Chapter 20 #2
The first president of the United States had not been at all pleased, and Ward had quickly let him go, but I’d personally taken a lot of satisfaction from his use of the phrase ridiculous, raucous cacophony.
I wasn’t convinced that we’d actually had to summon George Washington—Hart had more than once, in his days at Beyond the Veil—suggested to Ward that he just make up the responses to some of the stupider requests we got, but Ward maintained that he would do the job he was paid to do, and, tonight, that apparently included George Washington.
And Prince. And Michael Jackson, although to both of our surprise, those two had actually stuck around, at least for a while.
I hadn’t gotten a glimpse of either in about an hour, but still.
It had gotten dark not long after we’d finished setting up, and the party was illuminated mostly by what had to be thousands of strings of café lights, white and orange and purple, LED luminaria, and a battery-powered lantern that we had set up on Ward’s table.
“Rayn!”
I leaned over the table, trying to get my ear closer to Ward’s mouth so that I could at least hear what he had to say without him having to shout even louder.
All of us were going to be hoarse the next day, which wasn’t ideal, given that it was Halloween weekend, and we were working every day from now all the way through to the morning of November 2.
I made a mental note to buy lozenges from CVS on my way home, if I happened to pass one of the twenty-four hour ones.
“Yes?” I yelled back.
Ward grimaced. “Fuck, it’s loud.” At least, that’s what I thought he said.
I nodded my agreement.
“Can you go back to the truck?” he yelled at me. “We’re running out of crystal pendants and sage.”
These were some of the various party favors—well, we thought of them as party favors—that we’d put together for people to take. Tea lights, bundles of sage, bundles of oak and walnut twigs, and crystals wrapped in wire to thread on cords. The crystals were the most popular.
We had limited space under the table, so we’d only brought out one of the bins, which had forced Vi and I to repack half the favors in each—distributed more or less evenly across the types.
I lifted the edge of the tablecloth to grab one of the canvas tote bags we’d also used to bring in supplies, then headed back to where I’d parked the truck.
Thankfully, it was away from both the protest and the DJ, so I felt like I could almost start to think as I pushed my way through the thinning crowd.
And then I felt a shift—in both the dead and the living.
The sound came first, and then I felt a strange kind of pressure, like I was all of a sudden being pushed underwater. It felt hard to move, but I turned, then ran back the way I’d come.
I heard the revving of an engine, the squeal of tires, another rev, then people around me surged in a sudden wave, screaming drowning out the music as the two waves of sound collided and clashed around me. And then the pressure stopped being metaphysical as bodies slammed into me, pushing, shoving.
The engine was louder. So were the screams.
Another engine, then the sound of crunching metal.
More screams.
The very distinctive coppery scent of blood overlaid with the sour smells of sweat and fear.
Someone shoved me, and I stumbled, knowing, even as my elbow cracked against the pavement, that being on the ground in a crush of people was the last place I wanted to be.
For some reason, though, people were moving away from where I was.
Look out!!
I don’t know who she was, but the dead woman kept me from becoming like her.
I turned, and saw the bumper of a car coming at me. Five, maybe six feet away.
I knew exactly what would happen. I’d been inside those thoughts four times too many.
I didn’t think. I just threw magic directly at the driver. No. You have no right.
The car kept coming, and I reacted, my hand held up as though I could physically stop the car from continuing on its trajectory.
My panic essentially threw the dead in the path of the car, and it veered off to the side, away from the scrambling mass of humanity and into a cement planter.
Across what looked like a battlefield of people, some crawling, some lying on the ground moaning or screaming or sobbing, and some far, far too still.
I dragged myself back to my feet, my eyes scanning what must have been the path of a second vehicle.
Headed toward where Ward and Violette were set up.
I ran.
“Rayn, I’m fine,” my boss said for about the fourth time.
I crossed my arms across my chest. “You are not,” I replied, trying to ignore the part of my mind telling me that I was acting as ridiculously overprotective as Raj.
Ward glared at me. The expression was made much less effective in its severity by the fact that he was holding a gauze pad to his forehead.
Vi sniffled.
She was actually fine, because she had functional legs that could run—and Ward had (of course he had) told her to or he’d fire her—and my boss had managed to protect himself with magic enough that he’d been pushed to the side rather than run over, but his chair had flipped, with him in it, and in addition to the cut on his head, he had a split lip and nasty road-rash down one arm.
