The poor little guy didn’t sleep for a week after our first attempt at socializing our familiars.
The fact Keet was undead and didn’t require sleep was totally beside the point.
“Familiars are like batteries for necromancers,” he explained for the umpteenth time. “They boost our power, but they’re drained in the exchange. They must be recharged, or they will die.” He squinted at the cage. “Keet is a psychopomp. He’s already dead. The only limit on his capacity to act as a conduit is the breadth of your power, when we haven’t begun to understand your limits. That makes him uniquely suited to channeling your energy, but first you both must be trained on how to siphon.”
“Fine.” I strummed the bars of his cage like harp strings, finding the latch blindly and palming his quivering banana-yellow body. His round, red eyes pleaded for mercy. “But I make no promises.”
A shrill whistle from Linus brought Julius sweeping into the room, and yep, Keet pooped his bird britches, which is to say my hand. Glaring at Julius, I wiped my palm clean on the towel Linus had wisely left on the table. That bird was all beak, talons, and bad attitude, in my humble opinion. The way he followed my every move through wide, unblinking eyes gave me the creeps. I really wished Linus would pack him up and courier him back to the Lawson family aviary.
In preparation for Julius’s arrival, Linus had assigned a tome as thick as my wrist on cultivating a bond with your familiar. Parakeets rated one piddly footnote on page four hundred and twenty-three, but great horned owls? Four chapters. Four. Whole. Chapters. One even insinuated their golden eyes were windows into the goddess’s soul.
I really hoped not. Mostly when I stared down Julius, I saw a predator in want of prey staring back.
Three
Lessons ended that night with me speckled in fear poop, missing clumps of hair, and down one T-shirt. Julius had shredded the back of this one when I leapt between him and Keet during a trust exercise that required we leave the room for five minutes while they acclimated to one another. A bloodcurdling tweet sent me racing back in as Keet zoomed around in search of a hidey-hole while Julius did the owl equivalent of licking his chops then swooped down on him.
Linus had patched up the long furrows raked down my back and checked to ensure no damage had been done to my tattoo before I left. The shirt had too much blood on it to keep. It would have to burn.
As much as I loathed the idea, I might actually have to go clothes shopping soon.
I failed to suppress a shudder as it rolled through my shoulders, and that split second was the reason I noticed a shadow peeling from the rest and striding in my direction wearing butt-kicking boots, combat fatigues, and a matching black shirt. Taz wore her hair in a thick braid down her back, and the only part of her not dedicated to stealth was the bright red bindi dotted between her brows. Her brown eyes twinkled merrily—they did that when she was about to draw blood—and I swallowed. Hard.
Based on the broad grin stretching her cheeks, I was guessing she’d heard.
“Pause.” I threw up a hand before her powerful legs got too close. “I need a second.”
“Pause?” She threw back her head and laughed at the moon. “You can’t mash a pause button when you’re under attack.”
A cage full of traumatized parakeet weighted my arm when I lifted it. “I need to put him somewhere safe.”
“Oh, well, in that case… Nope.” She cracked her knuckles. “You still have to go through me.”
“Hang in there, fella.” I scratched Keet’s earholes through the bars of his cage. “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”
“Get your butt in gear, Woolworth,” Taz barked. “Moving targets are harder to hit.”
Without me realizing it, she had managed to force me to circle around until she stood between me and Woolworth House. How did she do that? Now I really did have to go through her to reach the porch.
Fiddlesticks.
Faster than I could let out a squeak, Taz was on me, and I had no idea what to do except curl in a protective ball around Keet’s cage. Sure, he was undead, but this was the only body he had, and I didn’t want to have to pick the pieces of it from between her boot treads for a proper burial.
The first kick hit me in the ribs, and I swear I heard one crack. My breath left me in a rush, and black dots spotted my vision. I stumbled back, still keeping my body between her and my bird.
“I’m not here to teach you how to take a hit,” she snarled her disappointment. “I’m here to teach you how to avoid getting struck in the first place.”
