by M. J. Scott
"Magic," Mitch grimaced. "More trouble than it's worth."
I agreed but wasn’t going to tell him that. "Right now it might be just what Damon needs."
"Can't you heal him?" Ajax asked. He was staring down at Damon, eyes wide.
"No." I shook my head. "When it comes to all of this, I'm a relative newbie. I'm not trained in healing magic, so anything I tried could do more harm than good."
"All right," Mitch said. "Madge, Ajax is going to wait in the lobby to let Doc Chen in when she arrives. Or Ms. Tallant and her associates if they get here first." He stood, then looked up at one of the cameras in the room.
"Yes, Mitch," Madge said as Ajax disappeared out the door. "Do you require any further assistance?"
"No, thank you." He turned back to me. "I didn't get a notification that you two were here. I take it that was Damon?"
"He didn't want to put anyone else in the path of the imps," I said. "He figured this place was more secure than a hotel even though it might be more predictable that he would come here. You were his next call after we'd had a chance to talk to Cassandra."
"Always was a stubborn pain in my ass," Mitch said, shaking his head. "Doesn't always take my advice."
"He's in charge. He has to trust his own instincts." I said. "Besides, if he'd listened to you, I wouldn't have been with him in his garden today. He could be dead."
"Or you could be doing a very long play where that's a way to win back his confidence," he said.
"Why do I need to win back his confidence? I haven't spoken to him for months. I don't need his money. I get paid very well for what I do. I'm not a crazed Righteous groupie. If I was, I wouldn't have gone away quietly when he broke up with me. I know it's your job to protect him, and I respect that, but this is all going to be a lot easier if you decide that he's right about me and that someone else is behind this. If only to make sure you're looking in the right places."
"Do you have any idea where those right places might be?" Mitch said.
"Whoever it is knew about him and me to target me in the way they did. And they're tech savvy. And they know about magic, judging by their preferred methods of attack. Any witches on staff here?" Somewhere as big as Riley had to have at least a few staff with some level of power unless they were actively trying to recruit people without magic. And people could still lie. True, only a small percentage of the population had power, but Righteous had something like fifteen thousand employees. There had to be some with power. Or who knew people who did.
"You really think it's someone who works here?"
I threw up my hands. "Do we really need to have this conversation again?"
His mouth twisted. "We vet people well."
"You vet them well when they start. But people can change." Or be changed. But no. Damon told me they'd hunted down all the beta testers and helped them. I stared down at him. The last time I'd seen someone collapse, it had been Nat, bleeding out. My breath caught suddenly.
Mitch looked at me sharply. "Are you sure you're okay?"
"It's—"
"Dr. Chen has arrived," Madge announced, cutting me off. I made myself back away from Damon. The doctor would need room to check him out.
Ellen Chen looked much the same as the last time I'd seen her. Her dark hair was cut into a sharp short bob now, but her expression was calm and professional as always. She spared me a quick glance, curiosity clear in her brown eyes before she bent to Damon.
"What happened?" she asked as she took his wrist in one hand, putting a medical bag down beside him.
Mitch started in with a rapid-fire description of events before I could get started. Ellen nodded and made “keep going” noises as she examined Damon. She wrapped a pressure cuff around his arm. She reeled off a series of figures, and Madge said, "Noted, Dr. Chen. Consistent with normal vitals."
Damon didn't move through any of it. I concentrated on the rise and fall of his chest, willing myself not to freak out again. Dr. Chen needed to focus on him, not deal with me having a panic attack.
Apparently satisfied with the results she was getting, the doctor turned her attention to Damon's arm. "What did you put on this?" she asked me as she started to unwind the bandage.
"Just what was in the first aid kit in the bathroom. Saline and antiseptics."
"Painkillers?"
"Just Tylenol."
"Okay." She studied the wound. "No obvious signs of infection, and his temp is normal. Other than the fact that he's nonresponsive, I can't find anything out of the ordinary. I'll take some blood, but this is all I can do without moving him to a hospital and consulting with a healer." She looked at me. "I understand there has been a magical...incident?"
