Told to wait outside the curtained exam area, Siena Sapharr stepped backward letting the curtain fall in a cascade of white. He briefly imagined smacking the Med who’d ordered him out, but instead, turned and looked directly at the intriguing puzzle of the robed woman. He noticed how her hand vanished beneath her dark robes. He could only assume she concealed some sort of weapon. But all she did was stand there, waiting. "Now what do we have here?" His boots clomped as he walked toward her. He looked up as he got closer, circled her as if she were an exhibit, and thought her strange. "Nice digs," he said as he poked at her robe.
She was tall, more than six feet in height, in fact. She watched the man with some hint of interest as he circled her, not moving, just... waiting, watching, silence over her like a shroud. Her golden gaze was feral, and she didn’t smile as she told him in a very soft tone, "I am glad you like them." Her accent was odd, he couldn’t quite place it, but it was definitely foreign to him. He sent a billow of smoke from his lips up at her face. She emerged from the cloud of smoke without sound or gesture, one step closer to him. Finally she offered a thing smile. "Is there a method, do you think?"
He stood still in turn as her slanted, gold eyes regarded him. The ember tip to his cigarette glowed again. "A method?" He said.
She leaned down slightly to scent the smoke Siena blew and oddly, she inhaled it. "To the madness," she finished, her exhale soft and soundless.
"Of course." A surreptitious smile crawled up his visage. "But not tonight. I have a headache. Who are you anyway?" He motioned up and down with his head as if he were perplexed.
Even veiled, her smile could be seen. "A pity." Her jet draped head tilted in consideration. The mask she wore was one of convenience, not shame.
"You pop the dude on the table?" Siena hooked his thumb back to indicate the curtained area they’d just left.
There was an almost feline grace to her but it lumbered because of her height. She eyed him as she straightened and one shoulder lifted elegantly. "And if I did ... pop him ... what then?"
The cigarette bobbed about as Siena licked his lips, clearly curious. "He important or sumthin?"
"Not anymore."
"Or you jus tryin to help business here?" Siena’s tone made her toss her head back, her laughter like a kiss of the night wind or a promise of the wild. She made her way in slow and soundless steps toward the curtained area, the sounds from the medical staff of the hospital flowing with an urgency that suggested the man on the table was dying if not dead already.
When she paused, Siena moved close to the curtain himself. He sensed the life-essence of the man as it expired and he smiled with delight. "His stuff is mine." He spoke low about the man’s clothing, "He won't be needin it no more." He never took his eyes off the woman.
From beyond the curtain Greg’s voice cut through the air, a verbal slap at Siena’s morbid jumping of the gun. "Back off vulture!" The Med was pissed. The implied, "He’s not dead yet…" lingered in the air after the commanding bark. It only took Siena back a little. The intention to own what was left behind remained.
Aspyre’s eyes darkened as she as she observed. "Did you ever ... aspyre, stranger?" Her question was her name. It amused her, but she didn’t show it, nor did she share it.
She thought for a moment she saw a crimson flash to the stranger’s eyes. "Every waking moment," he said in a whisper back to her.
Her look was smug, intended to taunt and tempt in it’s fluid fire gaze. "Do you need to live? Or live for need?"
He looked up, regarding her after that question. He didn’t like the fact that he had to look up to her at all. "What exactly do you mean by that comment woman?"
Her fingertips, covered in incredibly soft jet leather grazed over his chin, along the line of his jaw as she came within a breath of him. "It is a simple thing to answer."
Siena resisted the temptation to pump her full of Black Talons merely for touching him. "You ask if I need to live?"
Each of her forearms were slung with blackened daggers which seem to catch the light, and keep it. He knew she wasn’t threatened by his look. She only waited with those slanted gold eyes of hers; her patience that of a big cat intent on it’s prey. Siena didn’t like that at all. He had one hand buried in his trench coat, the other clenched by his side. She knew he carried weapons, just as she did and that neither of them held fear in their hearts. This was predator to predator. If anything, it inspired her. "I can move four times before that wasted metal frees your clothing, stranger, and the irony is that I mean you no harm..." She shook her head at him, amused.
"My dear. My existence is trivial to the grand picture. And if you think to threaten me you are making a death wish." He was not at all amused. Predator he was, but not a fool. He hadn’t come to the hospital that night to die, he’d come for information. He’d gotten what he wanted and his objective was to leave, that information in tact.
"Mmm ..." She circled his form, her regard not completely professional. "So touchy."
"No. I just hate women who are taller than me."
"You must hate a lot of women, then." Her laughter, on warm breath, filled his right ear as she moved.
He was not about to underestimate her, but he began to chalk her up as just another wanna-be hard nose, looking to make a name for herself. "You got a point, or are you gonna continue the mystery dance around me?"
Her gloved hand slipped to his throat and an old scrap of leather tied about it, drawing along it to find what might have been two dancers … perhaps … intertwined, light and dark in their fluid embrace. The interlocked symbol she held up to the light.
"Lady you really do not know who you are dealing with."
"No?" She jerked her hand and the leather gave, the talisman was freed. She took it and slipped it away within her robes in the blink of an eye. She watched him with some sense of derision in her mirthful laugh.