“Sorry,” I wheezed, forcing myself to straighten. “I’ll do better.”
“What you’re failing to grasp is no conditions will ever be ideal when your life is endangered. In fact, I can guarantee that the circumstances will have been engineered to ensure the conditions are as far from ideal as you can get. They want you off your game. They want you running scared. Fear causes us to make mistakes.” She cut her eyes toward the cage. “Love does too. You have to assess the risks.”
“You’re saying because I’m alive and my bird is technically not, I should prioritize myself above his welfare.”
Stunned into a rare moment of stillness, she zeroed in on Keet. “Your bird is…what?”
Thanks to Maud, few people ever saw Keet, let alone knew what he was or how he had been made, but I had started thinking of Taz as a fixture in my life, and I had let my guard down around her. Big mistake.
“What I meant to say,” I amended in a rush, “is I’m a person, and he’s a bird, so my life is more valuable.”
“Yeah.” She frowned at the cage. “That’s right.”
Desperate to draw her attention back to me, I went on the offensive and swung my left leg out in a kick that hit her in the hip and sent her stumbling. I was about to sweep her legs from under her when she laughed—a gleeful sound that promised pain—and leapt back into the fray with a roundhouse kick that grazed my chin with a cool swipe of mud.
Momentarily stunned that I had dodged the first strike, I was too slow to miss the mule kick that struck me right in the gut.
Doubling over, I heaved and clutched the cage to my side. Bells rang in the distance, and my head swam. I had trouble hearing whatever insult she hurled at me over the thundering of my heart.
An inquisitive chirp cut through the wool binding my head, and for a fraction of a second, it was like standing in the eye of a tornado. Absolute peace, utter tranquility, and the firming of my resolve to stop being a victim.
Make no apologies for surviving.
“Remember what we practiced?” I panted at Keet. “You got this, buddy.”
Against my better judgment, I popped the cage door open and released him. We had been working up to this for the last week. He had to learn to be part homing pigeon in case we ever got separated while he was assisting me. But I never imagined testing his radar under these conditions. Thank the goddess, Woolly was only a dozen feet away from us. Surely not even Keet could get lost between here and there.
Unable to track him unless I wanted to get a matching boot print on my cheek, I focused on Taz, who was incoming. She was always harping on me to make the best use of what I had, so I swung the cage at her. It clocked her across her right eye, and guilt swamped me.
“I am so sorry.” Just not sorry enough to pass on the opening she had given me. I kicked out hard with my right foot and hit her square in the solar plexus. Oxygen exploded from her lungs, and she doubled over. More afraid of what she would do to me if I didn’t finish her than if I did, I swept her legs from under her and watched her smack the grass on her back. From there, I hovered a safe distance away and squeezed the cage to my chest. “Are you okay?”
Wild laughter poured from her throat. “You don’t apologize for kicking someone’s ass.”
Warmth swelled in me, but it was quickly extinguished. “I cheated.”
“The cage?” She pushed into a seated position. “What have I been telling you all along?”
&n
bsp; “To use the weapons at my disposal?” I rubbed my thumbs down the bars. “Somehow I doubt you meant a birdcage.”
“You want to believe your enemies will show you mercy, that they adhere to the same moral code as yours, but they won’t, Grier. They don’t.” She accepted the hand I extended to her, and I pulled her to her feet. “There’s no such thing as a clean fight. Vampires will use their strength, their age, their skills against you. So will necromancers. So will humans. You must sacrifice your ego, accept there is always someone stronger, faster, or smarter than you, and do what it takes to survive.” She gripped my shoulders until I winced. “Whatever it takes, understand? There is no shame in living to fight another day.”
The sentiment drew me up short, almost an echo of the words I had melded into a personal mantra, and it occurred to me then while Maud might have been the first, she was far from the last to offer me that sage advice.
Tossing the cage aside, I sank into a ready stance. “Want to go again?”
Expecting the attack to come from below, as usual, I was stunned when her fist clipped my jaw.
Had my eyes not rolled back in my head, I would have cried foul.
