The Judah Black Novels: Boxed Set of books 1-3
Page 87
There was a wicked glint in his eye as he smiled at me and lifted his IV bag from the post near my bed, carrying it even with his head. “If you’re so intent on dying, Judah, I can’t stop you. I can’t stop him from helping you.” He tipped his head to Sal, offering a wink and a smile. “Give the devil hell, you two.”
Chapter Thirty
At some point, the nurses had changed me out of my clothes and put a spotted, blue hospital gown on me. Or maybe I’d done it. My head was so fuzzy from the drugs and strange magick I’d used that I couldn’t keep anything straight. The nurses seemed a more likely culprit, considering how neatly folded my jeans and t-shirt were. They’d even placed my boots together under the chair.
The cool, sterile air of the hospital bit into my exposed arms and legs. Sal’s body radiated heat and the comforting scent of him, earthy and warm. The side of my cheek rested against the exposed skin of his bicep, which was hot enough that I would have been sweating if he were all around me. Instead, I shivered at the cold and instinctively pressed in tighter. Had we been in that position just a few hours earlier, it would have been romantic. But I knew the heat and the loud thump in his chest was from anger. Sal sat down on the edge of the bed, arms curled around my body. He squeezed me tighter to him but refused to look down at me.
He spoke to me through grating teeth, his voice muffled by whatever damage Emiko had done to my ears. It was healing, thanks to Sal’s intervention, but I hadn’t yet gotten sound back to normal.
“How long have you known?”
I closed my eyes. “Since that first time Marcus brought me to the hospital.”
Sharp silence droned on. Occasionally, he hugged me tighter or squeezed one hand into a fist only to release the gesture. His jaw muscles flexed and released. He fought with the wolf, trying not to let it out. I ached to say something, anything, to make everything better, but the time for that had come and gone.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I swallowed and fought the urge to tear up. My nose ran anyway and I wiped at it with the top of my hospital gown. “Marcus made me swear not to. Him and Zoe both. They said if I told you, they would hurt Hunter or you. I couldn’t...” I stopped to work against the swollen feeling in my throat again. “I know it was selfish and the wrong thing to do, but I didn’t want to lose you. I promised Marcus that, if nobody died, I would keep the secret. But Chanter...” When I blinked, a tear trailed down from the corner of my left eye. My hand shook as I raised it to my mouth and choked, “I’m sorry. I never wanted anyone to get hurt.”
Sal’s chest heaved a heavy sigh as I finally gave in and let myself cry. He put a hand behind my head and drew me against his chest. “Whenever you lie, either by omission or by false information, someone gets hurt. It might take a while, but it’s going to happen. You’re a smart woman, Judah. One of the smartest people I know. You know that.”
He paused as I put my arm around him and hugged tightly. His voice sounded calm, but I knew, knew it was just the calm before the storm. Any minute, he was going to explode on me. Sal had every right to be angry. I knew that the one thing he’d wanted most in the world was a child. I had conspired with his ex-wife and a greedy vampire to keep him away from his child. I was a monster.
“You’re also one of the most stubborn people I know,” Sal continued. “Sometimes, that’s an asset. Most of the time, it just pisses people off, me included.”
I squeezed tighter. Here it comes, I thought. The one friend I have left in the world is about to desert me.
“You’ve got it in your head that you’re some kind of superhero. You’re going to save everyone, right? But when your back is against the wall, Judah, who’s going to save you if you go in half-cocked and without backup?” Sal squeezed me back and lowered his head to my shoulder. “When some asshole vampire threatens me, my family, or anyone I care about, you’re supposed to tell me, dammit! You’re supposed to call for help! Why the hell didn’t you let me help you from the beginning?”
“Marcus and Zoe—”
Sal pulled me back away from me and growled at me, “Marcus is full of hot air. He can’t lay a finger on me or mine without bringing the pack and the club into things. As for Zoe, she probably gets off on the idea of turning you and me against each other.”
