“You should have left him there,” Stone Face said.
“He needed a doctor.”
Axton arched dark blond eyebrows. “There are no emergency rooms in Virginia?”
“He didn’t want . . .” Lara’s voice shook slightly. “He was my responsibility. I had to make a decision—”
“When you go into the field, I expect you to be guided by your training and your partner. Not indulge in misplaced compassion.”
She winced.
Pain hammered Justin’s skul . “So dump me back where she found me, asshole, and we’l cal it even.”
“Please,” Lara said. To which one of them? “He wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. We were attacked.”
“You are trained in self-defense. Was it your preparation that was lacking? Or your skil ?”
“There’s nothing wrong with their training,” Stone Face said.
“Gideon?” Axton’s gaze pinned the Boyfriend like a bug.
“You were Guardian on this mission.”
The younger man flushed to the roots of his blond hair.
“We were outnumbered. There were four of them. Five.”
“Which?” asked Stone Face.
“So many?” Miriam said at the same time.
“Four and a lookout,” Lara said.
“Which compels me to inquire what you did to attract their attention,” Axton said.
The quick exchange made Justin dizzy. They’d been jumped in an al ey. Had they been set up? Had he?
He was in over his head, the undercurrents in the room sucking his strength. He felt the wal s closing in, the room whirling around him.
“Justin?” Lara’s voice, sharp and worried.
3 8
V i r g i n i a K a n t r a
Except his brain was on fire and his mouth wouldn’t form the words.
His eyes rol ed back in his head, and the floor tilted up to receive him.
*
*
*
Miriam Kioni stripped off her latex gloves and dropped them on the procedure tray. “He’l have a scar, of course,” she said to Simon, standing with Lara at the side of Justin’s bed. Jude Zayin, the dark-browed master of the Guardians, watched silently from his post at the infirmary room door.
“But the edges of the wound aligned nicely.”
The hot, bright medical lamp switched off.
In the sudden dimness, Lara blinked down at the shaved patch above Justin’s ear. Twenty-two stitches marched antlike across his scalp, disappearing into the gold stubble of his hair.
Something fluttered in her chest like wings. One of his eyes had swol en shut. His tanned skin had the waxy sheen of a melted candle.
She curled her nails into her palms. “Should he stil be unconscious?”
“It was easier to suture his wound while he was sleeping,”
Miriam said with the calm authority of her hundred years.
The nephilim were not immortal. But the wisest and most powerful of them could enjoy the span of several human lifetimes. Miriam had been master of the Seekers and the school’s physician longer than Lara had been alive.
Lara would have to be an idiot to chal enge her.
She moistened her lips. Apparently she was an idiot.
“But . . . His skul fracture . . .”
F o r g o t t e n s e a 39
“A simple concussion,” Simon said.
Water hissed in the sink. “Probably not the first one either,”
Miriam said.
Lara’s throat worked. “What are you talking about?”
“You can’t see it on the imaging equipment, but I found an old scar from a previous injury. Maybe he played footbal in high school.”
