The Walls of Jericho

Coming to Grips

It’s somewhere near dawn when I wake with the remnants of my nightmare still close to my waking consciousness. The ache in my ribs is soothed by the heat of the sun-warmed beach—.

No, wait.

That’s just Channing.

I can tell by the hard unfamiliar mattress beneath me and the soft clicks and blips that I’m still in the dark sterile hospital room. Channing lays on his side against my uninjured side, one muscular arm curled up and pillowing his head with his nose buried in my hair.

The strange electric current that runs between us hums along smoothly now. It cycles regularly with the steady rise and fall of his broad chest. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it’s the most peaceful and safe  I’ve felt in so long I can’t remember.

As if his mere presence adds logarithmically to my well-being.

Maybe it does.

With my eyes still closed, I pat around in the blankets at arm’s length, feeling blindly for the morphine control. It takes a second or two, then my fingertips brush against the plastic-sheathing protecting its wires and using it, I inch my way to the button. If I push it at this point on the razor’s edge between waking and sleep, the drug will push me back into unconsciousness.

Resting still a moment with the dispense button secure in my hand again, I run a quick systems check on my body. There’s a dull ache in my ribs with each breath I draw, but nothing I can’t manage without the morphine for the time being. Frankly, I have to admit I feel pretty darn good for what I’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours.

Mentally, I take hold of the tethered dream, spooling it around my awareness. I’m not certain why, but it bears further examination.

As Mia Newkirk, I was born in 1933 to working-class parents. For that being a seriously dramatic moment in life – the day of our birth – most of us can’t remember a lick of our first few years and I’m no exception. Even after my very first memories, the recollections tend to be few and far between until well into my youth. Things of painful significance like my mother dying in childbirth. My father killed in a mine collapse. The bleak and crowded orphanage where the dragon found me slowly starving.

But I remember much more from the moment that I joined the tiny struggling body of Jericho Jinks just as her tiny soul fled. The ceaseless pain, the uphill fight to keep breathing and to heal and grow. That started with a kinked umbilical cord blocking the flow of fresh blood and oxygen into her premature body. Her wriggling fight for oxygen in the womb didn’t pass unnoticed by her mother, who quickly sought medical help at a nearby hospital.

Astute doctors realize within mintues that the unborn Jericho’s life depended on immediate delivery and post haste, her mother’s wheeled into a surgical delivery suite. Though the obstetrician was quick, by the time the premature Jericho was out of the womb, she was slightly blue and mostly unresponsive.

The pediatrician who took over her care hoped to give her the oxygen she desperately needed. He ordered a blood transfusion into this four-pound four-ounce body. The life-saving transfusion started just as my consciousness, that of Mia Newkirk, surged through the wires that kept Jericho alive and into her newborn existence with her.

The pain we suffered was unbearable. It was an agony beyond description. Even with my adult soul struggling to protect her, the moments-old soul of Jericho fled, abandoning me within her dying body. Bereft and hopelessly lonely in my misery, I was put in an incubator to await death or the next transfusion.

Suffering from respiratory distress syndrome and born six weeks early in a hospital on the wrong side of Crossroads, my chance of survival doesn’t look good. Between the umbilical artery flow problem and my underdeveloped lungs, my prognosis was grim.

I questioned my choice to abandon my charred remains as Mia Newkirk. At least death by dragonfire (it would be called a gas main explosion by the humans who investigated the scene) would have been quick.

That abiding hell was what the dragon wanted. My only two options since the moment he found me were either A) live under his dictatorship as an unwilling accomplice to his dastardly machinations, or B) die a painful death. Despite the heroic efforts of the werewolves—Channing and his father, their friends, Ferdi and Damien—it seemed likely that scaly, black-hearted reptilian monster would have his way.

It was another eighteen hours of agony as my blood was replaced with a second, then a third transfusion. Throughout the process, tubes assisted my painful breathing. Surprisingly, during that time I learned what a marvelous machine even that frail human body was.

Thousands of regular biochemical reactions generated everything from the electrical signals used in nerve impulse and memory to the processes necessary for cell growth and development. Including for healing.

In seventy years of life as Mia, I learned very little about medicine. Some of that was because even in the twentieth century, human understanding of the process of life was crude at best. The rest was my fault. I openly admit, for a technomage, life science wasn’t exactly my wheelhouse.

But I learned in those first few days struggling as a new life, that the human body was the most miraculous, magical, and mysterious perfect machine ever created.

Hands down.

Absolutely no doubt about it.

