“Hey, Alexi.” Zane regarded me somberly as I limped to the altar. “That uh… that looks like it hurts.”
“I don’t want to know.” I zipped up the bottom of the body bag, struggling one-handed to put the unconscious man’s feet back inside. “We need to milk Vanya for everything he’s got. I put a lot of information together tonight… but I can’t explain most of it.”
He stared at me suspiciously, soulfully, and then jerked his shoulders in a restless shrug. “Fine. But we want to know what the fuck we burst in on.”
“I was hoping for something less arcane.” I hobbled to the head of the bodybag and fumbled the zipper it with my better hand. I was shaking so hard that it took more than one try, an attempt which was not aided by Binah, who batted at the zipper as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “We should… ah…”
“What?” Zane frowned.
Tongue-tied, suddenly hot with mingled wonder and confusion, I couldn’t reply. The body bag was opened to chest height, and I’d pushed the plastic back to reveal the most beautiful man I had ever seen.
Chapter 31
Angkor was still deeply unconscious, and in remarkably good condition for someone who had been struck in the head hard enough to knock him out for this length of time. His features were strong, fox-like, the lines of his skull spare, his face somehow both utterly masculine and utterly feminine at the same time. His skin was the color of rich amber; his lips were full, his upturned throat long and gracile. And that was where I got stuck, not because of his beauty, but because of the collar. He had a narrow, seamless glass band welded around his neck. It superficially resembled the hazed glass of the knife the priest had passed to Mason, but it wasn’t as brittle-looking as the dagger. I touched it, and an unpleasant sensation vibrated up through the tips of my fingers. It was magically active.
The only sign of injury was the powdery residue of dried blood – a lot of it. But Angkor had few cuts or bruises, and instead of the smell of filth, all I could smell was flowers. With the smell came a memory. Zarya. Zarya had smelled like this… a scent like mingled jasmine and temple incense, a scent that transfigured to a tactile sensation in the mouth. A deep, bright, vibrant blue scent, holy and inhuman.
“My GOD,” I whispered, still staring down at him. “Is this Angkor? Your mage?”
“Yeah.” Zane was looking between him and me with an odd expression that I couldn’t read. His gaze swept over me, lingering on the bristling shards sticking out from the front of my body, and then down. “Why?”
“I was just wondering.” I flushed as I pushed back some of Angkor’s hair, thick and silky even through gloves, and found the site of a skull fracture. “He’s badly injured… or he was. I was sure I heard one of the byki crack his head against the car.”
Angkor did not stir at our talk of him, though the lump on his head was continuing to shrink slowly as we watched. It was so gradual that you couldn’t see it, but for a man with hands as sensitive as mine, I could feel the tissues shifting slightly when I took the glove off and pressed my bare fingers in around it. He still had a pulse, which I also felt. Slow and steady.
“I can’t carry him,” I said. The admission was embarrassing, the kind of shame that sucked a little more strength out of my already weakened body.
“I’m surprised you can carry yourself. I’ll take him,” Zane said. He made a shooing motion as he advanced, and rolled Angkor’s prone form into his arms with a grunt. This other Phitometrist couldn’t have weighed that much… a hundred and sixty, at most. What I had seen of his body was perfect: lean and long, muscular, broad-shouldered. As Zane slung him up, one of his hands fell from the side of the open body bag. I could only see the highlights and shadows of his fingers in the fading moonlight, but my mouth turned dry. I had to look away, pulse hammering, as Zane swept past and I trailed him with my cat and a deepening sense of confusion and baseless discomfort.
“You… uhh… you have glass sticking out of your chest,” Zane said.
“Please. Really. I don’t want to know.” I was struggling not to stare at my throbbing hand, my throbbing arm, my thigh and abdomen and chest. There was no point looking. “Get me home. I’ll fix it.”
“No, hell no. You need to get to the ER. Can you walk?”
It took a few syrupy moments before I could process what he said, form a reply, and then speak. In light of the argument, I was still curt. “Why would I pay someone ten-thousand dollars for something I could do myself?”
He blanched. “You don’t have insurance?”
“What? You mean like ‘injuries gained during violent criminal acts’ coverage on the Illegal Wizard Plan?” I made a sound of disgust. “Give me your arm and get me to the GOD-damned car.”
Ovar and the men outside were gone: Sent packing, no doubt, by the arrival of three bullet-proof big cats. There were no bodies outside. They hadn’t been killed: they’d fled.
The long road back to the street was agonizing, and by the time I eased into the back seat of Duke’s Buick, every joint and muscle in my body was shrieking and stiff. Duke was half-dressed, pale and shivering as he recovered in the passenger’s side. His arm was pressed in against his ribs. Talya was in the driver’s seat, her hands white-knuckled on the wheel, a sawn-off shotgun lying across her lap.
“You told me not to worry, Rex.” Her voice was high and thin with fear. “But I worried. I worried a lot.”
“Given the circumstances, I’m not complaining.” I was breathing heavily, but as long as the shards didn’t move too much, I wasn’t going to bleed to death. Carefully, I eased into the back seat. “I figured out that the senior management of my old Organization were all tied up in this TVS cult.”
“The cops are going to be all over this tomorrow,” Duke wheezed.
“I doubt it. The cult leader will tell Nicolai what happened, and Nicolai will clean it up.” I was parched, aching for want of water, but there was no way to hurry things. Jenner was stuffing Vanya into the trunk by herself, his cursing punctuated by the smack of her fist into his flesh and the resulting yelps of pain. I heard her close the lid down on him, and then she peeled around the end of the car to get her clothes. She dressed, then took Angkor while Zane did the same. They then carefully got inside, laying the bodybag across their laps.
Now that the battle was over, I was in terrible pain. Wracking, awful pain. With gritted teeth, I eyed the shard buried in the palm of my right hand. The leather had stopped it partway, but there was still half an inch of improvised skewer trapped between the tendons of my index and middle fingers. I couldn’t move them. The glass had to stay until I had antibiotics, painkillers, and the tools to safely stop the bleeding.
“You still alive, Rex?” Jenner glanced over me, then arched an eyebrow.
“Yes.” I tried to sit back, but no matter what I tried, something was inevitably driven deeper into my body.
She licked her lips, suddenly downcast. “You… see any reason that Mason was there with those freaks? Did they have him tied up, or anything?”
“I wish I could say that he’d been captured,” I said. “He was unfettered. The ritual was some kind of initiation for Vanya. He was just standing there, watching it.”
Jenner said nothing for some time. Talya reversed all the way down the drive and turned onto the street, an arm over the back of the driver’s seat and one hand on the wheel. She was gentle enough that I only winced a little.
“That ain’t my old man,” Jenner said, once we were on the street. “That thing I fought. It was wearing his skin, but that ain’t Mason.”