I watched him for as long as I could, but once the debris started flying my way I dodged sideways, behind the heavy door of the freezer. I hit the ground and my chest and side screamed at me. I watched him run past me into the freezer, hit the wall and bounce off, then heard the crashing of a side of beef and cartons of God knows what hitting the floor. I kicked the freezer door and it swung closed. I wrenched myself up and yanked the pin off a shelf nearby and plunged it into the lock.
I took two steps back and fell down, breathing a sigh of relief. Everything still hurt, but at least that idiot was contained where he couldn’t do any harm—
That thought lasted less than the second it took for the door to the freezer to come exploding off its hinges. It flew through the air above me, skipping across my left shoulder and leaving a gash over an inch deep. I was pretty sure it broke my collarbone, but it was hard to tell among all the other agonies.
“Nice try.” Clary sauntered over to me as I squirmed on the floor. I heard a hissing that I thought was in my head until I realized that the idiot had severed the gas line to the stove when he charged through. “Ain’t nothin’ can hold me.”
“I think you’ve confused ‘can’ with ‘want’,” I said through gritted teeth. “For example, a woman ‘can’ hold you, but none of them ‘want’ to—”
He grabbed me in a clawlike hold around the neck and picked me up in a manner that reminded me of the way Wolfe had manhandled me, beaten me, abused me. Clary’s piggy eyes leered at me from behind his smug smile and I hated him, wanted to crush him, but now I couldn’t breathe.
The eyes.
I stared down at him. Sure enough, Wolfe’s voice was right—his skin was metal but his eyes were the same white as always, the blood vessels visible on the sides.
My fingers lanced out and I stabbed him with my thumb right in the socket. I did not hesitate nor pull my strike and he screamed in uncontrolled misery. I fell to the ground, unable to catch myself. A lancing pain ran up my entire upper body after the impact, and I floundered on the floor, holding onto my sides.
“YOU BITCH!” Clary stomped and I bounced a few inches into the air before landing again. It hurt more. “YOU TOOK OUT MY EYE!”
“Honestly, it wasn’t one of your best attributes,” I muttered. “Not that you have any good ones.” I managed to get to my hands and knees and looked for something to use as a weapon since it had become obvious that he was unlikely to present me with an opportunity to stab out his other eye. There was a ringing in my ears that went along with the hissing. I saw a fire extinguisher and it dawned on me that it was probably a better choice than anything else. I grabbed it and crawled along on my hands and knees, trying to avoid his blind rage behind me.
I had reached the door when he finally realized I wasn’t near him anymore. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”
I used a countertop to pull myself up and turn back to him. “Me? I think I’ll go for a quiet drink somewhere. Care to join me?”
He had started towards me but stopped, his head snapping back, his jaw opening slightly. “Really?”
I grimaced. “No. Not really. I’m going to get medical treatment. You? You can burn in hell. Literally.”
He stomped his foot again and his jaw made a scraping noise as he ground his teeth together. “Damn you, girl! What am I supposed to do with one eye?”
“You could be huge in the kingdom of the blind.” I reached back and flung the fire extinguisher with all my much-vaunted metahuman strength.
And it missed him.
He smiled as it sailed by. “You missed—”
It hit the side of the metal countertop, hard, and sparked. I had the intense satisfaction of seeing him look back, confused, before the fireball blew me out of the room.
Chapter 14
“You!” I awoke to the sound of Dr. Perugini’s less-than-dulcet tones. I stared up at her when my eyes opened. Her dark complexion was flushed, her eyes on fire as she glared down at me in the hospital bed. I took in the medical bay around me and saw Clary in the bed next to me, a bandage over his eye. Scott Byerly was across the way, Kat at his side, casting the occasional furtive glance at me.
The doctor poked her thin index finger in my face. “You keep causing me so many problems!” She let out a string of curses in her native Italian. “I used to have a nice, peaceful life! Since you get here I have nothing but bodies all the time! Before, I work on my novel and clean my instruments. Since you show up, all I do is fix hurt people!”
I coughed and tried to sit up. “Your job description includes that, I believe.” Her eyes blazed and she pulled her finger out of my face and grabbed a tongue depressor out of her jacket pocket. Without a word she poked me in the side. “OW!” She did it again. “OW OW! What the hell?! Were you absent the day you were supposed to take the Hippocratic Oath?” My fingers found my wounded side where she had poked me. “Pretty sure it includes something about not doing harm.”
“Not doing harm?” She thrust the tongue depressor in my face and wagged it at me. “You are a fine one to talk! All you do is harm—to yourself and others! All I do is clean up your messes! You are a menace!” The way she said it made me chuckle, which did not improve her mood. She whirled and marched away from me, back to her office. She slammed the door and dropped the blinds, giving me one last glower before her face disappeared.
“You awake, girl?” Clary’s stupid drawl drew my attention to him. He was laying on his back one bed over, a bandage over his eye.
“No, I’m talking in my sleep.” I tilted my head to look at him. “What do you want?”
“That was a cheap shot, blowing me out the back of the building. Hurt a lot too, when I woke up.” He blinked with his one good eye.
“Oh, yeah?” I adopted a disinterested tone. “I’m so not sorry.” It took a minute for him to register what I’d said.
“Yeah, well, I’m not sorry I busted your guts.” He guffawed. “That was the best tussle I’ve had in a long time. Cojones. Girl, you got ‘em.”
“Actually, I don’t.” I turned away from him and stared straight up. “But it doesn’t surprise me that you wouldn’t know that about women.”
He looked at me, blank. “That was a good fight, you hear me? That was good.” He put his hands behind his head and leaned back and smiled like he’d just won a prize.
I was about to tell him just how dumb I thought he was when the door clicked open. “I can assure both of you that what you did in the cafeteria was not good.” Ariadne stood silhouetted in the entry to the medical bay, a paper in her hand and a fury in her eyes that was only a couple degrees shy of what I’d seen from Dr. Perugini. “Thirteen people with minor injuries, Byerly—” she seemed to be flustered, searching for a word, “—soul drained or death touched or whatever, Clary lost an eye, Sienna with a host of broken bones and severe blood loss, and OH, let’s not forget! Over a million dollars in damage to the cafeteria!”
She made it across the medical bay and slapped the folder in her hand down on Clary’s tray. “She’s not even eighteen, Clary! Did it not even occur to you that she might have made a rash decision—a mistake—in attacking Byerly?”
“Well, no,” the big man said. “She was draining him pretty hard. I just wanted to put her down, you know—”
“Rhetorical question, Clary!” She thumped her hand on the tray, stunning him into silence. “Try to pretend you’ve never assaulted anyone before! It’s not your job to break up a cafeteria altercation by bludgeoning the offender to death; it’s your job to pursue the dangerous metahumans we send you after.” She pulled back after delivering the last directly to his face, causing him to flinch. “Get it straight. You’re not a four-year-old. Keep your damned hands to yourself and stop looking for a fight everywhere you go.”