Chapter 20 #3
Ward shook his head. “I’d asked Rayn to get some supplies from the truck,” he answered. “There was more than one vehicle.”
“There were three,” Raj replied, his voice tight.
“How many people?” I asked him, afraid to hear the answer.
He sucked in a breath through his nostrils. “Seven dead,” he answered softly. “Another nineteen hospitalized. Dozens being treated, including you.”
“Did they catch the drivers?” Ward asked.
Raj nodded. “One is in the hospital, one died, and the last is in RPD custody. For now.”
I didn’t ask which driver. But Ward did.
“One of the drivers died?” he asked, sounding surprised. “From hitting a wall or something?”
Raj’s features were tight. “There was an impact,” he replied. “But it’s far too early for cause of death.” He shifted his weight. “Could be that they were all on drugs and it induced a heart attack. Could be trauma from the crash.”
“Was the driver still in the car?” Ward wanted to know.
I really wanted us to stop having this conversation.
“Maza didn’t say,” Raj replied. “Just that the ME would have more information for us soon—hopefully tomorrow, given how high-profile this is.”
Raj’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he scowled even deeper, then pulled it out.
He thumbed a button and lifted it to his ear.
“What?” he asked. Then he paused. “Fucking pull it. It’s ours,” he said, his voice tight and sharp, but with an undercurrent of something that might have been excitement.
“I’ll be there ASAP.” He pronounced it like a word: a-sap.
Then he looked down at me, and something I couldn’t identify crossed his features.
I was expecting him to leave, but he took the two steps to cross the room, bent, roughly grabbed the back of my head, and kissed me almost bruisingly hard.
Then he pulled back and rested his forehead against mine.
“Please stay with someone tonight,” he whispered, the words almost begging.
“Vi was going to stay with me,” I replied.
“Good,” he replied. “Please, please be careful.”
“You, too,” I answered, recognizing that while my trials for the evening were over, his almost certainly weren’t.
He kissed me again, quickly and more softly, then left, nodding to Ward on his way out, but not saying another word.
“Are you okay?” Ward asked me, after a good thirty seconds of silence had passed in Raj’s wake.
I nodded. “Yes.” I was a little confused, but I was okay. The injection of pain medication was starting to wear off a little, and I could tell that it was going to be a very long night for more than one reason.
No. Not a long night. A long day, because a quick check of my watch—which now had several shiny scratches on the black metal around the screen—told me that it was nearly dawn.
Ward let out a sigh, then leaned back in his hospital bed. “Are you two… okay?” he asked me.
“What does that mean?” I asked him. “Are we okay?”
Ward let out a little hum that meant he was thinking. I was pretty sure it was a habit he’d picked up from Mason, and I wondered if he knew he even did it. “I suppose it means I’m asking if you feel like your relationship is a good one,” he replied. “If you’re happy and you think he’s also happy.”
I thought about this. “I mean, I’m not happy about this.” I waved my good hand at myself and the little curtained alcove. “And I’m fairly certain he isn’t, either.”
“No, probably not,” Ward agreed. “And Mason definitely isn’t. But I meant with each other—not with our current… situation.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. “I think so,” I said, finally.
“I like talking to him about things like books and movies, and he’s trying to explain cricket to me, although I don’t understand that at all, but I still kind of like trying.
” I frowned. “I assume he likes the same things, since he keeps doing them.” I also definitely liked the sexy parts of our relationship, but I wasn’t going to say that to my boss, even if he was also a friend.
“So you’re happy?” he asked.
I grimaced. “What’s happy?” I responded. “I’m not sure I even know what that is.”
Ward looked startled. “I—” He blew out a long breath.
“As stupid as it sounds,” he continued. “You’ll know when you are.
No one is happy all the time, obviously.
And even in a good relationship, you’re going to have arguments, disagreements, that shit.
Some of them small, about what to have for dinner or at what point you’re going to let the kids try peanut butter.
” I had the feeling that last one was probably not an arbitrary example.
“But some of them will be about big and important things,” he said softly.
“Like whether or not you should take on certain jobs and what ‘acceptable risk’ means—and doesn’t.
” He sighed again. “And how that changes when you have kids—not that you have kids,” he acknowledged.
“Obviously. But I think the part about risk and danger might still be relevant.”
I nodded. “Yes. It—” It felt a little bit like I was betraying a confidence, talking about it with someone who wasn’t Raj. “He’s protective,” I finished, even though there was so much more I could say.
Ward smiled. “Yeah, when they’re like a foot taller than you and can bench you with their eyes closed, they tend to think you’re a delicate, fragile little flower,” he replied with a sardonic smile that might have qualified as a smirk.
“Magic can make up for a lot, though,” he continued.
“And you shouldn’t let him forget that.”
I met Ward’s eyes squarely. “Even if I killed that driver?” I asked him.
Ward’s gaze never wavered. “I’m sure it’ll come back as a myocardial infarction,” he replied.
“A what?”
“Heart attack, basically,” came the response.
“But—” I started to object, then fell silent when he looked at me, and I realized that he’d understood perfectly well what I’d told him, and he was telling me that I shouldn’t accept responsibility for it. And, probably, that I shouldn’t tell anyone else, either.
I hadn’t told Vi, because I knew she’d have made a thing out of it, even if she wouldn’t have been upset or angry. I didn’t always understand my sister, particularly when it came to magic. The more I understood about traditional warlocks—like Vi, but unlike Ward—the less I liked them.