Chapter 5 #4
Pippa paused with her hand on the door’s push bar.
She could leave him here, let him make up his own story and hope he wouldn’t talk about demons and magic and accidental destruction.
The idea didn’t sit quite right with her though, considering how he had helped her.
And how it was his suit jacket wrapped around her thigh that was preventing her blood from dripping all over the shining tiles.
No, she couldn’t leave him.
“Maxim!” she hissed.
He glanced over, then scrambled to his feet and followed her into the stairwell.
After half of a flight of hobbling and biting her lip to keep from crying out in pain, Pippa began to think the stairs had been a terrible idea.
For fuck’s sake, there were two other elevators in the lobby—perfectly functional elevators—which, if taken, would have meant they would already be outside by now. Probably.
“How long until it works?”
She scowled at Maxim over her shoulder. He was hovering a few stairs behind her, arms slightly outstretched as if he expected her to fall.
“How long until what works?”
“Healing. The . . . uh . . . magic kind. What you did to me, and what I’m assuming you’re doing to yourself right now.”
A great heaviness pressed on Pippa’s chest, and she missed the next stair, landing heavily on her injured leg with a yelp. She pushed away his attempt to steady her.
“It’s gone,” she blurted, then cursed herself for revealing it.
Maxim jumped down several steps and landed in front of her. “Gone? You can’t heal your leg? Or you can’t do magic?”
“Both. There was something on the knife.” She limped along the length of one step so she could grab the railing Maxim wasn’t currently blocking and used that to support her weight as she continued down the stairs.
“Pippa.”
She ignored him.
“If you can’t heal yourself, we need to get you to a hospital.”
An entirely new sort of dread filled her.
Sure, the situation might look terrible to someone not initiated to her lifestyle, but thanks to the incredible power of compartmentalization, she’d been expecting to go home, stitch herself up, then curl into a ball on the couch with a lot of hot drinks and wait out the time it took for the walls that separated her from her magic to crumble.
Then she would heal, and then she would be fine.
She would be fine. She had to be fine. Maybe if she said it to herself a few more times, it would become the truth.
When she spun to face him, it set her head spinning as well. Pippa tightened her hold on the railing.
“No hospitals,” she said, then gave him a look that she hoped didn’t allow for argument.
It didn’t work.
His expression hardened, and he was opening his mouth to argue when a door slammed a floor above them.
There was something fascinating about his rapid change from alarm to worry to exasperation in the instant before he charged forward.
“I don’t need your help—” Pippa began.
Maxim caught her by the waist and lifted her off the ground, then with her pressed snugly against his side, he thundered down the stairs.
At first, she was too startled (and a short moment later, too pained by the rapid jostling) to be properly impressed.
She threw an arm around his neck just so she wouldn’t feel entirely useless.
“We’re going to my car,” he said as he ran along a landing and thudded down another flight, skipping far too many stairs for Pippa’s comfort, “and then straight to the ER.”
She began to argue with that last statement, because there was no way in any of the hells she’d let that happen, when voices echoed around the stairwell from above and derailed all of her possible arguments.
Then, somehow, they were on the ground floor. Maxim kicked open the emergency exit and barreled out into sunlight so bright Pippa winced. They were heading across the pavement to his car.
“Stop,” Pippa said. When he didn’t, she elbowed him hard in the ribs, and with a “Gah!” he let her go. Her legs threatened to buckle as her feet met the asphalt.
“What are you doing?” he said, his eyes wide in disbelief. “You have to—”
“I just need to go home.”
“You need medical attention!”
“No,” Pippa snapped. A wave of fatigue threatened to bowl her over and, embarrassingly, she found herself holding onto Maxim’s upper arm to steady herself.
“I can’t. I don’t know how long I’ll be like this.
And if it comes back—” She stopped, then amended, “When my power comes back, and I’m hooked up to machines, or being observed, there’ll be too many questions. ”
“But if you bleed out before—”
“No!” She curled her fingers into his arm. A vein in his neck pulsed with his frustration. She focused on that. “I need to get home. I’ll be all right there.”
For the first time since yesterday, she fully met his gaze. He looked at her as if he wasn’t sure who was more insane: her, for denying help she desperately needed; or himself, for hesitating about providing it.
“Please,” Pippa said.
He started shaking his head.
“If you take me home,” she blurted before she could think of how terrible of an idea this was, “I’ll tell you everything. Whatever you want to know. Ask any question and I’ll answer it.”
A muscle in Maxim’s jaw twitched. “That’s a shitty deal if it means you’re going to die in an hour.”
Pippa gave him a smirk she didn’t fully feel. “I’m a witch. We don’t die that easily.”
He glared at the office building and tapped his index finger on his thigh in a rapid tic. Then his shoulders lifted in a heavy sigh, and Pippa knew he’d surrendered.
“Fine,” he said shortly. “But this is a bad idea.”
She let him sling one of her arms over his shoulders so he could help her to the car. Then she collapsed in the back seat and put all of her energy into proving him wrong.