Marked: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 2) (7 page)

Ahead, I could just make out the body of the helicopter hovering in front of the building. The gunners were below my line of sight, no doubt getting ready to fill us full of lead the moment we appeared. Well, they were in for a rude awakening. Mac Brennan style.

“What are you doing?” Ricky shrieked, sparing me a glance as we moved steadily out into the open.

“Do you trust me?” I asked, holding onto her shoulder for balance.

She nodded. Yup, definitely couldn’t be friends.

“Gun it!”

Bless her heart, she did as I asked. I was somewhat surprised because I was pretty sure most people would be wondering what I was planning. Ricky didn’t. She just hit the throttle on the bike and sent us surging toward the helicopter. It must have caught sight of us as we zoomed out from cover because it began to rise, presumably to get into position to blow us to Kingdome Come.

“Brake!” I called when the concrete embankment was only a few feet away. In front of us, I could see a bald man in a suit already starting to bring the Browning M2 up.

Ricky braked. I went flying through the air like a goddamned missile, which was the whole idea. I curled my right hand into fist and a lance of agony exploded down my side. Blood began to pour from my wounded arm, but I ignored it as I reared back and called upon all my rage and desperation.

“Ignis!” I cried with everything inside me. My tattoos came to life in an explosion of scarlet star fire, spilling crimson light all around me as flame the color of Hell itself filled my hand. I slammed my hellfire wreathed fist into the side of the helicopter’s cockpit, which was pretty much when I realized punching a helicopter in the face six stories in the air was probably not my smartest move, and I should have just blasted it from the roof with my demon fire.

My world was suddenly enveloped in a burning fireball of doom that flung me backward in a flurry of busted glass and sheared off metal. The smell of burning flesh and hair filled my nose as I threw my other arm up in a vain attempt to shield myself with my trench coat from the chunks of flaming debris raining down all around me. Something struck my lower abdomen hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs, and everything went white with pain.

I slammed backward onto the roof of the parking garage so hard everything inside me seemed to break. My vision went dark and hazy around the edge. As I laid there struggling to breathe or even roll myself into a fetal position, a hunk of flaming metal the size of a chest freezer fell on top of me.

Chapter 8

My eyes snapped open, and I surged upward, instinctively throwing my arms up to defend against an attack that wasn’t there. I found myself naked in a bathtub full of ice and in more pain than I could have imagined. The bottom of the tub, along with the surrounding bathroom was splattered with blood, and not just a little blood, but a whole lot of blood.

I reached down, intending to shove my hands through the ice and feel for my kidneys to make sure they, along with all my other important organs, were still there, but pain so acute I could barely breathe past it exploded along the length of my right arm.

A scream of agony I couldn’t contain tore from my throat, and the handle on the door of the pay-by-the-hour motel jiggled with way too much feeling. I wasn’t sure who was out there or how I’d gotten into my current predicament, but there was no way I was going to lay here and let someone come carve out my organs or slice off my arm.

I ground my teeth together and used up pretty much all my manliness points to pull myself out of the ice-filled tub. I landed hard on the cheap, stained linoleum and tried to make my body move. My abdomen screamed at me to stop torturing it, but I ignored it as best I could. I stifled a cry, pushing down the fire roiling in my guts, and grabbed onto the toilet with my left hand. My muscles corded as I pushed myself into a semi-sitting position. Pale light spilled from my right arm, causing me to suck in a sharp breath. My arm was on fire. Figuratively, not literally.

In fact, my demonic arm throbbed so badly, I was pretty sure I was dead, only that’d likely hurt less. That’s when I remembered it had been carved like a Thanksgiving turkey. I hazarded a glance at my arm as the smell of burning flesh filled my nose. It looked like someone had used an honest to God office stapler to staple the cut in my arm closed before wrapping it in duct tape. Blood oozed out from the wound anyway, dripping down my wrist and spattering the floor with thin, steaming droplets.

“I need to stop winding up in situations like this,” I muttered, trying to figure out what had happened because the last thing I remembered was trying to Mike Tyson a helicopter and getting my dumbass blown up. How had I wound up here? Had Pierce’s men managed to capture me afterward? What about Ricky? Where was she? Was she okay? I had to find out.