I tried to control my chin when it started shaking. It was hard to do, looking up into Sal’s shining, gilded eyes. I hadn’t thought of that. At the time, I had been so busy trying to make sure everyone stayed alive and safe that I didn’t even consider Marcus’ threat wasn’t valid. He was a powerful vampire. He could kill Sal and Hunter. That didn’t mean he would. Doing something like that, especially after telling me that he intended to do so, would only make me hate him more.
I would have stopped working for him immediately to find some way to prosecute him for his crimes. It was in Marcus’ best interest to keep everyone I loved alive and happy so that I would turn my attention elsewhere. The vampire had lied to me, and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.
“Aren’t you mad at me?” I stammered.
Sal tilted his head away. “I’m pissed as hell. I understand why you did it, but I’m still pissed.” He turned back and lifted my chin with his free hand. “Just because I’m angry at you doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving you. You don’t get to run away that easily, not now that I’ve got you.”
I stumbled in my search for words and felt my cheeks flush. I must have looked terrible, splotchy faced, teary eyed, and now blushing. Not to mention all the bumps and bruises, the hospital gown and— God, when was the last time I’d seen a hairbrush? Probably more recently than I’d seen a toothbrush. Sal didn’t seem to notice or care. He leaned down to kiss me, but hesitated, mouth so close that his breath tickled the skin of my cheek. “I love you, you know,” he said.
Those three little words triggered memories. No one, Hunter aside, had said that to me, not since Alex. I’d never let things get that far. Every time I got close to something real and deep, I found myself wracked by guilt. Even after more than a decade, the pangs of grief still sank their claws deep. I cared about Sal, maybe more than I had anyone else, but loving him still felt like betraying Alex.
But I didn’t have the chance to object before Sal leaned down to kiss me.
Sal tasted vaguely of sugary coffee, sweet, bitter, and dark with just a hint of salty sweat. It was brief, soft, and gentle, his lips on mine. All the things that it shouldn’t have been. Under the surface, I felt the anger bubbling, knew it should have been more like that first kiss, the one in the ladies’ room at Aisling. It should have been angry and hard. It should have hurt to kiss him. His anger wasn’t allowed to feel good.
When he pulled away, I threw my hands up on either side of his face and drew him back down. This time, when I opened my mouth against his, I didn’t taste coffee and sugar. There was ash, the almost overpowering remnants of the last cigarette he’d smoked. Sandpaper stubble from his chin ground into my cheek. Teeth fought against the soft flesh of lips and tongues until the only taste in my mouth was the coppery taste of blood. He stole the breath from against my skin, and I dug fingernails into his arms and chest until he let me go long enough to steal it back.
It hurt, every touch of skin against skin, but it was more cathartic than what he’d intended. Pain meant we were alive, for now at least, and together.
Someone in the doorway cleared her throat and I turned my head to look at a nurse in pink scrubs. Nurse. That’s right. I was still in the hospital and hooked up to all those monitors. Sal had told Marcus to make them discharge me.
“If this is a bad time, I can come back.” The nurse tapped her fingers on the clipboard she was holding.
Sal hadn’t noticed the nurse, or if he had, he’d chosen not to acknowledge her in favor of kissing my neck. I pushed his head away and he let out a low, rumbling growl. It didn’t sound seriously threatening, though. I’d heard enough growling over the last two days to be able to tell the difference.
“No time like the present,” I said to the nurse and held my hands out for the clipboard.
~
Detached from all my monitors and dressed again, Sal walked me on unsteady legs to the parking garage. The nurses wanted to put me in a wheelchair since I was still too weak to stand on my own, but I wouldn’t have it. I was walking out of there on my own two feet or not at all. So, I slipped my left arm in Sal’s and walked close to the right wall, taking slow, steady steps.
“I just wish I knew what I’d done,” I muttered, limping along and leaning heavily on him. “I feel like an old lady.”
Physically, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me other than two perforated eardrums. The CT scan, MRI, EEG, and EKG all came back normal. They spoke of elevated stress hormones in my bloodwork, but no one seemed to think that explained my condition.
