Divine Misdemeanors (Merry Gentry #8)(60)

“Bittersweet,” he said, “please, honey, can you hear me?” I wasn’t the only one worried about her.
“Bittersweet,” I said, “do you want to be with Steve?”
Her tiny face screwed up with concentration and then finally she nodded.
“Good,” I said. “I’m here to help you be with Steve the way you want to be with him.”
Her face was emptying out or filling up. The rage was leaking away, but more personality was coming into her eyes, her face. The knife fell from her hands to clang on the floor and spatter blood so that some droplets hit my skirt. I did my best not to flinch. It wasn’t the blood; it was the thought of it being Julian’s.
Bittersweet looked at her hands and the fallen knife and wailed. That was the only word for it. It was one of the worst sounds I’d ever heard come from someone. It held despair and torment and utter hopelessness. If the Christian Hell exists, then people should make that sound there.
“Steve, Steve, what did I do now? What did you let me do? I told you not to let me hurt him.”
“Bittersweet, is that you?”
“For now,” she said, and she looked at me. There was weariness in her face. “You can’t make me big, can you?”
“I might be able to, but the Goddess would have to bless us.”
“There is no blessing here,” she said. “The Goddess doesn’t talk to me anymore.” She landed on the floor and looked up at me. She was nude, but there was so much blood I hadn’t been able to tell until she got close. What had she done to Julian? Were Doyle and the others inside the house? Were they rescuing Julian?
She held her hand out to me. I knelt down. Rhys said, “Merry, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Put the gun down,” Barinthus said.
The men danced their three-way gun dance, but for me the world had narrowed down to the small blood-drenched figure on the carpet. I offered her my hand and she wrapped a small hand around one finger. She tried to call her glamour and roll me as she could some humans, but she truly didn’t have enough power. It was as if she’d gotten the appearance of her demi-fey father, but her magic was brownie. It was so unfair.“You can’t save us,” she said.
“Bittersweet, she’ll make you big. We can be together.”
“I know there’s something terribly wrong with me,” she said, and she was calm as she said it.
“Yes,” I said. “I think you’d get an insanity plea pretty easily from any jury.”
She smiled, patting my finger, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “I can see into that other part of my mind now. It wants to do such terrible things. I’m not sure what I’ve done and what I just dreamed of doing.” She patted me again. “That other in me wants you to make her big, but once you do she’s going to cut the babies out of you and dance in your blood. I can’t stop her, do you understand?”
I stared at her, trying to swallow past my pulse. “I think so.”
“Good. Steve doesn’t understand. Doesn’t want to believe.”
“Believe what?” I asked.
“That it’s too late.” She smiled that sad, weary smile and then it was a totally different smile. She bit my finger and I reacted by jerking my hand, sending her flying skyward with my blood on her mouth. She went for the knife on the floor and a lot of things happened at once.
Steve yelled something and the gun went off. It was thunderous in the enclosed room and I was partially deaf as I watched her pick up the blade and come straight at me with that evil smile on her face. I didn’t try to draw the gun and shoot a target so small and so fast. I called my hands of power, my hand of flesh and my hand of blood. She slashed at me and I gave her my left arm to cut while I touched her legs with my other hand, the hand of flesh. A knife came from above and spitted her through the back, pinning her to the floor in front of my knees.
I turned toward Rhys and Barinthus and found Barinthus on the ground bleeding. Rhys had his gun out and pointed. The other man was on his back on the floor.
Doyle leapt from the balcony where he’d thrown the knife from, and landed in a crouch on the balls of his feet and his hands. He came to me, taking off his shirt to wrap my bleeding arm. It didn’t hurt yet, which meant it was probably going to be deep.
Bittersweet’s body was dead before my magic began to roll her flesh inside out. She ended as a ball of unrecognizable flesh curled around the bisecting blade. The full hand of flesh could melt a body into a mass and the worst thing was that it didn’t kill the immortal. You could stop them, but for death you needed a blade. I was glad she’d died first.
