Since the Zerg queen of white hot pain and all her little pain-filled broodlings were currently setting up a summer home in my hip, I decided to shut up and let him carry me.
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
Chapter 6
Harper tried to follow us into my bathroom, but I shut the door in her face, muttering something about too many cooks in the kitchen. I hoped I made some kind of sense, but I was in too much pain and panic to care.
I’d used my magic, like a lot of magic. Maybe too much. My head certainly thought I had used way too much. It was out of practice and I felt like a former athlete who’d spent a couple years on the bench suddenly trying to beat Usain Bolt in the hundred meter dash.
Plus the more passive side-effects of not being human were taking a toll. My body was shoving shards of cell phone and what felt like a million pieces of bullet out of my hip, with what looked like a million gallons of blood.
Alek set me down as gently as he could in my bathtub and then pulled out a knife.
I flinched and held up my hands, but he just sighed and reached for my pants.
“I need to cut those away, take a look.”
“Harper,” I whispered, then switched to Russian. “She can hear us.”
A weird warmth slid over the room and I watched as the walls took on a slightly silvery sheen.
“No one outside this room can hear anything now,” he said.
“Guess being a Justice comes with bonus features.”
“First we take care of your wound. Then we’ll talk.”
I wasn’t sure which part of that I looked forward to less. He cut my jeans away and it wasn’t anything like the fantasies I hadn’t let myself have about him cutting my clothes off. I was too busy trying to seal my teeth to each other with my jaw muscles to tell him that, thank the universe.
With the wound washed off, which let me tell you was a peachy experience I never want to repeat, it didn’t look so bad. Kind of like a steak after you take out your aggression on it with a hammer. And bonus, I now know what my hip bone looks like and I had a nice collection of metal fragments to show the grand kids. My phone seemed to have eaten the worst of the bullet and it was super FUBAR.
I laid back in the tub once we got the wound clean, focusing on breathing and not passing out.
“The bleeding has stopped,” Alek said. Helpful guy.
“Yeah. Give it a little while. I’ll heal.” I wished he would shut up and go away.
“You are no hedge witch.”
“You are amazing at pointing out obvious things,” I said, opening my eyes. “How did you know I’d understand Russian?”
“Call it a hunch.”
He leaned against my bathroom counter, looking entirely out of place in the small room. I turned my head, choosing to look at the Dragon Ball Z poster I had on the bathroom door instead of into those speculating, piercing blue eyes.
“What happened back there? What kind of magic was that? And how did you save that boy?”
“That’s way too many questions for my brain to handle right now,” I said. All questions I didn’t really want to answer. Some I didn’t even have the answer to, anyway. Like what kind of magic this was. Human magic, I was pretty sure, so that meant ritual most likely. But it wasn’t like just anybody could use a ritual any more than a kid could open up the Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Guide and cast Magic Missile. Magic was everywhere, in everything, but it was like sunlight or carbon molecules. If you don’t have the tools to use it and the ability somehow to even tap in, there’s no way you can make it work just by trying.
To work a ritual, you’d need knowledge, time, a power source you could access, the right ingredients and foci, combined with a strong enough will to bind it all together. It wasn’t those kids, not working alone. Jimmy, the dead one, he’d been on the phone with someone. Someone who had tried to kill both boys using their medallions.
“You are thinking very hard for someone who pretends to know nothing,” Alek said, interrupting my half-conscious train of thought.
“I don’t know anything, not really. It’s all speculation.”
Cat-quick, he bent over me and slid his large, warm hand into my shirt. When I pictured him groping my breasts, it wasn’t exactly like this. He pulled the medallion out of my bra and dangled it over me. I made out a pattern of circles on its stained, black surface and it looked to be molded from clay.
“You pictured me groping your breasts?” he asked and he had that smirk I’d seen a million years ago this afternoon, before everything went to hell on the handbasket express.