The many different systems in our bodies are each tuned to perfection. We’re an absolutely amazing feat of biological engineering. A spectacular masterpiece of creation and evolution. For me, that newfound appreciation started in a newborn brain. Made up a millions of specialized cells that carry electrical impulses called neurons, its neural pathways extend through the spinal cord, and connect to every part of the body through a vast network of fibers known as the peripheral nervous system.

This living computer monitors and controls each system necessary for the body’s support and existence. Not before or since have I ever encountered a more sophisticated technological machine.

All along, I'd been in my element. 

Detaching myself from the pain of my underdeveloped lungs, I analyzed the vast quantities of information flooding in through my nervous system, then selected the most critical needs and directed my premature body’s meager resources towards their assistance. 

With the external support of the medical providers caring for me, I learned the remarkable resilience of the body's complex machine. Eight weeks after that very real challenge as a new existence began, long before my tiny feet would every touch the ground, I crossed the doctors’ five pound body weight threshold having made a complete recovery.

Jericho Jinks would live to fight a dragon another day.

Over time and new experiences, I began to question if my earliest memories actually happened. 

Were my stories of dragons and men with superhuman abilities as real as they seemed? 

Or, as adults would assure me, were they simply made up? Figments of a fertile imagination and gifted or highly advanced intellect. Nothing more than unconscious intrusions, like dreams and nightmares, into my waking awareness. Or simply creative outlets for my ingenuity.

It would be years before I was old and resourceful enough to find that infant amnesia is simply a result of the natural process of forgetting the things we experience throughout our lives. I'm devastated and disappointed to learn that forgetting is entirely predictable. That if left alone, the human brain throws away half of all newly learned material within an hour. Within thirty days, we lose up to ninety-seven or ninety-eight percent of that newly acquired knowledge.

Here, cuddled against the radiating warmth of Channing’s superhuman body and connected to his strange feedback loop of reciprocal energy, so many of my carefully imbedded memories come flooding back in a reassuring barrage.

“I'm afraid to ask, but what are you thinking?”

It’s spoken so softly, I almost doubt my ears. When he yawned, stretching his long body alongside mine with a series of light popping joints, I realized he’d been awake for some time, waiting for me.

“Your father died when you rescued me, didn’t he? The dragon wasn’t dead under that mangled steel door.”

Channing inhaled deeply. “No, the dragon wasn’t dead, but my dad made it out of that skirmish alive. That one and a few more after. He died later.” 

“When?”

“The same explosion that killed your parents.”

“So we were both orphaned then.”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“How did you know it was me?”

He shrugs with one shoulder. “I could smell you.”

“Gross.” That thought is enough to make me nauseous. Suddenly I'm craving a hot soapy shower.

He chuckled, then nuzzled my hair and inhaled deeply. “No. Not at all. You smell nice. Like molasses, rich and sweet. Sort of fruity-spicy too. Like cloves. And girly,” he says with a ghost of a laugh.

“Excuse me? ‘Girly’? What the heck does ‘girly’ smell like?”

“It smells delicious.” His large warm hand rested on my hip, then slid across my abdomen to the opposite one possessively. He pulled me tight against him, fitting his large frame against mine like two spoons in a drawer. “You’re like catnip," he explains. "At a distance, your scent drives me crazy. I catch one whiff and I want you. It gets under my skin and I can’t shake it. I can barely restrain myself. Up close like this, it’s calming. Sedative. Especially in combination with your touch.”

“Yeah, that happens to me too.” I tip my head back to look at him. The electric awareness of him grows into a pull, a deadly seductive undertow so strong it’s impossible to resist. “Why is that happening?”

He grimaces. “No matter how I answer that, it’s going to sound hokey.”

“You sound hokey anyway. Why’s this any different?”

Channing chuckled. “Is it impossible for you to go easy on my ego, Jinks?” Still, his hand reached up to graze along my jaw in a tender caress. “What’s happening is exceptional.”

“That wasn’t even a good dodge, Stark.”

“Okay, fine,” he huffs. “I think it’s happening because we’re made for each other. Meant for each other.”

“This isn’t pizza. I don’t want cheesy, Channing. I want answers.”

“You asked. I answered. I told you it would sound hokey,” he retorts through tight lips. “You know, for a woman working on her second lifetime, you sure can be kind of dense.”

My eyes flick from his face to the ceiling. He has a point. Sort of. When he starts to sit up, I lift my hand and press against his chest. His scarred brow arches, as if to say: ‘Really? You think that little paw will keep me here?’. Yet when I push, he lays down beside me again.

“Let’s get a couple things straight.” Gingerly and with a great deal more grunts and flinches than can possibly be graceful or attractive, I roll myself onto my good side so I face him. To his credit, if he has some commentary about it, Channing holds his tongue.

