Title: The White Horse (11/16)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk, Spock, McCoy
Summary: Jim Kirk was a strange man. A silent man. No one knew much about him or, if they did, were not willing to say what they did know, especially to the town’s newest magical occupant. Not that Leonard McCoy cared. He had an old curse to track down and unravel by the year’s end. Meanwhile a killer was tracking him. AU.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
or at AO3

Part Ten

The thing about magic—all kinds of magic—was that part of the price to use it was always at the user’s expense. Magic was energy with a will. The mage had to exert himself or herself to curve this will to a specific purpose.

Some people believed that magic was an extension of the mage’s personal energy; it wasn’t so much a matter of one independent force trying to master another but the energy, being naturally wild, was very difficult to harness. Leonard thought that was a bunch of bullshit. Sure, when he was younger he had romanticized his ability, but ironically it was his ability that had convinced him of the true nature of magic. It existed alongside humans, a creature separate from whom they bartered for power. He had never felt magic as the same energy which ran the body, not even a kin to it. It was alien, it was unique, and it took rather than gave when it was being used.

Sometimes the magic only wanted his energy, and so after a healing he was tired. Sometimes it took part of his will in the exchange—the kind of will he needed to survive in a world that hated him. Whatever the magic demanded was never so much that he didn’t recover within a day or so, but that particular price had helped Leonard understand why some mages turned into blank-eyed husks of themselves after performing tremendous acts.

Simply put: magic could cripple you if it wanted to. So that was why it was always dangerous even at its most benign.

~~~

Leonard’s responses were sluggish after he finished the healing of Spock’s arm. His body wanted to sleep but his mind wouldn’t let him, and with good reason: Spock, standing just beyond the bathroom door, was inspecting the small scar of pink skin on his arm in the mirror above the sink. He seemed fascinated by it—or was determining if it would impede his next move.

Definitely, Leonard thought, the Fed had to be up to no good.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he called. “The only reason you’re still on your feet is because I gave you a little extra energy at the end there.”

It wasn’t a lie. He always made a gift of some of his energy at the end of a healing to help the body recalibrate itself. Some people told him afterwards they had the greatest sense of well-being once the healing was over. Others just thanked him, got up and staggered off with that little bit of time he had bought them to get a head start on whatever demons happened to be chasing them.

Spock switched off the light in the bathroom and came out. “In that case, Mr. McCoy, between us I would think you should be the least coherent.”

He gave the man a are you kidding me? look. “I’ll…” Sleep when you sleep, he almost said, and changed it to: “…be fine.” Then he peeled himself off the pillow that was propping him up and abandoned the bed nearest the hotel door.

Spock swooped down and picked up his blood-stained shirt from the floor. He started to fold it.

“I’d throw that away,” Leonard remarked.

“My spare one is nearly fifty miles south of here,” Spock replied in his dry way.

“We’re not here to attract attention. I have a t-shirt in my bag you can put on.” Before Spock could say no, Leonard reached into his duffel bag, pulled out a t-shirt at random and threw it at the agent’s head. The world kind of spun for a moment from the sharp movement. Leonard returned to the bed and sat down on its edge. Luckily Spock was too busy staring at the t-shirt to notice.

“This will not fit,” the man said.

“You’re skinny as hell. It’ll fit,” Leonard said.

Well, he amended privately, maybe Spock was right after all. The man’s torso was so long that the t-shirt stopped right beneath his navel.

Leonard put a fist to his mouth and turned a laugh into a cough.

“What is a… Tardis?” Spock questioned, staring down at the logo plastered across his chest.

“No idea,” Leonard lied, rifling through his duffel bag for a second t-shirt. “Got it at a thrift store on my way through Missouri. It’s probably from a movie.”

“That does not explain the British police box.” Spock pinched the fabric with distaste.

“Spock,” said Leonard, annoyed, “are you seriously going to quiz me about pop culture right now?”

Spock considered Leonard for some seconds. Then his eyes narrowed the tiniest fraction. “Are you going to pass out?” he inquired.

“No.”

“Your skin color is abnormal.”

Leonard grabbed the handle of his duffel bag and carted the heavy thing toward the bathroom.

“If you pass out while in the bathroom,” Spock went on to say as he shifted aside for Leonard to lumber past him, “and the door is locked, I will not be able to assist you.”

“You wouldn’t help me anyway,” Leonard snapped and slammed the door shut. Then he jerked it open again in order to eye the other man. “Can I trust you not to leave the room?”

“No.”

“Fuckin’ figures,” he muttered and shut the door again, turning the lock.

He placed the bag on the toilet seat and eased himself down to the tiled floor beside it. Considering the circumstances, at least he still had possession of the gun and the car keys.

The tiles were cold, and Leonard shivered, his palms pressed against it. Then he put one of his hands against his forehead.

