“Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”
He made a rude gesture at the driver.
“Fin!”
He turned around. “You ran back for it. Then drove back here to meet us and collapsed.”
He walked off before I could ask anything else, slurping on the cherry ICEE, while the truck driver and I stared at him. I got tired of it first and climbed out of the car. It took a lot longer than normal.
And a lot more effort.
I leaned against the hood, panting and drinking neon blue stuff for a while, because at least it was cold. The night wasn’t, and after the jog I didn’t remember, my sweats were living up to their name.
The gas station was up a hill from the waterfront, with some apartments on one side and a storage facility on the other. A scraggly tree grew down near the rocks, which were covered in graffiti, like the ones by the warehouse. New graffiti, because it was super bright and seemed to move in my peripheral vision whenever I looked away from it.
Squiggle.
Look.
Squiggle.
Look.
Trippy.
Especially with Dorina’s memories, or whatever the hell they were, still sloshing about my cranium.
Sometimes it felt like she was trying to tell me something, like when she gave me that mental slap for thinking I’d had it worse than her. But sometimes it felt like I’d just plugged into random bits of her memories—or Mircea’s, because she seemed to have riffled through his brain a lot, taking whatever she wanted. I wondered if the great mentalist had known that he was being spied on, and by his baby daughter, at that.
Or one of them.
A spike of pain tore through my temples, and I went down to my haunches, holding my head. I wanted to go home and crawl into bed. I wanted the stiff drink I hadn’t gotten at Fin’s. I wanted the landscape to stop slinging around every time I freaking moved!
After a while, it did, staying mostly steady when I looked up. But I decided there was a slight chance I wasn’t in any shape to drive right now. I drank some more of big blue, and then I decided that I might as well go and meet the other one—formally, this time.
I got up and walked across the road.
The big guy was down the incline, slumped under the tree, trying to get as low as possible, so his diminutive assistant could treat his wounds. He had a lot of them. Cuts and gouges, some deep, which I guess had been the result of flying shrapnel. What looked like a potion burn on the side of his face, which had barely missed an eye. And something I’d seen before: a chest that was almost black, eclipsing the copper highlights that gleamed on his shoulders in the distant gas station lights, and which I now knew meant bleeding under the skin.
He’d gotten himself a gargantuan bruise, I guess from where the mages’ combined spell had hit. It looke
d painful, but the fact that it hadn’t torn through his chest was nothing short of miraculous. A combined spell was a bitch.
I offered him the rest of my ICEE, and to my surprise, he took it. And seemed to like the flavor.
Or maybe he was just thirsty. He drank it in about five seconds, before I could warn him about brain freeze, but I guess that wasn’t a thing for trolls. Because he immediately looked around for more.
“I’ll get you another,” I offered, because I had a certain amount of fellow feeling. And because I’d just remembered that convenience stores carry beer. “You want something?” I asked Granny, who shook her head.
“Got it covered,” she told me, and pulled a hip flask out of a pocket. “But some more Bactine would be good. And some of that tape they use for bandages.”
“Okay.”
I wandered back to the store, loaded up, and came outside again, to find Fin dragging a U-Haul trailer past the front door. Or part of one. It was the little half kind.
“Where are you going with that?” I asked him.
“I’m gonna—puff, puff—attach it—puff, puff—to your car.”