Curse the Dawn

Page 69

“You have strange friends,” Pritkin said, finally wrestling my boot off.
I expected to see half the calf gone, judging by the pain. The khakis were soaked red to the knee, and slick streams of brilliant blood cascaded over the flesh of my bare foot. But when he pulled a knife out of my belt and slit the fabric, the actual wound was an ugly gash extending from the knee halfway to the groin.
“It’s a progressive curse,” Pritkin said grimly. “If left untreated, it will literally consume you.”
Consume him, he meant. “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I hesitated. A mage came in the door and I didn’t jump in time—”
“You aren’t battle trained,” Pritkin said, dismissing it with a lot more composure than I’d have shown if the circumstances were reversed.
The wound was deep and bleeding heavily. He tried to hold it closed, causing me to bite the sleeve of his coat to keep from screaming. And it only caused more blood to well up between his fingers, the hot spatter soaking the front of his capris.
He stared at it for a long second, his hands gripping my thigh, and then looked up at me. “We have to switch back.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now! My body can heal this, but you don’t have the necessary knowledge and I don’t have time to teach you!”
“Have you forgotten . . . what’s circling this hotel?” I gasped.
“No.” He licked his lips. “But we have to risk it. You’re losing too much blood.”
I’d have preferred to wait until Billy Joe caught up with us, but that could be a while and I was already cold and shaky. I didn’t think this body had a while. “I’ll push you out,” I panted. “Just . . . don’t panic.”
Pritkin nodded, looking pale but relatively calm. I only hoped that lasted because as close as the Rakshasas were, we wouldn’t have much time if anything went wrong. I closed my eyes and let my head fall back, and the next moment, I was sitting up with Pritkin’s body beneath me.
I put a ghostly arm out and no shields were in evidence. My hand went right up to his chest, and a couple of insubstantial fingers slipped inside his skin. I felt him start at the intrusion, but he didn’t shy away, although I could feel him trembling. I could feel something else, too.
Unlike most ghosts, his spirit was warm and almost solid against my hand. I’d never thought to ask Billy how ghosts feel to each other. But now that I thought about it, the times I’d possessed someone who was still in-house, so to speak, they hadn’t felt like Billy Joe normally did. They’d been a warm, solid presence. Like Pritkin.
I started rummaging around in his chest, trying to get a grip, and he began to look very nervous. “Calm down. I have an idea,” I told him.
“Whatever it is, can you hurry up?”
I nodded. This was either going to work or it wasn’t, and hesitating could be fatal. I gripped his spirit as tight as I could, stepped into my body and thrust him back into his. The whole thing took a couple of seconds, and suddenly, we were home.
He blinked at me blankly for a moment and then winced as the pain hit. “That was it? That’s all it took?”
“I guess,” I said dizzily. The sudden absence of pain made me a little light-headed.
“Why didn’t you just do that before?”
“Because I didn’t know about it before!” I snapped, sticking my head through the ward over the door.
I borrowed the least sparkly thing I could find—a plain white cotton blouse—to rip up for a bandage and ducked back inside. A glance at the monitors showed that the mages had spread out, with a few left in the club to guard the portal and the others doing a systematic search of the street. I wondered how long it would be before they decided to retrace their steps.
“I’m going to owe Dee big-time,” I said, shredding the cotton with the help of Pritkin’s knife. “I just hope this was off the rack.”
He didn’t say anything, and he was sweating and trembling by the time I got a pad secured around his leg. It didn’t look like it was doing much to staunch the flow. It didn’t help that there were other wounds rending his flesh in several places that I hadn’t even noticed; courtesy of the chase, I assumed. But the leg was what had chills running up my arms, making my hands clumsy, churning my stomach.
“Pritkin,” I said carefully. “Why hasn’t the bleeding stopped?”
Perspiration gleamed in the hollow of his throat as he breathed faster and more shallow than usual. But there wasn’t a flicker of emotion in his voice when he spoke. “As soon as you are able, shift back to Jonas. Get him out of here and do not leave his side. You can protect each other until the issue with the Circle is—”
“What do you mean, when I shift back?” I demanded, the cold feeling in my stomach growing exponentially.
“Listen to me; we don’t have much time—”
“Before what?”
“Stop asking questions for once and pay attention. Don’t rely on the vampires to protect you from Saunders. There are too many tricks they don’t know and won’t be able to counter. And tell Jonas . . . tell Jonas he needs to—”
“Stop giving me orders!” I hissed, glaring at him.
