Chapter Thirty-Three
Here,” something hit me.
I was on the chaise in the backyard again, trying to get a little fresh air, and had just closed my eyes for a minute. Or that’s what I’d told myself. But at that, I looked up to see Sophie silhouetted against the sun, and decked out in a red and white striped bikini and some cool sunglasses.
I’d always been told that redheads shouldn’t wear that color, but she loved it in every shade, and it loved her back. But she didn’t seem to feel the same about my wardrobe. I followed her disapproving gaze down to where the dark blue maillot she’d just tossed me lay in my lap.
“You could rock a bikini,” she said. “But that thing… is not cute.”
“I didn’t buy it to be cute,” I said thickly, sitting up some more.
I must have been napping for a while, because I was hot and sticky and my towel was bunched up under my butt. I pulled it free while staring at the water in the pool, glistening under the morning sun. I could really use a swim, but wasn’t sure about logistics.
No way was I hobbling all the way back to the bedroom to change and then back out here again. I’d barely made it the first time, although at least I hadn’t had to be carried today. Progress.
“I bought it for a white-water rafting trip,” I said, “so I didn’t flash everybody whenever a wave hit.”
“Did it work?”
“Don’t know. I never got to go. Work intervened.”
“You work too much,” Jen said, coming up wearing the same yellow swimsuit as yesterday.
She’d exited the pool, where the girls had been floating around while Valko, our resident soccer enthusiast, taught the guys how to play on the wide-open spaces behind the house.
Although with Were reflexes, it looked more like an enthusiastic pinball game.
Luckily, my house was on the edge of the development and backed up to the desert, with even the street in front petering out just down the road, into pebbles, dirt, and scrub.
Even better, my neighbors on one side were snowbirds, who were only in Vegas part of the year, and my neighbor on the other was Mrs. Kovacs, who was eighty-five, hard of hearing, and uninterested in anything but her daily soaps. So the boys could do what they liked.
It was the only reason my house hadn’t been torn to pieces.
Yet.
Jen had picked up a huge bath towel on the way over, which she and Sophie now held in front of me.
“Go ahead,” Sophie said. “Put it on. You need some pool time.”
I eyed the suit longingly. I really wanted that swim, but wasn’t sure I could stay afloat, or even manage to get changed, on my own. I also wasn’t sure I should get anything wet, and realized that I hadn’t checked myself today.
But when I pulled up my nightie, which I was still wearing because jeans were like trying to put on a straitjacket these days, I was surprised.
The bandages I’d been swathed in all week were gone, along with the remaining sutures on the worst wound.
There was only an ugly scar where it had been, and a fine pink line running along the approximate path of the other, so faint as to be almost invisible.
I vaguely recalled the healer stopping by and waking me up yesterday to tend them, but hadn’t realized she’d permanently removed my mummy wrappings.
Cool, I thought, poking the larger scar lightly, and wondering if it would fade any further.
It had been an angry red for days, and was still a raised, vivid reminder of what had almost—
My thoughts cut out, overtaken by a sudden, visceral image of my intestines coiled fat and gray and bloody, lying beside me on the concrete floor at HQ, and I shuddered all over.
Because there had been no almost about it.
Like it hadn’t been just a nightmare that I’d ripped off people’s heads, eaten part of what I found there, and—
“Goddamnit!” Sophie said, as I leaned over the side of the chaise and heaved up bacon and omelet.
“We shouldn’t have pushed,” Jen said. “I knew we shouldn’t!”
“It’s okay,” Sophie said, pulling me into her arms while Jen kept up the towel on her own, hiding us from view. “It’s okay.”
Don’t be kind, I thought desperately. Please don’t be kind! Not with the nightmare images flooding me hard and fast and washing all my training out the window, because I hadn’t been trained for this!
No one had trained for this.
“Is Lia okay?” Aki called from the pool.
“Just getting into a swimsuit,” Jen called back, widening her stance. “Keep your eyes to yourself!”
I didn’t know why I was reacting like this. I’d been fine yesterday, at least mentally, but now I found myself shaking, sickened, and feeling like screaming, some kind of delayed reaction now that my body was healing, I guessed. Maybe because I could finally spare the energy.
But something about Sophie’s touch was helping.
“It’s my Cat,” she whispered against my hair when I said that. “She likes to pretend to be all standoffish and hard to get, but when she likes you, she really likes you. And I think you—and your wolf—are her favorites here.”
Which wolf, I almost said, but bit it back in time. I didn’t want to think about that. I didn’t want to think at all!
