“Dead, I think. Faerie took her.”
Lunn nodded and cupped my cheek with his hand. “I thought she had killed you.”
“I thought she had too,” I said with a laugh that I quickly stifled as pain muddied my brain. Obviously, the adrenalin was wearing off, and when that happened… well, I could only hope I would be lying down.
“She told me she had killed you,” Lunn insisted. “She said that she’d found you with MacNa, that she’d ripped out your heart, but I didn’t want to believe her. I knew she wouldn’t be able to kill someone like you. But when she brought me your Bone Blade…” Lunn trailed off, and I stared at him in surprise.
“She brought you a Bone Blade?”
“Yeah, she said she’d taken it from you after killing you. When I saw that, I think I kind of gave up.”
“That’s when the sickness really started to spread,” I said, my skin breaking out in a cold sweat.
“Shit, Darcey, how hurt are you?” He reached out to brush my hair back from my shoulder. I was wearing a black shirt, making it almost impossible to tell just how much blood I’d lost, but when he pushed Idalina’s jacket back off my shoulder and saw the damage, he swore in English, Gaelic, and Fae, something I’d never heard him do before.
“Looks that good, eh?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light but failing miserably.
“We need to get you to someone who can heal you,” he said.
The world tilted suddenly and grew grey at the edges. “I’m not sure how to tell you this,” I said, leaning on him a little more than I usually would.
“What?” he asked, concern etched into his face.
“I don’t know if I’m going to barf on you, pass out, or perhaps both…”
The ground beneath my feet shifted again, and my vision filled with sparkling lights that fizzed and popped. That feeling alone was enough to cause bile to race up the back of my throat.
“I think both,” I said as my stomach dropped down into my boots like I was on a rollercoaster.
My vision went black. Suddenly, I was falling.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“How long do I have to keep drinking this crap for?” I called out, glowering at the small bottle of dark liquid on the kitchen counter.
“Until Noree says you’re all clear,” Samira answered from her side of the apartment.
We’d knocked the wall through to the adjacent apartment, giving us more space to move about rather than be in each other’s hair all the time. But it allowed Samira to remain under my protection, at least until I was satisfied the witch hunters were done with her. The fact that they hadn’t come after her was merely a bonus, but I had a feeling that creeps like them had long memories and would come knocking sooner rather than later.
When I say we had knocked through to the other apartment, I meant Byron and Lunn did the dirty work. The two had become allies of sorts, or that’s what I was hoping for. They at least seemed to tolerate each other for the sake of keeping the peace around me.
Lunn had a weird sense of honour and felt as though he owed me a debt for saving his life. No amount of telling him otherwise seemed to make a difference.
And Byron… Well, Byron was attempting to win back my trust. Plus, he felt the same debt of gratitude. Which was ridiculous, because I hadn’t been the one to bring him back. As far as I was concerned, everything that had happened belonged in the past, and I just wanted to put it all behind me and get back to work.
“And just when will Noree say I’m all clear again?” I asked.
“Just drink the damn thing,” Samira said, appearing in the kitchen doorway a moment later.
“You wouldn’t be saying that if you had to drink this stuff,” I said, scooping up the bottle and popping the cork. The fetid smell of feet and swamp juice wafted up to my nose, causing me to gag. Turning the bottle on its head, I swallowed down the contents as quickly as the gelatinous liquid would allow.
“See, that wasn’t so bad,” she said, turning away and grabbing her handbag from the counter.
“Where are you off to?” I asked.
“Emily and Tim invited me around for a horror movie marathon,” she said. “We’re doing all the classics. At least, they say they’re classics. I haven’t heard of half of them.”
“And what am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“Keep on recuperating?” she suggested with a wide grin.
It was totally the wrong thing to say, and she knew it. I’d spent the past two weeks ‘recuperating,’ and I was bored out of my mind. Granted, the first three days after Auriella’s disappearance into Faerie had been a whirlwind of delirium and terror that I didn’t fully remember. Lunn, however, had taken great pains to remind me that I had, in fact, vomited all over his boots, which I was surprised and disappointed not to remember, mostly because I hadn’t been able to see the expression on his face directly after it had happened. Auriella’s bite had poisoned me, and if not for the Noree’s ability to draw the toxin out of my body, then I would have bitten the bullet.
Noree was concerned with how slowly I was healing, though. She was still worried about Mannan’s hold on me, fearing that he was somehow reaching for me beyond the cage, and so insisted I take the swamp tonic. She’d said it would fortify my own personal psychic wards, and for that I was grateful. Still didn’t mean I couldn’t grumble about having to drink the stuff, though.
But I had regained movement in my shoulder and arm, and the worst of the scars had healed, leaving me with only the slightest twinges when I used my throwing blades. So really, everything was coming up roses…
Except for the pact with the vampires…
And my missing Bone Blade…
And the fact that the Between still hadn’t let me back in…
But I’d learned that you needed to take the win when you got it, and I was certainly willing to consider stopping Auriella a win.
Yup, everything was coming up roses. I just hoped it stayed that way.
Acknowledgments
Thanks goes to Tracy Carroll for thinking up the fantastic name, ‘Havoc’, for Darcey’s kitten.
Personally, I think it fits perfectly. Here’s to hoping she will live up to her name.
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