What the hell was he supposed to do now?

Christopher Pike had no liking for fools. It took him a few seconds longer than normal to remind himself not to shred what was left of Decker’s already fragile mind. He decided to settle for invoking a deep-seated fear of what would happen the next time Decker went against his orders.

“I told you not to follow McCoy!” he snarled at the back of the man’s head.

Decker pulled in his shoulders and like a frightened child clutched at his right hand. “Pig almost took off my goddamn trigger finger, Chris.”

Christopher was tempted to pull out his own gun and shoot the idiot in the back of the head. “You disobeyed me,” he said, the words biting. Although Decker’s body did not move, Chris felt the flinch of the man’s mind.

“Can’t let the McCoy man die,” Decker whispered. “Can’t. Fed was gonna get him.”

Chris closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe. He didn’t want McCoy working with the agent, that was true, but he wanted Decker tailing McCoy even less. At this point they were all walking on thin ice, where one step astray would lead to complete disaster.

“What else?” he asked, opening his eyes, feeling a scritch-scratch of something evasive circling through Decker’s mind. “Tell me.”

Decker rocked forward and rubbed the knuckles of his uninjured hand against his beard. “What else, boss?” he echoed. “Don’t know. You think McCoy made it?”

He knew for a fact McCoy was upstate. “You know where he was staying. How?”

Decker shook his head like a dog and sat up abruptly. “Where is this?” he asked, finally becoming more cognizant of his surroundings. “Chris?”

At that hint of suspicion, the sheriff came around the back of the chair to face him, schooling his face into a calmer visage. “Easy there, Matt,” he placated Decker. “I ran interference with one of my men who almost caught you and brought you out here to the cabin. Shock,” he added, looking pointedly down at Decker’s hand, “must of had a strong hold on you.”

Decker blinked once, then nodded. “That fight was something else,” the man admitted before grinning slightly. “I’m pretty fuckin’ sure I hit the son of a bitch though!”

“Good,” Chris muttered. He crossed his arms. “Listen to me, Matt—you can’t take stupid chances like that again. Gunfire at a local motel: it always makes the headline news. That said, you need to lay low and stay out of trouble. Don’t leave this cabin for a few days, understood?”

Decker lost his grin. “But I have to hunt, Chris.”

“You’ve done enough for now,” Chris assured him humorlessly and turned for the door.

Decker shot to his feet, bellowed, “No fucking way!”

Chris stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and looked straight ahead.

“What if it goes out tonight, huh, while I’m stuck the fuck in here and it kills?! I have to hunt! You can’t do this to me!”

“I can,” Chris said softly. “Sit down.”

Decker sat, still ranting. “No way am I gonna hide like a pussy! I’ll hunt it and when I find it, I’ll slit its fucking throat! I swore that to God and to my little brother, Christopher, so just—you c-can’t—what—mons—” His tongue tripped over several words before he stuttered to a stop.

A moment later, Chris released his choke hold on Decker’s thoughts just enough so that the man’s brain would not hemorrhage. “You do what I say,” he said. “Stay here. Be silent. Be nothing.”

And with that he left the man spellbound to the chair. They would resume the conversation, he decided, when there was a good reason to come back.

Leonard managed to doze in sporadic starts and stops, the atmosphere of his dreaming wrought with the tension he felt when awake. Meanwhile Spock did not stir from the bed next to his as Leonard fidgeted or intermittently reassured himself the gun was safely tucked in his grasp under his pillow. The man breathed evenly, quietly, like he was truly asleep. But Leonard still had the sense that Spock was more aware of every sound and shifting shadow than he was. The buzz of energy around the bed said as much; if Spock himself wasn’t keeping vigil, his magic was.

And it continued to creep ever closer towards Leonard.

Leonard gritted his teeth against the intrusion and rolled to face the drawn curtains of the hotel window, running a finger across the warmed metal of the gun’s barrel. He thought he could smell gunpowder and a hint of Spock’s blood.

Would he really have to use the thing when Spock attacked? Could he?

The answer had to be yes.

All-at-once Leonard’s hand felt cold, so shockingly cold. He became conscious that it wasn’t the temperature of his flesh that had changed but the gun itself. Sucking in a small breath, Leonard let go of it and withdrew his hand from beneath the pillow. He whispered into the dark, “What’re you doing?”

When no reply came he eased onto an elbow and tugged the gun into sight. But touching it again, the metal felt warm. The cold had been a figment of his imagination.

Or, he supposed, biting down on his lower lip, a warning.

He slid off the bed, weapon in hand, and went to the window. The parking lot beyond the hotel was a stretch of black, glistening in places where rain had been left behind on pavement and windshields.

Something white stood down below. It turned up a round face to look Leonard in the eyes. Leonard backed away without realizing it until he bumped into a solid mass from behind.

Spock said, unnervingly close to his ear, “What is it?”