His puffy-sleeved shirt, needless to say, was ruined.
The leather pants had protected his hips and legs from scrapes, although he kept rubbing at them, so they were clearly causing him pain.
The chair was trashed.
Vi felt horrible for having run, despite the fact that neither Ward nor I was angry at her for it.
I was also not fine, but I wasn’t going to point that out.
I’d landed on my formerly-broken arm, and the pain was telling me that something might be broken again. I was trying to hold it tight against my body without telegraphing the fact that I was protecting it.
Raj was going to kill me, but only if he beat Mason to it.
“Rayn—” Violette half-sobbed it out.
I looked over at her.
She pointed at my arm.
“I fell on it,” I replied. “It will heal.”
“It’s bleeding,” she said.
I nodded. “Yes.”
Ward glared up at me from the folding chair someone had brought over for him, given that his chair was missing a wheel and bent funny, and therefore would not have been usable even as a seat. “I’ll go to the hospital if you go,” he said to me.
I clenched my teeth together. I didn’t want to go to the hospital, but I also knew that I probably should.
“Damn it,” I muttered.
Ward’s eyebrows rose. I don’t swear much.
“Mason’s is not going to be happy with me,” I told him.
“I’d be more worried about Raj, if I were you,” he replied.
I sighed. “I know.”
It was almost four hours later before the police released us to be taken to the hospital after taking our statements. We were officially an hour late leaving the gig.
It was going to be at least several more before we got out of here.
“I texted Mason,” Ward informed me. I’d convinced a nurse to let me be treated from the chair beside Ward’s bed.
As the ER had been all-but-overwhelmed by more severe casualties, they hadn’t really tried to convince me otherwise.
Ward had a head injury—although they were pretty sure he didn’t have a concussion, head injuries were riskier.
He’d had five stitches, and Vi, who had followed us to the ER in Mason’s Tacoma, had joked that we would end up with matching scars when she’d stopped freaking out quite so much.
She’d disappeared to go find us something resembling a snack.
“What did he say?” I asked Ward.
He huffed out a sigh. “More or less what you’d expect.”
“That he’s going to strangle me?” I asked.
Ward rolled his grey eyes. “No,” he replied. “He asked what stupid thing I’d done to have that happen.”
“Did you tell him?”
“I told him I’d explain when I got home.” He grimaced, clearly not looking forward to that conversation.
I sympathized, since I knew Raj really wasn’t going to be happy with me, either.
Not that we’d done anything wrong, specifically, but because we’d insisted on keeping the gig even though we knew there would be a protest. Even though protestors had already thrown things at Mason’s truck and a brick through a window and into my skull.
We both looked up sharply when the curtain was pushed back with a good deal more force than was strictly necessary.
“What the fuck happened?” Raj demanded.
“Hello, Agent Parikh,” Ward replied mildly. “Yes, we’re both fine. How was your evening?”
I thought I understood what he was doing—trying to diffuse Raj’s anger and remind him about what was actually important, namely, that we weren’t badly injured.
Ward’s stitches would heal, and they’d given him the dissolving kind, so he wouldn’t need to come back to have them removed. Given what had happened, he was unbelievably lucky.
I would also heal, but the fact that I’d fallen on my weak arm was pretty bad—I’d refractured my arm in multiple places, although it wasn’t broken badly enough that I’d need surgery. It did mean that I was once again sporting a plaster cast that Vi had already drawn a little bat on.
Raj’s eyes were alarmingly gold as he studied me. “What. The. Hell. Happened,” he repeated, although it didn’t actually sound like a question.
I leaned back in my chair and scowled up at him, annoyed. “You know what happened,” I retorted, because I was pretty sure he did. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”
He might have growled at me, but ERs are noisy, so I wasn’t completely sure. “How close were you to it?” he asked.
I met his gaze. “Closer than I wanted to be,” I replied.
“But I broke my arm when I fell in the rush of the crowd.” I didn’t mention the fact that I’d essentially thrown the dead at the car in order to redirect it.
I’d also thrown a lot of death magic at it without really paying attention to how much I’d cast.
I didn’t ask about the welfare of the drivers.
I didn’t dare.
Raj looked over at Ward. “You were together?” he asked.