Go man! GO!

John actually gasped when he saw the new message. His eyes widened and hovered over the text while Robyn stared at him from across the alleyway between the buildings. She must have realized what had happened because, when she saw his reaction, she straightened up, pointed her hand at Grace, and yelled at him.

"Get her to a hospital, now!" she called out from the other building, and John rushed back to Grace's side. Before he could pick her back up, Robyn called out to him again, urging him to wait for a moment, and he turned to look at her. His lips parted as if to ask her what could possibly be so important that she needed to stop him, to ask her what she was going to do, before she simply interrupted him. "I will meet you there! I have to secure the barrier and look for clues! We need to know where they went!" With a small huff, she tossed him her phone. "Press and hold three on that when you get to the hospital. Ask for Eddie, and then let them know that Robyn needs backup! Got it?"

John nodded at her and quickly scooped Grace back up again.

"When you get out, go northeast! There is a hospital across the river, in the v-" This time John interrupted her. He knew Springfield. He didn't need her to give him a rundown of the city districts or what was in them.

"In the village, I know!" he snapped and dropped out of the barrier.

The park was a lot more barren when John finally reappeared in it. Most of the crowd had gone to gather around the edges of the marathon's path or to participate in the marathon itself. The streets were bustling, but the grassland and the playgrounds in the park were all sparsely populated. The other people who might have been in the barrier, Moira and Cassandra and their enemies, were nowhere to be found. As far as John could see, there were no suspicious figures or shapes moving away from the park and the rest of the marathon. The others were just gone.

On the edge of his vision, near the starting line of the event's race, John spied out a pair of bright, flashing, silent vehicles. Men and women in blue and black uniforms stood off to the side chatting and drinking cups of coffee while they watched over the marathon with 'observant' eyes.

John immediately charged over to the police cruisers and the ambulances. He didn't bother thinking about what he must have looked like, covered in blood and thick, shoddy pieces of armor. He just ran to them and called out for help. To their credit, they responded fairly quickly. The officers also ran over to meet him and held him at gunpoint when they saw all of the red covering his body, until the paramedics got close enough to move Grace from his arms to a stretcher. The police and the paramedics demanded to know what had happened, while John simply uttered that she had been shot. He told them he was her friend, but when they asked who had shot her... John thankfully remained silent. He did what he could to help apply pressure and **** his way into ambulance with the emergency responders.

They didn't try very hard to stop him from following along. When they saw that he wasn't armed and he insisted to them that it wasn't him, it proved to be enough for one of the paramedics to request that he come with... just in case he was wounded too. The police were worried about him and Grace, but she took the higher priority, and the fact that he was still trying to help her must have reassured them in some way. One of the cops did join John in the ambulance though, to try and keep an eye on him, to try and take samples of the blood on his hands, and the vehicle became crowded. When the paramedics saw how many gunshots Grace had, he demanded for someone to help. He strapped her into the gurney they had available and, when they took off fast enough to make John jerk in his seat, the speedy rush and abrupt turning did nothing to stop him from listening to the medic. When he said to do something, John tried to do it, even if it meant just trying to hold on and keep applying pressure.

It was hard though. When the paramedic finally injected Grace with something and he saw her start breathing a little easier, John almost stopped listening. He almost let himself relax and admit that she was going to be okay. Some color returned to her apparently pallid face; he hadn't even noticed that her skin had become almost ghostly white while he had been carrying her, and then the responder snapped at him suddenly. He was struggling to put another injection into her other arm, and he couldn't have John spacing out.

When they talked about a longer commute to a proper trauma center, John had to focus enough to try and turn them away from the idea. Time was too precious here, and after a couple seconds, the driver turned towards the nearest hospital. It was smaller, but it was available. They wrapped her legs in something that seemed to push life back up into her chest, and by the time that the paramedic could finish applying dressings to her wounds, they arrived.

Doctors came out to greet them, and before John could even stop them, they yanked him away from the spot that he had been applying pressure to. The police officers forcefully dragged him aside while John was still focused on helping her. Whatever questions they had, John didn't hear them. He was so focused on Grace and demanding to know that she was going to be okay that he only barely noticed the other woman approaching the doctors while they wheeled her inside. An older, bronze-skinned lady with long black hair stumbled into his line of sight and stared at Grace for just a moment, her lips opening and closing repeatedly as she tried to speak.

"G-Grace?" The older woman followed after John's coworker, shaking and stumbling as if she was about to fall.

"I need to get in there," John growled after Grace finally disappeared from his view. One cop put a hand on his chest and urged him to be patient and answer his questions, but...

...John had never maintained the best patience normally. He socked the cop in the face and tried to charge in regardless before someone finally tackled him to the ground and put him in a pair of handcuffs.

Hours passed before John was let out of the handcuffs again. They didn't take him out of the hospital; he fought back when they tried to do that and even managed to break someone's nose. When he was finally calm enough to converse with them coherently, after he had at least heard she was in surgery and the doctors were working to help her, he realized a couple of things. One, his interface was littered with new pop-ups that he shoved to the side for the time being, two, the older, tanned woman was actually Grace's mother, and three, Grace's mom was there because she had been staying by her son's side while he was in the hospital. The cops took John up to the floor that Grace's younger brother was staying on while they spoke with the mom, and John got to sit and watch them while they spoke.