But the man did not wait for Leonard’s answer. He went to the window himself and drew back one of the curtains. After a moment Spock let the curtain fall again.

His head turned in Leonard’s direction. “What was it?” he queried.

Leonard removed his thumb from the safety on the gun, leaving it engaged. Spock hadn’t seen the same thing. Of course not.

“Nothing,” he answered, and went back to his bed.

Spock remained standing by the window for a long time, staring through the open space between the curtain fold and the glass pane. Eventually Leonard gave up on watching the tall silhouette, muttered “For fuck’s sake, go to sleep,” and stuffed his head under his pillow. The smell of gunpowder was so overpowering it burned his nostrils but he made do.

When he dragged his head out again it was morning and Spock was gone.

Early morning turned to late morning.

The car was still sitting in the parking lot. Leonard tossed its keys from hand to hand, trying to decide what this meant. Did the agent intend to return, or had he snuck down to the lobby to call for local law enforcement?

Leonard was close to convincing himself of the latter when someone knocked on the hotel room’s door.

He cursed after he looked through the peep hole and jerked the door open, snapping at the man on the other side, “Where the fuck were you!”

“Good morning,” said Spock, and moved past Leonard into the room, balancing a cardboard multi-cup holder with one hand. He extended his arm. “Yours is the left one.”

Smelling coffee, Leonard grabbed the cup, only belatedly remembering who was doing the offering. So he popped off the plastic top to peer down at the dark liquid with suspicion. Then he sniffed it for good measure.

Tone bland, Spock mentioned, “I forewent the cream and sugar. Also the poison.”

“Yeah, all right,” Leonard said grudgingly, because his coffee addiction pretty much guaranteed he would be desperate enough to drink the stuff even if it happened to be poisoned. He raised the styrofoam cup to his mouth and took a sip. His eyebrows lifted in pleasant surprise. “Not bad,” he commented. “Where’d you get it?”

“There is a gourmet bakery two streets north of here.” Spock turned away slightly to remove the second cup from the holder and sip from it. “It stood to reason they would serve coffee a grade or two above your usual gas station fare.”

This coffee was clearly meant to be savored. As Leonard leisurely inhaled the scent, he also eyed the paper bag dangling from Spock’s fingers. “What else did you bring me?”

Spock lowered his cup. “There is one bagel.”

“Well,” Leonard said, pleased, reaching for it, “thanks.”

Spock shifted to hold the bag out of range. “It is mine.”

“Bagels aren’t gluten-free,” Leonard pointed out, stepping forward.

Spock folded his arms behind his back, thereby hiding the bag, and said primly, “My dietary restrictions can be flexible.”

He stared at the man and contemplated if a fight over a piece of bread was worth it. In the end, his decision was motivated less by hunger and more by pride. “Give me that bagel, Spock.”

“No.”

“Is it worth dying for?” He made a show of reaching around to his back where his gun was tucked away.

“Yes,” Spock said, and walked off to the corner table.

Son of a bitch, thought Leonard. He left the gun where it was.

Across the room, Spock set aside a small container of cream cheese and began to unwrap his breakfast. The stupid bagel looked and smelled ridiculously good. “We should discuss today’s plans.”

Leonard couldn’t figure it out. How did Spock win?

His stomach gurgled, also upset. Leonard had to take a large gulp of hot coffee to shut it up.

“Plans?” he repeated, sounding dubious. “There is no plan. There is no ‘we’ either. I’m in charge.”

“We know we are searching for a serial killer,” Spock continued on. “I suspect you began to realize the true nature behind the drownings after you crossed into Missouri.” He paused. “The killer is not human.”

“You mean he’s a mage.”

Spock glanced at Leonard. “I have yet to encounter a magic user who is not human.”

“Wait,” said Leonard, putting his coffee cup down on the nightstand between their beds, “that doesn’t make any sense. It has to be a human—and a damned powerful one at that!”

But it seemed Spock did not agree. “I should inform you, in your haste to flee my father’s house you missed the map of Arkansas. Two towns were marked on that map, both near a body of water where a series of fatal drownings occurred during the 1940s.”

“Is that how you found me?” Leonard wanted to know.

The man gave a slight nod. “Affirmative. Once I determined the correlation between the towns, tracking you became much simpler. But that is not my point, Mr. McCoy. In my research, I also located the record of a similar instance in Louisiana in 1927. If the killer is human, he is nearing or over one hundred years of age.”

“Then it’s a cult,” countered Leonard. “God knows sacrificial drownings aren’t anything new to this world.” He thought for another moment. “If not a cult, then it could be a family rite of some kind.”

“Those theories were dismissed.”

“By who?”

Spock gave him a long look. “By persons more knowledgeable than ourselves.”

