Derek covered them and made them sit down with their hands on their heads. I thought about the sick and bleeding Asheville vamps. Here was a treatment that might save them until we figured out how Sabina had healed that guy . . . the vamp . . . the dumb pretty one whose name was totally gone from my exhausted brain. Callan! Yeah. Callan. I texted Leo. “Humans here have antibody to illness. Send to Asheville?”
Instantly he texted back “On the next plane.”
Gotta love modern forms of communication. Then I texted to Adelaide “Got treatment. Will send ASAP.” I closed my phone. And slid down a wall to sit on the floor.
Eli wandered over, his combat face still in place, looking hard and remote. He stood next to me, staring out over the battlefield, and when he spoke, his lips didn’t move, a sotto voce not even vamps could have overheard. “The marine called Cheek Sneak. I caught him taking pics and texting. I took his phone. You want I should give it to Alex?”
“Yeah,” I said, and closed my eyes. Had we finally found our other tattletale? “If you prove he’s been talking to the enemy, tell me first. Not Derek.”
Eli breathed a low laugh through his nose. “Copy that.” He meandered away.
“You’re hurt.”
I opened my eyes and looked at Rick. “So are you,” I said. He was burned and limping, and blood crusted his knuckles as if he’d hit a wall. Or maybe beat in a vamp’s face. Either one sounded like him.
“My were-taint will heal it,” he said, offhand. “But yours is bad.” He knelt, lifted my arm, and I saw that blood coated my sleeve. He peeled back the cut cloth to reveal the injury, three oozing wounds, parallel, made by vamp talons. The lacerations were about two inches across and cut into the deltoid muscle deeply enough that when he pressed it open, a tiny pulse of blood started, rhythmic and steady. A tiny artery had been severed.
“I’ll heal it when I shift,” I murmured.
Rick sat beside me and opened a military med kit on his belt. Inside was a tourniquet, the kind a medic put on a severed limb to stop the bleeding, packages of sterile gauze and alcohol pads and cleanser. Stuff to sew up a wound, black thread and tiny curved needles. A syringe of clear fluid. It was marked MORPHINE.
“You are not sewing me up,” I said.
Rick laughed. “No. I’m not. But I will pack it until we can get out of here.”
“Okay. Sure.”
I watched as he tore away my sleeve and cleaned and bandaged my wound. He tied the gauze snugly and wound cling wrap around my arm. It hurt, but I watched his hands, sure and steady as he worked. I smelled his scent, sweat and blood and cat. When he was done, he raised his eyes to me and smiled, flashing that small crooked bottom tooth. A shiver cut through me, burning and icy.
Rick lifted a hand and touched my burned face. Gently. So gently. I closed my eyes, inhaling him. Wanting him, and knowing that I couldn’t have him without risking contracting the were-taint. “You smell so good,” I whispered.
“I miss you,” he whispered.
“I miss you too,” I said. “This so sucks.”
He chuckled. “Yeah. It does. What’s worse, now I have a job that’s likely to pit us against each other way too often.” And then he was gone, taking his med kit and its little syringe to a soldier we had thought was dead but who was still with us. In agony.
I looked up to find Eli’s gray eyes on me, a strange look on his face, an odd amalgam of something sharper than mere curiosity, more intense than suspicion. And maybe something like longing. It took me by surprise. He studied me and I studied him. And then he turned away.* * *
A bit less than an hour after sunset, Leo arrived in a rented, extra-long stretch limo. With him was Sabina, the outclan priestess, healed of the disease that had taken her down, and three blood-servants chosen for battle experience, more so than beauty. Lounging on the beautiful upholstery was Grégoire, Leo’s secondo heir, dressed in sky blue silk pajamas. Next to him on the long seat were the surprises. Rick introduced his unit—a werewolf stuck in wolf form, and Pea, a juvenile grindylow—and with them was his supervisor at PsyLED. Her name was Soul. She was gorgeous.
Soul could have been anywhere from forty to sixty, the kind of woman who was ageless and sexy and sultry, and made all the men in visual distance perk up and think about taking her to the nearest hotel. She had smooth olive skin and black, flashing eyes and platinum hair, the kind nature gives some formerly black-haired women. It hung down her back in long, supple waves. And she had curves in all the right places. I disliked her on sight.
I stepped back behind the wall and studied her. Soul was wearing some kind of long, floating, diaphanous dress made of layers of silk gauze that brushed her feet. Over it she wore a watered silk coat to her knees. She was wearing a pair of black dancing shoes with straps over the instep that I coveted. Around her neck was a thin gold chain with a solid gold apple depending from it. In Beast sight, she glowed with the heat of magical energies, not witch, not were, but something not human. She was also carrying a staff with a psy-meter mounted on the top. A supernat working for PsyLED. Great. Just freaking ducky.
Soul, the wolf, and Pea went straight to Rick. Leo came straight to me. Instantly I flashed on the forced feeding, the pain and the fury and the helplessness. My hands clenched, but I forced down my reaction, knowing that anything I felt he could read in my body language, or smell drifting from my pores. I took a slow breath and blew it out.
“Report,” Leo said. It sounded like a military command and I was forced to remember that Leo had fought in wars for centuries, Grégoire at his side, as he was now. Or leading the way. Despite his slight build, delicate form, and silk pjs, or perhaps because of it all, Grégoire was a fierce warrior. I’d seen him jump in front of a bound demon armed with nothing but a sword and zeal. Leo was scary in totally different ways. The MOC was just freaky powerful.
“We beat ’em. I guess. But your enemy wasn’t here. Sorry, Leo.”
He lifted one black brow in that elegant and infuriating way he had, and said, “You are bleeding. Humans are dead. Mithrans are dead, and their blood smells of disease. I require details, my Enforcer.”
I sighed. And there it was. The instigating factor of all the crap I was in just now—my claim to be his Enforcer.
And then Leo leaned in, his nose near my collarbone. He sniffed once, delicately, and stood back, his face puzzled. He turned to his second and said, “Something is different.”
Grégoire leaned in as well and sniffed. He said, “Your bonding with your Enforcer has undergone a metamorphosis.”
Oh, crap. They could tell that by my smell?
Grégoire clasped his hands behind his back and walked in a half circle around me like I was a mare he might buy. I narrowed my eyes at him. If I hadn’t been so weak from blood loss, I might’ve socked him. “Interesting,” Grégoire said.
To a blood-servant standing at his back, Leo said, “Bring my injured servant a chair before she falls supine.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
One Punch with a Set of Brass Knucks
I refused the chair. I was feeling stubborn and ornery. I sat, bloody and exhausted, on the floor of the first level, my back to the wall, watching the cleanup. My involvement here was done. The battle between Leo and de Allyon had resulted in the death of humans, attacked by diseased vamps. Two of Derek’s men had sustained life-threatening injuries, Vodka Martini and Vodka Lime Rickey. Even with a good supply of vamp-blood to heal them, they might not make it. Vampira Carta had been bypassed, we had a vamp war on our hands, and I had no idea where de Allyon was. I hated to think that things couldn’t get much worse—because they always could. They always did.