"Yes. And there's a healer on the way. Several, in fact."
That had her dark brows lifting. "Who?"
"Cassandra Tallant." If Ellen knew anything much about magic, she may know Cassandra. Or Radha.
"All right. I'd still be happier if we at least moved him to the medical suite, but we'll wait and see what the healers say."
She peered up at me. "You look pale, too. Are you all right? Last time I saw you, you had the wobbles after using a VR system."
"I'm fine. It wasn't the system. It wasn't like Archangel."
"I can check—"
"Cassandra Tallant has entered the campus,” Madge interrupted. “She will be directed here. She has two companions. Reagan, Lizzie has clearance. Morgan, Radha does not."
"Grant her temporary clearance," Mitch said. "Tonight only, unless I say otherwise."
"Registered. They will be here shortly."
"Go wait at the door again," Mitch said to Ajax, who was hovering in the background.
Ajax frowned but turned and left.
I sat on the game couch closest to the door, figuring if I was there, I was taking up less floor space. The room wasn't huge, and it was going to start feeling crowded with seven people in it.
Cassandra entered the room first, her gaze raking over all of us before she focused on Damon. Radha was close on her heels. The two of them exchanged a look and then went to join Ellen. Lizzie came in with Ajax. She looked at the crowd around Damon and came to stand by me instead.
"You've been having quite the day," she said quietly.
"Tell me about it," I said.
Lizzie tucked her arm through mine. She was shorter than me, but it was comforting to lean into her. "He'll be okay. Radha will be all over it. And if she doesn't know what to do, she'll call in one of the other healers."
Radha was already kneeling by Damon, both hands resting lightly on his arm, bracketing the ends of the wound. Her eyes closed, her forehead wrinkling slightly in concentration. Ellen was typing something into her datapad.
Ajax moved over to where Lizzie and I stood. "Should I call for an ambulance?"
Lizzie shook her head. "Not yet. If Radha can handle this, then no point moving him. And easier for you guys to keep the security tight." She smiled up at him, then tugged on my arm. "How about you and I go out in the hall? You can tell me a bit more about what happened at the house?.
"I don't want—"
She tugged harder. "He's fine, Maggie. They'll call us if they need us or if he wakes up. Let's give them a bit more space to work. You can tell me what happened."
Meaning she really wanted to talk about the imp. Preferably out of Ajax and Mitch's earshot. Not that it was really out of their earshot when Madge was listening in. I doubted my clearance was high enough to tell her not to snoop, so we'd just have to live with it.
Lizzie took me back to the break room/kitchen and told me to sit. She grilled me about the imp while she busied herself making tea from the well-stocked cabinets. She loaded one mug with sugar and handed it to me.
"You're too pale." She sat opposite me, another mug cradled in her hands. "Did you have a panic attack?"
I grimaced. Lizzie was the only other person who knew I had them. She'd even seen me once. "What makes you ask that?"
"You have that lo
ok. Wild around the eyes, sort of. And your aura is jittery."
"Two imp attacks in half a day. I'm allowed to be jittery."
She nodded. "Sure, but you're also allowed to admit if you had a panic attack. There's nothing wrong with having them."
I sipped tea. Then sighed. "I thought I was done with them."
"Well, if anything was likely to trigger them again, it would be this." She made a vague gesture. "Back at Righteous, dealing with magic, dealing with Damon." Her head tilted. "Why did you come here?"
"Damon was driving. He chose here. He said a hotel had too many people."
"You could have come back to Cassandra's."
"I told him that. He wanted to come here. He was pretty freaked out. I guess this is where he feels safe." Something suddenly occurred to me. “I think the wards on the yard went down. Shouldn’t you have felt that somehow?” I didn’t know entirely how the wards worked, but I would have expected them to have some sort of magical intruder alert like the housecomp would send me if someone broke in.
Lizzie’s mouth flattened. “It should have. It didn’t. Which is a concern. So tell me exactly what happened. The imp didn’t attack Damon, it went for you first?”
