Death of an Adept

"You're right," she whispered. "All of you are right. I'll go upstairs and lie down for a few hours. Do have Julia start that site research, but carry on with the sweeps we've been making for the past two days. You might want to switch to pendulum dowsing, now that we've got the locket. And call Noel. Have him get back here with Peregrine. If we did make a contact, we wouldn't be able to make a timely response, physically scattered as we are right now."

"We'll do all of that," Christopher reassured her. "But you will get some sleep in the meantime?''

"I promise I'll try," she replied.

Philippa was as good as her word, and came back downstairs for tea when Ximena and Harry finally returned at mid-afternoon. McLeod and Peregrine had arrived a short time before, and took Harry off to the parlor to bring him up to date on police efforts.

"We've installed Mom at Harry's town house," Ximena told them, shaking her head as she gratefully accepted a mug of tea from Victoria. "His housekeeper will look after her. She took the news well enough, under the circumstances, but I thought her jet lag would never kick in. That's why we're so late."

"The poor thing," Julian murmured. "Hopefully, she'll sleep through the night."

Ximena managed a resigned shrug. "I expect she will. She wasn't happy that I wouldn't bring her back here to the house, though. She'd thought she'd be staying here, after all. But I tried to explain how that really wouldn't be a good idea, without telling her why it really wouldn't be a good idea. I've given her to understand that the house is being used as a staging area for the police search - which I suppose it is, in a way. Anyway, she'll never know the difference. She does know that cops over here don't operate like the ones back home."

"Some of them do," Philippa said with a faint smile. The look she exchanged with McLeod made it quite clear she was not referring to conventional police agencies.

"Oh," Ximena said. "Well, anyway, she'd never understand about all of this." She gestured toward the items temporarily set aside on the map on the table. "I wish I understood." She sighed. "I'm almost afraid to ask whether you made any progress while we were gone." She gnawed at her lower lip, fighting back tears. "Philippa, tell me he's still alive…."

"I can tell you that, my darling," Philippa whispered. "I only wish I could tell you more."

"Can he hear us?" a voice asked, just edging at Adam's consciousness.

"Maybe a little," another voice replied. "Give me five minutes, to be sure he's stable." "Very well. I'll be back."

The exchange came to Adam through a faint easing of the oblivion forced upon him. A hand turned his face slightly to one side and a bright light shone momentarily in first one eye and then the other. As the light withdrew, random tiny sounds began to anchor him to hazy awareness.

That awareness was hardly reassuring. He had managed to surface this far before. Following his second descent into oblivion, his drugged and unresisting body had been stripped naked and hooked up to a panoply of medical devices designed to monitor his vital signs and ensure that he never achieved more than a twilight level of consciousness. His occasional drifting forays back across the threshold of the abyss were accompanied by the soft, measured beep of an ECG somewhere behind his head, heard as if muffled through layers of cotton wool.

More rarely, when he managed to surface enough to open his eyes, he could see an IV bag hung close by the left side of the bed, its near end disappearing under strips of adhesive taped across the top of his wrist. Close pressure around a forefinger told of a pulse oximeter clamped there to monitor blood oxygen.

The IV itself was unalarming - a drip of dextrose and saline to sustain him. More insidious was the syringe pump attached to the IV, delivering a continuous infusion of the drugs keeping him sedated and helpless.

From his inability to move, Adam vaguely supposed that one of the drugs being given him must be a deep muscle relaxant of some kind - perhaps even one of the curariform substances that paralyzed voluntary movement and, in higher doses, interfered with breathing - for at some point, Mallory had intubated him. Since Adam was not now hooked up to a ventilator, he supposed that it must have been done as a precautionary measure until Mallory got the dosage fine-tuned - which was only what one might expect of a competent anaesthetist---

"Stay with me, Sinclair." Mallory's voice stopped him drifting, reinforced by the sensory stimulus of a sharp pinch to his right earlobe. "Mr. Raeburn is going to pay you a visit in a few minutes. It wouldn't be polite to go to sleep on him."