“Not here,” I told her, “Cindy is coming.”
“The mundane Sheriff?”
“Yeah, I can’t be suddenly healed, if that’s what you were going to do.”
She nodded and pulled out what looked like two quarter-sized green gemstones from the pouch and put them in my hand. “You know how to activate these?”
“A gate charm?” I asked her, pulling it up to examine it, knowing it wasn’t, but double checking the futures where I used it and seeing she was telling the truth.
“No, it’s a one-time healing charm. When I heard about your crash, I grabbed two and gated here.”
“You’ve been to this hospital before?” I asked her, looking around at the modern facility, most of it painted stark white, with white drop ceilings. It seemed like a cold place.
“Yes, but that isn’t the issue. We need to talk, we need to move you and we don’t have a whole lot of… what happened here?”
Her fingers trailed down a long scar that started under my left arm and wrapped around almost to my spine. It tickled and sent shivers running through my body. I tried to pull my shirt on quickly, before I even attempted to answer her. Something about the intimacy of the touch had set my nerve endings on fire and the last thing I wanted to happen was—
“Want a hand with that?” Cindy asked from the doorway, not sounding amused.
“Sure,” I said softly, suddenly caught between two people who seemed to be living embodiments of a ready to erupt volcano.
“That one he got by crashing his quad into some barbed wire,” Cindy said.
“The puckered one over your left collarbone?” she asked, using her nail to point out the spot.
“Was riding a horse through some thick stuff and got poked with a stick. There’s a reason why you’re not supposed to be a big game guide and wear a Nirvana t-shirt in the bush.”
“Looks like a gunshot to me,” Cindy said moving closer to the point where I had to turn to keep both ladies in focus as they circled me on the hospital floor.
“What about this one?” she asked, pointing to a square-ish one over my ribs.
“Never told me that story,” Cindy said and pulled the shirt down, taking the strain off my left shoulder. It seemed to be stuck in set concrete from the bruising from the seatbelt.
For once, I felt objectified the way ladies complain they sometimes do. It was nothing sexual, actually it was more like being a bug that was being microscopically examined.
“I think that one was when I was hunting,” I told them.
“I assume you’re here to talk to Tom again about whatever it was you were asking him last time?” Cindy asked.
“Yes,” Vivian said, finding my boots and dropping them on the bed next to where I was standing. “He tells me you’re giving him a ride back to his place?”
Cindy nodded, her face set. She wasn’t angry at me, and she didn’t appear to be reacting to Vivian’s presence. Something else was bugging her. “I need to talk to him some more about the crash that got him stuck here. Can you take a rain check?”
I tucked the gems into my jeans pocket and slid off the end of the bed and started the painful work of getting my boots on and just listened.
“Sure. I work a couple minutes away from Salt Lake City, so there’s no rush.” The last bit was said with a trace of irony that only I would get. “Thanks, Tom, call me as soon as you can, please? I need you to go over a photo lineup as soon as you’re healthy, and I’m glad you came out relatively unscathed. I figured if you were on death’s door I wanted to go on record saying I got all the information I could. I’m glad to see you recovering so fast.”
“Thank you, Agent Sparks,” I said as gravely as I could.
My head was spinning. She urgently needed to talk to me about the assassin and the situation and she was letting Cindy get in the way. I halfway thought about gating, but knew I would kill what little bit of friendship I had left with Cindy if I just bailed on her. She wouldn’t understand, and Vivian already had seen or heard about how much a mundane like Cindy had learned, through fault of my own. I was getting sloppy. I’d spent decades not making a mistake, and had decided to semi retire from running and hiding. I now had a one-man wolf pack and a fairy that…
“He called her a traitor,” I whispered to myself as Vivian walked out the door.
“What’s that?” Cindy asked.
“Talking to myself. Did you hear from JJ?” I asked, fishing for information.
“Yeah, he said some wolves were chasing deer and you hit a couple, went off-roading and hit a stump.”