Then again, I’m the one lacking in that inhibition. 

“A. I may be working on a second lifetime, but I haven’t lived much in either of them. Got it?” The ache has increased to something acutely insistent in my cracked ribs and I won’t be able to maintain this position for much longer. Eager to have my say, I charge on. “I spent the first life slave to a dragon and the twenty-one years of this one running from my personal demons. For the record, they aren’t done with me yet. And B. I’m not dense. I’m trying to make sense of things—you—and how exactly, suddenly, you and I just clicked.”

“Clicked?”

So I’m really not ready to be laying on my side. Much as it perturbs me, I press the button, sighing in relief when the hot flood of morphine swamps my system. “Yes, ‘clicked’. Are you denying it, Mr. Mushy-Meant-For-Each-Other?”

The slow pulse of a blue-white star begins in the depths of his deep blue eyes, then swirls about his dilated pupils like it’s in orbit around them. Immediately, I feel its golden cousin flare to life in my own eyes. The once-staticky now-smooth flow of energy between us surges.

“I’m not denying it at all.”

His hand’s on my hip again, but this time instead of pulling, he’s pushing me to roll back so I’m laying flat. The ache in my ribs that even the morphine was having difficultly containing eases, but not before it tears a trembling relieved whimper from my lips. The whole bed lurches as Channing gets an elbow beneath him so he can look down and still see my face directly.

“You’re so stubborn sometimes,” he tells me, but his lips curl up at the corners in that sexy little smirk that sends a hot flush over me. “How about we just agree that we’ve clicked and let it go where it wants from there?”

My eyes narrow and I peer up at him. Dodging. Again. So frustrating. “Fine. But I want a shower. And my own clothes. Clean ones.”

“How about some breakfast first? I’ve never made cherry cream cheese turnovers, but I’ll give it a whirl if that’s what suits you.”

“Nope.” I shake my head. “That’s the only thing of marginal quality that Esteban cooks. I’m sure if you make one, it’ll ruin the experience entirely for me.”

He laughs outright. It’s a warm infectious sound that makes my heart beat a little faster.

“Okay. One chef’s special coming right up.” He plants a kiss on my forehead, then the tip of my nose. With a frustrated growl, he skips my lips and sits up on the side of the bed. “I’ll be back for those later after I brush the fuzz off my teeth.”

“By the way, am I ever going to see an actual doctor here?”

Rising, he looks down at me. “Sure. I’ll send someone in to talk to you. I’m giving you fair warning though, they’re not letting you out of here any earlier than I’ve said anyway.”

“Fine.”

**

True to his word, within moments of his leaving, Channing has a doctor in my room.

Also, annoyingly true to his word, I get the same story from her. She’s an older woman, with a short capful of silvery Jean Harlow curls, slim and lean and bespectacled in a way that reminds me, oddly, of Damien.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better after some rest. You had a pretty rough accident last night,” the doctor tells me. Her badge says her name is Dr. Lyall. “Unfortunately, there’s not really a way for us to cast broken ribs, or in your case, cracked ribs. We did take radiographs to make certain everything is aligned properly, but I’ll want you close by for pain management the next three, and more likely four days. Once your pain levels can be managed with oral medications, I’m happy to discharge you to predominantly bed rest.”

“Dr. Lyall, that isn’t going to work. I work as a waitress six days a week, twelve hour shifts to support myself, and I’m a live-in caregiver all the rest of my time. There has to be something else you can do.”

The doctor looks at me over the rim of her glasses. “As I understand from the Alpha, he’s addressed the issue of providing for your homecare charge,” she glances at a tablet on which she’s entering orders for my medical care, “Mr. Adriani. Isn’t that right?”

Alpha? That’s the second time I’ve heard that and I still have no idea what it means. The best clarification Channing’s provided is that he’s the ‘boss’. “I’m not certain I think Ferdi counts as a home health caregiver.”

Her eyes narrow. Or they do the closest approximation to narrowing they can do with the lenses of her glasses making them look so much larger. “He sent Ferdi?”

“Yes. Why?”

“No reason in particular.” Dr. Lyall shakes her head slightly, dismissingly. “Only that he had the option of assigning anyone in the organization to that role. That the Alpha would commit one of his right-hand men to the task speaks a great deal to the regard he holds for you.”

“The organization meaning—Avernus?” I pry.

“Yes.” The doctor lowers the tablet. Holding it with one hand, she wraps the fingers of her other about her wrist. “Do you have any further concerns about your treatment plan?”

Dr. Lyall nods. “I’ll send a nurse in to get your IV covered. You’ll need to be careful not to get it wet. I think you’re fine to pull the catheter.”

