Hunt the Moon

Page 54

“She needs a healer,” Pritkin said harshly, and started for the door.
That was it. “No doctors,” I said again.
And then I flopped over.
“You heard her,” Caleb said, as Pritkin paused, his hand on the knob.
“Damn it, Cassie—”
“I’m just really, really tired,” I told him, wondering why the fake wood paneling behind him was bleeding over into his body space. And then I realized that my eyes were crossing. “Do you have any booze?” I asked Caleb.
“You probably shouldn’t drink,” Pritkin said, looking conflicted.
I thought about that. There was a phrase I was looking for, but my brain was really not cooperating right at the—Oh yeah. “Fuck it,” I said brightly. And then I sat up again, because the antisofa seriously reeked and because Caleb was coming over with a paper cup in his hand.
It was the kind you get out of watercoolers, small and cone-shaped, but it held some really fine whiskey. Really, really fine, I decided, tossing it back, all smooth and peaty.
And then it hit the party going on in my stomach and oh, shit.
“Trash can,” I said thickly.
“What?” Caleb looked at me.
“Trash can!”
Pritkin cursed and grabbed one, just about the time everything I’d eaten that night paid a repeat visit. Whiskey, pizza, milk shake, beer—and a lone, half-dissolved gummy bear, which was a surprise, since I couldn’t actually recall having eaten any. Fun times.
I finally finished, and was rewarded with another little paper cup, only this time filled with water. “Keep it coming,” I said hoarsely as Pritkin held my hair back from my face and Caleb handed him a box of tissues.
Cleanup took a while, since I’d been pretty damn dirty to begin with. During which Pritkin kept bitching about a doctor and I kept saying no, until I got pissed. “You’re not putting your head in a noose when I’m fine,” I croaked. “I’m just tired. For God’s sake!”
He finally shut up, maybe because he realized he was giving me a headache. Or maybe because he had one himself. He looked like nine kinds of hell. He’d had the presence of mind to leave the shredded coat in the car and to toss a blanket around the two of us, which had hidden the fact that he had no shirt and his jeans were acid-washed and not in the fashion sense. His face was drawn and pale, despite the feed, there was dried blood on his chest and his hands shook. And the less said about his hair, the better.
But then, that was always true.
“You need clothes,” Caleb said roughly.
“There are some in my locker,” Pritkin told him. “Two twenty-one. Or there should be. I don’t remember what I—”
“I’ll get them. Stay here.”
Caleb looked at me sharply, why I don’t know. Like I was actually up to shifting us out of there. Or walking out. Or sitting up.
I slumped back against the stinky couch and stared at Pritkin, who stared mutely back. I didn’t know if it was because he’d fed, but his eyes were a little freaky. Almost neon green, bright and burning. And full of some dark emotion I couldn’t read, but could guess at pretty well.
“I volunteered,” I reminded him.
“To be used!” His hand tightened on the sofa cushion, until the knuckles bled white. “He wouldn’t have cared if I’d drained you!”
“He’d have probably preferred it,” I said, staring at that hand. “Save him some trouble.”
“How can you—” He stopped and closed his eyes, and just breathed for a few moments. That wasn’t a good sign; Pritkin was better when he was yelling and stomping around. But maybe he didn’t have the strength right now. I could sympathize.
I moved my hand over the top of his and he immediately pulled back, something close to horror on his face. It seriously pissed me off. “That’s a little hypocritical, don’t you think?”
“It isn’t—” He looked away. “It isn’t you.”
“I know it isn’t me. What? Am I stupid?”
That got an eye blink, and I grabbed his hand again and tugged at him. I was too weak for it to have much effect, but he came anyway, sitting beside me. I held on to the hand, partly to be an ass, but also because, for some reason, it made me feel better. And right then, anything comforting, I’d take without question.
“I’m sorry,” he said, after a moment. His jaw was tight enough that it looked like it hurt. I sighed.
“For what? For saving my life? For almost getting killed in the process? For not dying nobly? What?”
His brow tightened into a familiar frown. “You’re in a mood.”
“Yes. Yes, I am. I have had a day, and I am in a mood. So what are you apologizing for, exactly?”
“For . . . taking it that far. But I didn’t see an alternative. He’d put you under a strong compulsion, and that kind won’t break without—without completion.”