“Pretty much,” I told her, “but then I tried to put one of them down. Must not have been as hurt as I thought - or my aim was off.”
“There was blood on the hillside,” she said, “not exactly where you were. Is that what you’re talking about?”
Vassago’s blood.
“Must be. Maybe I did hit it. Want to help me track it?” I asked her.
She let out a snort and then looked me in the eyes. I blinked first, to prevent a gaze, but she grabbed my chin and looked at me again.
“You’re crazy, and I’m sorry. I never should have gotten so pushy with you yesterday.” She kissed me on the forehead and turned towards the door. “Oh, and you need a shower. You stink.”
JJ started down the hill after Cindy dropped me off at the cabin, and I waved to him. I heard a pop and saw a flash of purple smoke ahead of me and Rose appeared.
“Hey boss,” Rose said.
“Hey short stuff,” I replied, grinning.
“Tom!” JJ said running up, once again wearing shorts, though this time it was a pair of khaki shorts and nothing else, despite the chill in the air.
“Hey kid. You done good, both of y’all. You saved me. Thank you.”
“Hey, that’s what a pack is for, am I right?” JJ said.
“You are. Did Carl’s pack give you any grief?”
“No, they understood. Just told me to call them next time I decided to play Robin to your Batman.”
“You got their number?” I asked him.
“I do now, I just need a cell phone. By the way, yours was ringing off the hook. It’s on the car charger, it was almost dead.”
I nodded and went to the beat up Jeep. The front grill had been dented, but the heavy brush guard had done its job. I didn’t crawl under, but I was willing to bet the reinforced skid plate I’d installed under the motor had done its job and that was fine as well. I reached in through the missing side window and pulled my phone out and pocketed it.
“Want some company?” JJ asked as I headed back towards the cabin.
“If you want,” I told him, “but I’m probably going to sleep for a day or two.”
“It’s not that. I didn’t want to sound like I don’t care, but there’s an elk uphill I scented half an hour ago and I haven’t hunted… it’s something we sometimes need to—”
“Go ahead,” I said with a grin. “Save me a little for steaks, would you?”
He grinned and took off at a lope, towards his shack. The roof was done and I could barely make out the features of the soffit, because despite the mountain side being littered with short shrubs and trees, the unfinished wood seemed to glow against the backdrop of the greenery.
“How bad was it, boss?” Rose asked.
“Not bad. We talked. She apologized for kissing me.”
“And you let her?” Rose asked.
“Wasn’t I supposed to?”
“Romeo, you are not. Let’s get inside and then I want you to fill me in on everything. Oh, and just so you know, you’re still a dumbass.”
Rose told me how she’d gone back to the cabin with JJ when she’d heard that Cindy was going to need to talk to him. Once again, she was providing my alibis, had gone for help… yet Vassago had called her a traitor and she hadn’t denied it. Who did she betray, and why? I remembered sitting on the mountain side, leaning into Cindy, and the ambulance pulling up, but the rest of it was fuzzy. I had s
lept some, but in the haze of pain and a concussion, I had big gaps I couldn’t remember until after we’d got to the hospital.
“Did Cindy find the knife Vassago dropped?” I asked her.
“No, I did, I stashed it under the seat in the Jeep, along with the pistol,” Rose told me. “Want me to get it before you close the vault up?”
I paused and then nodded. She poofed and was back a few seconds later. The dagger looked like it was twice the length of her body and should probably outweigh her by an order of magnitude, yet she lifted it easily. She carefully flew over, past me towards my tool bench. I turned and made sure the bunker went into lockdown and thought of JJ and his hunt. Since joining me, he was the one who was rarely around. I kind of understood it in a way. He was a loner, a rogue. I was sort of the same way, though my reasoning was more because of my paranoia and a lifetime of running from the Council of Mages.
