Honeyed Words (29 page)

She let go. Just like that. One moment the anger and fire were so hot inside her that I could feel it all around me—an aura of hate and carnage. Then she went limp, whimpering, and rolled off me.

“What’s happening?” she whispered, turning her head away from me.

I lay beside her, gasping for air, wondering when she was going to grab something really heavy and bash in my head.

When she didn’t, I sat up, pushing away from her, and rocked against the dresser again. A bottle rolled to the edge and dropped off the side, pinging me on the head.

She ran out of the room. The next second I could hear her vomiting in the bathroom next door. I leveraged myself up, trying not to knock anything else off the dresser while keeping pressure on the throbbing pain in my head. I glanced around and saw a heavy perfume bottle on the floor. Mystery solved. Once I was steady on my feet, I looked in the mirror, which was askew. Of course I was bleeding. My hand and the hair under it were matted with blood. I reached out and touched the mirror with my bloody hand to straighten it, and the surface roiled like boiling water.

“Jesus H. Christ.” I stepped back

“Pretty mouth,” Gletts said, appearing in the mirror. “I thought we’d never find you.”

I stumbled back as he and Skella climbed through the mirror.

This day just kept getting better.

Forty-one

“We wondered where you disappeared to,” Skella said, stepping to the doorway and hugging the side of the doorframe. Anezka was still puking.

Gletts bent over, one long finger out reaching for the shotgun. I pulled him back. “Don’t touch that.”

“Nasty bit of work, that one,” he said. I glanced down and saw the stock was carved with fiery faces.

I pulled the blanket off Anezka’s bed and tossed it over the shotgun. “Just leave it, okay?”

Gletts shrugged and sat down on the edge of the bed, away from the gun. He pulled a Rubik’s Cube out of his fanny pack and started twisting the sides frenetically.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We’ve been looking for you all day,” he said, not looking up. “Skella insisted.”

“How’d you find me?”

Skella glanced at Gletts furtively, but did not answer.

“Just thought you might be here,” he said, again not looking up. “Been here before, back about a year ago. Dwarves had some business here.”

“For the dragon,” Skella said quietly. “But I couldn’t find you in this place. It’s blocked to me.”

Gletts smiled. “You’ll find it now that you’ve been here.”

Skella let out a shuddering sigh. “Creeps me out.”

I looked over at her. She smiled at me and turned back to the hall. The toilet flushed, and she scampered back into the room, ducking down beside the dresser. “Don’t let her see us.”

“Great.”

I walked out to the hallway, pulling the bedroom door mostly closed, and tried to get a good angle view into the bathroom.

“Anezka? You okay?”

“No,” she moaned.

I hurried to the bathroom and saw her lying on the floor by the tub. She was covered in blood.

“What did you do?” I cried, rushing in to her.

“Something’s wrong with the baby,” she said, sobbing.

Baby? She’s pregnant?

What the fuck?

I grabbed a towel off the rack and reached for my cell phone. It wasn’t in my pocket. Where the hell had I left it? Restaurant? No time. I handed her the towel. “Here.”

She looked at me, confused, and took the towel.

“Don’t move,” I said, and I ran out into the living room. “Where’s your damn phone?”

She had a phone, right?

I couldn’t find one. We needed an ambulance.

Or, I could take her in my car? Not the best idea. An ambulance was the only way, with that much blood. And I knew who could get me one.

I ran back down the hall, stopping and kneeling by Anezka. “Hold on,” I said, touching the side of her face. “I’ll get help.”

“Okay,” she whispered. “I’m getting cold.”

This was nuts.

“Skella!” I shouted.

“Who?” Anezka asked, looking around.

“Skella, get in here now!”

“Eep,” Skella said, skidding around the doorframe and stopping when she saw us on the floor. “Oh, crap.”

“I need you or Gletts to get an ambulance. Tell them she’s pregnant and bleeding. You hear me?”

“We can’t,” she started, but I gave her a look that I hope scared her future children.

“Right,” she said, and darted back out of the room.

“You’ll be okay,” I said to Anezka. “I’ll make sure you’re okay.”

No promises, Gunther had said. What the hell else could I say?

Soon, Skella was back in the room, rinsing a washcloth in the sink and handing it to me. “Gletts has gone off to find help,” she said sheepishly. “Sorry for how that works out.”

I glanced up at her. “Meaning?”

She shrugged. “We can only see people in mirrors we know of, and can only travel to them if they are around one of them. He’s at your apartment now. Your master, Julie. She knows where you are, right?”

Oh, jeebus. Great. “She should, but he knows to tell her I’m at Anezka’s, right?”

“Well, he knows you are at a house, and it’s full of pain,” she said apologetically. “We don’t know Anezka.”

“I’m Anezka,” Anezka growled from the floor. “Who the fuck are you, and when did you get here?”

Skella squeaked and scampered back toward the bedroom.

“Friend of yours?” Anezka asked through gritted teeth.

“It’s complicated,” I told her. “Just hold on.”

It took the ambulance another thirty minutes to get out to the house. By the time they arrived, Anezka had slipped into unconsciousness.

When the volunteer firefighters pounded into the house, I was sitting on the bathroom floor with her head in my lap. We were both soaked in blood. She had a pulse, but it was weak.

I mentioned a baby and miscarriage, and they didn’t ask any more questions.

By the time they got an IV in her and called in her vitals, the chopper arrived.

It was one of those medical jobbies. I shaded my eyes as it landed, stirring up gravel and dust in its rotor wash.

The firefighters loaded Anezka into the chopper and scurried back toward the house as it lifted off again. She’d be in Redmond in no time.