I had some ideas but no answers. I knew using the magick had drained me, the same way using magick to enhance my muscles did. Only this felt worse. A lot worse. I’d never seen a spell like that before, let alone learned it. Maybe it was some hidden, innate ability that I hadn’t ever used before. For something like that to surface at my age was rare. In fact, I’d never heard of it. Magick and abilities usually level off after twenty-five or so. My thirty-second birthday was coming up in a few months, so I should have been well past the age where I could expect new powers to surface. Maybe it was something else.
My right hand went to the talon and feather necklace hanging on my neck. I forgot to brace myself against the wall again when I went to take a step and almost went down.
“Easy,” Sal said, pulling me up.
“Maybe I should have stayed in the ER for just a little while longer.”
“There’s nothing they can do for you here that I can’t do for you at home.” He tightened his grip on me.
I repositioned my arm and hobbled forward. “Zoe is sick too.”
“I know.”
“Did you leave any protections behind?”
“Salt, wards, and a thing or two extra that I know,” Sal answered, nodding. “And I called Shauna to sit outside the door. She’ll call if anything happens, but with what I put down and with Han watching over her, I expect her to make it to morning.”
We came to a ramp and I grabbed onto the railing instead of the wall. A soccer mom with a blonde bob hurried by, gripping the hands of her two kids. Her son was so busy staring at his cell phone that he would have walked into a wall if she didn’t keep her hand on his head, directing his steps. The girl just a few months older than Mia toddled by holding her mom’s hand and shaking her pigtails. She was wearing fairy princess get-up, complete with a tiara, pink, frilly dress, and light up shoes with wings. A middle-aged man in a suit who looked like he belonged to the rest of the family walked along behind, stuffing the parking garage receipt into his wallet and calling for them to wait up.
For a moment, I wondered what it was like to live that life. Had there ever been a time when my biggest worry for Hunter was spending too much time staring at screens? Knowing what I knew about the fae, I couldn’t imagine Sal would let Mia dress like that. If Sal and I married, would we ever take our kids to doctors and dentists and worry about such mundane things? I couldn’t imagine it. That was a life that could have been, a life I thought I wanted with Alex. The Revelation had ripped that future from my fingers and painted it with memories of blood and pain. It was gone and buried, who I was before buried with it. Still, whenever I caught a glimpse of the woman, wife, and mother I might have been, I grieved for a loss that had never happened.
“What’s the matter?”
My arm tugged tight as Sal stopped walking, his forehead wrinkled with concern. I offered a weak smile and shook my head. “Nothing.”
We walked on in amicable silence for two more steps.
“This spell we’re going to work,” Sal said quietly. “I don’t want to do it.”
“Because I’ll be dead for a few minutes? Come on, Sal. I was already dead for a whole sixty-two seconds earlier today and now look at me. I’ll be fine. You know I’m too stubborn to die.”
He gave a nervous laugh. “No, it’s not just that. It’s...”
Sal trailed off as we reached a set of double doors, reaching out to open them for me. Fat chance I was going to let that happen. I’d rather look like an invalid than be treated like one. I slammed an elbow into the handicap plate that would open the doors instead and flashed him a sly grin that he didn’t return.
“Do you remember when you first came to Paint Rock and I told you I didn’t start out as a healer?”
I cleared my throat, lowered my voice two octaves to imitate his, and said in an exaggeratedly serious tone, “I began my practice doing other things. I started out hurting people.”
His smile was strained and short lived. “That was before Chanter taught me the right way. I was on a dark, dangerous path. This spell I have to work, it calls for a lot of the principals I learned before Chanter. It is magick designed to cause suffering. It goes against everything Chanter taught me.”
“Maybe it was designed to hurt people. But you’re going to use it to save people. Any damage you do is only going to be temporary.”
“Maybe,” Sal agreed. “And then maybe not. I’m still not me. I’m still broken.” He rubbed his chest. “I’m afraid I’ll get lost in it. That I’ll like it. Before today, I hadn’t killed in a long time. Today...” He trailed off as both of us thought about the two men he’d shot in the back of the head. “I almost killed my brother today, too. What if...What if I go back to the way I was before Chanter?”
