“Please lie down, Miss Dawson. I only just completed your healing and—”
I swung my legs off the bed and stood. My left leg twinged painfully, but it held me up. For a second, I was surprised to realize I was in a drafty hospital gown, but I didn’t let that stop me. If this lady wasn’t revealing anything, I’d find the answer myself. I took a wavering step toward the curtains.
They flipped open and Aaron stood in the gap. One glance told me he hadn’t been in a hospital bed. His jacket was gone and his shirt resembled Swiss cheese—black-edged holes everywhere. A dark, bloody stain ran down his front and splattered his jeans. His left arm was wrapped haphazardly in bloodstained gauze.
“Mr. Sinclair—” Healer Austin began while trying to force me back onto the bed.
“Give us a moment, please.”
Nodding, the healer retreated and closed the curtains behind her.
“Where’s Sin?” I demanded.
Aaron walked over and sat on my bed. Bracing his hands on his knees, he bowed his head.
“Aaron?” My voice shook. I wanted to sit beside him, but my limbs weren’t obeying. “Where’s Sin?”
“I couldn’t.” The words were hoarse, stilted. “I couldn’t go after her. I couldn’t leave the students alone. I couldn’t leave you. You were bleeding everywhere. You were unconscious. The wolves were in the trees. I couldn’t leave the students. I couldn’t—”
He broke off, breathing shakily, then he looked up like it took all his willpower to meet my gaze. His eyes shone with anguished tears.
“I couldn’t save her, Tori,” he choked. “I let them take her. I couldn’t stop them.”
My legs trembled. I sat heavily on the mattress beside him. “She—she’s—”
“They’re searching for her,” he whispered, shoulders slumping. “Kai and Ezra and a bunch of others.”
Every part of me shook. I grasped his forearm and squeezed hard. “It’s not your fault, Aaron. You—”
“It’s entirely my fault!” His shout jolted through me. “I took the students out there. I was the only combat mage with twenty-two lives to protect, and I wasn’t enough. I knew that before I went. It was stupid. I was so stupid.”
I leaned over and hugged him tightly.
“It’s all my fault.” He buried his face in my shoulder, arms clamped around me. “All because I couldn’t handle one boring lesson in a classroom.”
I held him tighter, my eyes burning with tears I desperately blinked away. I had failed too. I hadn’t been strong enough, prepared enough. Sin’s terrified face flashed through my mind, my last sight of her. Oh god, Sin.
“What now?” I whispered.
“We wait for word from the search team. There’s nothing else we can do.”
A shrill voice in the back of my head kept howling Sin’s name, but I held back my terror and focused on Aaron. “Are you okay? Do you need a healer? You’re covered in blood.”
“It’s mostly your blood.”
“My—oh. What about the kids? Lily and the others?”
“They’re okay,” he replied heavily. “A few minor injuries. Lily needed her arm healed, but there won’t be any lasting damage.”
“That’s good.” I straightened my hospital gown over my bare legs, wondering what my bitten thigh looked like now. Aside from a dull ache, it felt fine. “What were those things, Aaron? Those giant wolves? Were they fae?”
“They were shifters. Werewolves.”
Werewolves. Even after seven months in the mythic world, some things still shocked me. I’d heard werewolves mentioned before, but I’d still thought of them as fairytale monsters.
My stomach plunged with terror. “I was bitten by a werewolf. Am I going to become one now?”
“No. The healer already tested you for infection. You’re clean. We’ll test again before the full moon, but you should be fine.”
I gulped several times, trying to get my heart back down into my chest where it belonged. More questions piled up in my head, but I couldn’t get any more words out. All I could think of was Sin. Being dragged into the trees. Watching her friends and injured sister disappear. Terrified, hurt, alone. Surrounded by monstrous wolves. No one coming to save her.
Abandoned. Left to be bitten, torn, turned, eaten—
Aaron put his arm around my shoulders and I realized quiet sobs were shuddering through me. He stared at the floor, jaw tight, tears standing in his eyes as he fought for composure. I wanted to be out there, searching for her, and I knew Aaron wanted the same thing, but we were stuck here, too hurt and exhausted to help.