Grace's mom, Giva was her name, told the cops a number of things. Apparently, Grace's brother was no more than a child. He was stuck, comatose, in bed while he tried to heal from what her abusive boyfriend, Chad, had done to him in retaliation. It made John sick, and with every beep he could hear coming from the monitors in the room, he could feel his stomach turning more and more.

BEEP BEEP BEEP!

Thoughts of guilt and blame over what had happened to the boy flicked in and out of his mind until one of the cops came over to John to try and talk to him again, and he demanded a phone call. It was a short conversation, since John refused to give up until he got it, and then once he had it, he called the number that Robyn had given to him.

He was given just enough privacy to whisper into the phone, and when it clicked like someone had answered, no one spoke.

"H-hello?" John didn't even realize how hoarse and dry his throat felt until after he spoke. Nobody spoke back. "I... I was told to ask for Eddie." Again, no answer, but he did hear some shuffling on the other end of the conversation. "Robyn needs backup at the park." The phone clicked again, and the line went silent.

"Is your lawyer on his way?" the cop asked, and John turned... and then nodded at him. He wasn't so apprehensive about answering his questions after that. John told him his name, gave him his phone number, his identification, and address. He told him what Grace's name was, where they worked, and then, when he asked what had happened, John only had one answer for him.

"She was shot." He barely had enough composure to remember not to spill his own secrets. He couldn't talk about his powers, though he was tempted to, just to get some help. To his credit, he lasted for almost an hour. They kept questioning and demanding answers from him, and he nearly did spill the beans... and then Robyn showed up again. She got involved in their conversation, explaining that she had been there too and who she was. The cops verified his story with Robyn's own, confirming that he was who he said he was and Grace was as well. To her credit, Robyn came up with an easy story saying that she had met him at the marathon, loud enough for John to hear her.

When the cops tried to ask her and John what had happened, she jumped to John's defense, insisting that 'he got a moment alone to speak with his legal counsel.' Somehow, she assured them that she was his new lawyer, and they let her pull him aside in a new room to talk.

"The good news is that you can't have told them too much because we're still alive," Robyn muttered as she closed the door to the room behind them. It only had one entrance and a cop posted up by it to stand guard, but they had a moment of privacy at last. A part of him tried futilely to reassure himself that he could escape into his own barrier if he had to... but the knowledge didn't help. He had to stay there. He had to know that Grace was going to be okay. "However, I do need to know exactly what you told them," she said, and John quickly repeated everything that he had told the cops to her.

"Okay..." she said with a small sigh of relief. "Good. We cannot tell them what happened. You didn't see the shooter, you didn't see what happened. There was no magic involved. We can't send them after Michel's allies."

"What?!" John cried out, and for the first time since he got to the hospital, he turned to face another person head on, looking away from where he had been waiting for Grace's surgeons to come back from. "That's ridiculous! We have t-"

"If we tell them, this whole hospital will be destroyed." she said and **** John to shut up. She put a hand over his mouth and held it there with her own strength while John glared at her and tried to turn his head away. "Call it Gaia, call it god, or whatever the hell else you need to, alright? It doesn't like it when magic is revealed to the rest of the world. If you come out with the existence of magic to the public society like this, she will smite you!" John stared at her for a moment, and then his expression fell. He opened his mouth to talk back to her, scold or ridicule her in some way, and then she outright slapped him. Right across the cheek.

-8 HP

"Keep your fucking mouth shut! If I die because you couldn't handle the responsibilities that came with your magic, then I'll rip your soul apart in the afterlife, got it?!" she said and watched as John's jaw hardened. His teeth ground together as he felt his anger rising in his chest again. He was half tempted to tell her to fuck off... but the next thing she said managed to calm him down somewhat. "We will deal with this on our own. When we get out of here, forget the cops, forget the government. You and I, and all the other people in the Flame, can hunt those bastards down ourselves... as we should." His muscles relaxed, and he stared at her for a moment, but she simply glared back. Eventually, he looked away when he could not bring himself to meet her gaze anymore.

Perhaps it should have been his right to go after them.

"Besides... it's not like they could actually do anything against a bunch of people with magic, right?" she said, and John froze. She had a point there. "Tell them that you didn't see what happened. Tell them that one moment you were standing next to her and then the next she was on the ground." After a couple of seconds, John nodded.

"Alright," he answered her, and she stood up to let the cops in. She informed them that they were willing to talk and then gave them her story. She explained everything that happened with a fair amount of easy details for John to pick up on while the rest of the ambient background noise filtered into the room.

BEEP BEEP BEEP!

"Is that right?" the cop turned to look at John as he collapsed back into a nearby seat. "Neither one of you saw the shooter?" his voice was rumbling deeply with skepticism. Again, the hospital noise drowned out his senses.

BEEP BEEP BEEP!

John could see Grace's mother standing off a few yards behind the cop. She was looking over to him expectantly while her son's heart monitor echoed in John's ears. It was so loud... so daunting with everything that had already happened over the past week. He inhaled, ready to repeat what Robyn had said... and then stopped.

"No," he answered, and Robyn's face went pale. He could feel the hair on his arms suddenly standing on ends as waves of goosebumps traveled up his body. A single, nearby light flickered and then popped when the energy in it randomly burned too brightly. One of the nurses screamed at the sound and the falling glass. Robyn slowly shook her head at him, trying to advise him not to do it. The air felt like it was charged, ready and waiting for his mistake. "I saw who shot her."

BEEP BEEP BEEP!

"His name is Chad Ricken... and you better fucking find him before I do."