Yikes. That explains the weird cord tangled around my legs. “What about my job?”

“I’ll advise the Alpha that you have concerns about it, but if I’m any guess, he’s already addressing it.” The doctor uses a stylus and makes a few more notes in my electronic medical record, then looks up at me again. “If there’s nothing else, I’ll check on you again tomorrow morning. If you need something before that, you can push the call button on the side of your bed.”

I glance down at the bed, surprised to see there is, in fact, a call button. “Three dimensional rendering of everything in a mile radius and I miss a stupid call button,” I mutter to myself, leaning back against the reclined back of my bed.

**

“I wasn’t sure what you typically like for breakfast besides sweets, so I’ve provided a buffet,” Channing tells me as he returns about an hour after Dr. Lyall departed.

Both sweet and savory scents assault me from the plates on the foil covered tray he’s wheeling in and my stomach gives a loud grumble of approval. “How many people are you feeding? You’ve got enough there for an army.”

“Dr. Lyall says you’re a bit thin—.”

“Surely Dr. Lyall can’t blame me. She knows I work for Esteban, right?” There’s an edge to my tone I don’t mean to put there. I have to admit, I’m feeling a little resentful of the whole secret underground organization, Avernus. Particularly since I still know next to nothing about it.

Channing catches it immediately and his eyes flick up. He switches half the glaring overhead fluorescents off so the room’s more pleasant, then wheels the tray over to the bed. “Yes, she does. I didn’t think that was too terribly private.”

“No, but you are. Especially for a guy who knows like everything about me, even the weird stuff, and still keeps prying.”

“Alright,” he says, removing foil covers from the various dishes on the tray, “what’s eating you now? Or are you going to pretend it’s that you’re hungry this time too?”

“I wasn’t pretending, and I’m not now. I’m hungry. End of story. As for what’s eating me, I want to know about you. And Avernus.”

He tosses a brief glance of irritation my direction, then starts scooping scrambled eggs onto a plate. “You know about both. I asked you not to snoop further into Avernus using your ability not to hide anything from you, but to keep you safe. You know the overall mission though.”

“Hunt down and kill dragons.” I watch as he adds a few slices of crisp bacon to the edge of the plate, then starts scooping a chopped fruit medley of strawberries, two kinds of melon, pineapple, halved grapes and a mix of berries. “What does it mean that you’re the Alpha?”

“I told you that too. It’s a title. I’m in charge.” He drops a couple of perfectly browned, perfectly round pancakes on the plate. “I’m the boss.”

“You’re like—twenty. Twenty-five tops.”

Chuckling and shaking his head, Channing sets the plate in front of me, then a tall cool glass of orange juice, and utensils. He sets a little container of individually wrapped pats of butter and a syrup dispenser within easy arm’s reach. “There are muffins if you’d rather those than pancakes. What does my age have to do with it?”

I give a frustrated huff. “How many people work for Avernus?”

He tilts his head to the side, staring blankly at a spot on the ceiling. “Avernus itself, thirty-five, nah, closer to forty thousand people. The number’s higher if you take in the subsidiary companies.”

“Thousand!?” My mouth gapes open. “How is this secret? And where did you learn to run something like this?”

Rolling his eyes, he grabs the wheeled chair and brings it over to the bed again. “Trust me, it’s secret. And running it is part instinct, part training that I had under my dad.”

“Your dad’s been dead for eleven years, Channing,” I reply flatly. “It doesn’t take a technomage to figure out your numbers don’t add up.”

“I’m older than twenty-five,” he replies evasively, taking a seat and starting to dish his plate.

I eye him again. He’s got a full head of thick sort of coarse brown hair and not a strand of gray in it. There’s not a wrinkle on his face and his hands and arms are young looking too. “How much older than twenty-five?”

“What difference does it make, Jericho?” He sets the plate down. “Did I freak out when you collected enough energy to hurl a bolt of lightning at a dragon? No. Did I freak out when I realized you’re technically a reincarnation of a woman who’s dead? No.”

More than human.>

Yeah, yeah. I got it the first time. I’ve scoured my memories. More than once I’ve seen the dragon. Not once have I seen these werewolves my mind tells me must exist. If that’s what Channing is—if that’s what Avernus is—then I want him to admit it. “How old?”

“One hundred and thirty-two.”

You had to ask.>

More like ‘demand’, but yes. I did. 

“How is that possible?”

“You know how, Jericho.” He meets my eyes with a powerful intensity in his, an overwhelming compulsion. You know. Accept.>

“So tell me.”

“I’m not a man. Not human like you. I’m a wolf, Jericho. A werewolf.”