“Oh…” Leonard murmured, feeling a bit mischievous. “You mean like people from the super-secret government agency dedicated to containing the American werewolf population that the public isn’t supposed to know exists? Those ones?”

And wouldn’t Scotty be proud that Leonard had remembered one of his favorite conspiracy theories?

Spock’s mouth twitched. “There are no such things as werewolves, Mr. McCoy.”

“I stay off the streets during a full moon all the same.”

“Then you agree,” the other man inserted smoothly, “there is the possibility we are not looking for a human.”

Leonard resisted the urge to throw up his hands. He asked instead, “So if this… whatever-it-is was picked up as a case by a government somebody, how come it’s still unsolved?”

Spock turned back to his uneaten bagel and began to cut into it with a knife. “I cannot answer that question.”

“Because you won’t?”

“Because I do not know the answer.”

Standing there, arms folded and watching Spock, Leonard suddenly had a nasty suspicion. “What if,” he said, “all of this has nothing to do with me?”

Spock’s hands stilled in the act of spreading cream cheese across the open face of the bagel.

“What if—” Leonard began again slowly, only to find he couldn’t finish. A ball of dread had taken up residence in the pit of his stomach.

Memory blurred the hotel room, transformed it into a very familiar study. He could picture Sarek’s dead body on the floor. Around the body everything had been upended, strewn about by some unknown whirlwind of power. Leonard taken the maps based on the assumption Sarek had been using them when he died.

But what if the maps had been in that study for far longer, already tracing out the path of a serial killer as part of a different job? Leonard, in his folly, had picked them up without a second’s thought and run with them.

He sat down on the edge of the nearest bed—Spock’s—and forced himself to breathe.

Don’t panic, he thought. Panic is bad. Panic is pointless.

Joanna was dying, and only now he saw the gaping error in his logic. What if he has wasted over a month’s time to come as far as Iowa only to solve another man’s case?

Motherfuck.

Leonard’s head shot up, and he looked at Spock. “I need to call my father,” he said, not caring how he sounded. He pushed off the bed and went for his duffel bag, where he had stashed the cell phone he had confiscated from Spock. Once he had it, he shoved it into Spock’s hands and ordered, “Get him on the line—and keep the games out of it.”

Spock stared at him and ignored the phone.

Leonard pulled the gun out of his waistband and flipped off the safety. “I may not hurt you over a bagel,” he said, “but I will hurt for the sake of my family. Now fucking do it.”

Spock pressed a single button on the phone. In the next instant it was ringing. A voice Leonard didn’t recognize answered the call.

“This is Agent Spock,” Spock said.

“Agent,” the unidentified man replied, “you almost missed the second check-in. I was about to notify Headquarters. Where are you?”

“My location remains classified, but your concern has been noted. What is your current status?”

“I’m outside the house. Barnes is covering the hospital. The Chapel woman came back to town last night but otherwise there’s nothing new to report. Sources indicate her communications to be clean.”

“Thank you. The update is always appreciated. Is David McCoy within the residence?”

“Yes, sir.”

Spock said, still looking at Leonard, “Please exit your vehicle and approach the home. You are to give your phone to Mr. McCoy.”

A beat of silence came through the line. Then, “Sir, you’ve asked me to expose my cover.”

“I am well-aware of that fact, Agent. Present circumstances require a change in protocol. I am authorizing you to make contact with the family.”

Apparently Spock did have that authority because Leonard heard the sounds of a car door opening and closing through the phone speaker. He almost held his breath as the agent rang the doorbell and, seconds later, knocking could be heard as well.

“What do you want?“

Until that moment Leonard had never known his father to be so unapologetically rude to someone.

David McCoy’s voice grew louder. “Take—What in blazes? What is this? Hello?“

Without a word, Spock handed the cell phone to Leonard. Leonard took three steps back and put it to his ear, lowering the gun slightly so that its muzzle pointed toward Spock’s feet instead of his chest.

“Dad?” he said, unsurprised when his voice cracked. He spoke quickly, “You’re not talking to me, understand? This is Federal Agent Spock’s phone.”

“Agent Spock?” The words came out a bit strangled but otherwise David had caught on. “I don’t know any Spock. What the hell do you want?“

“I’m fine. I’m—I can’t tell you where I am, but never mind that. Are you and Jo all right?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business, and I don’t thank you for asking!“

Leonard pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it funny. What was that code for?

His father went on to say, “Over a month you knuckleheads have been camped out on my doorstep and all you’ve done is give me more grief on top of the grief I’ve already got! So you can keep your bullshit about my son to yourself, you hear? I’d sooner expect a pig to fly than accept my boy killed someone!“

Leonard winced. “Easy there, Dad. Spock is Sarek’s son.”

“Sorry for your loss,” Leonard’s father tossed in rather flatly. “Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got an appointment to keep with my granddaughter’s doctor. “

“If Clay isn’t living up to his promise, I’ll gut him.”

