Page 176 of Forever Dead

The blow struck the left side of her head before she reached the pistol.

Her shoulder hit the doorframe. The cane slipped from her hand, and she fell across the laboratory threshold.

Selena tried to push herself up, but her left wrist gave beneath her. Metal rattled somewhere nearby. Foss’s shoes moved into view.

Then everything disappeared.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Pain returned before the room did.

It pulsed along the left side of Selena’s head, each beat pushing nausea through her stomach. Her cheek rested against cold flooring, and something metallic pressed beneath one palm. For several seconds she could not remember where she was.

Then the laboratory came back in pieces. Foss. The photograph. The flank. Movement behind her.

Selena opened her eyes. The room tilted sharply and settled again. Her cane lay near the doorway, beyond easy reach, and one leg was folded awkwardly beneath her, the knee brace twisted enough to bite into the side of her thigh.

Gerald Foss stood over her.

The cardigan was gone. He had rolled his shirt sleeves above the elbows. Without the mild expression he had worn during both consultations, he seemed less like a retired doctor and more like a stranger who happened to occupy the same body.

“You’re awake,” he said.

His voice had changed. Not deeper or louder, simply stripped of warmth.

Selena kept her head against the floor. “Disappointed?”

“Actually, yes.”

Foss moved around the worktable and stopped beside her cane. “I had heard impressive things about you. Agent Selena Raven. Difficult cases. Difficult people. A rather inconvenient habit of seeing things other investigators miss.”

Selena flexed the fingers of her right hand. They worked. Her left arm responded, too, although pain ran through the wrist. She tried the injured leg without moving it visibly. The knee answered with a hot stab.

Her pistol was gone.

Selena spotted it on the far side of the worktable, well beyond her reach.

“You researched me,” Selena said.

“Not extensively.”

“That hurts.”

A faint smile touched his mouth. “You’re making jokes.”

“I’m lying on your floor with a concussion. I’m working with what I have.”

“You may have a concussion.”

“Thanks, Doctor.”

He stepped closer, and Selena resisted the urge to shrink away.

“Do you understand what disappoints me most?” Foss asked.

“Your bedside manner?”

“The fact that I gave you the answer.”