Noticing exactly how closely the man had been watching her beneath his half-lidded eyes, Anora took another slight step back in experimentation. His gaze seemed to follow her a millisecond before she actually moved. 
	Anora stared at him curiously when he looked away. In the short few seconds, she reminded herself that perhaps not all people with powers were good. 
	She scowled when he looked back to her and addressed her as ‘woman.’ “Nora,” she reminded him. “And what ‘bigger prob—’” 
	Her question cut off when he snapped his fingers a gun she recognized from the ambulance appeared in his hand.
	She gasped through her nose, her heart beating faster in her chest. In her panic that he planned on using it on her, she pulled her thumbs from her pockets and raised her hands defensively. The electric purple mist sparked to life at her fists, ready to form a barrier or strike out if Darsby so much as twitched to point the revolver at her.
	Instead, his gaze shifted to the door. Her head twitched slightly in the direction he looked, but she did not take her eyes from him. He stepped toward her, and the swirling mist curled down her arms. But whatever he was after, it was not her. He paid her no mind, heading instead to the door.
	The relief that she was not his target was short lived. After all, he was after [i]something.[/i]
	“Nuh uh! You're not going anywhere!” She reached to grab his arm, to stop him from leaving the room with what she assumed was a loaded gun. But he stumbled and wriggled away from her grasp. She staggered and her hand closed on empty air.
	“Hey!” she called after him, righting herself as he left the room.
	For a man with a limp, he moved rather swiftly. She exhaled in a half snort, half growl. Whoever—or [i]what[/i]ever, she supposed—he was, she could not let him wander about unchecked. Who knew what kind of damage he could do?
	Anora let her powers extinguish at her hands, then hurried after him. She turned down the hall to follow it back toward the waiting room. 
	“Hey!” she shouted again, gaining the attention of a few workers mulling behind a nurse’s station.
	“I [i]said,[/i] you’re not going anywhere!” She reached to grab him again, but, once more, his body moved awkwardly and out of her reach.
	Ignoring the others around her, each blind to the appearance of her powers, she extended a palm toward him. The familiar mist of her powers grew around her hand, directed by her thoughts. A sparking coil of gold and violet dripped from her palm and slithered across the floor, shooting toward Darsby to wrap around his legs and force him to a stop. If not for the sake of whoever he intended to use the gun on, then for his own before he did more damage to his still wounded body.
	She shouted and turned when a male nurse dressed in blue scrubs placed a hand on her shoulder. Her coil burst into a series of harmless sparks millimeters before it reached its target, then disappeared.
	“Is everything okay, ma’am?” the nurse asked, his voice higher-pitched than she would have expected from someone of his girth.
	She gave him a look that asked, ‘Are you [i]serious?[/i]’ She looked after Darsby once more.
	Her brows furrowed as she realized the only person the other nurses were looking at, was her. She took a deep breath as that fully sunk it. She was the only one who could see the man and the trail of smoke he left in his wake. 
	Anora looked back into the hospital room, almost expecting to see a patient still in bed and find that she was hallucinating. But the bed was empty, a thin blanket crumpled at its foot.
	She snorted and a smile quirked the corner of her lips as she looked back down the hall. Somehow, he was shielding himself from the hospital staff.
	“Yep, everything’s fine,” she offered the nurse rather unconvincingly. “My mistake.”
	Well ahead of her by now, Darsby paused just long enough to gesture for her to follow him.
	“Gotta go.” Anora adjusted her backpack and hurried after Darsby. She glanced up, taking in the intricate patterns of smoke that lapped at the ceiling, refusing to obey the laws of physics and dissipate. 
	The door had already closed behind Darsby by the time she caught up with him. Once she had opened it and stepped through, she looked around frantically for him. She spotted him not far from the door. She reached behind her to one of the side pockets in her backpack and pulled out her phone as she hurried over to him. Pretending to call someone on the device as a cover for talking to no one, she stood in front of him.
	“Look. You’re still hurt!” she scolded him, holding the phone to her ear. “You need to—” 
	Darsby cut her off, making her scowl. The expression deepened when he added quotations to the word she had used.
	“I was born here, thank you very much,” she growled to his second statement. The tone he used only irked her that much more.
	Remembering the gun, she glanced to it nervously. There was no telling what could trigger him to use it. She had no idea what kind of mental state he was in. She looked back to his face as he continued speaking.
	“Blue things?” she asked dubiously. “What ‘blue things?’”
	Instead of answering, he continued with his count. Her lips pursed with an irritated snort. Though she wondered who ‘they’ were, she did not bother to waste her breath with the question.
	Her eyes narrowed at his last statement. “There’s always the front door,” she offered flatly as Darsby rubbed his temples. “But you’re still hurt. And barely dressed.” Her eyebrows rose at the last.	
	The unusual statement gained a curious glance from the nearest of the two teenagers in the waiting room. A girl with short curly hair, she stared at Anora for a moment. The boy she was with, who looked like he could be her brother, regained her attention, engaging her in another round of distraught discussion.
	Anora offered the teenagers little more than a quick glance to make sure they would not be a problem. She gave an irritated huff when Darsby defiantly went to the doors she had used to enter through. She followed slowly, trying to make the action look natural as she told the emptiness on the other end of her phone that she could wait.
	As he neared, she glanced from him to the doors. Her brows furrowed, noticing their unusual stillness. She glanced around, suddenly aware of exactly how quiet it had become. Though the chatter of the teens still periodically filled the air, noises from the outside—sounds she had paid little mind to until they were gone—had fallen dormant.
	A soft [i]thud[/i] made her attention snap back to Darsby when he thunked his head on the door. 
	[i]That… should have opened. At least a little.[/i] She shifted her weight uneasily, but she did not have time to dwell on the thought. 
	She shouted and spun around to face the rest of the hospital as a series of slams and bangs filled the halls. The woman at the reception desk jumped to her feet, and other hospital staff started rushing about frantically, trying to find the source of the uproar. The teenagers grew more frantic and stepped closer to the elderly couple. The elderly woman's eyes widened, and the man placed a hand on hers reassuringly despite his own surprise. 
	Anora inhaled when, though faint, a man began screaming from deeper in the hospital.
	“Whatever you’re doing—” she hissed at Darsby, pausing when the lights flickered once, then went out. “Stop it!”
	The teenage girl shouted in surprise in the short moment of darkness before the backup generators kicked on. The eerie red glow of the emergency lights filled the halls. Despite having some form of light again, tension hung amidst the unnerved quiet that had settled in the waiting room.
	She glanced over when two police officers appeared and addressed the few people there.
	“Yeah, fine,” she answered the officer when the woman addressed her in her Southern drawl. “Thanks.” 
	Anora watched, relieved, when the officer went to check on the others. Making sure no one was paying her any attention, she looked back to Darsby.
	“What do you think you’re [i]doing?[/i]” Confusion, agitation, and unease mingled in her eyes. She reached for his shoulder to force him from the door and to look at her. “And [i]how[i] are you doing it?” she could not help but add.
	She cast another quick glance over her shoulder to make sure she was not being watched. The dimness of the lights made shadows cling to corners and people, and bathed everything in an unnerving shade of crimson.