Chapter Thirty
Hands on me; I grabbed them, fought them. Someone screamed and it wasn’t me. A voice I should have known yelled, “Havoc, they’re trying to help you.”
“Detective Havelock, stand down! That’s an order!
” I knew that voice, too. It made me blink and try to look at who I was fighting.
There was a paramedic crumpled on the floor beside me.
Charleston loomed over both of us standing so that he looked like a giant, as tall as the ceiling.
The moment I thought that, I knew something was wrong with me. Was I hurt?
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, but my voice sounded too low, so I said it again.
“Do you know your name?”
“Havelock, Zaniel Havelock, Havoc.”
“Do you know where you are?”
I looked around the room. “Interrogation room.”
He almost smiled. “What city are you in?”
I frowned at him. “The City of Angels.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Charleston, you’re my lieutenant.”
“Yes.”
“What happened? Why am I on the floor? What happened to the medic?”
A woman’s voice said, “You happened to him.”
I looked toward the voice, but I couldn’t see her past Charleston. “Who is that?”
She peered around Charleston’s side, looking child-sized compared to him. She looked angry. “I’m his partner.” She pointed down to the paramedic on the floor.
“What happened to him?”
“I told you, you happened.” She knelt beside her fallen partner and she looked even tinier that way. Was she really that petite or was I more out of it than I thought? Charleston was a giant and she was doll-like. It was like everything was all funhouse mirrors.
Her partner groaned and started to push his way up from the floor. She started trying to examine him, but he said, “Look at our patient first, not me.”
“Our patient knocked you cold and may have broken your nose,” she said, her voice warm with anger.
Her partner turned his head enough for me to see the blood all over the front of his face and shirt. “Did I do that?” I couldn’t remember doing it, or maybe I did. I remembered hands on me, and I hadn’t wanted them to touch me.
The female paramedic glared at me. “Yes, for the third time, you did this.”
“He’s hurt, Becki,” her partner said, and I realized he was trying to make excuses for me. That seemed really sporting of him since I’d just hit him in the face.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know who was touching me,” I said.
“He got attacked by demonic energy, Becki; anyone would fight.” He leaned against the wall and used the dressing she gave him to press against his still-bleeding nose, but that was all he’d let her do for him.
He insisted on her looking at me first. I might owe him a drink later if he kept being that nice about it.
Becki grumbled, but she knelt beside me and again she fit between me and the closest chair. I wasn’t hallucinating, she was just that tiny.
She looked at my eyes with a flashlight, then told me to use just my eyes to follow her finger as she moved it back and forth. Her frown softened a little. I didn’t know if that was good or bad, or just meant she was calming down.
“Neil was trying to put a brace on your neck when you clocked him,” she said, and was back to sounding angry, maybe it was just her default.
“Can you wiggle your fingers and toes?” Neil asked, his voice muffled from holding the dressing against his nose.
I looked down my body to try moving everything and noticed there was fresh dressing and medical tape across my stomach. I ignored it for now and tried to move my fingers and toes. “Everything moves,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
“Why are there fresh bandages on my stomach?”
“The wounds on your stomach started bleeding again,” Neil said.
“If they’d put stitches in at the hospital they wouldn’t have started bleeding again,” Becki said, frowning her disapproval.
“It was already healed closed, so the doctor didn’t think it was necessary. Did the wounds reopen?” I asked.
“No, but there was still blood coming through the wounds when we got here,” Neil said.
“The attack was just earlier today, though, right?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“But angel magic healed it,” Neil said, and his voice sounded wetter, as if more blood was going down the back of his throat. That was not a good sound. It meant I’d really done a number on his nose. I might owe him more than just a drink.
“You told them what happened at the hospital,” I said, looking up at Charleston.
“I told them what I could, but I’m a Voodoo Priest, not an angel worker, so I could only give them the magic I could sense and what you said was happening.”
“Why didn’t the angels heal it completely?” Becki asked.
“I didn’t ask them to. I asked them to help us save the woman who was in jeopardy.”
“Usually that means they will heal you more than you asked, for being selfless,” Neil said.
The comment bothered me. “I wasn’t being selfless; I’d have done almost anything to save the woman.”
“I think they didn’t heal it because they couldn’t,” Becki said.
