"We get him brought in. The docs patched him up and got fresh blood into him. He passed out about an hour later. But he made it."

Lamar was silent for a long moment.

"That couldn't have happened," he said then. "I mean, I've seen people pull through some bad stuff. But not like that. He should have been dead. Everything I know tells me so. But he kept going."

"Sometimes miracles happen," I said quietly.

He shuddered. "This wasn't a miracle. There wasn't any angel choir singing. My skin tried to crawl away and hide." He shook his head. "I don't want to think about it."

"What about your partner?" I asked.

"He drank himself under the table twenty minutes after our shift ended. Hell, only reason I wasn't with him was that I was teaching a CPR class this morning." He looked at me. "That help?"

"It might," I said. "Thank you."

"Sure."

"What are you going to do now?" I asked.

"Gonna go find my own table." Lamar stood up and said, "Good luck, man."

"Thanks."

The big man left, and while I got my prescriptions and filled out the last forms, I thought about what he'd had to say. I got the prescriptions filled at the hospital pharmacy, called a cab, and told him to take me to Mike's to pick up the Blue Beetle.

I sat in the backseat with my eyes closed and thought about what I'd learned. Kumori had saved the gunshot victim's life. If everything Lamar had said was accurate, it meant that she had gone out of her way to do it. And whatever she'd done, it had been an extremely difficult working to leave a mystic impression as intense as it did. That might explain why Kumori had done very little during the altercation with Cowl. I had expected her to be nearly as strong as her partner, but when she tried to take the book from me, her power hadn't been stronger than my own muscles and limbs.

But the Kemmler Alumni Association was in town with some vicious competition in mind. Why would Kumori have expended her strength for a stranger, rather than saving it for battling rival necromancers? Could the shooting victim have been important to her plans in some way?

It didn't track. The victim was just one more thug for the outfit, and he certainly wasn't going to be doing anything useful from his bed in intensive care.

I had to consider the possibility that she'd been trying to do the right thing: using her power to help someone in dire need.