Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The motion made my head spin, and I stumbled, caught by the man who’d called me. Detective Nicholas King held my shoulders with both hands. His eyes were wide, and he was panting.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“What happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
“I think I should sit down.” I started to lower myself to the inviting pavement, but Nick held me up.
“You’re going to the hospital,” he said, pulling me away from my apartment.
In the middle of the street, I saw an unmarked car, driver's side door open, lights on, still running. I looked at him and frowned. “Why are you here?”
“A couple of officers saw someone getting kidnapped by werewolves.” He huffed a sigh and narrowed his eyes. “I knew it had to be you.”
“Because I’m so helpless?”
“Because I don’t know anyone else who’s dumb enough to go talk to the SoPa pack about the murder of their alpha,” he said. “C’mon, hospital.”
“Can’t,” I said. “No insurance. Just get me inside. I’ll call someone for a healing spell.”
Pursing his lips, he shook his head. Pointing at me, he said, “Stay. Here.”
A few cars were waiting behind him and one leaned on their horn. He smiled and waved, getting back into his car and pulling into a spot along the curb. I locked my knees to keep steady when he came back.
“You know,” I said. “I think I’m okay. You checked on me, I’m fine.”
“You aren’t going to file a police report, are you.” He kept his voice flat, no question in it. “You’re just going to let them get away with this—”
“Hey,” I said. “Help me inside.”
I let him wrap his arm around my shoulder and pull me close. He smelled ridiculously good, and this close, I could feel the heat from his body seep into mine. I better not be getting a fever from the beating Dieter had given me.
“Careful.” He guided me through the narrow doorway. The elevator was working for once and it groaned as it took us to the right floor.
We managed a slow walk to my door, and my trembling fingers made the keys jangle against each other. Fitting the key in the lock, I opened the door and tried to step away from him, but he kept me with him, his body snug against mine as he guided me to the couch. I groaned as I lowered myself down.
I’d have to call Laurel. She was the only one strong enough to deal with the mess Dieter had made of my body. I couldn’t feel the slow seep of blood into my abdomen anymore, so either my own magic had healed it or I was losing sensation.
Stepping back, Nick rested both hands on his hips for a moment. I looked up at the motion and saw a frown carved between his eyebrows, his eyes narrowed.
With a glance around the apartment, he began clearing a large space, pushing my desk back against the wall, moving my coffee table. Checking my bag to make sure I had most of my stuff back, I glanced at him.
“I get that my room wouldn’t pass a fire inspection, but what are you doing?”
“If you won’t go to a hospital, then I can at least make sure you don’t hire some back-alley witch who will leave you high as a kite and still injured,” Nick said. He surveyed the space he had made and nodded to himself.
Smoothly, he pulled off his jacket and draped it over my desk chair. He unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them up to his elbows. When he pulled his tie loose and then off, I swallowed the saliva pooling in my mouth. My throat felt painfully dry.
Then he took a marker out from his jacket and started drawing on my floor.
“Uh, I do have a security deposit. And I’d prefer to get it back.”
Even as I said it, I shut my eyes for a moment, a wince of anger. I didn’t have a security deposit. All my deposit money had been spent on rent, and even if it hadn’t, I knew Jeffrey Jenkins would find a way to keep every penny.
Rolling his eyes, Nick said, “It’s washable.”
"Okay,” I said doubtfully as he drew a large circle.
The motion was fluid and practiced. He drew an outer circle a few inches away to limit the spell and then drew four circles between the two larger ones, at the four points of the compass to anchor the spellwork.
Inside them, he wrote distinct alchemy symbols.
Shannon, the witch who’d trained me and Laurel, had only taught me witchcraft, and in craftwork there were plenty of different ways to design spells. Written circles were just one of them.
Alchemy was different. It was precise and relied on its own language of spellwork, a mix of medieval symbols and Latin most alchemists memorized before they even used their magic to light a candle.
I’d heard of alchemists who could do spells without writing anything, but it was higher-level stuff because they had to keep the language and symbols clear in their minds, as though they’d written them down.
Nick’s writing was clear and meticulous, even on my laminate flooring. I watched with curiosity as he filled in the gaps between the two smaller circles with even more writing. Not even a single line was out of place.
