Chapter 23 Old Habits
OLD HABITS
Kat
“Back in the infirmary again?”
Brioni whipped around in her seat, red curls splaying out and green eyes wide. She looked an absolute wreck, covered in smudges and her skirt ripped past the point of saving with a needle, yet she smiled so brightly the entire chamber lit up.
Kat wasn’t prepared for the embrace, but the short woman barreled into her anyway and squeezed the breath from her lungs while joyfully expounding on how happy she was to see her.
Kat too was glad, especially because Brioni wasn’t the one lying in an infirmary bed, but she was surprised for her presence to be so…
appreciated. Her heart warmed under the other woman’s tight embrace, and she even managed to return it.
“What is this, the fourth time you’ve been in here, Bri?”
“It’s only been three times, thank you very much!” Brioni giggled and pulled Kat over to a second stool beside the bed. “This is Ragnar’s turn.”
“Oh, dear.” The gray beastmaster lay with his eyes closed, an angry bruise along his jaw.
“He’s okay,” Brioni said with a sudden tightness in her voice. She ran fingers through the demon’s strands of black hair then gently pat his unmarred cheek. “Balran had to put him under so he would stay still and heal. He’ll make a full recovery soon.”
Kat winced at the thought, wondering how much incaendi moss it would take for a demon so humongous. “What did this to someone like him?”
“Well, the story is kind of complicated, but there was this orange demon from the scholar’s hall who’s sorta been poisoning me with magic, and Ragnar went to beat him up, which is very romantic I gotta say, but my poor hero ended up getting kidnapped and taken to this creepy cottage in the woods instead, which is a lot less romantic except for the part where I saved him.
” She waggled her ginger brows. “I mean, the veilhounds and Moar helped a lot, especially with the whole eating-the-bad-guy-so-I-didn’t-have-to-kill-him part, which I totally would have done—anything for Ragnar—but that might not have been as cozy of an ending, you know?
Anyway, Moar brought us help because he’s the best dog ever, and we even found a new demon and human too, but they’re not waking up, and there was just so much old magical junk in the basement that it’s probably going to take forever to figure out how.
But Balran was able to clean up all of Ragnar’s cuts, it’s just the aftereffects of that weird rune he needs to sleep off now. ”
“Uh, wow?” Kat blinked, a hundred questions spinning around her head, but Brioni had her own.
“So where’s your boyfriend?” Brioni bent sideways in her chair as if she could see through the wall and into the corridor where Azrion might be—or any demon really, since Kat wasn’t in any real relationship.
Brioni would have only seen Zaiya leaning against the wall out in the infirmary anyway.
After their harrowing evening, Kat had asked Azrion’s sister to sleep at the post, and then when Alamar reported Brioni was again in the infirmary the following afternoon, Kat brought Zaiya along for moral support.
Kat found it was easier to mask helping Zaiya by being the one who asked for help, and Zaiya seemed to find it easy to oblige the both of them that way.
“Oh no, is he in here too?” Brioni’s eyes went glassy. “These ridiculous demons just can’t seem to not get themselves hurt.”
Kat snorted, taking in Brioni’s bruises and the tear in her sleeve—she had a remnant that would make the perfect patch for that, and she would add an embroidered rabbit just because. “I don’t have a—”
“Stop it.” She clicked her tongue. “I might have been busy lately, but I put the pieces together myself! As if that talk we had about soul bonds wasn’t a big enough clue, that dress you were wearing during it was a dead giveaway. I know you’re putting to use Aofe’s Good Time Tonic.”
Kat covered her reddening cheeks but remembered the contract. “Fine, yes, there is someone. He’s um…delivering some documents. Boring documents. Ledgers and stuff.”
Brioni stuck out her tongue and thank all the gods for her disinterest in bureaucracy because Kat wasn’t exactly ready to spill the details about the break in.
Even involving Rosalind felt too dangerous, but Azrion was determined to see through Kat’s first idea because, as he said, it was her strongest. Her only other regret was that he was going to one of his wealthy neighbor’s houses for some fancy party to pass off the pages they’d torn out of Tarzul’s secret ledger to the other human and wouldn’t be bringing Kat along.