I didn’t know how long we’d been sitting there in silence, lost in guilt and despair, when a noisy clatter reached the infirmary. Loud voices, thudding steps. Aaron and I stood in unison. He strode ahead of me and threw the curtains open. The room was a long rectangle lined with a dozen curtained beds. Half the curtains were drawn, but as the noise grew, Healer Austin and a middle-aged man poked their heads out.
The infirmary door flew open.
Kai was first across the threshold, dressed in his dark gear with swords sheathed at his hip. Right behind him came Ezra—and in his arms was a body wrapped in someone’s coat, slim legs in bloodstained jeans hanging limply. Sin’s teal hair spilled over the dark jacket.
Aaron yanked me aside. Ezra went straight for the nearest bed—mine—and as he laid Sin on the mattress, the two healers crowded in. A third came running, rolling a medical cart in front of her.
Healer Austin pulled the jacket away and scissors flashed as she cut off Sin’s clothes.
“Check her breathing and put her on oxygen,” she barked at the male healer. “Kallie, elevate her legs then insert two large-bore IVs. Quickly now!”
As the man bent over Sin’s face, the youngest healer pushed the cart beside the bed, then snapped the curtains shut, blocking our view.
I inhaled unsteadily. “She’s alive?”
Kai and Ezra turned, noticing me for the first time. Next thing I knew, Kai was crushing me against his protective vest, then he passed me to Ezra and I was engulfed in his arms instead. They must have left for the search without knowing how bad my condition was.
“Sin is alive,” Kai confirmed. “Barely. I don’t know if …”
He glanced at the curtain, his face tight and eyes tormented. My hands closed around fistfuls of Ezra’s shirt—and it squished wetly. I looked down and saw red oozing between my fingers.
I jerked back. “You’re bleeding? Where are you hurt?”
He withdrew swiftly. “Oh shit. Did I get blood on you? It’s not mine. Shifter blood.”
Voices rose from behind the curtain. Healer Austin was shooting off instructions about binding wounds and starting a thaumaturgy frame. Electronic beeping now narrated Sin’s rapid heartbeat.
“Where did you find her?” Aaron demanded. “What happened? Tell me everything.”
Kai began an explanation but I didn’t hear him. My attention was on the dozen mythics crowded in the doorway, all geared for battle. I recognized them as alumni. Some gazed toward the sounds of the ongoing healing with concern, but others watched Aaron—observing his distress with haughty judgment.
I opened my mouth, not sure what I was about to say but absolutely certain it would be rude, when Ezra stepped in front of me. Taking my arm, he caught Aaron’s elbow with his other hand and led us to the far end of the infirmary. Kai exchanged a few brief words with the alumni, and they filed out the door.
Guiding me to the farthest hospital bed, Ezra nudged me onto it. The moment my weight was off my leg, I realized how badly it ached.
Ezra pushed Aaron down too, then took the spot on my other side. We sat in a row on the bed, waiting silently. Kai returned and handed me a sanitizing wipe, which I used to clean the shifter blood off my hands, then he shook out a soft blanket and swung it around my shoulders.
“Where did you find the shifter pack?” Aaron asked as though there’d been no interruption in his conversation with Kai.
“They weren’t far from where they ambushed you,” he replied, perching on the foot of the bed. “They were fighting among themselves—whether over Sin or something else, I don’t know.”
“Did you kill them?”
“Injured a few, but they scattered and we didn’t give chase. Our priority was Sin.”
“How many?”
“We saw five. There might’ve been more.”
Aaron cursed. “Five shifters on the property. How the hell did this happen?”
I pulled my legs up and wrapped the blanket around my bare feet. “What exactly is a shifter?”
“Superficially, they resemble the werewolves of human myth,” Aaron explained. “A person gets infected and turns into an animal on their first full moon. After that, they can transform at almost any time, and the full moon strengthens them. But what makes a shifter into a shifter isn’t what humans think.”
His fingers dug into his knees. I slid a hand out of my blanket and rubbed his arm.
