Last November, a lot of shit had happened. One relatively small piece of that shit was that my girlfriend’s magically-controlled, shapeshifter cousin had kicked in my knee. I realize there’s a lot to unpack there. Trust me, I’ve been unpacking it for six months and it seems like there’s always going to be something left in the box.
And there was that faint nausea that always came when I thought about it, like my inner ear was upset by my massive shift in worldview. I’d accepted it all, initially, because that’s what you do when it’s a matter of survival—you adapt. Your brain takes it in stride and puts processing on the back burner until the danger is over.
At first I thought I was rolling with it all really well. I wasn’t freaking out. Sure, there were the occasional shudders when I remembered the pain, the blood, the fear of being trapped in the form of a wolf forever. But overall I thought I was taking it like an Olympic gold medal champion. Solid nines from all the judges.
Except that totally didn’t last.
There was a light knock on the door, and Dr. Lambert entered, clutching a file with a bunch of flimsy plastic sheets.
“Hey there,” she said, reaching to shake my hand. Hers was small and warm, with that slightly clammy feel of skin that’s just been washed. “You look like you’re about the climb the walls!”
“Wait, was that on my physical therapy regimen?” I said, letting go of her hand. “You’re going to have to amputate now, aren't you?”
Dr. Lambert laughed. “I’ll let you off the hook this time. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
She pulled a rolling stool in front of me and sat down. On command, I flexed and pointed and pronated. I extended my leg while she put pressure on it. I sat still as she pressed her fingers into the divots of the joint, and my leg performed its involuntary kick at the tap of her mallet.
At last, she sat back. “It’s looking really good,” she said.
Relief washed through me, but she wasn’t done talking. I suspended full celebration and listened.
“The nerves and vasculature all seem to be doing exactly what they’re supposed to. Range of motion is good, and I-”
“Good compared to what?” I interrupted. “Good in general or, like, athlete good?”
She seemed taken aback. Her thin eyebrows pinched and she opened her mouth. “Um, well…” she reached for the x-rays.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’m just paranoid, you know. This is…”
“It’s fine,” she said, flicking through the plastic negatives. “I understand, dance is your passion.”
“I’m with a company,” I said. “It’s my career.”
She flinched.
Every part of me went cold. What had that flinch been for? She’d said I was healing well. My range of motion was good. Nausea swooped in my belly.
Dr. Lambert extracted an x-ray image of the side of my knee and held it out. I took it, stared at it. I had done hours of research, so I recognized the structures. I could see where the breaks had been, the brighter line where healing had happened, but I couldn’t see anything wrong.
She ran her finger down the outside of the joints. “These ligaments have some scarring, which we expected. You can’t really see it on the X-ray, but I could feel it by palpating the area.”
I nodded. I’d been prepared for that. It wasn’t ideal, but it wouldn’t prevent me from dancing at a professional level.
She tapped the black space where the bones met. “The bigger issue is the interior of the joint. The reconstructive surgery did what it was meant to do, but the buildup of scar tissue is hard to predict.”
“What does that cause?” I asked.
“Some stiffness, and probably some difficulty with certain range-of-motion activities.”
It was like someone had tied a block of concrete to my heart and dropped it into a lake. I felt it sinking, felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Is it…just pain?” I asked. I could handle pain. I could dance through it. “I have to hyperextend the joint to really-”
Dr. Lambert’s thin eyebrows bunched again. “Hyperextension could cause more damage around the scarring. You’d end up with a knee replacement.”
Okay.
Okay. So. That sucked. I felt my brain swim down into the dark cold water after my heart.
Dr. Lambert put her hand on my good knee and rubbed it.
“You’ll be able to do a lot of other things—run, jump, squat, things like that. You can even continue dancing-”
I was shaking my head. “Not at a professional level. Not if I can’t...” I pressed my fingers to my cheekbones, suddenly so dizzy I wondered if I was about to pass out.