I nodded. "Yes. I was closer to where it appeared, but it made no effort to get around me and get to Damon. It attacked me straightaway. Of course, it could have been under orders to take me out to get to Damon after what happened at his house."
She nodded. "That's a possibility. And it just vanished after you hit it?"
"Yep. Disappeared the same way it appeared. Do they usually do that?" Before tonight, every encounter I'd had with an imp had ended with dead imps.
Lizzie tapped her fingers on the mug. "They can move around that way. It takes a lot of energy from what we can figure out. Harder for the smaller ones, but as they get bigger—or smarter, at least—they have more skills of their own to help whoever is moving them around. At least, we think so. Some of them might just do it on their own."
"We don't know for sure?"
"Not many witches get a chance for cozy chats with imps or lesserkind. There have been a few witches, of course, who we've taken away from demons over the centuries. But generally at that point they're not very coherent. And they get executed if found guilty of consorting with a demon voluntarily. If they survive the demon stone. I've read a lot of the books in the archive. Big on descriptions and some sort of classification but a bit lacking in any real insight." She pushed her mug around the table for a moment. "Fortunately, we're mostly dealing with humans doing bad magic on their own rather than toying with demons."
"Until I came along."
"We live in interesting times," Lizzie said blandly. "None of this is your fault."
"Will they use demon stone on Damon?" I asked.
"Radha might be able to read him," she said. "It's unlikely an imp could have forged a connection from just a wound. They'll check him out."
"This one looked like the one at his house. Taller but pretty close. The book in the archive said contagion. Could that be it?"
It was Lizzie's turn to grimace. "That will fall under the category of ‘we’ll have to wait and see.’ Cassandra and I went looking for more about imps and infection, but so far we haven't found anything that gives us much to go on. There have been cases of imps spreading sickness in the past. So Dr. Chen can pump him full of antibiotics and antivirals and we'll see what happens. Was there anything weird about the wound?"
"No, it was clean. And Doc Chen said his temp was normal."
"Well, that's good." Lizzie frowned. "Damon's not wrong about the archive. This would be a lot easier if we could do a search digitally."
"Maybe he'll convince Cassandra," I said.
She smirked. "Sounds like you think he's sticking around. What was he doing taking you home?"
"He was giving me a lift. Nothing more." I gulped tea, trying not to think about the kiss. Or his almost confession. Time enough to worry about that once the man was awake. "Stop matchmaking. We have bigger problems than my love life."
"Maybe. Your love life is a pretty big mess," Lizzie said, but then she relented. "All right, a subject for another time. Shall we go back to panic attacks?"
I groaned. "Can we not? I feel okay now. Damon made me sit on a beach in VR for a while. It worked."
Her mouth fell open. "VR calmed you down?"
"Is that a bad sign?" I asked.
She blinked, then shook her head, bangs bouncing. "I'd say it's progress. You used to enjoy gaming. I know it reminds you of Nat, but she loved VR. She wouldn't want you to never play again, would she?"
She'd made this point to me before. Then, I hadn't really wanted to listen to her. But now, well, maybe she wasn't completely wrong. Nat would definitely want me to game. In fact, if there was such a thing as ghosts, she was probably haunting me right now just to be back in Righteous. But I'd never been the gamehead she was and nowhere near as good as she’d been. But my geek heart found what Righteous did fascinating, and the technology they were creating—and the potential it had beyond games—even more fascinating. I was reluctant to cut myself off from being part of that world forever. So I had to get over my fears.
That was beginning to be a theme. I'd been hiding away. Apparently rejoining the real world was going to be more of a rip-the-Band-Aid-off process rather than baby steps if this week was anything to go by.
"We didn't game, we just sat on a beach."
"Was he wearing speedos?" Lizzie waggled her eyebrows suggestively.
"Everyone kept their clothes on," I said, but my mouth twitched.
"Pity. But you doing some VR sunbathing is a step in the right direction, at least."