“Stop babying her,” Taz grumbled. “She must have a glass jaw. I didn’t hit her that hard.”
“She bit through her tongue,” Linus snapped. “Go wait in the garden before I return the favor.”
“Kinky,” I slurred, my words thick and wrong. “You canth…go ’round…bithing…”
“Shh.” Linus cradled my cheek in his cool palm. His touch felt divine against the hot pain throbbing in my jaw, and I leaned into his touch. “Don’t speak.”
A jolt of alarm zipped through me, and I leveraged myself upright. “Keeth!”
“Keet is fine.” Linus rested a hand on my shoulder. “Woolly noticed him on the porch and let him in the house.” He lowered me back against the pillows. Pillows? Had they sprouted on the lawn like mushrooms? “Amelie caged him for you.”
“Not Taz’s faulth.” It felt important that he remember that. “Asked for ith.”
“I very much doubt you requested to have your tongue shortened.”
A miserable noise rose up the back of my throat. “Thath…bad?”
“I’ve done what I can, but I require a second opinion.”
“No.” The last thing I wanted was a record of this incident in the Society databases.
“Yes.” He smoothed sweaty hairs off my forehead. “He’ll be here shortly.”
Without making the conscious decision, I slipped through the door in my head and gave myself permission to rest there, away from the pain, until firm nudges forced me to return to my body.
“Hey, you.” A young black man with a smile that promised trouble stared down at me through eyes the rich, deep color of my favorite triple dark chocolate brew from Mallow. “Remember me?”
A distant gurgle in my stomach, paired with the bitter taste in the back of my throat, told me I had hurled my breakfast while unconscious. No wonder I was framing the poor man’s looks to align with my sweet tooth.
“Heinz,” I murmured. “’member.”
The shameless flirt was a medic attached to the sentinels. Maybe he was a sentinel himself. I hadn’t thought to ask. All I knew for certain was Boaz had dialed him up after my dybbuk hunt on the Cora Ann went sideways.
A pen light swept back and forth across my vision. “What happened this time?”
“Taz.”
Sympathy twisted his features. “Ouch.”
“Yeah.” I flinched when his fingers prodded my jaw. “Ouch.”
“She called me up, but she didn’t give any details.” He answered the question I had just been pondering. “I’m a better medic than a sentinel, so I tend to ride around in the box, but I’m in Taz’s unit.”
“So you know.” That she must be the love child of a centaur and a donkey the way she loved to kick.
“I do know.” He pulled aside the collar of his shirt to expose a long scar across his collarbone. “She clipped me once during training, and I fell on a pile of volcanic rock. I hit a sharp edge and nearly got decapitated in the process. She thought it was hilarious. I thought I was dead meat.”
“Thath sounds like her.”
Linus peered over Heinz’s shoulder. “Will she be all right?”
“Her jaw is bruised, but it’s not fractured.” He tapped my chin. “Say ahhh.”
“Ahhh—crap. Thath hurths.”
“I don’t doubt it, but I need to see that tongue. Mr. Lawson tells me you bit the tip clean off, so I need to check and make sure it’s been properly reattached. We don’t want you to have mobility issues. Those might lead to problems with deglutition or articulation later.”
This time my ahhh was more of an AHHH, but I let him examine me for as long as I could endure the pain.
“The seam is flawless.” Heinz sought out Linus. “Are you sure you’re not certified, Mr. Lawson?”
“No.” His gaze touched on the books scattered across every available surface in what I was just realizing was his bedroom. That explained the pillows. “I read a lot.”
“Huh.” Heinz sounded unconvinced. “Maybe you should loan me a few of those books.”
A ghost of a smile twitched his lips. “I’m happy to make a list if you’d like to borrow them from the Lyceum.”
“I’ll take you up on that.” Heinz answered the challenge in Linus’s tone then turned back to me. “You’re going to be fine. You’re also going to be on an all-liquid diet for the next five to seven days.” He pinched the skin on the underside of my upper arm. “You’re thin as it is. Don’t skimp on the calories just because you have to suck them down. Drink those enriched shakes with lots of protein. Broth is also an option. Any soups that have small pieces that won’t choke you, like tomato basil or wonton—minus the wonton—are good.”