God, I needed to buck the hell up. There wasn’t time to break down about this. I had to tell the company director. I had to see if there was a way to increase my hours at the dog rescue, or up my Financial Aid and go full time at the university.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Park. We’ll continue with your physical therapy and try to slowly increase your range of motion.”
I wasn’t listening anymore. I was spinning out scenarios as fast as my brain could come up with them. I’d always known ballet wasn’t forever. Dance is like any other sport—you age out. You have to have something to do when you’re done, whether it’s teaching or something entirely unrelated.
And like a total asshole, I’d chosen sociology as a major, because it was interesting. Because it scratched that stupid itch in the back of my mind that prickled when I wondered why laws were the way they were, why American culture was so different from Korean, why symbols defined our subcultures.
Which is totally useless in the real world.
The real world, which is full of gangs that use blood sorcery and ancient arcane bloodlines and underground networks of magical law enforcement agents…
I was supposed to have years to figure out what to do with my life. That should have been a question for my thirties.
“Mr. Park?”
I looked up. “Okay,” I said, though I had no idea what Dr. Lambert had just asked me.
“Okay. I’ll write out two more refills for you.” She rubbed my knee again. “I’m so sorry, hun. You try to relax this evening, okay?”
I nodded, but it was just to be polite. Just to get her out of the room. I was not going to be able to relax when I got home.
I knew this chill in my chest. I recognized it the same way I knew when one of our rescue dogs was going to bite, or I was going to land a jump wrong. It was that creeping sense that the ropes anchoring me to the pillars of my life had been cut, and if I didn't start rowing, I’d drift off the edge of the earth.
I needed to figure out a direction, and I needed to do it fast, before the sheer overwhelming insanity of my situation sent me straight to the bottom of the world.
Chapter 4
helena
It was close to midnight when the Range Rover rolled up in front of the old Erickson St. Fire Station, which now bore a black and white sign that read “Ruff Patch Dog Rescue”. The brick building had been fitted out with kennels on the first floor, but the second and third stories made up the apartment where I lived with Jaesung and Krista.
It was late enough that I’d expected my two roommates to be asleep, but light spilled from the big arched windows on the second floor. Someone was waiting up.
I kicked aside the burger wrappers at my feet—they were feet now, not paws—and grabbed my satchel.
“Hey,” Eric said, tapping my arm with his knuckles. “Extra iron. Extra sleep. Call me if you need anything.”
“Kay.” I slid out of the car, but a question was knotting itself in my chest, and I stopped with my hand on the door. It took effort to look up and meet Eric’s eyes. “How fucked do you think I am?”
He leaned his head back against the seat and thought a moment. At last, he lifted one hand in a shrug. “Could be completely fucked. Or De Vries and Ritter could pull their heads out of their asses for long enough to figu
re out you saved them, and you might be only slightly fucked."
I pushed back from the car. “So they have names. Which one’s which?”
“De Vries is Tweedle-dee, and Ritter’s Tweedle-dum.”
“Helpful. Do you actually know?”
Eric sighed. “Yeah. De Vries is the good looking one. His family’s old magic. Not quite as old as yours, but still. Pretty old.”
I raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t used to guys describing each other as good looking—most of the guys I knew pretended they couldn’t even tell, though I think that’s probably bullshit. The eye loves symmetry.
Still, that answered my question. De Vries was Officer Blue Eyes.
“I’m gonna give Deepti a call,” Eric said. “She probably already knows, but she’ll want to hear it from me.”
I winced. “Good luck with that.”
Eric grunted. I tossed him a wave and trudged to the door. By the time I had my keys in the door, his headlights had vanished around the corner.
The smell of the kennels enveloped me in a comforting gust of sanitizer, pet shampoo, and excited dog. Some of the pups were already barking, others I could hear just from the steady thump of tails on kennel padding.
