A name floated up to the surface of my memory: Roman.
Reality slammed into me, sudden and hard. I pulled myself back from the brink. My mind registered the strained expression on Roman’s face and my claws puncturing his shoulders.
Oh God.
I rocked back, releasing him, slipped on something slick, and slumped against a ruined building. The street was filled with bodies. Blood pooled in the recesses of the uneven pavement, its scent like the cut of a razor on my tongue. A thing that used to be a woman lay only a few feet away. Half of her stomach was missing and her skull was a mess of crushed bone. I had done that.
“You okay?” I asked softly. My voice was hoarse.
“Yeah.” Roman slowly rolled up. “What the fuck was that?”
“Bouda rage. It happens sometimes when we’re at our limit. We get a few minutes of berserker rage.” It was the last-ditch defensive mechanism of a body out of options. “I was bitten by a viper earlier. The Pack medmage pumped me full of antivenom. It made me weak, so when I turned, my body reacted. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Roman brushed his robe and got up. “No worries. Black doesn’t show blood at all.”
“I’m sorry.” He had no idea how close I had come to killing him.
“No worries. Look.” He raised his arms, indicating the scene with the dismembered bodies, blood, and his black horse at the beginning of the bridge. “All our enemies are dead, we survived, the horse survived, the staff survived. I even get to say the best line from my favorite book. All is well.”
I pushed away from the building. Roman opened his mouth to say something and didn’t close it.
“What is it?”
“Breasts.”
“Oh for the love of God!”
Roman squeezed his eyes shut and turned away from me. “I have a cloak in my bag.”
“I’m comfortable with my body the way it is,” I growled.
He turned toward me a little and opened one eye, then turned and looked at me. Or rather at my chest.
“Don’t stare.”
“You said you were comfortable.”
Comfortable was one thing. Being on the receiving end of a very male stare was another.
“How about we find some gauze and bandage your shoulders,” I suggested.
“It really isn’t that bad.”
We walked toward the horse.
“What were you doing in front of me anyway?” I asked.
“You had that dark-haired bitch by the throat and kept beating her head against the wall for almost three minutes,” he said. “I became concerned…”
A red and gold silhouette plummeted from the sky. It dived at the horse, bit the Bone Staff, ripping it from the leather, and shot up to the clouds.
Holy shit.
Roman fell to his knees. He opened his mouth and let out a wordless scream of pure rage. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
“It will be okay,” I told him.
“I had it! It was in my hands!” He showed me his hands, as if expecting the staff to materialize in his fingers. “In my hands! Eight hundred years!”
“I know,” I told him. “I know.”
He slumped forward. “I had it and I lost it. I lost it!”
“Come on,” I told him. “Let’s get ourselves home before we both pass out.”
We climbed the stairs to my apartment. I had collapsed on the street, my body finally giving out, and we had ended up riding Roman’s horse after all. Roman moved like a zombie. Despondent didn’t even begin to describe him. If despair was liquid, he’d be dripping buckets of it with every step.
“I had it in my hands,” he told me mournfully, halfway up the stairs.
“I’m sure I have some honey in my pantry,” I told him. “And lemon juice. We can have a nice cup of hot tea.”
The landing smelled like fresh banana bread. Mrs. Haffey had been baking again. I slid the key into the lock and swung the door open.
A pair of familiar black boots sat in the shoe rack in my foyer, between my black pumps and my yellow work boots.
You’ve got to be kidding me. He didn’t.
“Something wrong?” Roman asked.
On the right, a row of hooks was attached to the wall—I usually hung my rain-dampened jackets there to dry out before taking them to the closet. A large black leather jacket hung on the middle hook.
I marched into my apartment. What must be a spare set of Raphael’s keys was in the round plastic dish where I normally left mine. In the kitchen a hanging pot rack had been installed over my dining room table. Raphael’s copper-bottomed pots hung from it, and in the corner, his wine cabinet sat next to my spice shelves.
I dashed out of the kitchen, almost knocking Roman over. In the living room three prized swords from Raphael’s collection hung on the walls. A picture of Aunt B in a dark frame was on the bookshelf next to the picture of my mother. Raphael’s beige and brown Jaipur rug covered the floor. He had double-stacked my DVDs in the media case and added his own, all pre-Shift movies he loved: the entire Rocky collection, the Godfather I and II, Commando, Tropic Thunder…