And it must have worked, because after a while, the shaking stopped. Fortunately, I didn’t have anything else on my stomach. I lay back against the chaise, panting slightly, and feeling like I’d run a marathon and had a therapy session, all at the same time.
“Cyrus,” I croaked, because if he saw me like this, there would be drama.
“Out front on a call with Sebastian. He said he wanted privacy.”
“You want to go to bed?” Sophie asked, her eyes serious.
I shook my head. That would be worse. Now that I wasn’t half dead, that room held nothing but peace and quiet in which to think, and that was the last thing I wanted.
Here, there was light and laughter and, if I could manage to get into the suit, a cool pool to paddle around in. Or more likely, to hang onto the edge of and try not to drown, but that sounded pretty good, too. Distractions were everywhere, and I could use a few.
“I want to swim,” I croaked.
“Then let me help you,” Sophie said, and somehow, we managed to get me into the suit.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” I told her. “I look like I’ve healed, but I feel…”
“As rough as you look?”
I glanced up at her. “Is it that bad?”
“It’s… pretty bad.”
I felt my mouth twist. “Thanks.”
“We can help,” Jen said, from where she was now using the towel to clean up my mess. “Maybe braid your hair or something?”
“Gotta comb it out first,” Sophie said, her own perfect red locks rippling down her back. “And you better let me do that before you get wet,” she added to me. “Or you’ll have to cut those tangles out.”
“Cyrus should have been doing it!” Jen said indignantly. “If he wouldn’t let us in the bedroom—”
“Guys don’t think about things like that, and anyway, he was too busy being pissed after finding out—” She cut herself off.
“Relax,” I said. “I already know you went to Tartarus.”
“And you know that because… the guys told you?” she asked slowly, exchanging a look with Jen.
“Something like that,” I said, watching the blonde, who had dropped the bundled-up towel onto the other chaise and turned the hose on the remains of my accident.
That wouldn’t fool Cyrus’s nose, but maybe the sun would help. And if not, I fully intended to blame Mrs. Kovacs’ little yappy dog, which was a barf machine. Or maybe it just got so overwhelmed whenever it got loose and came over here that it reacted poorly.
Too bad it was as old in dog years as its owner was in human, and couldn’t remember to stay away from a pack of Weres for more than five minutes.
I was honestly surprised that a coyote hadn’t had it for breakfast yet.
But it seemed to have borrowed a few lives from the neighborhood cats, because it, uh…
“What?” I asked because the girls were looking shifty.
“It’s just… I saw your third there,” Sophie whispered. “In Tartarus.”
“Not saw exactly,” Jen corrected, as if the girls had discussed this.
“No, more like she registered the idea of you,” Sophie said, “and when she shared her vision with me, I saw… well, something. Vague and shimmery, like light reflected off a mirror onto a wall.”
“Are you talking about a spirit?” I asked. Because Weres didn’t leave those, according to the seers whom the Corps occasionally worked with anyway. So we presumably didn’t send them out to explore the depths of Tartarus either!
It seemed my Relic was exhibiting more new abilities.
And demonstrating once again that modern Weres had gotten seriously nerfed.
“I’m… not sure,” Sophie said. “My Cat knows spirits. She talks to them all the time; that’s the world she moves in. But she didn’t know what it was…” she trailed off, looking dissatisfied, and I automatically went into interrogation mode.
“Then tell me what you do know.”
“Maybe we should save this for another time,” she said doubtfully, going to the cooler we kept outside for drinks, because otherwise the poor refrigerator ran constantly with all the thirsty kids pawing through it. “Do you want some water or a Powerade or—”
“I want to know what’s been going on,” I rasped. “Although water would help, too.”
“I’m going to finish cleaning up,” Jen said abruptly. She started to take the towel inside, before I called after her. “If Cyrus smells it—”
“I know. I’m going to do a load of laundry. We need one anyway.”
She disappeared inside, and I turned to Sophie, who had returned with an ice-cold bottle of water and a soda for herself. But when she sat on the edge of the other chaise, it wasn’t to fill me in.
Blue eyes met mine soberly. “You know, you really freaked everybody out the other night, right?”
“Sophie, can we talk about—”
“Later. We need to talk about this. It’s like… Cyrus is the brains around here, but you’re the heart—”
I raised an eyebrow. “Are you calling me stupid?”
She shot me a look. “Maybe obtuse. It seems to be a war mage trait.”
“Meaning?”