The Cardinal Bird (1 of Cardinal Series)

Chapter 13

A searing pain from my thigh brought me back to the van. I gasped. The double onslaught from both my torso and leg was exhausting. I hadn't eaten anything for about a day, but that didn't seem to matter to me as the back of my throat filled with bile. Nausea suffused my throat as my mouth watered, compounding the simultaneous need to swallow and throw-up.

"Bucket," Karl yelled. Brandon and Corey kept working, and the rocking of the van certainly wasn't helping anything as Karl searched for something to place under my mouth.

I was hot and cold. I was dizzy. I wished desperately for the van to steady out, but I knew it wouldn't make a difference. It was too late.

I twisted and turned my head as much as possible, which wasn't very much at all because Corey and Brandon, in an act of twin telepathy or just random coincidence, guessed what I was about to do and simultaneously clamped their hands down on my torso and thigh to keep me from pulling or injuring anything further.

Luckily though, Karl was right there with the bucket to catch whatever came out. It wasn't much due to my empty stomach. I looked back up at the roof in a daze. My eyes studied the same dips and grooves from earlier as I tried to feel more balanced. Someone, Karl probably was petting my sweaty, smelly, knotty hair. I focused on that instead. It was a new and foreign thing to feel someone touching me in comfort. It made the pain easier to bear.

Finally, Brandon and Corey removed their hands from me, and a full minute passed before I realized the fact. It took even longer for my body to stop shaking from the shock, though there were still small tremors running through me. The pain receded enough for me to notice the feel of dry bandages and medical tape shifting and pulling every time my body shook.

I laid there, my body calming down as the van grew still.

Karl was studying my face, and I had to wonder what he was seeing. I was sweaty, smelly, pale, and shaky. Possibly I was bruised too, but I couldn't remember if those had healed up yet. There was at least a new bruise from the van door slamming me between the eyes. I probably looked and felt like the rundown victim that I was and had always been. Misused and cast aside like a wet, soiled napkin littering the street.

I met his electric blue eyes and saw a burning emotion in his intense gaze. It was hard to decipher or sort into one single emotion, so I was unsure if it was good or bad.

"I have lots of questions for you," he murmured. He cleared his throat, speaking louder to address everyone else but maintaining eye contact. "We need to leave now. Raven, you're too illegal. North, I need you with me to help translate. Corey, you too. She needs a hospital, and we may need to you to...edit paperwork to fly under Ivanov's radar. We can't let him know she's not in fact dead. She's the closest thing we've come to a lead with him. Hell, we didn't even know who we were looking for until she threw his name in our laps. She gets protected at all costs."

Corey jumped into action to go to the other van, possibly going after one of the many laptops I had spotted earlier.

However, my mind was stuck on the word hospital.

"What if Ivanov comes back to check if she's there?" Marc asked.

Karl finally broke eye contact as he looked up and to the side, thinking. He pulled a phone out of his pocket and tapped at the screen. "I'm open to suggestions."

"We could do swapsies." Raven said with his deep, accented voice.

"Swapsies?" North grumbled.

"No," Marc said. "I think he's onto something. Inventive English, as usual, but a good idea. We could put one of the other bodies in the tank and hope Ivanov doesn't come back too soon. Maybe he'll think it's her...if enough time passes."