“You had a close call, darlin’,” the woman straightened her old-school white blouse, skirt, and stockings with a big red cross on her hat. “The odds of getting struck by lightning are about one in seven hundred thousand. You had a near miss, but it still counts.”
“A near miss. That makes more sense.” If I had been struck, I’d be nothing more than a crispy critter.
Out of reflex, my hand dove beneath the sheets to check my twig and berries. With a sigh of relief, I confirmed everything was where it should be. The nurse gave me a disapproving look, but ignored it otherwise. Despite the unique student body of St. Vincent’s, it still wasn’t normal for people to have near-death experiences.
“I’m going to monitor you for the next few hours, and if your vitals are stable, I’m going to release you,” the nurse continued, as she went to record the data on a monitor next to my bed.
“What day is it?” I asked. I didn’t have my phone, and if I had to guess, even a near miss would have fried it.
“It’s one o’clock on Friday. You’ve been out for about eighteen hours,” she confirmed, and then headed out the glass-paneled door to the main section of the building. In the recovery ward, mine was the only bed in about a dozen that was occupied.
“Eighteen hours . . .” I gave a mental sigh. Despite the whole experience, I felt great. I didn’t get more than six hours of sleep on average, and eighteen really filled up my tank. “Wait . . . shit!” I remembered what I was supposed to do.
I’d been so focused on meeting up with Lilith, I forgot about other pressing issues. First and foremost, there was a certain item I was supposed to obtain for a certain Fae. There was no way Aveena’s order was going to get filled in her twenty-four-hour timeframe, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t going to care about my incapacitation. That was the Unseelie way.
I was still thinking of how to dig myself out of this hole when the door burst open and my friends rushed in. Jerome was first through the door and grinning like a fool. Brad looked more concerned. Unlike my other friends, he had the frailties of a human, and knew just how close I’d come to being roasted alive. Makaylah just looked uncomfortable since there was a lot of blood around, and it probably smelled delicious to her.
“You have to be the luckiest, and unluckiest, man alive,” Jerome clapped me on the shoulder, driving me deep into the padded mattress. “You get the sexiest girl in school to play your fiddle, and then you get struck by lightning on the walk home. That’s some epic shit,” he laughed.
“Sure, because good luck is getting a woman to suck your dick; sexist pig . . .” Makaylah’s voice drifted off as her eyes darted from side to side. “I need to get out of here,” she looked paler than usual as she turned on her heel and made a beeline for the door.
Brad watched her go before approaching. “How are you feeling?” he asked a very human question that the two supernaturals hadn’t even considered.
“Great, actually. I should be out of here in an hour or two. Late enough to miss class, but early enough to call in a favor,” my eyes met his, and I batted my lashes.
“No, no . . . no . . . no,” the Caeli mage backed away from me. “I told you already. I’m not going back to that weirdo.”
Brad knew my request before I could ask it. The sheet of paper Aveena’s changeling handed me requested a baby’s rib. It was a magical version of a controlled substance; obviously, because of the source it came from. Mostly, they were taken from babies that succumbed to SIDS, but that number was shrinking by the year. I didn’t know the properties of the item once infused with magic, and I didn’t want to know. All I did know was there was only one black market operation in the small town that surrounded St. Vincent’s.
The guy who ran it looked like a child molester. He wasn’t actually one, but he drove around in an 80’s Astro van filled with illegal magic trinkets. He kind of hit the stereotype on the head. Being on the move, kept him off the local PD’s radar, and a few enchantments made sure the human cops didn’t find anything if they ever searched his mobile shop.
I had Brad run an errand once before and the guy creeped him out. He wasn’t willing to do it again. “Please,” I gave him my best puppy-dog look. “You were there. You know who this is for. If I don’t come through, she’s not the type to shrug and walk away. She’s the ‘I’ll take my pound of flesh in payment for your failure’ type.”
Brad held my eyes for a moment before dropping them. “Fuck. Fine, I’ll do it, but you owe me big, Cam.”
“I owe you,” I agreed, and my word was good when it came to my business.
Brad left to track down the pedo-van in town while Jerome had to go back to class. Good to her word, the nurse discharged me a couple hours later, and I was left to my own devices. The first thing I did was get a change of clothes. They returned the uniform I’d been wearing, but it had a sharp burnt smell to it that would never come out. I tossed it, and donned jeans and a shirt; something comfortable, but easy to move in. There was no way in hell I could outrun a Fae if it
