Forest Moon Rising (3 page)

Sticks dug into me. Reaching shrubs scratched my face.

And still I rolled. The world twisted and spun. My eyes couldn’t focus. Dizziness robbed me of any sense of direction.

Then with a back-numbing thump, I fetched up against the base of a tree.

Every inch of my body ached inside and out.

Each desperate attempt to draw breath met with knife sharp pain.

“Miss, miss!” A male voice inserted itself into my hearing.

“Hhuh,” I mumbled, not yet comfortable with consciousness.

You can wake up now, babe. Bad guys have gone bye-bye,
Scrap sneered at me.

I couldn’t ignore my imp’s mental jab. It felt somewhere between a migraine and a shrill whistle. Or maybe both at the same time.

With a wince and a groan, I opened my eyes and tried to raise myself to my elbows.

Wrong move.

Fire demons raced around and around my chest, pressing tighter and tighter.

“Lay still, miss. You might have broken ribs.” That intrusive male voice again.

Nah, you’re not broken, just bruised and sprained. Had the breath knocked out of you.
Scrap landed on top of the jagged stump. He conjured a black cherry cheroot from the ether, lit it with a flame on his fingertip, and blew a smoke ring in my face.

I had to cough. I couldn’t cough. Each breath hurt worse than the last.

The man I heard but couldn’t see dribbled some water across my face. The urge to cough the smoke back at Scrap eased.

The impudent imp waggled his eyebrows at me.
See. If you’d broken something you wouldn’t have coughed at all.

“Easy now. I’m a paramedic. Let me see if we need to get a crew up here or if you’ll be able to walk out.” The man must have been crouched at my head, uphill and out of my line of sight.

He pressed gently on my ribs and neck with dark hands. Nothing hurt any worse.

“She’s not walking on that ankle,” a female said from behind him.

The man sucked in a whistling breath. He moved around to my side. I recognized him then as the African American who’d passed me going uphill a little while ago. Another shrill breath through a gap in his front teeth. “That needs an X-ray, miss.”

“Scrap?”

No answer from my buddy.

“It’s crap all right,” the woman said. “Raquel Jones.” She sort of offered me a hand to shake, then realized I’d have to sit up to reach it or she’d have to move downhill onto uncertain footing. So she looked at her hand as if at an alien being, then stuffed it into the pocket of her shorts.

“I’m Jordan Jones,” the man said, putting his hands to better use assessing the damage to my left ankle. “JJ to most people.”

“Tess Noncoiré,” I said on a sharp inhale as he touched the rapidly swelling and bruising ankle. My lightweight shoes felt six sizes too small.

Raquel gasped. “Tess Noncoiré the writer? I’ve read all your books. What are you doing in Portland? Research?”

“I live here now,” I ground out. What a horrible, ignominious way to meet a fan! I tried brushing twigs out of my short sandy blonde curls to fix
some
of the damage. “I bought a condo in John’s Landing last year.”

“I’m so proud to meet you. Oh.” She put a hand over her mouth. “Sorry it has to be under these circumstances. I’m just glad JJ and I can help.”

“It won’t be comfortable with those bruised ribs, but I think I can carry you over my shoulder to the trailhead,” JJ said, oblivious to his wife’s gushing, fan girl chatter. “We’ll drive you to the emergency room. It’s only a few miles across the river.” Middle height and wiry, he didn’t look big enough to carry me two steps, let alone one hundred yards to the parking lot.

I’d fallen far enough downhill to almost meet the snaking path again. Could I crawl that far?

Not with those ribs, dahling
. Scrap informed me.

Obviously, Raquel and JJ had no idea he was there.

“If you can just get me to my car, I’ll drive myself,” I replied to JJ. If Scrap said I hadn’t broken anything, I believed him.

“Not a good idea, Tess.” Raquel shook her head emphatically. “I’m a nurse and I can guarantee you’ll feel dizzy and maybe nauseous from the pain. Then there’s shock, which will set in as soon as the adrenaline wears off. How about if I follow you and JJ to the ER in your car? That way it’ll be available when you can
safely
drive home.” She efficiently relieved JJ of his daypack, placed it and her own on the path, then returned to help get me upright.

“You’ve had the breath knocked out of you,” JJ said as he shoved one of his hands beneath my shoulders to heave, while Raquel grabbed my hands with her own to haul. “It’s gonna hurt, but I promise you, things will look better once we get you back to the cars.”

That was not fun. Nope. No way in hell.

About halfway up, balancing on my right foot, I passed out. As a tidal wave of blackness washed over me, I heard a demonic chuckle in the far distance.

Round one to the Nörglein.

“A
RE YOU GOING TO BEHAVE YOURSELF and stay off that ankle for a few weeks, Tess?” Dr. Sean Connolly asked me. He looked maybe thirty, a year or two younger than me. Dark circles ringed his eyes like a raccoon and his white coat needed a good washing and pressing.