“The man’s an ass but he seems able enough to keep her goin’.“

“Good,” Leonard replied, relieved. “Listen, Dad, I might be at a dead end here. If I come back—”

He was interrupted: “Mr. Spock, I might as well stop you right here. I don’t know where my son’s gotten to and even if I did, I’d tell him to stay far away from the likes of you.“

Leonard looked at Spock and his mouth twitched, thinking it was far too late for that warning. “He says he knows I didn’t kill his father but there’s still the question of whether or not he intends to let me hang for murder.”

Spock responded, cool as ever, “If you help me catch the culprit, Mr. McCoy, I may consider letting you go.”

Leonard hoped his father couldn’t hear that. “But I’m working on him, I promise.”

“I have to hang up now,” David insisted, which probably meant the agent at his door was getting ansty.

“Wait, one more thing. As soon as this call is over I’ll ring the house phone. Hang up on me, but make sure you write the number down. If you need me, you call it. If somebody else answers, don’t talk to him. Got all that?”

His father hmphed. “I was born at night but not last night, mister.” Then the line went dead.

Leonard tapped his foot with impatience as he dialed his father’s home phone number. The call was picked up on the fourth ring. Even though his father did as instructed and hung up immediately, Leonard was almost disappointed they didn’t say anything else to each other. He placed Spock’s phone in his pocket for safe-keeping.

“I trust you are satisfied,” Spock said from his chair.

“I don’t know that satisfied is the word,” Leonard retorted, engaging the safety on the gun and tucking it away. “It shouldn’t be this convoluted just to talk to him.”

“Indeed,” Spock said too softly. “But imagine how you would feel if the act were impossible.”

Leonard felt a pang at that. It took him a moment to find his voice. “You know I’m sorry, don’t you, Spock? If I’d known what would happen—”

“Enough,” the other man interrupted, standing up. “I want no apology.”

“Then what do you want?”

Spock’s dark eyes glittered queerly at him. “I want us to return to Riverside, Mr. McCoy—so that you may meet James Kirk.”

What was it about fucking James Kirk that was so special? Leonard would wonder later on the car ride out of Iowa City. It seemed a portentous thing that both a federal agent and a county sheriff were pushing him in that direction.

And if Kirk was key to whatever mystery Spock and Pike pursued, did that necessarily mean Kirk held answers for Leonard too?

Somehow, Leonard thought not.

Jim rolled over onto his back, thinking there was no comfortable place anywhere in his mind that he could crawl into and hide. The memories of his mother had been soured by her death, and the rest of the memories—what few that weren’t nightmarish—had been part of the boy before the lake. That boy had never come back.

Jim supposed the monster ate him. Wasn’t that what all monsters did?

He hated these thoughts. If he could physically pull them out of his head, he would. Some nights they circled and circled and finally engulfed him until he rose from the bed in the morning with the torment at which they excelled carved into his face. Those times he contemplated peeling off his skin with his fingernails to see what really lay beneath the flesh.

But he never did. He was a coward that way.

He had made it through last night only a little worse for the wear. At one point he had felt his bones shifting but he had stretched his limbs as far as he could, to each end of the bed, and forced them to stay where they were. The bedroom had grown terribly cold, then, until his breath was a puff of white in the air. He hadn’t cared how angry his resistance made it. When he stopped resisting, he stopped being Jim. Jim wasn’t so bad in comparison to what else he might become.

The sun had returned while he imagined he was walking a different city and sidewalk than the ones he knew. He didn’t understand why he traveled in these imaginings, but he did know that sometimes he came upon something in them that he thought might help him. Like in real life, however, he could never communicate his need properly.

Sleepily Jim blinked at the ceiling. He felt a weight settle at the end of the bed, directly on top of his feet. When it began to purr, he sighed through his nose.

“Can’t you sit somewhere else?” he asked the cat.

Jinx kneaded his owner’s socks and ignored the nonsensical words.

Jim reached up to brush at his hair. “Some of us have to go to work.” When he realized he was trying to reason with a cat, he blew out a breath and moved his feet.

Jinx, no doubt having decided he didn’t want to relinquish his favorite new perch, dug his claws through the cotton socks and into flesh. Jim hissed and sat up, latching onto the cat around its pudgy middle and hauling it sideways.

Jinx spat at him, declaring, “Mrrr’www!“

“Shut up,” Jim said, and dumped Jinx onto the floor.

The cat dashed under the bed and out the other side to leap onto the top of Jim’s chest of drawers. From there, he narrowed his eyes at Jim and swished his tail in agitation.

Jim flicked his middle finger at the angry feline, then half-fell out of bed and shuffled towards his bathroom. When he removed his socks, he saw that tiny red welts had puckered up on the tops of his feet. He gave them a cursory swipe with rubbing alcohol and stripped off the rest of his clothes.