“Hey, guys,” I murmured. I was too tired to go over and greet them all. Eric had fed me about five cheeseburgers before I’d been able to change back into a human, and I’d managed a milkshake, a pack of donuts, and two cloyingly-sweet gas station cappuccinos before we even got back to Henard.
A pointy-eared silhouette appeared above me, peering down through the plexiglass cutout that had once been the fireman’s pole. I glanced up, and the German Shepherd mix gave an excited huff and scrambled toward the door.
I smiled, and followed the sound of his doggie toenails toward the stairs. My heart was hammering by the time I got to the top, and I was out of breath with post-magic anemia.
Poo-stank backed up when I opened the door, letting out the excited, voiceless “aff!” Sanadzi had trained into him. I knelt, and he sprang forward, sniffing and licking. His cold nose poked into my neck, and he whined, licking at my ear.
“I’m fine,” I whispered, and put my arms around him.
I wasn’t really fine. Poo-stank knew it too. He sat and pawed at my knee.
“Hey, girl,” came a voice from the kitchen.
Krista was pouring herself a beer. She’d tied a bandana around her napalm-orange hair, and was holding one hand out awkwardly, drying what smelled like a fresh coat of holographic purple nail polish.
I patted Poo-stank on the head and headed toward the kitchen bar. Without asking, Krista reached back into the fridge and pulled out a second beer.
“Did you get my text?” she asked.
There was something about her tone, a sort of masked thread of anxiety I didn’t like.
“No, it’s been on silent,” I said. I dug around in my bag, even as Krista groaned.
“Drink that beer,” she said. “You’re going to need it to deal with Jae."
My hand froze on the unlock button. “Shit. His appointment was today.”
I was the worst girlfriend in the world.
I unlocked my phone, expecting an inundation of texts and calls from my boyfriend and my roommate. Instead, there was just a single text from Krista and…
Two missed calls from Deepti Iyengar, head of the Midwestern Guild and owner of my life for the next four-and-a-half years.
I blacked the screen.
“So, it didn’t go well?” I asked.
“It pretty much went as badly as it could.”
I closed my eyes, fighting not to drown in the sudden deluge of guilt. It was my fault, of course. I’d put him in danger. I’d put Krista in danger too, though she didn’t know how much. She didn’t know what I was—what Jaesung was, now—or that Jae had been grabbed as bait to draw me into a trap.
How badly did he regret it, now? He could have let me go.
He should have let me go. I should have made him.
When I opened my eyes again, Krista waggled the beer bottle at me. “I figured I’d better stay up and make sure you knew before you just waltzed upstairs like, ‘hey, babe, how was your day?’”
“Yeah, no. That would have been pretty bad.”
Krista nodded with the beer bottle pressed against her mouth. I drank. I probably shouldn’t be drinking with my hemoglobin so low, but at this point, I needed a little bit of liquid courage to climb those stairs. And I had to climb those stairs. It would be bad to avoid Jaesung right now, even if I dreaded the conversation we would have to have.
It was my fault. I had to own that. And I had to be there for him.
Krista and I finished our beers and ascended the stairs together. At the landing, she ducked left into her room and I ducked right, into the room Jaesung and I shared most nights.
He was lying on his back, one arm behind his head, the other slack on top of the covers. Had he not been staring at the ceiling, I still would have known he wasn’t asleep. Jaesung only ever slept on his side. He didn’t look at me as I walked in.
I crossed the room, feeling like I was approaching one of the strays we sometimes rescued from downtown—it’s hard to tell with some of them if they’re going to bite or cower.
He didn’t move when I reached the bed, or when I sat on the edge of it.
He would have every right to hate me right now. Because of me, he was losing his career. He’d lost everything about his life that was normal, and I wasn’t sure I was worth it.
I lay a tentative hand on his chest, and waited. He was warm, as always, and despite the palpable misery hanging in the air, his heart was beating strong and steady.
For a minute, he held himself still. I had just begun to entertain the idea that he wasn’t going to respond when his hand twitched. It seemed to take a lot of energy for him to lift his arm and cover my fingers with his.
