches from his face, “and bring me a doctor who knows what he’s doing right now!”

He stumbled backward, white with shock. A second later, he disappeared into the hall.

? ? ?

Two hours later, Brie was sitting on the floor of a deserted hallway, her back against the wall and her head hung low, forehead almost touching her knees. She’d spent an hour and a half working with the little girl to try to flush the toxins from her system and manage her symptoms before she was stable enough to move to the ICU. She’d spent the last half hour sitting on the floor. She was exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically. She barely registered when Denise walked up, paused a moment, and sat beside her.

They sat in silence for a minute before Denise spoke. “It was strychnine. Well, something almost chemically identical to strychnine that the lab has never seen before. She inhaled it. It was all over her clothes, all in her hair.”

Brie didn’t say anything.

Denise put a hand on her shoulder and forced her to look up. “She’s alive, Brie. She has kidney damage, and her liver’s been through hell, but that little girl is alive because of you. We never would have caught it in time.”

Brie nodded slowly as the words sank in. “She’ll be okay?”

“She’ll be okay.” There was a pause. “Weldon, it was all over the room too. The poison. What you said about how she’d been exposed after she was admitted?” She paused again. “You saved the entire team from exposure.”

Brie didn’t say anything.

“How did you know? Did she say something to you?”

Courtesy of my magical necklace.

Denise leaned back against the wall. “The police want to talk to you. I told them you were under my direct supervision the entire time, and there was no information you could provide that I couldn’t.”

She looked at Brie. “Did I tell them the truth?”

Yes. Unless you count seeing a phantom woman who may or may not have hooves for feet blackmail that girl’s doctor into attempted murder as information.

Brie looked at her and nodded.

Denise exhaled. “There’s an ex-husband in the picture. No custody, very bitter after the divorce. Nobody saw him come in, but—”

“It wasn’t the ex,” Brie said in a quiet, flat voice.

Denise locked eyes with her and asked carefully, “You’re saying that someone else was responsible for her poisoning.”

“Yes.”

“Someone involved in her admission or initial examination, someone who works in this hospital deliberately exposed a six-year-old child to an unknown, lethal toxin,” Denise repeated carefully. “An action that would almost certainly have killed her and poisoned the rest of the emergency room team had it not been for your early diagnosis.”

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