After a bad night, he never had high hopes for the following day. This day, in particular, it seemed was meant to test him. He wondered almost objectively just how bad it was going to be.

Leonard wanted lunch. Spock had other plans. It didn’t matter that Leonard was driving the car. Because of these ‘other plans’ and Spock’s sheer tenacity, Leonard ended up following a country highway outside the town limits of Riverside. He pulled the car into a large muddy lot filled with tractor trailers, eighteen wheelers, and Ford pickups at the instructions of his backseat driver and killed the engine.

“What’s this place?” he asked as he exited the car.

“This is where Mr. Kirk works.”

Leonard closed the driver-side door and zipped up his jacket, eyeing the varied sizes of the buildings. Warehousing, he thought to himself. “Can we just walk in?”

“We should have to provide identification, sign waivers for liability, then change into the appropriate safety gear.”

That sounded like a hassle to Leonard.

“However, upon my last visit, the administration was… notably relaxed. I suspect nothing has changed in that regard.”

Leonard eyed his companion. “You’re saying you didn’t report their negligence?”

“I will, once my business in this area is complete,” Spock assured him, and started across the parking lot.

Leonard just shook his head, not surprised. He hadn’t known Spock all that long but from what he had seen, the man had a disturbing sense of dedication to his own ambitions. He wondered what Sarek had thought about that characteristic in his son—or if that characteristic was a recent development.

He suppressed a shiver and followed Spock to the front office of the building that likely acted as the main warehouse.

There, Spock flashed his badge and addressed one of the workers as one well-known acquaintance to another. He said, “I need to speak with Mr. Kirk again. Is he available?”

Leonard didn’t like the mean look that came into the worker’s eyes.

“Sure he is,” the guy said. He pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt and pressed the button on the side, saying, “Towler to Finnegan. You’re needed in the office.” To Spock, he supplied, “Kirk’s in one of the coolers. Finnegan will show you the way.”

“Can’t you just have the guy come up here?” Leonard butted in, seeing no reason for them to go tromping through a dangerous work zone unless it was necessary.

Towler (Ed Towler, if the name on the breast pocket of his uniform was anything to go by) looked Leonard over. “Are you saying you want me to pull the man off his shift?”

That wasn’t what Leonard had said at all but he heard the threat clearly enough. “No, sir,” he amended and shut his mouth, cutting his eyes at Spock.

Spock didn’t seem to have an opinion on the matter. Leonard cursed him silently.

The fellow named Finnegan showed up, blinking stupidly at everyone until his gaze landed on Spock. The slow, sly grin that formed on his face wasn’t at all comforting. “Mr. Spock! Here to see my good buddy Jim again? I sure didn’t know he was so popular with you government types.” He kept his grin as his gaze transferred to Leonard but Leonard could see Finnegan didn’t peg him for a ‘government type’ like Spock. The man didn’t ask any questions about him, though, like it didn’t matter.

When Finnegan motioned for them to follow him, Leonard planted his feet and crossed his arms. Both Finnegan and Spock stared at him.

“We need hard hats,” Leonard said, looking pointedly at Finnegan’s hat. “And reflective vests.” His gaze dropped Finnegan’s boots. “You have to have some steel toe guards around here. Or am I wrong in assuming your company doesn’t value the safety of its visitors as highly as its personnel?” he added acerbically.

Towler’s sour expression was worth the jab. “Get them suited up,” the supervisor snapped at Finnegan.

Finnegan ducked out of the office without another word and led them to a side room. Leonard had to show Spock how to put on the toe guards. The agent stared down at the metal contraptions in dismay, like they were spoiling the effect of his shiny black shoes.

“When a beam drops on your foot, you’ll thank me later,” Leonard told him.

“I doubt that.”

Leonard put his hard hat on and bared his teeth. Then he turned his unfriendly smile onto Finnegan and said, “You can take us to Kirk now.”

“Sure,” the man muttered and hurried out the door ahead of them.

In hindsight, Leonard should have never made that comment about the beam. He shouldn’t have. Fate had a way of turning his words on him—or, in this case, literally trying to flatten him with them.

The carton boxes on the skids were stacked five high. When they started to wobble, then to fall, Leonard had nowhere to go. He had already shoved Spock aside. And now he was going to be crushed to death because of his decision to save the nation’s most bone-headed federal agent.

Scotty was going to die laughing over the irony of this. If they gave Leonard a funeral, the man would watch from an unmarked van two blocks over and laugh so hard. Then he would call Leonard’s spirit back from the Great Beyond and say, “You fucking moron! Worst way to die!”

As the boxes fell, the only thing Leonard could think to do was to close his eyes so he did. Because he had his eyes closed, he had no idea who rammed into him out of nowhere and sent him sprawling onto the dirty warehouse floor. When his eyes shot open in the wake of a deafening crash, he saw he had missed death by mere inches.