I swallowed.
“Jae, I’m-”
“Don’t.” He closed his eyes. “I’m trying really hard not to blame you for this. That gets harder when you keep acting like it’s your fault.”
I clenched his fingers. “Blaming me is pretty fair. It is my fault.”
He opened his eyes and fixed his gaze back at the ceiling. “I can’t do this right now,” he said.
Fear sent a spasm down my hand. “Can’t…”
He squeezed my fingers. “This conversation. I can’t do it right now. The number of times we’ve…it’s like a script. You’re going to keep blaming yourself and I’m going to say it’s Gwydian’s fault, not yours. Then we’ll keep pretending we believe that until it’s true.”
Well, that was blunt, but it wasn’t wrong. I nodded.
“We’ll skip it, then.” I rubbed my thumb along his hand and watched his face. I’d never seen him look like this before—he was always so vibrant, a bright package of sarcasm and potential energy. This dull-eyed Jaesung was frightening, like the sun had been extinguished.
“Stop,” he said, and dragged his arm from beneath his head. He rubbed at his face. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“I…like what?”
“Like you want to keep apologizing,” he said. “Krista and mom were bad enough. Sanadzi is going to be worse tomorrow. I can’t deal with everyone’s feelings about my feelings right now.”
It kind of hurt, but he was right. He was the one hurting—he didn’t need to manage my guilt on top of all the shit that must have been going on in his head.
“Do you want me to leave you alone for a while?” I asked.
He was quiet for a long time. I imagined him picking through words, trying to figure out a way to tell me yes without sounding like a jerk. Eventually, he said, “No.”
It didn’t sound completely convincing.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
He sighed. “I don’t know.”
That sounded more like the truth. I glanced at the window, out at the overcast sky pitching back Henard’s midnight lights. I was about to kick
off my shoes and stretch out beside him when the phone in my pocket vibrated.
I pulled it out, and saw Deepti’s name lit up on the screen. I sighed.
Jaesung’s expression gave signs of life, a twitch of reflexive concern. “Did something happen?”
No way in hell was I dumping my disaster in his lap. His brain might short circuit.
“It’s fine,” I lied. “I’m gonna take this, okay?” I pressed the accept button and muted my microphone. Leaning over, I kissed him on the cheek. “I love you. Text me if you want company.”
His fingertips caught at the end of my braid, the barest of touches, before I rose from the bed and ducked out the door.
I didn’t take the phone off mute until I was down the stairs and halfway across the living room. Poo-stank lifted his head from the couch as I passed and padded over, butting up against my legs as I opened the door leading down to the kennels below.
“Hey,” I said, grabbing the railing as Poo-stank dove down the steps ahead of me.
“What were you thinking!” It wasn’t a question. A swell of defensiveness and irritation rose in my throat.
“That Eric was about to get blown up by a sanguimancer. That dude was so juiced up, it wasn’t even funny.”
Deepti’s usually-modulated tone trembled with frustration. “You realize you’ve just knowingly broken Guild law in front of two Guild Enforcers who are some of your most vociferous opponents?”
“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how Deepti knew that second part, unless Eric had told her about our conversation. I reached into the treats jar and pulled out a handful of biscuits. “but it was-”
“There is no but, Helena!” Deepti snapped. “The only reason you weren’t arrested is because Eric never would have let De Vries and Ritter take you.”
I tossed a cookie to Poo-stank, then to Daisy the pittbull and to an especially drooly boxer.
“Did Eric tell you they flipped their sirens and warned the sanguimancers? Or that Officer Blue Eyes—De Vill, whatever—shot at me?”
Deepti sighed. I imagined her on the other end of the line, pinching the bridge of her nose between two perfectly-manicured fingers. “Enforcer De Vries insists he was shooting at the sanguimancer, not at you. There’s no way to confirm it, though Eric seems to agree he was aiming for you.”
UNMAKE (Spellhounds Book 2) Page 3