“And I think they didn’t heal it because they knew that there’s some magic in there that needs to come out before the skin closes over it,” Neil said.
“If I’d thought to ask, or if I’d needed it completely healed, the angelic power would have healed it,” I said.
“Well, the claw marks were bleeding when we got here,” Becki said.
“Did they tear open?” I asked.
“Not that we could find,” she said.
“Then how were they bleeding?” I asked.
“We’re not sure.”
“It wasn’t just blood,” Neil said, “there was power mixed in with it. The kind I usually only sense when really bad things have attacked people.”
“Like demons,” Charleston said.
“Exactly,” Neil said, and coughed, wincing visibly enough that I asked Becki to take care of him.
“Not yet,” he said, though he was beginning to sound a little less sure. He waved her off and said, “The bandages are holding a magical poultice that will draw out any negative energy that isn’t yours.”
“Will the dressing need to be changed?” I asked.
“It depends on how much negative shit the demon left behind,” Becki said.
“How will I know if it needs to be changed, or if I’m clear again?” I asked.
“I’ll help check you. They walked me through it along with one of our newbie witches,” Charleston said.
I looked up at him. I was beginning to feel silly lying on the floor. “Thanks.”
“We all play to our magical strengths in this unit. You have angels and demons; I have herbalism and folk remedies like poultices that will drain the bad juju out of a wound.”
“Can I sit up now?” I asked, not exactly sure whose permission I was asking. If I hadn’t felt bad about probably breaking the paramedic’s nose, I wouldn’t have asked anyone’s permission.
“Slowly; if it hurts, lie back down,” Becki said. She was back to sounding angry, but I was beginning to think it might be her natural state. She wasn’t angry, she was cranky; they sounded the same, but angry usually didn’t last, cranky could be a constant.
I sat up using more of my arms to push than I normally did, so that I didn’t overtask my abs.
There was a pull of the medical tape against my stomach; it didn’t hurt more than it had before, but Becki thought my caution was pain and tried to push me back to the floor.
I outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, and most of that was muscle.
She wasn’t going to be able to push me anywhere.
“It doesn’t hurt, I’m just being cautious like you told me to be,” I said, looking at her as she kept trying to push her gloved hand against me.
She stopped pushing but didn’t move her hand as she looked up at me, because with her kneeling and me sitting she was now shorter than me. “A man who actually listens and does what I ask, that’s different.” The sarcasm dripped out of the last two words.
“Hey,” her partner said, “I am not that guy.”
She frowned and looked at him, her small hand still on my shoulder as if she’d forgotten it there. “I didn’t mean you, Neil. I meant, you know who I mean, all of them.”
“You do need to find better guys to date,” he said.
“They see someone this small and think I should be cute and soft, which they think means weak.” The one comment probably explained the bad attitude. If she went around with a huge chip on her shoulder, then men might not assume her personality matched her packaging.
“I’m sorry they’re jerks,” I said.
She looked up at me, then moved her hand as if just realizing she’d left it on my shoulder. “You’re over my height limit, sorry.”
It took me a second to realize she thought I was flirting. I showed her the wedding band I was wearing. “I was apologizing for other jerky men, not trying to flirt.”
She looked embarrassed. “Sorry,” she said.
MacGregor the Elder came into the room. “Good to see you conscious, Havoc.”
“Good to be conscious,” I said.
“The Infernal specialist is here, Lieutenant.”
“Infernal specialist? I’m fine.”
“It’s not for you,” Charleston said.
“Wait, what happened to Lila and Ravensong? Where are they?” I heard the panic in my voice and tried to calm down. How had I not asked about them sooner? I felt like a bad friend.
“Lila got the wind knocked out of her.”
Charleston hadn’t mentioned what happened to Ravensong, just Lila. I felt that tightness inside me that was the body tensing for bad news. “What happened to Ravensong that would need an Infernalist?”
“One of her hands is . . . damaged,” Charleston said.
I got to my feet and asked, “Damaged how?”
“Her hand is deformed. It looks like the demon hand from the hospital.”
“That’s not possible, true transformation magic is not something that demons do. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Your expertise is angels, Havoc, not demons.”
“But we study both sides and demons aren’t contagious. They can’t turn people into one of them. It does not work like that.” I made every word clear and firm because I knew it was true. They had to be wrong.