Rose
Istopped in a little courtyard between a couple of shops. We’d come several blocks, and no reaching whisper of magic had touched me yet. I didn’t know how severely I’d taken down the enforcers, but they obviously weren’t bouncing back quickly.
My heart was still thumping away twice as fast as normal, adrenaline singing through my veins. The lingering sweetness of blueberry jam from my breakfast had turned sour in my mouth.
The guys came to a halt around me. I immediately turned to Jin. He was holding his arm a little away from his chest—any contact must have still been painful. Sucking in my breath, I motioned him closer and studied the mottled burns that streaked down his skin from his neck to his wrist.
“They’re not so bad now,” he said, but the rough note in his voice gave him away. They were hurting him evenwithoutany contact.
“I can do a better job of healing them,” I said. “Now that we’re out of the line of fire.”
I worked the magic with my hands over his body, knitting together the broken flesh and cooling the sting as well as I could. Jin’s shoulders had come down half an inch by the time I was finished, so I guessed I’d done an all right job.
He flexed the muscles and turned his arm one way and then the other. “Good as new,” he said with a smile, even though pink marks still mottled his olive-brown skin like scars. I wasn’t sure those would ever fade completely.
Imagining how much damage that spell might have done if he hadn’t been wearing his protective pendant made my stomach churn.
“Is anyone else hurt?” I asked, glancing around at the other guys. In the chaos of the fight, I wasn’t sure I’d been able to keep track of everyone’s injuries.
I got nods all around. Gabriel cleared his throat. “I think maybe we should talk about other lines of fire.” He cocked his head at Damon. “Bringing a gun to a magic fight—maybesomething it’d have been good to discuss with the rest of us ahead of time?”
He said it in his usual calm, almost gentle way of chiding, but Damon immediately bristled. “What, so you all could have freaked out and told me to ditch it? I know I do things differently from the rest of you, but some of the things I’ve learned are actually useful when you’ve got murderous witches after you, you know. I’m probably ten times better prepared for protecting myself against anyone this vicious than any of you are.”
His voice was brash, but I saw a twitch of his eyelid that made me think he wasn’t as certain as he was trying to sound. Seth had already laid into him about the gun. I wasn’t all that crazy about Damon going around with a weapon like that either—the crack of it firing still jittered through my nerves whenever I remembered it—but it wasn’t as if he’d necessarily hurt our attackers any more than my own magic had. So, who was I to judge, exactly?
I took Damon’s hand. “I meant what I said before. I’mgladyou had it so you could help fight back. I have no idea what the Assembly people after us are going to make of it… but there’s not much we can do about that now, right?”
“Yeah,” he muttered. His fingers squeezed mine and then let go. There was something pained in his expression that I didn’t like.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He gave me a smile that looked a little forced. “It’ll take more than those bastards to get me down, angel.”
I didn’t think he’d respond well to being pressed harder, especially when the other guys were already on that job.
“Can I just say I’d like to know if you picked up any more exciting items from those associates you met up with yesterday?” Kyler said with a tight grin.
“I got a few pistols,” Damon said. “In case anyone decided they wanted to go into these fights armed too. So we’re not leaving Rose to do all the work.”
My stomach flipped right over. “Hey,” I said, and waited until he met my eyes again. “I’m not doing all the work anyway. I need you—all of you. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be a miserable slave to a consort who hated me. So don’t for one second think you haven’t done enough.”
“What do we do now?” Seth asked into the silence that followed. “They know we’re in New York. Should we hit the road again?”
“Where would we go?” Gabriel said. “We’d still have the same problems. We came here because Rose thought there were people who’d help.” He tipped his head to me. “Do you think we should risk meeting up with that woman from the shop?”
I inhaled and exhaled slowly, gathering my thoughts. “It’s almost time for us to meet her at the park anyway. I don’t think the people after us will attack us again right away—they never have before. They’ll need time to decide on another plan.” One of the few times the Assembly’s bureaucracy had benefitted me. “You’re right. We have to see if we can find people who’ll help us, information we can use against them, or we’ll end up losing no matter where we go. But let’s hurry. If we’re lucky, she’ll get there early and we won’t have to stick around here too long.”
We flagged a couple of cabs—no way were we all squeezing into one—and I sat on the edge of my seat as the driver wove through the streets and crossed over the bridge back to Staten Island. The taxi dropped us off at the edge of the park.
A salt-laced breeze blew through the trees from the shoreline I couldn’t see. A few kids were playing on the playground while their parents watched. I checked the signs and led the guys between the scattered trees to a signpost I could see in the distance near a thicker stretch of forest. That was where Margo Elands had said we should meet her.
When we were close, I motioned for the guys to stop. “I think you should let me wait for her alone. She sounded a little weirded out by the whole public meeting thing… I don’t want her to get overwhelmed.”
“We’ll be right here if you need us, Sprout,” Gabriel said. Kyler gave me a playful salute.
Leaving them behind sent a tug through my chest, even though I was only walking about twenty feet away from them. They’d be able to see me the whole time; I’d be able to look over at them. And it wasn’t as if I couldn’t defend myself or was likely to need to against the expert on historical witching oddities.
No, it was just that it didn’t feel good acting as if they shouldn’t be standing beside me. As if I were ashamed of who I’d taken as my consorts, when that wasn’t true in the slightest.