“There’s a type of fae.” He exhaled harshly. “They don’t have corporeal bodies. They’re parasitic spirits, and humans are their hosts. The two most common kinds create shifters and vampires. When a shifter bites a human, its saliva primes them for possession. If there’s a parasitic fae nearby, it’ll try to possess the person.”
I shuddered, feeling horribly unclean. “You’re sure I’m not infected?”
“You’ll be susceptible for a few more days, which is why we’ll test you again. If you were infected, we’d call in a witch to exorcise the fae spirit from your body. You’ll be fine. Lily tested negative too. Mythics almost never get turned.”
“But I’m not a mythic!” I blurted in a panic.
“Mythics don’t get turned because we know about shifters and how to deal with infections. That applies to you too.”
“Oh,” I said weakly. “Right.”
Ezra ran his fingers into his tangled hair. “Aaron, when you fought the shifters earlier, were they … deformed?”
“They had strange wounds, but …”
“Wounds that didn’t bleed, effluvium emanating from them, milky eyes,” Kai listed. “And they were too strong.”
“Shifters are always strong,” Aaron countered.
“We’ve fought shifters before. These were bigger and stronger than I’ve ever seen.” He rubbed his hands together, almost nervously. “I hit one with a current strong enough to kill a bull and the werewolf barely stumbled.”
“Whatever they are, we’ll deal with it.” Aaron’s voice was hoarse again, but not with grief or despair. It was growling fury and the promise of retribution. “We’ll find every one of those beasts and exterminate them.”
Silence fell between the four of us. The healers’ voices rumbled through the infirmary, the words unintelligible. Or maybe I couldn’t understand because my head was slowly spinning, fatigue washing through my limbs like lazy ocean waves.
My brain fizzled. I realized I was slumped against a warm body and vibrations were shivering into my chest. The body was speaking in a low voice.
“This is all my goddamn fault. If Sin doesn’t make it …”
Aaron. I was slumped against Aaron, his arm draped around my waist.
“You always turn into a complete idiot when you come back here,” Kai said with a shocking lack of sympathy.
My eyelids fluttered but refused to open properly. I wanted to tell Kai not to be a jerk but I couldn’t find my way through the haze of exhaustion.
“And you’re a shining example of a perfect son,” Aaron fired back in a hiss. “You couldn’t handle your family at all so you ditched them for mine.”
“And you were delighted to have a buffer between you and your dad,” Kai growled. “But I never led anyone into danger just to prove how—”
“Kai.”
Ezra’s quiet voice silenced the electramage, and my eyelids fluttered again. That was a tone I rarely heard from Ezra—not a quiet, silk-smooth murmur but an unyielding snap of steel.
“Aaron knows he screwed up,” Ezra continued. “He’s not fishing for sympathy and he doesn’t need a lecture. Our job is to help him fix this.”
The other two were silent.
“You’re right,” Kai conceded. “We’ll figure out this shitstorm together.”
“Thanks,” Aaron said, gruff in that “manly emotions” way. His arm briefly tightened around me. “I think she’s asleep.”
I wasn’t, but now seemed like a bad time to reveal that.
Something shifted under my legs and I felt a hand on my knee through the blanket. “She was in bad shape. You got her back here just in time.”
Ezra’s voice, close by. My legs were across his lap. When had that happened?
“Sometimes I think we push her too hard,” Kai murmured. “For all that she avoided training at first, now that we’ve started, she’s giving it everything she’s got, and I can’t …”
“Can’t help but push her even harder,” Aaron finished. “She’s too stubborn to sit on the sidelines. Since we can’t keep her away from danger, all we can do is help her get strong enough to survive.”
Ezra’s hand tightened on my knee. “We can’t lose her.”
My lungs hitched at the quiet determination that had joined the implacable steel in his voice. Strangely, his words echoed the ones I’d uttered to Sin that morning. I can’t lose him.
“You two will need her,” he added more softly.
A heartbeat of silence. It was heavy, aching, layered with things I didn’t understand.
“Ezra,” Aaron whispered. “Don’t …”
He trailed off. No one spoke.
“Have you talked to your father yet?” Kai asked, his tone deliberately neutral.