Now I was… cordial with them? I shivered at the memory of Vivian’s touch. I’d spent most of my life avoiding any personal entanglements and now one woman wanted to talk to me because of my past and the other… I shut down that train of thought and walked over to the work station. I turned on the magnifying lamp combo on and directed the harsh white light on the knife. Rose stood on the wooden section of the table. The Fae didn’t like iron. It hurt most of them and I never really knew if it did Rose or not. She’d carried the dagger in by the handle, which made sense; it was double edged. But she’d landed on the wooden section I used when I didn’t want metal on metal to scrape. I’d ask her about that later.
Under the light and magnification, I saw the knife was old. Really old. The metal seemed to have a wave pattern right in the blade.
“Damascus?” Rose asked.
“I think so,” I told her and then walked over to the jeweler setup I kept on the left and got a jeweler’s loop. I slid back in and examined the knife and used the extra magnification. With the naked eye, it looked smooth, as all straight edged blades are, but then—
I burped and the nausea hit me again. I had been so intent on getting in and then on everything else, I’d forgotten how bad of a beating I’d taken in the Jeep. I put the knife down and reached in my pocket. I took out the greenish colored gemstone and searched the futures where I activated it and its effects. I was surprised to see it wasn’t a gate trap and that it would actually do what Vivian had said it would. I knew I had done that once already, but you’re only paranoid if somebody really is out to get you, and if time had proven anything to me, somebody was out to get me.
“Rose, can you get these stitches out of my temple? I’m afraid I can’t do that myself easily.”
“Uh… isn’t that what’s holding your skin together?” she asked, flying into the air above the magnifier.
“Yup, but this is a healing charm. I need the stitches out or they become a permanent part of me.”
“Right,” she said and flew closer.
I closed my eye as she worked and I could feel the wind from her wings flapping and the warm touch of her microscopic hands. Then a ticklish tugging sensation.
“Hand out,” she said.
Neatly cut black stitches started falling into my palm. She flitted around my head like a large moth. A flying five inch tall, drop dead gorgeous fairy. All fae were beautiful in their own way, but I could make out Rose’s face as she concentrated on cutting with a tiny dagger, and she was the kind of beautiful that sculptures were made out of. Her short brown hair, seen this close, seemed to be cut in a page boy style and her dress looked like it was made out of tailored leaves. It wasn’t green this time, but it was more of a blending of different earth hues.
“I can’t get the last one, can you feel it by the knot and pull it?” she asked me.
“No,” I said fumbling, “the blood trickling down…”
“That’s why you need stitches, dumbass… hold on,” then she moved and put both feet on my temple.
I opened my eye and looked and snorted in laughter just as she launched herself backwards, a bloody stitch in her hand.
“Thank….” I busted up into laughs as I reached under the table and threw away the stitches.
“What?” Rose asked, flying down and dropping the stitch she finally wrenched out.
“Fairies wear boots…” I said snickering.
“Of course, we don’t!” she snarked, looking down at her sparkling, bedazzled heels.
“And underwear…”
“Are you twelve? Looking up the leaves of a fairy? I ought to shrink your—”
“Sorry, the old Black Sabbath song… never mind.”
I pressed the gemstone against my forehead and activated it. For some reason, I felt that curious tickling sensation again just as the gemstone made an audible popping sound, interrupting the tirade. Slowly, the aches and pains left my body and, after a couple moments, Rose whistled and put a hand up to her chin, looking.
“Wipe the blood away and I think you’re all done.”
I stood up, and the dizziness was gone, but I was suddenly tired. I walked over to my cot on the other side of the room.
“Rose, can you turn off that magnifier for me?”
“So now I’m your lab assistant too? After you look up my skirt and make fun of me?”
“It’s an old Black Sabbath Song. Not the underwear part, but the boots part. No, I’m exhausted all of a sudden.”
“You just got out of bed!”
“Yeah, but that healing charm still runs on my own energy and will. It healed everything I had enough power to heal,” I said, and pulled my shirt off.
“Boss, I know that,” she said, killing the light and flying over to me, “but you really do need to take a shower. You stink.”