As the door began to swing inward toward me, I somehow got my naked legs under me and flung myself at the door, intending to hit it with my shoulder and knock it closed, but my feet slipped on the blood-slick linoleum. I wound up pitching forward, flailing my arms like an idiot.

I careened forward as the door swung fully open and crashed into a brunette wearing pink scrubs and carrying a black medical bag with the weird snake symbol on it. Our collision drove her backward into the hallway, and we collapsed into a heap atop the frayed green carpet. Ricky sat bolt upright on the frumpy queen bed to the right and stared at me like I was absolutely insane.

“What the hell are you doing, Mac?” Sera cried, shock filling her “girl next door” features, which was totally reasonable given that I was lying naked and bleeding on top of her.

“Trying to keep you from stealing my organs!” I hollered. While the words hadn’t sounded insane in my head, they sure did once they were out in the open. I tried to crawl off of her but only succeeded in putting weight on my torn up right arm. The world went spotty and shrapnel filled. I fell back on top of her, my forehead smacking against her chest.

“Mac, I put you in the ice so you wouldn’t overheat,” Ricky called, leaping from the bed and coming toward us. “You used so much power, your body was about to combust. Your skin started flaking away like ash.” She grabbed hold of my left arm and forcibly pulled me off Sera who was still on her butt in the hallway of the cheap motel room. She hadn’t so much as moved since I’d tackled her.

“What are you talking about?” I cried, whirling toward Ricky and jerking my arm out of her grip. It hadn’t been my brightest play because it caused me to lose my balance, and I wound up flopping into her. Ricky grunted, catching me and keeping me from braining myself on the tiny television stand.

“You need to calm down, Mac. No one is going to steal your stupid organs.” Ricky made a disgusted face at me. “I own buildings, plural, as in more than one. I don’t need to sell your kidneys for cash.” Ricky began dragging me back toward the bathroom with so little effort it made me wonder just how strong she was. “Unless you think I was going to eat them?” She gave me a withering look. “Have you ever eaten liver? It’s disgusting. Whenever it gets served, I just pick at the onions.”

“Well, maybe you just wanted my skin cool to the touch before you had your way with me,” I said in a display of complete and total ridiculousness.

“Trust me, Mac. If you ever get lucky enough to find out what that’s like, you’ll be conscious,” she said, a slight flush coloring her cheeks as she spoke. Was she imagining such a scenario?

“Ricky called me to take a look at you on account of your arm,” Sera said, injecting her voice into the conversation like a calm wind buffeting against the fury of Ricky’s annoyance. She was back on her feet, medical bag clasped in one hand. “But if you don’t want me to examine you, I can show myself out.” Her eyes roamed over my body as she spoke, and I realized I was stark naked in front of her for the second time in as many days. The last time had ended with her pulling a gun on me. This time wasn’t looking like it was going to end much better.

“No, it’s okay. I’m all done freaking out,” I replied, noting the blush settling on her cheeks as she looked away from me. “But you are officially the least fun female to be naked around.”

Ricky smacked me upside the back of the head and flung me back into the tub way more violently than was necessary. The ice beneath me began to melt as I sank into the depths of the tub. Almost immediately I felt a lot better, you know baring the whole duct tape and stapled arm thing. Maybe I had really been about to combust. Apparently that was a thing. Good to know.

“Sadly, you are not the least fun naked man I’ve been around,” Sera deadpanned as she stepped into the room and set her bag on the small counter.

“Do you need me to hold him down?” Ricky asked, tossing a predatory glance at Sera that made me think she might enjoy drowning me in ice cubes. “Because I’m totally up for that.”

“Mac, do you need Ricky to hold you down, or are you man enough for me to stitch up your arm without freaking out?” Sera asked me and there was only a faint trace of humor in her voice.

“I think I can manage,” I said, looking away from the two women as they exchanged a mental conversation I couldn’t follow.

“I’ll be in the other room then. Try not to scream too much, Mac. Kung Fu Panda just doesn’t sound the same when there’s screaming in the background,” Ricky said before walking out of the room. A moment later, I heard the television come on, but before I could determine what was actually playing, Sera shut the door.