“Not yet,” Aaron muttered. “I only saw him briefly. He’ll corner me once I’m back at the manor.”
Footsteps clacked against the floor and Aaron’s arm tensed around me. I dragged my weary eyes open as Healer Austin stepped into the curtained room, her scrubs splattered with dried blood. She pulled her glasses off, wearily wiped the oversized lenses with a tissue, then slid them back on.
“She made it through the healing. The danger has passed.”
All four of us let out heaving sighs. I pushed off Aaron and sat up straight.
“Permanent damage?” he asked tersely.
“Some scarring. With careful treatment over the next twelve hours, she shouldn’t develop a limp.” Healer Austin hesitated. “I just completed the test for were-fae infection.”
A chill ran across my skin.
The healer settled her bleak stare on Aaron. “Tell your father he needs to summon a witch immediately.”
Chapter Eleven
“If I have to drink one more revolting potion, I’m going to steal a car and drive back home.”
I grinned at Sin. “Will you stowaway on the ferry too? Also, you’ll drink the potions if I have to pour them down your throat.”
She laughed, the angry red lines on the side of her jaw stretching. Healer Austin had promised those cuts wouldn’t scar, but some of her other injuries … those would scar.
“That’s the Tori I know and love,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Thank you for not treating me like I’ve turned to glass. Aaron has been fussing all evening.”
Pink suffused her pale cheeks. Aaron, Kai, and Ezra stood twenty feet away—where I’d banished them after Aaron had adjusted the blanket around Sin’s shoulders three times in ten minutes. We were all beyond relieved that she was alive, but I had to draw the line somewhere.
Scattered around the three mages were a dozen academy alumni. I recognized more faces now—the trio of assholes who’d insulted Aaron yesterday, two mythics from Aaron’s morning run, and four combat mages who’d helped find Sin. Three of them had been looking at Aaron all judgy-judgy in the infirmary.
Yes, I was absolutely making a mental list of the jerks in case I got an excuse to punch them later. Though, from what I’d seen so far, I�
�d be karmically safe punching any of the alumni. They all seemed like jerks.
Behind the mages, a stone retaining wall rose six feet, creating an elevated perch from which Tobias and Valerie were observing. Cast into silhouette by the warm lights of the house, the two Sinclair mages seemed regal and mysterious. I wondered if I’d look that cool if I went and stood with them.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked Sin, nodding toward the upcoming spectacle. I didn’t know whether it would be a spectacle, but I was kind of hoping.
At the edge of the sunken garden where we waited, our professional exorcist was setting up for the ritual that would take place at midnight. The woman was, according to Tobias, the best of the best. No mere witch was enough for the Sinclair patriarch.
Instead, he’d called in a renowned druidess.
I watched her curiously, searching for any similarities to the only other druid I’d met. She was tall and thin, in her mid-thirties, with ash-brown hair that flowed down to her butt. I couldn’t see any tattoos, but maybe that was a dark-druids-only thing.
Her fae familiar fascinated me. All I could see was a weird shimmer, roughly the size of a person, that reminded me of the way light refracted through water. The shimmer trailed after the druidess, never more than a few feet away.
My thoughts drifted to Hoshi. I’d given her a vacation while I was away from home. She could find me anytime she wanted, but she was off doing her own thing. Who knew what that thing was. Despite spending months with the fae, I had no clue what the life of a sylph was like. Communicating through shared mental images was limiting.
The druidess, one Josephine Pisk, had drawn a large circle, added various ingredients around its perimeter, and lit a fire at its center. As smoke curled into the still night air, she tossed a handful of leaves into the flames. The smoke twirled into corkscrews. Neat.
She stepped out of the circle and approached us, her long skirt swishing. Her shimmery familiar followed.
“We’ll begin in a few minutes,” she said as she joined us. “Do you have any questions, Sin?”
“Do I have to do anything?”
“Nope. Just sit in the circle. It will take about …” She trailed off, eyes narrowing. Her stare lost focus, then she gave her head a tiny shake. “Five minutes and I’ll be able to confirm that you’re fae-free.”
The Alchemist and an Amaretto: The Guild Codex: Spellbound / Five Page 9