I knew I did, I could smell myself. Still, I was tired. One other time in my life I’d used a healing charm after being badly hurt by a ghoul I’d been sent to hunt in Paraguay. It had almost literally pulled my arm off to beat me to death with it.
The charm had used all the magical will I’d had, and every little bump and bruise and hurt was gone, but the result was feeling like I’d run a marathon and had caught up my breath. Bone weariness. Still, I was mildly surprised that Rose didn’t act more curious about it; it was almost like she’d been around them before. For all I knew, she had been with her former master.
“I will, when I wake up. Hey, short stuff, did the patterns in the damascus look like anything to you?” I asked her, drowsy, fighting to stay awake.
“Hold on a second,” she said and poofed.
She flipped the switch that took the lights off the motion sensor and flew into the bathroom. A second later she came out with a damp cloth and dropped it on my face. Taking a hint, I wiped my head down and then my neck and basically gave my upper body a quick wash down.
“Well, at least now I don’t have to hold my breath near you,” she said.
“Ok, that blade. Damascus.”
“Yes boss, you said that already,” Rose said quietly, probably sensing I was fighting sleep.
Truth was, I was fighting to stay awake.
“The patterns of the Damascus look like they are runes.”
“Why is it everything around you has runes? Do you know how unusual that is in the magic world? It’s a weird field of study, and most mages don’t have time or patience to learn how to use them correctly.”
“It was the one thing I was good at as a kid. The only magic that I could do, before I got my sight,” I told her.
Oddly, I felt like I was at a confessional. I remembered telling Rose that I’d first started drawing runes as wards against intruders, but I hadn’t had enough juice back then to really make them do anything other than work as a first alert system. I laid back and she landed on the pillow next to my head. I closed my eyes and continued talking to her as she asked me a couple of questions in a hushed tone. Anybody could make a rune as long as they could draw them to perfection and push their magic into them, activating them.
I woke up to my phone ringing. Eve
rything was pitch black and I rolled over, feeling hollowed out, hungry and with a raging thirst. I still had my pants on and I reached into my pocket and pulled it out.
“Vivian?” I asked, my voice rusty.
“You sound like shit,” she said.
“Your charm worked,” I told her, sitting up, my legs moving off the bed triggering the motion activated lighting, something Rose must have taken care of while I slept.
“I’m glad to hear that. Hopefully you’re in good shape now. Ready for us to have a conversation?”
“Probably not for a day or two, unless you’re willing to come to my cabin,” I told her truthfully.
“What about the cop?” she asked, after a long hesitation.
“My neighbor,” I told her, rubbing my eyes.
“Mind if I gate in?”
“Let me get awake, put some coffee on and tell the gang. Otherwise they might freak out. Where is that tiny terrorist anyway?” I asked, looking around the shop.
I got up and started walking, flipping on the light switches. I could see at the far end what I had taken as the soft green glow of the monitor’s ready light was in fact Rose, with a book open in front of her.
“I am not a terrorist,” she squeaked.
“Your fairy is gone?”
“No, she wasn’t… never mind. I don’t mind if you gate in. I literally need to shower, shave and get some food in me, so how about you give me a half hour?”
“That’ll be good. See you soon.”
“Want me to tell fur face?” Rose asked, closing the book.
“Yeah,” I told her, “I gotta get ready.”
“You trust her, boss?” Rose asked, “You know, the Council Enforcer?”
“Against my better judgement, I sorta do,” I admitted, and then realized I actually meant it.
Chapter Twelve
JJ was still sleeping off the effects of his hunt, but Rose told me he’d left one whole flank for me to cut into steaks. He’d barely woke up for Rose. I’d learned from my reading that sometimes the Weres would do that. They would go on a large hunt and, if successful, gorge themselves. I’d never seen any of it in action myself and lately was really my first real contact with the Weres of the areas, but my mom, when she’d been alive, had been big on making me learn everything. Like it’d help me someday… which it had.
First Sight: The Rune Sight Chronicles Page 12