“Completion.” It took my tired brain a few moments to work through that one. And then another moment, because the only answer I was getting didn’t make sense. “Okay, let me get this straight. You’re apologizing for giving me a mind-shattering orgasm?”
Caleb slammed in the door. “I didn’t hear that.”
“Damn straight.”
He had clothes, plain gray sweats and sneakers for Pritkin, and an oversized navy T-shirt for me. “It’s mine,” he told me. “I figured it’d work as a dress on you.”
“Thanks.” At this point, anything was better than the scratchy blanket. “Is there a shower?”
“Yeah. Over by the gym.” He looked at Pritkin. “Gonna wash her back?”
And Pritkin growled—literally. Rabid pit bulls don’t make that kind of noise when going for the jugular, although that seemed to be the plan, since he was out of the seat and lunging for Caleb faster than I could blink. Only to stop when I kept a grip on that hand.
Good idea grabbing it, in hindsight.
“Not the time, Caleb,” I said briefly.
He nodded, looking a little freaked. I guess he hadn’t heard that particular tone before, either. I struggled to my feet.
I’d actually been asking about the shower for Pritkin, who looked like he could use some hot water downtime. But clearly, leaving the two of them together was a no-no. And I was sort of afraid that maybe the couch wasn’t the only thing stinking in the room.
Pritkin threw on the new sweats, which pretty much negated their status as clean, but which meant that I got to keep the whole blanket. I drew it around me until I was pretty sure I wouldn’t shock anybody, and grabbed Caleb’s tee. And then peered out the door.
Thankfully, the halls outside were as deserted as you’d expect at something o’clock in the morning. There wasn’t even a janitor pushing a mop around; just a shadow behind a frosted glass door and a guy doing laps in the gym. Not that it was a gym, per se. Just an area carved out of the huge complex by some plywood partitions, and fitted out with a track, some treadmills and a lot of iron in the form of weights lining the walls.
A Fey would go nuts in here, I thought vaguely, and felt slightly more cheerful.
We followed a line of lockers to the back, where two bathrooms were situated side by side. Pritkin got me a towel and a squeeze bottle of something out of his locker that had no discernable scent but that I assumed was soap. I said thanks and he said nothing at all, and we went our separate ways.
The shower part of the bathroom was, like the rest of the place, extremely utilitarian. I guessed it made sense—until a month ago, the Corps had been based at MAGIC, aka the Metaphysical Alliance for Greater Interspecies Cooperation, aka the supernatural version of the UN. At least it had been, until the war left it a glass slick in the desert. That had forced the Corps to find a new home, and trust them to make it as Spartan as humanly possible.
There were no cubicles—privacy was so damn girly—just an even dozen showerheads and a sloping floor with a drain in the middle. The tile was white and the fixtures were shiny, but only because they were new. I doubted that the shoe warehouse had come equipped with bathrooms this big, so they’d probably been a recent add-on. And yet, despite the newness, the place managed to be really ugly in the tradition of institutional spaces everywhere.
I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed some more, and since the soapy stuff seemed to double pretty well as shampoo, that included tackling my hair. And damned if I didn’t manage to finally soak the green out. Should have asked Pritkin for something before, I thought blearily, resting my head on the water-slick wall.
I felt exhausted, clammy and vaguely nauseous—the same as when I fed Billy a little too much. I wasn’t completely drained; Pritkin had stopped short of that. In fact, Billy had left me feeling worse than this a time or two—with one exception. Feeding Billy had never left me with a burning little knot of guilt under my sternum.
And that’s exactly what this was, too: guilt. Not overwhelming or paralyzing or crushing, but guilt all the same. I’d experienced enough of it in the past to have no trouble identifying it. I just didn’t know what it was doing there.
This wasn’t the first time Pritkin and I had gotten close; it was the second. The first had been about a month ago during the final battle with Apollo. Pritkin had been seriously injured and his incubus abilities had saved him, with a little help from me. Very little, compared with today, but the basic idea had been the same: I’d provided the energy, he’d done the healing, the end.
And it really had been the end. Our relationship had gone back to the usual and I hadn’t even thought that much about it afterward. There had been so much other stuff going on that it had seemed, well, just one of those crazy things. Like almost drowning myself in a bathtub or being chased by a dragon through an office building. Crazy shit like that happened all the time lately, and that’s the folder it had gone into in my brain. If anything, I’d just been grateful it had worked and that we’d both come out of the battle with a whole skin.