“Well, when this one’s all healed up, we should go on a double date.” Brioni rubbed the massive demon’s hulking shoulder and gazed down at him with more love in her eyes that Kat had possibly ever seen, which was definitely a feat for the over-expressive woman.
“I would love that,” Kat breathed as the sweet image of the four of them out at some tavern together filled up her mind, but then she blotted it out because that wasn’t meant to be Kat’s future.
Not with Azrion. And really, she had much bigger problems to deal with.
“Um, hey, have you seen the healer? Balran?”
“She was just here, but I think she’s with the others now. Their room is down the hall and to the right by the other set of stairs. There are two grumpy guards outside, so you can’t miss it, but if you smile at them big enough, they’ll let you in.”
“If you smile at them, I’m sure that’s what happens.” Kat chuckled and said her goodbyes, then briefly told Zaiya it would be just another moment. A scrawny blue scribe was finishing up a hushed conversation with the guards when Kat approached them.
Arms crossed and weapons strapped to their hips and backs, the two stood on either side of the door.
Intimidating was a word for it, but terrifying was a much better one.
Still, Kat peeled back her lips and clasped her hands behind her back, running through the dumbest sounding reasons to enter the chamber she could think of before clearing her throat.
“Go ahead,” said the surlier of the two and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
It worked! And I didn’t even have to say anything! Kat’s grin was genuine as she entered, but it quickly fell away as a sense of wrongness settled on her shoulders. It was a heavy unseen thing, but it dragged at her as she paced into the chamber.
The yellow demon who she had woken to so many weeks ago was standing between two beds, features bent in distress as she held a glowing hand over…
“Oh, my gods, is that—” Kat rushed up and grabbed the foot board, then her mind snapped back into reality. Of course it wasn’t. This was a human. A human.
“Do you know her?” Balran’s black eyes filled with expectation, and Kat hated to shake her head, but the human had only looked briefly familiar, like a memory she couldn’t quite place or a dream that had felt too real.
Kat shuddered. She’d felt magic many times since coming to Heck but never like this, never magic that made her think she was staring at someone who was wearing the wrong face, and yet that was all she could think until she looked away.
The other bed held a demon with stubby horns and an angular face that was a brilliant shade of green. The magic tickled at her mind again, this time only suggesting polished stone which was bizarre but at least not terrifying.
These must have been the two that Brioni had meant she had found along with the beastmaster in the so-called “creepy cottage.” Both were asleep, but the ominous feeling in the room told her something devious was at play.
“So far no one has recognized either of them.” The healer sighed heavily and picked up a stack of parchment, flipping through the pages. “But we haven’t put the word out yet, so there’s still hope.”
Light linens were placed over their bodies, but the thighs of the demon and the stomach of the human were consciously uncovered to reveal angry wounds.
Kat’s innards twisted as she took a closer look.
It was bad enough to be slashed at haphazardly, but there were patterns cut into their skin, and she wrapped her arms around herself.
“They’re runes,” Balran confirmed and showed Kat one of the pages from her stack, detailed drawings of what had been carved into their flesh. “I don’t suppose you know what they mean?”
Az might, Kat thought as she shook her head, nausea roiling in her belly as she took a second glance at the actual markings.
She wanted desperately to look away, but her gaze was held, like looking might wake something in her mind.
Her fingers twitched, and she pat her pocket just for the comfort of knowing her needle and thread were close.
“I know these markings are keeping them unconscious, but that can’t be all.
The human’s muscles suggest she’s only been this way for a few days, maybe a week, but the demon has been like this for a while.
I hate that I’m going to have to call in the scholars soon—those know-it-alls just take over the infirmary and all they see is experiments, not patients.
” Balran traced a finger over the demon’s brow, and if Kat didn’t know better, she would have thought the healer had known him for years rather than hours.
Kat studied the human again just in case. She had chestnut colored skin and black hair like the people south of Ankerick, but her features still held a strange familiarity.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Kat. You must have wanted something, yes?
” Balran strode up to her and placed her stack of parchment on a table at the foot of the demon’s bed.
She was especially tall, and though she wasn’t particularly muscular, she always exuded a quiet strength.
Kat hadn’t been roomed with her sister those first days in the infirmary, but Balran’s presence was a good replacement, especially after her actual human roommate Rosalind had kept herself unendingly busy advocating for the lot of them.