Gunmetal Magic(69)

“Maybe,” I told him. “I haven’t tried.”

Barabas picked me up, like I weighed nothing. “Will there be anything else, Detectives?”

“She isn’t Pack, so don’t even think of claiming this is a Pack scene,” Tsoi growled.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Barabas strode out of the door and into the sunshine.

He walked down the street. “I parked on the side so they couldn’t block me in. It’s a fun tactic they use—they’ll park behind you and try to grill you while they take their sweet time moving their vehicle. Are you okay?”

I nodded. I was so happy to be out of there. “Barabas, if you weren’t batting for the other team, I’d marry you.”

He grinned. “If I weren’t batting for the other team, I would accept your proposal. You had me at ‘No comment.’ If all my clients were this smart, my life would be much easier. Much, much easier.”

He paused by a Pack Jeep, opened the passenger door, and carefully loaded me inside.

“Where are we going?”

“To your office. It’s closer than your apartment and better fortified. Doolittle is already there and he’s awaiting your arrival with all sorts of needles and torture devices.”

“Great,” I murmured.

“He’s very excited. It will be fun,” Barabas promised and started the engine.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, my stomach pirouetted inside me. “You won’t tell anyone about carrying me, will you?”

“It’ll be our special secret,” he said.

“Thanks.”





CHAPTER 10




Doolittle was a very nice man. He looked to be in his early fifties, although he was probably older—shapeshifters lived longer and looked younger than most regular people. His skin was dark, almost blue-black; silvery gray salted his short dark hair; he spoke in a soft voice with a soothing Southern accent; and the glasses he insisted on wearing combined with a slightly absent-minded look in his eyes made him resemble a kindly college professor, someone who specialized in history or anthropology and spent his life in an office full of books. You half expected him to sit you down to have a heart-to-heart about some long-forgotten civilization and reassure you that really a B on your paper wasn’t so bad.

However, the moment any kind of injury, no matter how trivial, manifested itself, Doolittle turned into a stubborn, disagreeable tyrant, who treated you like you were six years old. He served as the Pack’s medmage. He set broken bones, he removed silver and other foreign objects, he sewed up wounds, and generally spent his every waking minute making sure that the shapeshifters of the Pack remained breathing. And he went about it with the dogged persistence that made his animal counterpart so famous. If there were any laws of nature, one of them surely said that arguing with a honeybadger was futile.

The second I stepped across the threshold, Doolittle placed me into a chair. He drew my blood and examined the bite site on my foot and the bigger one on my shoulder, which had acquired a plum-purple swelling. Barabas recounted the scene, while Julie and Ascanio hovered in the background, quiet like two mice.

“Pit vipers?” Doolittle asked, checking my eyes.

“Appears so. At least the one I caught was. Not a rattlesnake, though.” Barabas shrugged. “Three-inch fangs.”

“Nauseous?” Doolittle asked me.

“Yes.” I was still sweating, too. The sweat drenched my face and my back, clammy and cold, and my heart was beating too fast. The bite on my arm hadn’t sealed itself either. That was a bad sign. Lyc-V closed most wounds in minutes.

Someone pounded on the office door. Barabas moved to the door, slid aside the metal shutter covering the narrow spy window, and looked through it.

“It’s your lover man.”

“Barabas, open the damn door,” Raphael snarled.

Barabas slid the shutter closed. “Do you want me to let him in?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

Barabas slid the shutter open. “She’s thinking about it.”

“Andrea,” Raphael called. “Let me in.”

“The last time I saw you two together, you were so happy,” Barabas said. “Just out of curiosity, Raphael, how the hell did you manage to fuck that up?”

Raphael’s voice gained that dangerous, I’m-about-to-go-nuts quality. “Remind me, how are things with you and Ethan?”

“None of your business,” Barabas said.

“Let me in and I won’t rip your head off.”

“You won’t rip my head off anyway,” Barabas said. “We’re friends.”

“Let him in,” I said. If we didn’t let him in, he wouldn’t go away. He would just stand by the door and him and Barabas would yell obscenities at each other. My head hurt enough as it was.