Leonard grabbed the elbow of his savior digging into his stomach and shoved the upper torso off of his. The person went with a grunt of pain.

Leonard sat up and said, “Holy fuck.”

Slowly surfacing from his shock, he became aware that the man at his side had hardly moved. The reason was evident. While Leonard had escaped the boxes, the other guy hadn’t. One of his legs disappeared at the knee under a mountain of crushed cardboard and splintered wood. The man’s face was bloodless, sweat-covered.

But he hadn’t uttered a word.

Leonard shifted to his knees and ignored the way his hands were shaking slightly as he laid them gently against the man’s breastbone. No sign of blood, he thought. He focused inward, looking for internal injuries. None.

But there was a thread of pain. If he reached for it, to find its source…

The pain nearly swallowed Leonard whole. He heard himself say, “Don’t move,” and repositioned one of his hands on the thigh of the partly visible leg. The femur was fine, the knee strained but whole. Below that, he felt the swelling around the lower bones, although neither was broken.

When he reached the ankle joint, the world whited-out like an electric shock.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. If it weren’t for the boot, the foot would have been turned completely around. Leonard instinctively knew this and had to dispel the image in his head quickly, fighting down a strong wave of nausea.

“Will removing the boxes injure him further?” a voice said to his right.

Leonard jerked back, but his magic kept moving deeper into the leg to catalog the rest of the damage. It was like information filtering in from the back of his brain. He realized in that moment he had been talking the entire time, describing what he felt.

And Spock, crouched next to him, had been listening. Leonard didn’t dare look at the injured man; hopefully the poor bastard had passed out.

Spock repeated the question.

Leonard considered the mess and the angle of the leg. Nothing was under it but ground. “I don’t know,” he said at first, before an idea came to him. He turned to face Spock. “Can you shift the boxes the way you did that bed? There’s a chance if they’re moved by hand accidental pressure could be placed on the leg, but with a force that can project outward—”

“The control is infinitely finer,” Spock finished, catching on. “I believe I can.”

Leonard caught at Spock’s sleeve as the man started to focus his attention and his magic on the boxes. He warned, “Try not to rattle any of them.”

“I will do it properly,” retorted Spock, “on the condition that you can refrain from breaking my concentration, Mr. McCoy.”

Leonard just said, “Get on with it,” and placed one hand on the injured leg again. When he dared to sneak a glance at the face of the person his power was currently running through, he saw he was being watched.

The guy was still sweating but some of his paleness had receded. His eyes were bright blue and eerily intelligent.

“Sorry,” Leonard said, then added, “Thanks.”

He cleared his throat and tried for the professionalism that doctors always had on television. “You’ve, ah, broken your ankle. We’re going to get you out first and then fix you up—but in the meantime you gotta stay absolutely still. Sound good?”

The man gave him the barest of nods.

Leonard was just grateful the fellow hadn’t started screaming bloody murder for the whole of the warehouse to hear. People tended to do that once they understood the help being given was through unnatural means.

Since he was thinking about the warehouse itself, Leonard lifted his head and surveyed the area. That brat Finnegan was long gone. Maybe he had run off to get help but somehow Leonard doubted it. He was the one after all who had put Leonard and Spock in this spot to wait, claiming it was safer if he walked the rest of the way to the cooler and called Kirk over to meet them.

“He’s on that piece of junk we call the Caterpillar,” the worker had said, “and he’s not real tame with it. Wouldn’t want either of you gettin’ hurt.”

Leonard hadn’t thought much of it at the time, and then thought even less about it once Spock had grimaced down at the vest fastened over the outside of his coat as though he had endured it too long and started to take the thing off. Leonard had asked the man what the hell he thought he was doing. Spock had then spouted some kind of statistics on the likelihood of the reflective vest preventing an accident.

They had both heard the sound of a forklift running along the opposite aisle. Leonard had assumed it was Kirk finally making an appearance.

Then the tower of stacked skids had shuddered ominously, and tilted, having been moved by the mysterious forklift and its driver from an angle they couldn’t see.

It would have been a terrible accident—and a deliberate one, Leonard now realized.

Finnegan would claim he had told Kirk about the visitors and the rest was anyone’s guess. It smelled of a setup to Leonard.

The thigh muscle under his hand twitched, drawing Leonard out of his thoughts. He felt his own muscles twitch too as he drew in a breath. The air was charged, had the smell of ozone. Spock’s eyes were closed, his mouth parted slightly from the intensity of his concentration. The spell had to be nearly ready.

Leonard told the body under his hand to be calm. To the body’s owner, he spoke out loud. “You might feel easier if you close your eyes.”