Afraid was not a word I heard Sal use often. In fact, I didn’t hear any werewolves use it except in rare circumstances. Being afraid meant being vulnerable and werewolves hate to admit weakness. The word made me take notice and pay closer attention to the worry lines etched on his face.
I leaned into Sal. “You mean, what if you turn into an evil witch?”
His face darkened. “What if I turn into something dark and evil and you’re not here to stop me?”
“Guess you’d better make sure I come back then, huh?” I said squeezing his hand.
After another set of double doors (which I opened using the handicap button), we stepped into the cool, night air. Gasoline, oil, rubber, and other car smells hung in the air, mixing with the special stink all parking garages have. Moths fluttered against the buzzing fluorescent lights, casting strange shadows. There weren’t any walls to lean on, and I didn’t want to set off every car alarm on the way to the truck, so Sal picked me up and carried me the rest of the way. It wasn’t any more effort for him than pulling open a door, but it still made me feel broken. I wanted to walk.
“We’ll get you healed up,” Sal said. With my ear pressed against his chest, I could hear him a lot better, though sound still hurt when it touched my ears. I’d refused more pain medications at Sal’s urging. He promised I wouldn’t need them. “I’ll finish fixing up your ears and anything else that’s bothering you. Then, we’ll both have to get cleaned up. Sunday best clean, Silvia used to say.”
Silvia was Chanter’s wife. Thinking about them together made me happier until I remembered Chanter’s ghost was still hanging around. Once I’d dealt with Emiko, I’d do my best to send him on his way, too. Hopefully, he wouldn’t prove such a difficult customer.
“Dress in something comfortable and then do an aura cleansing. We should both be at our best before we try the spell. Makes the chances that something will go wrong just a little less. Then, if you’ve got affairs to get in order, I want you to do it just in case. While you’re doing that, I’ll get the things we need.”
“What kinds of things do you need for this one?”
The muscles of his chest shifted as he shrugged. “Candles, good incense, and I’ll have to go out to Chanter’s and see if I can find his recipe for the right medicine. That will take a while. He had a weird system of cataloging things to keep people out. Silvia’s idea once I moved in. She d
idn’t want me accidentally turning people into toads.” He laughed. The sound hurt but it was also comforting. “He took to transcribing the spells as recipes.”
“Like in a cookbook?”
“Yeah,” Sal said, nodding. “Had a whole system and codes and everything.”
I sat up in Sal’s arms. Well, technically I wiggled a little, twisted my head, and fought to get my hand down into my jeans pocket. My fingers settled on the folded bit of paper and fumbled to pull it out. “Does this mean anything to you?” I held the recipe I’d found in the envelope with my name on it out to Sal awkwardly. Inside, I was beaming that I’d finally gotten one of four limbs back under complete control.
Sal walked a few more paces and put me down next to Chanter’s truck, helping me get my other hand on the bed where I could hold myself up. Then, he plucked the folded paper out of my hand, unfolded it and frowned.
“How did you... Never mind. It might work, provided we also get a piece of Emiko’s remains. To be honest, all the weed is going to do is get you stoned. It’s not a good medium. For this, you’d need something stronger,” He lowered the page and added, “Not that I’d know anything about that. I can get something. Chanter probably had some around if he was reading up on it.” He folded the paper back up and held it out to me. “But maybe I shouldn’t be talking about where Chanter’s stash might be in front of a cop.”
I smiled and laughed. “This whole case has been off the books and stinks of illegal activity, Sal. If the spell works, I don’t care how illegal the ingredients are.”
“It’s not my spell,” Sal said defensively and opened the passenger door for me. “And I’m not the one who has to eat the stuff. If I were you, I’d avoid telling this story at the water cooler, though.”
He helped me into the truck, and then went around and got in on the driver’s side. The truck purred to life and the air conditioning with it. Outside, it was a cool night. If we’d been in my Firebird, I would have run the heat. But werewolves run a high core temperature. They like the cold, which naturally meant that I had to endure frigid temps if I wanted to ride with Sal. I made it halfway to the highway before I reached out and switched off the cool air.