“She’s stabilized,” the middle-aged firefighter said as he set a kit on the porch beside me and bent over to look at my scalp. “But before they loaded her, she wanted me to tell you she expected you to keep an eye on things around here.”

I looked at him. “She said that?”

He nodded. “She was quite insistent. Said you’d know what needed looking after. She got a cat or something?”

“Something,” I mumbled. Great.

“Ya’ll fight?” he asked as he poked at my head.

“You could say that,” I said, wincing. “Could you tell them she tried to kill herself?”

He stood back, eyeing me. “Thought it was a miscarriage.”

I nodded. “That’s what she said, but before that I had to stop her from blowing her head off.”

His partner walked over to us, and my guy stepped away. I caught a glimpse of his name sewn onto his shirt. Jerry. The other guy, about thirty and stocky, like a football player, was Mitch.

They talked a minute; then Mitch walked over to their truck and got on the radio. Jerry cleaned the cut on my head and closed the wound with two butterfly stitches.

“Keep that clean and dry for a few days,” he said. “And you should be fine. The cut wasn’t too deep, but you might want to check with your doctor, just in case.”

“Thanks.” I touched the wound carefully. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“Try not to touch it,” he said, shaking his head. He watched me for a second. “I guess you are the new girl Anezka has working for her, huh?”

I looked at him, wondering who knew what in these parts. “Just for a while,” I said. “My current gig is on hiatus.”

“I remember you,” he said, snapping his fingers. “You pulled those people from that fire in the spring. Out north of Gold Bar, where all those people died making that movie.”

Great. Just what I needed, publicity. “Was a bad time.”

“Yeah, for sure.”

Mitch came up with a clipboard and asked me a few questions for their records. Then they packed up and headed back to Leavenworth.

I sat on her stoop and watched them drive away, my blood-soaked jeans congealing into a cold and nasty mess.

A nice hot shower and some clean clothes sounded like a good idea. I’d clean up her place, maybe patch the hole in her wall so critters and weather didn’t get in. Then, I’d see about getting a hold of Julie, then Gunther, and eventually Katie. God, it felt like I hadn’t seen her in a year.

I was across the road pulling my pack with my spare clothes out of the trunk when Skella started screaming.

What in the living hell was going on now?

Forty-two

Bub was back. He had Skella pinned in the kitchen, snapping at her with his massive jaws. She was up on the table, about to throw a salt shaker at him, when I burst in the door.

“Don’t bother,” I said, storming into the kitchen. “He’ll just eat it.”

He turned to me, hissing and baring his bajillion teeth.

I swung my pack as hard as I could, catching him upside the head and flinging him across the room to smash into the refrigerator. Before he could rise, I stomped on his head. Squish, and Bub was dead again. He must be tired of this by now.

The little bastard managed to put a bite into the sole of my Doc Martens, though. Damn it all. I sat on the floor beside his already-bubbling corpse and pulled my boot off. They were soaked in blood as well, and the sole was ruined.

Good thing I had sneakers in my spare-clothes kit. But those were my favorite boots. This I was not going to forgive.

“Okay, now I know where you’ve been disappearing to lately,” Skella said, looking over the edge of the table at Bub’s frothing corpse. “There’s some seriously dangerous magic around here.”

“Gee, ya think?” I said, pulling off my other boot and climbing to my feet.

She slowly climbed down off the table and edged around the room toward the door, keeping what remained of Bub in close view.

“Really weird shit,” she mumbled and bolted across the living room and back to the bedroom.

I stood in the kitchen and stripped off my jeans. For the time being, I shoved them in the sink, along with my socks. Finally, I just said to hell with it, and stripped off my shirt, and added it to the stinking pile. My bra was unscathed, thankfully, so I left it on. After I washed my hands I’d take it off.

I padded across the living room, shut the front door, and went into the bathroom. I knew there was a washing machine somewhere here.

“Skella?”

“What,” a frightened voice called from the bedroom.

I stepped out into the hall and down toward the bedroom. Skella was looking in the mirror. “You leaving?” I asked, annoyed.

“No,” she said. “Looking for Gletts. He knows about blood magic. I don’t like the dark stuff.”

Blood magic. I glanced down at my soiled hands. How much trouble were we in? Pieces tumbled in my head, connections fell into place. “Is this related to the mead and Ari?”

She sat on the edge of the bed and dropped her hand in her lap. “Gletts is better able to talk about all this,” she said with a sigh. “Some of the dwarves worked with the dragon. Their loyalty was rewarded; power was gained.”

I could tell she was scared, but this rang in my head, a resonance with Odin’s warnings. “Blood magic,” a chill ran through me. The connection here, this place, Justin, Flora, Anezka … Was there some connection to the mead? “How did you find me here?” I asked. “You said you couldn’t see me.”

“It was Gletts,” she said, studying her hands. “He knows some tricks.”

“Tricks?”

For a minute, she looked embarrassed. “He did something the dwarves taught him, a little thing to help find someone. The more powerful they are, the easier it is.”

“That explains a few things.”

“But this place,” she said, looking around. “This place is bad. He knew about it, was surprised you were here.”

Coincidence? It made my brain hurt. I hated coincidences, and this was a big one. “Is Anezka connected to all this?”

“No, like I said, we don’t know Anezka. It was the man. He’s not here any longer.”

“Justin?”

She shrugged. “Jean-Paul had dealings with him.”

I staggered back. “Holy fuck.”

She looked embarrassed. “It’s something about this place. There is power here. Can’t you feel the taint of it?”

I could. “Yes, it’s palpable.”

“I thought the world would be better after you killed Jean-Paul. But it’s still just as big a mess.”