“Hey, Mac. How are things?” she asked, moving over to the counter and rummaging around inside her bag. “Seems like you’ve been busy. I heard you blew up a helicopter with your fist.”

“Yeah, well, bullets are overrated.” I tried to smile at her, but it hurt too much, and her back was to me so it wouldn’t have mattered.

She laughed, and the sound could have summoned small woodland creatures to her aid. She turned back around and came toward me with a large syringe filled with yellowish fluid. “Well, next time, try to do it when your arm isn’t sliced open to the bone. When you’re like that, your magic can short circuit and fry you from the inside out.”

“Like a puppy in a microwave?” I asked and immediately wished I hadn’t because the look on her face made me feel pretty horrible. Still, what she said worried me. I didn’t know my magic could pop me like a fuse. I’d have to be a lot more careful in the future to avoid slicing open my demon arm. While the amount I knew about my demonic arm could have filled a shot glass, it would be nice to know the things that would cause it to kill me. Where was an owner’s manual when you needed one?

“Yeah… you need to work on the filter between your brain and your mouth,” she said and sat down on the toilet seat. She put the still capped syringe down on the top of the toilet’s tank and looked at me for a moment. “Can you put your arm up on the side here?” She patted the side of the tub.

I complied even though doing so felt slightly less pleasant than flossing my teeth with barbed wire. Apparently, she wasn’t super thrilled with Ricky’s first aid job because she clucked in annoyance. “Seriously, Staples and duct tape? That girl needs to get away from the other werewolves for a bit.”

“I’m just glad she didn’t pee on the wound,” I said, smiling at her as best I could.

Sera didn’t reply which was disconcerting. Had Ricky peed on my arm? I half-leaned in to check before deciding against it. If she had peed on my arm, I didn’t want to know.

A moment later, Sera had the duct tape cut away and had injected my arm with what felt like concentrated snake venom mixed with a dash of harpy fury in several places along the length of the cut. It sort of reminded me of going to the dentist, although I could talk because Sera’s hands weren’t all up in my grill.

“Let’s give it a minute to numb up, tough guy,” she said, pulling a pair of what looked like needle-nose pliers out of her black bag. “Then I’ll pull out the staples and sew you up.” She put her hands in her pink scrub clad lap. “Okay?”

“Why did you come to help me?” I asked before I could stop myself. “You should be staying as far away from me as humanly possible.”

“I’m a nurse. My job is putting Humpty Dumptys back together, although I haven’t sewn anyone up inside the bathroom of a cheap motel room in a while.” She grinned at me. “Besides, Mac, I owe you for saving my son and me from Van. There aren’t many people who could have pulled that off.”

“You know,” I said, weighing my words carefully. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Oh?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at me. “What have you been thinking?”

“Why did Van want you?” I paused to gesture at her, but as soon as I tried to move my arm, I thought better of it and decided to let it lay on the cool tub. “You seem pretty normal, but he was draining your blood, and you know a lot about, well, everything.”

“And that makes you think I’m somehow not normal?” she asked with a hint of laughter in her voice. “Maybe he’s just some crazy douchebag.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “But in my experience, limited as it is, he didn’t strike me as insane. Well, not in the foaming at the mouth insane sort of way. He struck me as more Bond villain insane, like a guy who was too wrapped up in what he was doing to realize he’d skipped past the line to crazy town a long time ago.”

“Seems like you have him pegged,” Sera replied, leaning down and plucking one of the staples out of my arm with her pliers. It didn’t hurt, thank God, but it didn’t exactly feel awesome. “When did you get so smart?”

“About the time I punched a helicopter in the face,” I said, looking away as she kept plucking away at the staples because it was starting to make me feel like a Foster Farms chicken. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

“Can’t I just say it’s because he’s a dick?” she asked in a way that made it clear she wasn’t expecting me to respond. She bit her lip, chewing on it in thought. “Van was trying to find my husband and was using my blood in some demonic ritual to try to find him. Van and his demon Vassago think my husband might still be alive somewhere, but that’s impossible. He
died
a few years ago. If he wasn’t dead, there’s no way he would just walk away from John and me. He would have come back to us.”