"Perhaps. But that step is a long way from being all the way in. And who knows if I could even have a chip again." Damon might be full of confidence about his new technology, but that didn't mean it would work.
Lizzie cocked her head. "Would you get one if it was safe?"
"The tech is heading that way," I said. "I'll be obsolete if I can't make the leap."
"Speaking of tech," she said, "Yoshi called me earlier to check in."
"Crap." I'd completely forgotten about him. "I suck. I should have called him."
"Will you have more work for him?"
"The kid has skills," I said. "And good instincts. And I'd like to help him out. So I'll think of something. Of course, what he needs is to go to school. I mean, I assume he's not?"
Lizzie shook her head. "He got through high school. Aced everything. But college...we probably could have wrangled him a scholarship. The charity has connections, but he balked. Never have quite gotten it out of him why."
"Did you meet him through the charity?"
"Yes," she said.
I didn't press. Yoshi could tell me his story one day himself if we continued working together. But Lizzie worked with kids from some pretty messed-up backgrounds. Kids who'd ended up on the street. "Does he have family?"
"A sister. She's with a foster family now, finishing high school. Next year is her last year. They're good people. They would have taken him in, too, but once he finished school, he said he wanted to do things for himself. I think he doesn't trust anyone else, deep down."
I knew how that felt. I'd had trust issues of my own, thanks to my mother. But I was thirteen when she died, and I'd started living with my grandparents. Their love had gone a long way to rebuild my faith in humanity. It didn't sound like Yoshi had anything like that. Not really. So I wouldn’t let him down.
"I'll call him. Get him to come in once all this is sorted out. I don't want him mixed up in this." I paused. "He doesn't have any magic, does he?"
Lizzie shrugged. "Not that he's ever told me. He has an interesting energy field, but that could mean any number of things. Would it matter to you if he did?'
"Of course not."
"What about Damon?"
"Damon doesn't get to choose who I work with. And if—and this is a big if—we have any sort of friendship
after we get to the bottom of what's going on, he's going to have to put on his big-boy pants and get over his thing with magic, isn't he? I mean, if I can do VR, he can do witches. Or he can just go away again."
That thought had my fingers tightening around my mug.
Lizzie looked like she wanted to say something, but Cassandra appeared in the doorway.
"He's awake," she said. "We need to figure out what happens next."
Chapter Twenty-Two
What happened next involved Mitch insisting that Damon should go to the hospital. Dr. Chen looked as though she'd be in favor of that particular option, too, but Radha and Cassandra stood firm.
"Hospitals are hard to secure," Cassandra said, echoing my earlier arguments.
"And he's not actually sick," Radha added. She turned to Ellen. "Did you find anything that gives you immediate concern?"
"He fainted and wouldn't wake up," Ellen said. "I'd be happier if he had an MRI."
"His brain seems fine," Radha said. "His energy fields are normal, other than being a little low, which is constant with him being tired. I can't sense any infection. Or anything else."
What exactly did that mean? No demon taint? I glanced at Cassandra, but she shook her head slightly. Apparently we weren't going to be discussing the magical nitty-gritty in front of the civilians.
"Do I get a say?" Damon asked. He was lying on the game couch he'd used earlier, looking somewhat exasperated.
"No," said Mitch.
"Overruled," Damon said. "If a hospital isn't needed right now, then I think staying here, or in one of the other suites, is a better option. I don't want to be poked and prodded any more tonight. We can do whatever tests you want tomorrow, Ellen, but right now, I think everyone should just go to bed. We can keep a suite here more secure than the hospital."
"We can't necessarily keep one of those things out," Mitch said.
"I can take care of that," Cassandra said. "There are things we can do. Short of there being another trigger spell, he'll be safe."
I hoped that was true. The imp had appeared at my house despite the wards. But maybe that was just a fluke. "I'll stay with Damon," I said without thinking. Then felt myself start to blush as Lizzie snorted. "I mean, it makes sense. We still don't know if those things want him or me. Splitting us up just splits the resources in trying to keep them out."