Visions of Mallow danced in my head. “Okay.”
A snort to my left told me Linus had me pegged. “You can’t live off hot chocolate and melted marshmallows for a week.” He hesitated. “Well, you probably could, but you shouldn’t.” He fussed with the edge of my—his—sheets, as I was lying in his bed. “Pick your poisons, and I’ll put soup on later. We can freeze it in batches. That way all you have to do is thaw them out when you get hungry.”
I reached for his arm. “You donth have tho do thath.”
He tensed under the weight of my hand. “I don’t mind.”
“Has anyone told Boaz yet?” Heinz inserted himself into our conversation. “He’s going to flip his lid.”
“I’m sure Taz called him the second my head hith the grass.” I snorted, and goddess that hurt. “Oh, no. Whath abouth Amelie?”
“I called her,” Linus assured me. “I’ll update her once Mr. Heinz leaves.”
“Thanks.” I pushed out a tired breath and released him. “I donth want her to worry.”
The expression he wore conveyed perfect neutrality, but I knew he wasn’t thrilled that I had taken in Amelie. He worried about me being alone in the house with her, but I wasn’t alone. I had Woolly, who never slept, and I had Oscar too. Although he tended to pop in and out on his own schedule.
“Okay, I’m all done here.” Heinz passed over a prescription for painkillers I would ball up and toss after he left. “These will get you through the first two days. I’ll leave my number with you. Call if the pain gets unmanageable, and I’ll give you a lift to the hospital.”
“Thanks.” I took the paper he offered me. “I appreciathe you coming outh here.”
“No thanks necessary. It’s my job.” He winked. “Plus, I get to call Boaz and tell him I conducted a thorough examination of your mouth while you were stretched out on Mr. Lawson’s bed. You can’t put a price tag on that.”
Mortification singed me clear to my hairline. “Please donth.”
“I like you, Grier, so I’ll take it under advisement.” He gathered his things and stood to leave, but he didn’t make it far. Cletus barred the door. “What
in the—?”
“This was a confidential visit,” Linus answered, ice glazing his words. “You’re free to tell Boaz what the instructor he chose for Grier has done to her, and you’re welcome to update him on her condition, but you will not make any insinuations that might damage her reputation.”
The wraith swelled until he filled the doorway with his tattered black cloak, his bone-white fingers curved into claws he clacked together at his sides.
“Confidential,” Heinz agreed, his voice pitched higher. “My lips are sealed.”
“Good.” Linus dismissed him with a flick of his wrist reminiscent of his mother. “You may go.”
“Imperious much?” I mocked his gesture. “You may go now, peasanth.”
Linus didn’t crack a smile as he sank into a chair angled toward the bed. He penned fresh healing sigils along my jaw where the ones he had inked on had begun to flake. Cooling magic enveloped my mouth, and my tongue tingled like I had eaten one too many jalapenos. The swelling reduced, and the pain eased to a dull throb. There were runes that would stop the ache entirely, but he knew I wouldn’t go for those.
“You must end this madness with Taz.” After dusting the reddish-brown crumbs into his palm to toss in the trash, he toyed with the ends of my hair where they fanned across his pillow. “She’s too advanced for a beginner. She’s a skilled fighter, but a poor teacher. She doesn’t grasp that she can’t beat the knowledge into your head.”
This was a conversation I sensed had been a long time in coming. For weeks, Linus had allowed us to spar. No, that’s not right. Unlike other men in my life, he didn’t view my decisions as a thing he had the right to allow or disallow. More like he had kept his mouth shut, the way a friend might, while watching another friend embrace a bad decision with arms wide open because they craved recklessness or needed an outlet.
“I like her.” From the hips up, at least. “She doesn’t pull her punches, and she trusts me to take care of myself.”
How to Break an Undead Heart Page 3