I touched the lapel of his coat. “I’ve got to see how bad the damage is.”
He nodded, and we carefully pulled the coat down his arm on the uninjured side. Nathaniel paused, his face contorted in pain.
“Perhaps you should cut it off,” he said.
“But we have nothing else to cover you. And it’s January out there,” I said. “We’re not going to be able to take the El home, you know?”
“I only need to wear clothing as a concession to humans. The cold does not bother me,” he said.
“If you say so,” I said doubtfully.
“I would prefer to endure the cold than the excruciating pain of attempting to carefully remove the coat.”
“Okay,” I said, sitting on the cot beside him. “Turn toward the wall.”
Nathaniel turned so his back faced me. The torn right wing was gruesome. I delicately cut from the hem of his coat up the middle of his back, through the space between his wings, and then pulled the two flaps of cloth away.
His white dress shirt was stuck to the middle of his back. He’d bled profusely, and then the blood had dried. In some places there were scabs that would be torn open as soon as I removed the shirt.
“Nathaniel,” I said.
“I know. Do it quickly.”
I made the cut with the scissors from the tail of the shirt through the collar. I grabbed the two pieces of the shirt at the top, bit my lip, and pulled.
Nathaniel only grunted as his skin was torn away. He drew the sleeves over his arms and off his wrists, dropping the remains of his shirt on the floor.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, took a deep breath and opened the bottle of disinfectant. “This isn’t going to get any better.”
“Do not weep for me,” he said quietly, then hissed as I poured the solution into his wounds. “After all the pain I have caused, I deserve whatever harm may befall me.”
I paused. “What happened to, ‘I was under orders, I didn’t have a choice, and I didn’t mean any of it anyway’?”
“I kissed you,” he said simply. “When our magic entwined, I saw your heart. And I finally understood how you saw me, and why you held me in such contempt.”
I applied gauze to the worst of the open wounds. There were several bullet holes in addition to the broken wing. “That’s probably the first time a kiss from me has ever had such a transformative effect,” I muttered. “And I never held you in contempt.”
“You did,” Nathaniel said. “Your feelings for me were stronger than dislike from the beginning.”
I thought back to the first moment I’d seen Nathaniel in my father’s court, golden and glorious and full of disdain.
“You looked like an arrogant jerk. And it doesn’t make a woman think well of you when you say, ‘Hello, we just met, we’re getting married.’”
“I was doing as—”
“Azazel told you, I know. Nathaniel, what happened to the bullets? Are they inside you? I don’t want to patch up these holes now only to have to cut the bullets out later.”
“My body rejected the bullets as part of the healing process,” he said.
“Like Wolverine,” I said, cleaning and covering the bullet holes.
“Whom?”
“I could explain, but you probably still wouldn’t get it,” I said. “Nathaniel, just what exactly did you do for my father?”
There was a long pause, and I wondered whether he would answer. I finished bandaging the bullet wounds and then contemplated my final task. I had thus far avoided looking too much at the mess that was his wing. I’d have to find some way to immobilize it until we could get him healed the angelic way.
“I am not certain that my status will improve with you if you know precisely what I did for Azazel,” Nathaniel said carefully.
“I know that you didn’t do anything good,” I said.
I carefully touched the top part of the wing root, the part that had torn away. “I’ve got to move this closer to your back. I’m going to put it more or less in its proper place and tape it there.”
I cut several long strips of tape to have at the ready.
Nathaniel nodded. I shifted the wing toward his spine. The exposed muscle and arteries squelched. I turned my head away, gagging.
“This is not a task for a pregnant woman,” Nathaniel said.
His body had stiffened as I moved the wing into place, and his fists were clenched so hard that the veins in his arms bulged.
“The only person available is a pregnant woman,” I said, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth until the nausea passed. “If you want to talk about things a pregnant woman should or should not be doing—I probably shouldn’t be fighting demons or killing vampires, either. But there’s no choice. There’s no one in this city besides me who both cares enough and has the ability to fight.”
I packed gauze around the wings as best I could and then started tacking on tape to hold it in place. Once I’d managed to fix the wing into the position I wanted it, I took a roll of tape and wound it diagonally from Nathaniel’s shoulder, over his back, under his rib and back up his chest to his shoulder again so that the tape looked like a sling. I repeated the action a few times until I was pretty sure the wing would stay in place.
“Done,” I said finally.
Nathaniel tried to stand, trembled, and sat down on the cot again. “Now that you have mended me, you must get home. I am too weak to travel at this moment.”
“Do we have to have this discussion again?” I said. “I’m not going.”
“Madeline, I must sleep,” he said. “My power can be restored if I can simply rest. But it is too risky for you to stay. If the vampires discover us here, we are, as you might say, sitting ducks.”
“And what will you be if you’re found here alone and sleeping? We’ve been here for a while and haven’t been discovered. If the vampires were approaching as quickly as you thought they were, then surely they would have passed by the place where we landed already.”
“It seems very unsafe to make such an assumption,” Nathaniel said, or rather, mumbled. He was so tired that his words slurred together. His eyelids were almost closed, and all I could see was a slit of pale blue rimmed by white.
“Go to sleep,” I said, pushing him down. “I’ll keep watch.”
He was too exhausted to argue any further. His eyes were closed and he was breathing deeply a moment later.
5
I WATCHED NATHANIEL FOR A MOMENT, MY THOUGHTS troubled.
I’d never expected what had happened when we put the veil over the hospital. I’d never considered the possibility that I’d be kissing Nathaniel at all, much less kissing him like I wanted that kiss to go somewhere.
That might have been the aspect of the situation that bothered me the most. In that moment I had wanted Nathaniel so much I had forgotten about Gabriel entirely. I put my hand to my stomach, to the place where Gabriel’s child fluttered safe and sound inside me.
Gabriel had been mine for such a brief time that it seemed like a dream, the dream of another woman in another life. Every day I woke up to a new reality, a new threat, a new enemy. It had not been long since Gabriel died, but it felt like eons had passed.
I brushed Nathaniel’s sweaty hair out of his face. He was so deeply asleep that he didn’t even shift. I pulled my hand away, almost as disturbed by this newfound tenderness toward Nathaniel as I was by the lust I’d