"Take your hands offa me." He slapped at her gloved hand. His other hand darted for his Desert Eagle and leveled it at her temple. "Crazy Leather Lady. You touch me again and I bust a Black Talon in your brain. You got me?’
She ducked fluidly, like water flowing through air. She caught his wrist and twisted, the gun brought back without thought for his pain. "Mmmm ... threats. And I thought their were no cults here."
As fluidly, he dropped the gun from the hand she’d captured and retrieved it with his other hand, as capable with that as with the first. He let her twist his wrist, himself not caring at the pain it caused while he shoved the gun into her gut. "Don’t piss me off, Lady."
A flick of her wrist brought a blade brought within the arch of his twisted arm and to the tip of his chin. "Shoot," she said. "I may not slip."
He smiled concupiscently. "Seems we atta impasse?"
His expression pleased her. "Impassion, perhaps," she said, and chuckled as she slid the blade along the heat of his pulse.
"Trust me lady, my gun will do more damage than your puny knife."
"Will it?" Her voice was still soft as desert sand whispering down a dune.
"Yeah it will," he said, clearly annoyed now. "So drop your silly knife, so I's don't gotta kill ya."
She tipped the steel toward his flesh a bit more. "Let's try it and see."
At that moment, with an audible sigh, Ed Archer entered the waiting room intent upon the couch he saw someone on the day before. He and Mera had gotten the batteries they'd gone after and she was off cleaning up -- having put the batteries away for hospital use --while he had decided that a little nap never hurt anyone. At the same time, Chumba, New Rhydynn’s crippled janitor came from his closet toward the waiting room, dust broom and brush in hand. He stopped as soon as he saw the man with the gun and with an old soldier’s fearlessness announced. "Hey, hey, hey. No weapons allowed in the hospital."
"Hey, you two!" Ed screamed at them, seeing they weren’t listening to Chumba. "Cut that crap out! Take it to the streets ... where they're used to people killing each other off."
Her laughter was exquisite, taunting and soft. "Do you need to live? Or live to need?"
"This is a place of healing," Chumba told them firmly. "It is revered in the eyes of the ones. There are no weapons or fighting here. Unless of course you’re hospital security; but I don't see any uniforms on you two."
Surprised, Ed turned to the janitor. "Um ... is there a security force?"
They both ignored the men who ordered them to stand down. Siena rolled his eyes. "Again with the enigmatic questions." His tone was not one of street slang any longer, but tight, educated.
"Answer them, stranger." Her voice purred in his ear as she pressed her sleek, robe-hidden form to the gun he held at her abdomen.
"Enough already," he said, his tone tinged with disdain at her continued physical innuendo.
Chumba nodded to Ed. "I'm gonna call em if these guys don't put the weapons away." To Aspyre and Siena he said, "Don't make me call security. Put the weapons away." With a slight limp, the janitor made his way to, oddity of oddities, a functioning radio.
"Just get away from me," Siena told the robed Aspyre. "So that Goon does not have another body to bury."
"It is hard to kill that which is already dead."
Siena smiled at last at that comment. "Trust me I have much experience." Then, whether because of the janitor, the possibility of security or some force within or without greater than any of those, Siena clicked back the safety on the gun still leveled at her gut. Aspyre released the kiss of steel to his throat and she stepped back from the nose of his weapon to stand before him.
He spun the gun in his hand as he returned it to the aged leather holster. "Good woman." She merely smiled as she noted his display of machismo. Chumba set the radio down and nodded to himself when he saw the weapons put away. That was all he’d wanted in the first place.
He stepped away from her and continued out into the hospital lobby, where neither vagrants nor janitors lurked. She followed him. As she turned, her body exuded the scent of amber, and the sound of the soft swish of black silk and brocade.
"You know," Siena told her as she drew abreast of him again, "you might be useful. Look me up sometime. Or my buddy 'Bert. You know who I am talking about?" She nodded once, confirming that she knew many of the things of which he spoke.
"I only came for the talisman, stranger."
He looked down at his chest where it had been. "That ole thang? Seems its magic was once greater. These days magic is at its end." He shrugged.
"Did you know..." she began, her tone rather sad, "the name for lover, in Spanish ... is Armante? But things change ..." Her voice trailed away.
With a maniacal glint in his eyes, he said, "Things change indeed..."
"Aye, they do." She glanced over at the others. Ed had curled up on the couch, trying to sleep and the janitor was about his business.
"Yeah," Siena said. "And Dead means Muerte. So stop with the crazy questions. I have to go see if the Meds saved that guy in the other room or not."
"… dia de los Muerte …" she murmured. She bowed slightly, her slender form in jet black folded in half. "I wish you well, stranger. Think of dead lovers once in a while."
Siena’s smile was bright as he turned from the leather clad woman. "Dia de los Muerte. I like that. And good luck in the desert stranger.’
"At least it will have heat, stranger." In a soft swish of sound, she moved to the door and slipped back through the lobby, the way she had come in.
He walked away from Aspyre toward the emergency room. "Perhaps," he said, as he pushed through the doors. "Some say the world will end in fire ... others say Ice ..." His voice trailed off as he hovered in the waiting room between the lobby and the emergency room. He could go in and take the dead man’s possessions, but in that moment he decided he didn’t want them. Siena pulled his trench coat around him and exited the lobby into the night, the shadows swirled to embrace him.