“I’ll live. See to Barinthus,” I said.
Doyle hesitated, then did what I asked. Rhys was checking for a pulse on Patterson. He made sure the gun was kicked away from his hand, but when he turned and saw me looking, he shook his head. Patterson was dead. 
I heard sirens. The neighbors had called because of the gunshots. Of all the times for someone in L.A. to call the cops.
Doyle helped Barinthus sit up. The big man winced and said, “I’d forgotten how much it hurts to get shot.”
“It’s not fatal,” Doyle said.
“It still hurts.”
“I thought you gave me the lecture about how the sea can’t be hurt,” I said.
He smiled at me. “If I hadn’t said it, would you have let me come?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know.”
He nodded. “It’s time I pulled my weight,” he said.
Cathbodua flew from the balcony, her raven-feather cloak looking more like wings than ever before. She knelt by me. “How bad is it?”
“Not sure,” I said. “Is Julian … ?”
“He’ll live and he’ll heal, but he is hurt. Usna is with him now.” She held pressure on the makeshift bandage. Doyle was applying pressure on Barinthus’s side, and Rhys had put his gun out of sight and had his detective’s license out in plain sight when the police hit the door.
They didn’t shoot us, and they didn’t arrest us. It helped that we had so many wounded and that I was Princess Meredith Nic Essus. Every once in a while it doesn’t suck to be the celebrity.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
I HAD TO HAVE STITCHES IN MY ARM, BUT THEY WERE THE KIND THAT dissolved into the wound because the other kind of stitches would be grown over by the body before the doctor could get them out. I wasn’t sure I healed that fast but I was glad the doctor knew enough about the fey to take the precaution.
Lucy was as mad as I’d ever seen her. “You could have been killed.”
“He worked for the police, Lucy. I was afraid if we called you guys in it would get back to him.”
“None of our people would have talked to that serial-killing son of a bitch.”
“I couldn’t risk Julian, especially since it was my fault that they took him.”
“How was it your fault?” she asked.
“I put myself out as bait and we protected ourselves and our demi-fey, our fey, but we didn’t think to guard Julian and the others.”
“Why did they take him?” she asked.
“He comes over and gets a little skin-hunger fix now and then.”
“Is that code for sex?”
“No, it’s exactly what it sounds like. He comes over to get cuddled and we send him back home with his virtue intact. He slept over the other night for the first time and apparently the bad guys saw him leave in the morning. They assumed he was another lover.”
“Don’t you have enough already?”
I nodded. “Some days too many.”
“They didn’t find out that Julian is gay?”
“Doyle said that when someone is heterosexual they think that first.”
She nodded as if that made sense to her. “You know that Lieutenant Peterson is screaming for us to arrest someone.”
“On what charges? Forensics can look at the blood patterns, but she attacked me. If Doyle hadn’t used his knife when he did it would be a lot worse than this.” I motioned at the bandaged arm.
“And I’ve seen Barinthus down the hallway. The doctors say that he’ll live, but that if he’d been human he wouldn’t have.”
“It’s hard to kill an ex-god,” I said.
She patted my shoulder. “You know we do know our job, Merry. We could have backed you on this.”
“Your boss’s boss doesn’t even like me at a crime scene for fear I’m going to get hurt by some overzealous reporter. Do you really think he’d have agreed to me walking in there to save Julian?”She looked around the room, then leaned in and spoke quietly. “I’ll deny this if asked in public, but no. They’d have never let you go in.”
“I couldn’t let my friend die because we screwed up and didn’t put a guard on all my friends.” That made me think. “How is Julian doing?”
“He’s still in surgery. It looks like he’s going to pull through but he was cut up some. You don’t want to see the picture the little psycho bitch was using this time. It was a medical text on anatomy.” Lucy shuddered. “She hadn’t gotten too far when you got to him, but it would have been the worst of the lot, and they weren’t going to kill him first.”
“She wasn’t pretending that she was killing to gain power or magic. She’d admitted to herself that she liked the pain and the killing.”