“You’ve been on duty too long, Sean,” I replied. I banked on his longing for a shower and eight hours of sound sleep before his next shift. “Of course I’ll take it easy,” I lied.

“Good one, Tess. I don’t want you in here again for at least two months. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

I grumbled something. So I’d taken a few falls and fencing accidents this past year. It’s not like I was stalking him.

“You’ll have better luck putting her in a body cast and drugging her insensible for forty-eight hours,” a familiar voice said from the doorway. “If you want to know why she winds up in the ER so often, read her books. She takes her research seriously.”

“Steve!” I called to my brother. He was a taller copy of me with sandy hair that curled too tightly and a lanky build. But unlike me, he stood six feet tall, topping me by a good ten inches.

Not the voice I truly wanted to hear, (I’d probably never hear again from the man my heart called to) but welcome nonetheless. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Chicago?”

“Can’t I come visit my baby sister?” He bent to kiss my cheek. “I have some good news to tell you and wanted to do it in person.”

“You didn’t call first. How do you know I’m not on deadline and therefore cranky and dedicated to solitude?” I scooched to sit a little higher on the hospital bed and winced at the pressure on my ribs and ankle.

“You’re always on deadline,” my best friend since kindergarten, Allie Engstrom, said coming around the corner. “Don’t worry, Steve and I won’t intrude on your precious privacy.” She too kissed my cheek. When she straightened and caught Steve’s gaze across the bed—they stood nearly eye to eye in height—something strange and wonderful clicked in my head.

“You two, together? You came all this way just to tell me you got together.” I pointed first to Allie then to Steve. “When and how did that happen?”

“Long story short, you decamped from Cape Cod after your mom’s funeral, leaving the family at loose ends. I picked up one of them,” Allie said with a quirky grin that was half remorseful at Mom’s tragic murder seventeen months ago and half full of the joy of new love.

My own heart sank. I’d never get that kind of happiness. The only man I loved and truly wanted had married another woman. I knew his heart belonged to me, but his loyalty and honor were legally tied to the woman his family had selected for him to marry when they were infants.

“More than just together. We’re engaged,” Steve added.

“Since it looks like you’ll have family to look after you for a couple of days,” Dr. Sean Connolly said, “I’ll see about releasing you. After we put a cast on that ankle. I doubt an air cast will be enough to keep you down. There’s a lot of soft tissue damage that might never heal properly if you don’t
stay off it
.” The doctor left, taking the x-rays with him.

“Anything broken?” Steve asked with a frown.

“No. Bruised ribs. The ankle’s badly sprained and he’s afraid I’ll walk on it too soon and permanently damage things.” I dismissed the diagnosis. Part of being a Warrior of the Celestial Blade was the ability to heal fast and clean.

“Even you will have to take a few days’ rest,” Allie said, as if she’d read my mind. She knew my role in keeping a balance in this world between the humans who belonged here and the demons that didn’t.

That nasty little Euro trash Nörglein from the Italian or Swiss Alps (they used to have a big range until tourists and industry civilized most of their habitat) didn’t belong here. He didn’t belong anywhere in my world.

I needed to get back out there and take care of the little bugger, not sit on my rear end nursing a sprained ankle.

“So how did you find me?” I finally asked.

“I pinged your cell phone’s GPS,” Allie said, still gazing fondly at my brother.

My eyes went to my fanny pack that rested on a corner chair along with my shoes. The phone pouch sagged emptily.

“It was in your car, Li’l Bit,” Steve said on a chuckle. “If your car is in the ER parking lot, then you must be in the ER.”

“And you have three missed calls from your sister-in-law, Doreen Cooper.” Allie pulled the phone out of her pocket, checked the screen, and tucked it into my fanny pack.

“Doreen can wait.” I’d put off meeting her for weeks. “How ...? Not just anyone can ping a cell phone.”

“I’m a cop, Tess,” Allie replied. “I have access to those sort of things.”

“An off duty cop out of your jurisdiction. Way out, by three thousand miles.” I have to admit I pouted a bit, envying these two their happiness in each other.

“Well, that’s another long story.” Allie dropped her gaze to her hands and fidgeted with the tasteful diamond on her left ring finger. A new diamond in a modern setting, not much more than a half carat. Quite a bit less gaudy than the three-carat antique I’d turned down in Vegas last year. Donovan Estevez had offered it, not the man I wanted to marry. I wanted the ring, not him.

No regret there. The ring had gone back to Faery where it belonged.

A nurse bustled in with a wheelchair and my chart.

“See if there’s a way to put rebar in the cast so she can’t saw it off,” Steve stage-whispered to the nurse.

Nasty drugs they keep pumping into my Tess. Everything they give her they might as well shoot into me. We are tied by bonds of love and loyalty, blood and magic. What happens to her happens to me.

I’m too sleepy to keep up with the complex ins and outs of her family.