That was less than satisfying since I couldn’t see him very well. What little light there was in the room seemed to fall at an angle to him, skirting his edges. I moved in front of him so I could grab his arms, so I could get in his face.
“You said you could heal this. So do it!” He wouldn’t look at me. “Stop the bleeding, Pritkin,” I pleaded, my fingers digging into his arms. “Stop it and I’ll do whatever you want.”
He licked his lips. “My energy level is . . . lower than usual. Healing will take time.”
Yeah. Time he didn’t have. I stared at him in utter disbelief. “You tricked me! You wanted me to switch back because you knew—” I couldn’t even say it.
I stared at him, unable to believe this was happening. That he could just disappear, along with everything rich and strange he’d brought into my life. Vanished, like magic.
“You can’t do this,” he said, finally meeting my eyes. And if I’d had any doubts that he was serious, that look would have dispelled them. “You can’t tear yourself up every time you lose someone. War—”
“Don’t give me some stupid lecture about war when the person we’re talking about losing is you!” I said, surprised by the savagery in my tone. At least my voice didn’t shake.
His face blurred and I tasted salt on my lips. It was warm, warm like Pritkin’s hands coming up and framing my face, his thumbs brushing over my eyelids, soft as his fingers in my hair. “One person is not so important in the scheme of things,” he said, and his voice was gentle, gentle when it never was, and that almost broke me.
But you are important, I thought. And yet he couldn’t see that. In Pritkin’s mind, he was an experiment gone wrong, a child cast out, a man valued by his peers only for his ability to kill the things they feared. Just once, I wished he could see what I did.
“Then neither is this,” I said, leaning in and pressing my mouth to his, the kiss lightened by desperation and weighted down by everything he meant to me.
His bloody fingers tightened on my face, but he kissed me back with a tenderness, a reined-in need that contrasted painfully with his passion in Marsden’s kitchen. There was no spark of electricity this time, no cool breeze rolling up my body, ecstatic and draining, no—
No power loss.
I tore away and stared at him. “Wait. What was . . . You healed earlier—back in Marsden’s kitchen. A scratch on your arm. I saw it!” Pritkin didn’t say anything. “You’re half incubus—you can feed from my power,” I said, slowly catching up. His ability must be spiritual rather than physical, like my power. That was why I could still shift, even in his body.
Like he could still heal.
“You don’t have any power to spare!” he told me.
“I have more than you!” I gripped his arms. “Pritkin, you can use my power to heal—” I stopped because he was wearing an expression that I’d never seen before. It looked a little like terror.
“This is precisely what happened last time!” he said harshly, his eyes skittering to the wall, the monitors, the wastebasket in the corner. Everywhere but my face. “You saw the house. It was even more isolated then, with nothing for miles but fields and water and forest. There was no one to help, no one to hear her scream!”
And it suddenly occurred to me that it wasn’t his own death that had him looking like he wanted to bolt. It was mine. He drew in air, his face strained, and a flush darkened the skin of his neck. “You don’t understand the risk,” he said more calmly.
“Your father tried to kill me. Believe me, I understand.” It had been added to my regular nightmare list, that horrible, sucking, draining sensation that had my flesh wanting to shudder off the bone. But that had been Rosier. Pritkin hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. He’d lost control with his wife because no one had warned him about what might happen. But he knew the risk now.
Which is why he wasn’t going to take it.
It was written in the glint in his eyes, the flare of his nostrils, the jut of his chin. “I can’t lose you!” I told him, feeling defiant and miserable and furious all at once.
“I promise—you won’t. I’ll follow you. But you and Jonas have to—”
“I didn’t want to do this,” I said, cutting through the obvious lie. “But you’re not leaving me a lot of choice. This is my call and I’m making it. Do what you need to heal.”
“Yours?” It was if he’d put all the frustration he felt into a single glare. “How precisely is it yours?”
“Oh. So suddenly I’m not Pythia?”
“That has nothing to do with this!”
“It has everything to do with it! You’re a war mage sworn to my service who thinks he doesn’t have to actually do anything I tell you! And yes,” I said, as he opened his mouth, “I know you have a lot more knowledge and experience, which is why I listen to you most of the time. But you’re wrong about this because you’re too emotional to see that the risk has to be taken. So I’m making the decision—which, since I’m Pythia and it’s my body, is my right.”