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Erica Slaughter was dead. She wasn’t, the way the red and blue lights made her eyes hurt told her that much, but when Aaron found out she managed to get hurt bad enough to need an ambulance, she might as well be.
“You can’t arrest her! She’s Spoiler!” shrieked the boy she’d just saved.
“Still dunno who that is,” Erica slurred, then winced at the sound of her own voice. A Batman character? She didn’t think Batman had any girl sidekicks, but she was kind of busy hunting a big-ass animatype while the kid debated with himself what blonde superhero she was. She was too concussed to identify what kind of people in uniforms were walking towards her. That wasn’t ideal.
“She’s a superhero and she saved me from the monster, so you can’t arrest her!” he repeated, stomping his foot.
Shit, fuck, what scary animals lived near LA? A… “Bear,” Erica corrected eventually. “It was a bear.”
The police woman eyeing her suspiciously had pretty cheekbones. “I don’t think she’s in a state to be arrested anyway,” she muttered, half to herself and half to the boy, then turned over her shoulder and called for someone to come check her out.
Erica reluctantly reconsidered her plan to insist she didn’t need an ambulance and find somewhere to lick her wounds in private. Hospitals were annoying and asked difficult questions, but they were a whole lot easier to sneak out of than police stations. A man a little older than her introduced himself as Chimney, which was a silly name, and started checking her vitals. She was nearly as surprised as he was that she was able to correctly recite her name, the date, and the President.
“Where are you hurt?” Chimney asked.
“Yes,” Erica muttered.
“Well, yes ma’am, I see that you’re hurt, where are you hurt?”
Erica glared right into his eyes. “Yes.”
His face opened in comprehension and he called to one of his colleagues. “Right. Hen, can you come start a line while I check her head?”
The other medic was already rolling up her right sleeve before Erica could ask for the IV in her left arm. “That’s a neat tattoo.”
“Thanks…”
Chimney was asking about her medical history. While Erica explained that she wasn’t technically allergic to prednisone, it just made her unable to sleep until she started hallucinating, the firefighter with CAPTAIN on his hat glanced over at her arm and inexplicably grinned. “That is a cool tattoo! Are you from Minnesota?”
Erica blinked at him in confusion. “No?”
“Ah, must be a coincidence. I met a woman with a really similar tattoo when I was a kid.”
“Yeah?” The fire captain must have survived a monster attack when he was young. Was the hunter he met somebody Erica knew?
“There was a freak tornado at summer camp one year, and a staff member and two teenage counselors came from an all-girls camp nearby to help evacuate ours. I don’t remember which camp they came from anymore, but I do remember they all had these really cool matching bandanas. The woman had this really tough energy like she chewed nails for breakfast, and a tattoo a whole lot like that.” He grinned nostalgically. “It took me a while to figure out I wanted to be a firefighter specifically, but I knew I wanted to be like her and save people when I grew up.”
Erica grinned despite herself. “That’s sweet.” Adda would have been glad to hear that. She thought so, at least. It took her far too long to figure out that the old woman didn’t look at her so grimly because she disliked her. Jessica definitely would have loved to hear it. She would never, ever tell Cecilia, though she might tell some of the white mask apprentices just for the amusement of undermining the woman’s cold alpha wolf shtick. That wasn’t even how wolves worked. “They sound cool.”
One of the other firefighters, a young guy with a birthmark on one eyebrow, leaned over and grinned conspiratorially. “Ooo, did you escape some kind of cult?”
Erica stared at him. The lady cop with the nice cheekbones sighed heavily and Chimney smacked the man’s shoulder. “Buck, this is real life, not a comic book,” he scolded.
“Cults exist in real life!” Buck protested. “I met a guy who actually for real escaped from a cult one time! He had even rescued some kids from it and they had a nice little found family situation going on.”
“I feel like I should be asking follow-up questions,” the police officer deadpanned.
“Nah. If the guy didn’t sometimes talk to this weird plush fox like he was asking it for advice, they all would have seemed pretty normal, honestly.”
Erica stared at Buck some more. Either there was another batshit insane guy with a plush fox totem who had deserted the Order of Saint George, or Jace Boucher was still out there plotting God knew what (...good for him) and this firefighter had a pretty fucked idea of normal families. “If that guy really escaped a cult you probably shouldn’t talk about him,” she suggested. “Wouldn’t want the cult to find him.”
Buck snapped and made a finger gun. “Good point.”
Erica silently watched Chimney and Hen finish stabilizing her wounds and load her into the ambulance. This crew was quirky, and even Erica could tell that two of the firefighters were flirting with each other, but they seemed a hell of a lot more cohesive than any combination of white masks she had observed. “You guys are good at teamwork,” she mumbled. Probably the concussion talking.
“Uh, thank you?” Hen replied.
“I’ve seen teams who are really bad at teamwork. Fucked everything up worse than it was already fucked up. You guys seem like you actually like each other and shit. Gets better results.”
Chimney grinned slyly. “Can I get you to repeat that into a microphone so I can play it back?”