“You’re pretty good at this,” I noted. “You’ve been practicing long?”
He glanced up at me, squinting, as though trying to read me. “Are you serious?”
I shrugged. “I’ve seen a few alchemists practice, and they weren’t this precise.”
He turned back to his writing and I could see half a smile on his lips. “Yeah, I’ve been practicing a while.”
Bending closer, I tried to read some of it, but my Latin was limited to the basics taught in a few foster-kid after-school programs where alchemist studios would volunteer to get the good PR. I go to school kind of stuff. Whatever he was writing was a lot higher level than eo ad scholam.
He began writing a third circle outside of the larger one, and I hadn’t seen that before. Then a fourth, and finally he bounded it with a last circle. By the time he finished, I was pretty sure even if it was washable, I’d just be leaving a giant alchemy mess when I got evicted.
“Come over here.” His voice seemed lower, somehow more resonant.
“You should get undressed,” he said. “You can leave your underpants on unless they did some damage there.”
I looked down and sighed. Awkwardly, I tried to pull my t-shirt over my head one-handed, and startled when his hand covered mine.
“I’ll help,” he said.
I was aware of how close he was. We were almost the same height, but he had a few pounds of muscle on me. He gripped the bottom of the shirt, and we got it off without too much extra pain.
He hissed when he saw my chest, and it looked bad. Purple stained my rib cage and abdomen, yellow and brown lining the outline of fists and feet. It was a stark reminder I hadn’t been supposed to survive the night.
Nick’s plush lips opened and I could see him start to make another argument for the hospital, but I spoke before he could. “I don’t have an extra twenty thousand dollars for a hospital visit without insurance.”
The floor creaked as he shifted his weight and unbuttoned my jeans.
Over the course of our rocky relationship, I had to admit I’d thought about him unbuttoning my pants before.
Of course, in all of those imaginings, it had been more hurried, and we’d both been thinking about a more pleasurable end to the evening.
Still, I felt myself getting goosebumps as he pulled my pants down, his fingers brushing my thighs as he crouched to help me out of them.
I rested my hands on his shoulders. The sight of his head at my groin was exactly as exciting as I thought it would be.
Luckily, the residual pain and exhaustion was enough to quash any physical arousal.
It was not the time to be perving on the hot, uptight cop, I reminded myself.
I wasn’t even sure why I trusted him to heal me, except he was confident he could do it and I knew he was too by-the-book to offer if he wasn’t sure he’d be more help than harm.
It’d go against the Boy Scout code or something if he didn’t leave me better off than he’d found me.
He stood, and we were inches away from each other. My body heated at my near-nakedness while he was still fully dressed.
“Can you step over the circles?” he asked, eyeing my feet and the expanse of writing. It was about a foot and a half put together.
“I’m not that injured,” I lied. Still, I was careful not to touch the black lines as I entered the circle.
“Lie down,” he directed. “Head north, feet south, hands angled.”
I took a guess at north and settled down, my arms angled away from my body.
He walked around me, then crouched and touched my left hand, adjusting it so it was brushing the inner circle near the western anchor of the spellwork.
His hand was hot against my injured fingers, and he gently undid the wrapping around my palm.
Tossing the bandage and popsicle stick aside, he held up my hand for a moment, and sucked in air through his teeth.
“I’m going to position them so they’re easier to heal,” he said.
I braced for the pain. “You do you.”
Quickly, he moved them so the broken bones were better aligned with the knuckles and I cried out, panting as he finished.
“This shouldn’t take too long,” he reassured me. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, they glowed a soft green as his magic flowed through him.
My eyes widened a bit as I examined his changed appearance. I’d never seen an alchemist with that much power in person. The most I’d seen was an alchemy instructor at a studio who had faint lime green lines around his irises when he started using his power.
Nick’s eyes lost their hazel coloring and flashed hunter green.
I could practically see the magic flowing through him as he reached down and pressed his hands on the outer circle.
The black lines lit up the same green as his gaze and I saw the color spill through the words and circles getting closer and closer to me until they reached the anchor points and then his magic hit me like a wave.