The guy blinked at him a few times before focusing resolutely on the slow, almost mesmerizing lift of Spock’s hands like he didn’t want to miss this magic show for the world. Leonard had a feeling later on he was going to regret ever crossing paths with this person.

Leonard felt the moment the spell snapped into place. The boxes shot outward, away from them, like a spray of bullets. The impact of some of the boxes against whatever was blocking their path, another skid or a wall, was like gunfire to Leonard’s ears. He wasn’t aware he had been holding his breath until he released it after the spell had died.

Spock dropped his arms, and his shoulders sagged.

Leonard couldn’t imagine the amount of energy it cost to fling more than a ton in weight across a room.

Now that the leg was free, Leonard ordered the injured man again to remain as still as possible and shifted his crouch so he could reach the ankle. The leg was straight, facing forward; the foot was bent sideways.

Healing the bones in the wrong position would leave this man a permanent cripple. They had to be reset beforehand.

This was where the line was drawn between science and magic. He knew he didn’t have the medical training for this. What he had was an innate sense of the body and how it needed to be to work properly. Was that as good as knowledge?

Doctors like Clay Treadway said not. They said healing mages were essentially charlatans with luck on their side.

Other doctors argued that the healing arts had been practiced by humanity long before medical licenses came along. In many cultures it had been believed, or was believed, that faith had more power than science. Perhaps that wasn’t so strange a concept now that they knew the supernatural existed.

Sweat gathered along Leonard’s forehead. He felt eyes on him and met them, deciding that the choice should be made by the patient.

“I can heal this,” he said, “or you can go to a hospital.”

“Yes for the first option, no for the second,” Spock added, which did not make much sense to Leonard but he didn’t see a need to argue about it.

The man just looked between them for a long second. Finally he nodded his agreement.

Leonard moved to kneel on either side of the foot. “I have to reset the ankle first. It’ll hurt.”

His patient lifted both eyebrows as if to say don’t you think it hurts already?

“What about the boot?” Spock wanted to know, shifting forward slightly.

“Sit your scrawny ass down, Spock,” Leonard snapped in the agent’s direction. “You’re listing.”

Spock pressed his mouth into a flat line.

“And the boot and sock can stay,” added Leonard. “As long as I can touch the skin in close proximity to the injury, I can heal it.” He doubted with the massive swelling of the foot that they could get the boot off anyway.

But first things first. He inched his fingers under the hem of the jeans and touched the skin there. It helped to close his eyes and form a picture of the way the joint should be aligned in the socket. He let his fingers walk downward to the top of the sock and then onto the boot, hearing faintly a gasp.

“He’s going to move,” Leonard murmured. “Pin him.” He didn’t open his eyes to see if the order was being followed.

He snapped the foot back into place with a sudden, sickening jerk. The patient screamed; the scream was quickly muffled by something. Leonard blocked it all out and shoved both hands back under the jeans of the leg which was now trying to move enough to kick him and poured his energy into the healing. He sent tendrils of magic to stabilize the tendons; he called tiny chips of broken bone back to their places; he said to the blood flow but don’t spread, rush but don’t drown.

Pain sang under him, through him, in him until the healing was done. It settled behind his eyes and at the back of his head after he finally disconnected from the skin and the magic. Sitting up made him dizzy, his mouth dry.

“He passed out,” Spock said, voice hoarse.

Leonard nodded, then sat back on his ass to stare at Spock. “You look like shit,” he remarked eventually.

Spock was ghost-pale, his hair and eyes seemingly darker by contrast. And he looked weirdly frail to Leonard in that long trench coat.

“You look no better,” came the reply.

Leonard turned his gaze to the slack face of the man who had saved his life.

“I had intended for this meeting to be less… adventurous,” Spock said, following a moment of silence.

“Screw the meeting, Spock. The last thing I want to do right now is pander to some kid. Somebody nearly killed us!”

Spock made a quiet sound, like the faintest of sighs.

Leonard pinched the bridge of his nose and started to dredge up an apology for his short temper. He didn’t have a chance to apologize, though, because Spock spoke instead, sounding as if there was an irony in his life he was still trying to puzzle out:

“Mr. McCoy, allow me to introduce you to James T. Kirk.”

Leonard stared, bemused.

Spock stared back.

Then he added, “I would complete the introductions but I fear it would be moot, given that Mr. Kirk is currently unconscious.”

Leonard’s gaze dropped to the person laid out between them, everything clicking into place.

He said the most succinct thing he could think of since he had no extra energy to spare: “Fuck.”

Spock did sigh this time. “Indeed.”

Next Part

Related Posts:

• The White Horse (18/18) – from May 12, 2014
• The White Horse (17/18) – from May 10, 2014
• The White Horse (16/18) – from May 10, 2014
• The White Horse (15/16) – from April 4, 2014
• The White Horse (14/16) – from March 7, 2014

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