“I mean it.” He wrapped the last towel around his hips. “I’m going to get my kit.”
“You never let me have any fun,” I pouted when Linus returned fully dressed. “You could have at least played doctor with me naked.”
“I’m not that strong.” His grip tightened on the knot. “Resisting you is hard enough as it is.”
“You say the sweetest things.” I cuddled against him, drenching his shirt. “You make it sound like you could Hulk out and ravage me at any moment.”
When Linus turned his gaze on me and his eyes were black from corner to corner, I couldn’t help my smile. You might say that unraveling his self-control had become a hobby of mine, one I practiced often.
“I’ll behave.” I crossed a finger over my heart. “Promise.”
His gaze dipped, black tendrils unfurling around him, and he growled low in his throat.
“Sorry,” I whispered, folding my hands primly in my lap. “I really will behave.”
Linus sat me at the foot of the bed then helped me turn onto my stomach and stretch out my legs.
“I’m going to try closing these with a healing sigil,” he murmured, his voice rough. “We’ll go from there.”
The magic took the sting out of the wounds, but it didn’t accomplish much else. I hadn’t expected it to, given how Linus had reacted, but it was worth a shot.
Testing his patch job, I gave an experimental flex that set my leg on fire. “Want me to give it a try?”
He raked a calculating glance the length of my thigh. “Can you reach?”
“Good question.”
I would have offered to give him my blood and let him do it, but goddess-touched magic worked only for goddess-touched necromancers, as far as I could tell. That didn’t make it any safer for my blood to fall into enemy hands. There was always someone clever, ambitious, or desperate enough to figure out a workaround for most anything.
With effort, I got myself sitting on the foot of the mattress, back where we started. “Knife?”
Linus passed me my pocketknife and hovered as if unsure how best to help.
The combination of our stress must have summoned Cletus, who arrived with a downcast head and linked hands. He looked…guilty. Even his moan of inquiry came out higher and tighter than usual.
The sight of my blood on the bedspread wasn’t doing Linus’s blood pressure any favors, so I let the wraith off the hook for the moment and focused on how best to position myself with minimal ouchiness. In the end, there was no way to avoid more pain as I crossed one leg, bracing that ankle over my knee.
The quick bite of my blade drew blood, and I used it as ink to draw on the healing sigil that had worked on Linus. Magic filled my hands, and I sank it into the furrows, leaving my skin glowing and my pores sparkling.
“Your palm.” Linus caught it in his. “You’re still bleeding.”
“The sigil didn’t work on my calves, either.” I uncrossed my legs. “Ow.”
“Lie down.” He rifled through his kit. “We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
“Goody.” Used to the drill, I spread out again. “I wonder what’s up with my hand.”
“The toxin might have an anticoagulant in it. It could be stopping your blood from clotting.”
“Ugh.” I held out my hand to him since it was making the bigger mess, and he cleaned it, smeared his own antibacterial concoction on it, then bandaged it up tight. “The claw marks didn’t bleed this much.”
“You cut hard when you’re healing.” He pressed his lips to the bandage, kissing my boo-boo. “The scratches aren’t as deep.”
“They feel like it,” I grumbled. “They sting like you’re pouring peroxide on them.”
“I am pouring peroxide on them.”
“Oh.” I glanced over my shoulder at him. “Well that explains it then.” His soft huff of laughter told me we were over the hump. “You want to watch a movie and make out when you’re done?”
“Yes and no.” He gave me a stern glance that held too much heat and amusement to sting. “You’re going to rest and heal. We can make out tomorrow, if you’re a good girl.”
“Sex has really changed you.” I sighed dramatically. “I remember the days when you were innocent…”
Heat crept up his throat. “You have only yourself to blame.”
“True.” I had trouble containing my smile. “I will gladly take the credit for corrupting you.”
The wraith touched my shoulder, moaned unintelligible words, and left us alone.
“He’s acting weird.” I drummed my fingers on the mattress. “Do you think he’s okay?”
“Cletus is a singularity, so it’s hard to say.” He finished cleaning and medicating my calves then wrapped them with bandages. “Most likely, he’s worried about you or still upset about your fall.”
“Hmm.”
When Linus finished, he helped me turn over and propped me against the headboard. “Are you hungry?”
“Use your best judgment.”
“That’s a yes.”
“Yes, that is a yes.”
“Do you need anything else from the kitchen?” He made zero progress toward the door. “I’m going to lock you in from the hall while I’m gone so you don’t have to get up again.”
“I wouldn’t say no to a bottle of water.” I flexed my toes, which didn’t help with the itching under my bandages. At all. “My throat feels like I swallowed all the dust in the basement.”
He left, eventually, but he didn’t look happy about it.
Since I had time on my hands, I checked my email. I had a message from Bishop but decided to wait on Linus to read it. With that decision made, I dialed up my bestie to see what trouble she had been getting into without me. “Hiya.”
“Hi yourself.” A tick, tick, tick filled the background. “Your honeymoon was a total bust, huh? Must be if you’re calling me twenty-four hours in instead of making sweet, sweet love to your hubby.”
“There was an accident,” I confessed. “Sweet, sweet love has been put on hold.”
“What kind of accident?” A growl entered her voice. “Do I have to eat someone?”
The temptation to make a cat and dog joke was there, but I managed to swallow it with minimal choking. “How much do you know about our honeymoon plans?”
“Everything.” She scoffed. “Do you really think we’d let you out of our sight otherwise?”
“I haven’t been kidnapped in years, and no one hardly ever tries to murder me anymore.”
“Until tonight.”
“Okay, fine. Until tonight.”
And the night before, but who was counting?
A masculine voice murmured what sounded like directions, and brakes squealed in my ear. “Are you and Hood going somewhere?”
“You could say that.” She hissed at him to be quiet. “Don’t worry about us.”
Call me crazy, but I didn’t like the tone of this call. “How’s Keet?”
“He’s been watching an anime series about a dragon egg or a dragon prince with our little diva.” The ticking noise resumed then switched off. “He tried to incubate the boiled egg from her breakfast, so we gave him an Easter egg from last year, one of the tiny decorative ones. He’s been sitting on it ever since.”
“As long as he’s happy?” I exhaled. “Let’s cross our fingers they run out of episodes before he realizes his egg will never hatch. Switch to The Lion King if he starts getting depressed about it. Nothing cheers him up like making farting warthog noises.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Tires screeched, and Hood swore, but Lethe’s breath didn’t so much as catch. “I know the drill.”
The call ended without another word, and I pulled back to look at my phone. Almost immediately, it rang, and I answered, “Hello again.”
“Sorry about that,” Hood apologized. “Eva connected her cell phone to our radio, and we can’t figure out how to override hers with ours, so it keeps dropping calls.”
Ah, the joys of parenthood and having a tech-savvy kid. “I totally understand.”
We made goodbye noises, and I flopped back in bed to wait on Linus.
I was halfway to dozing when a mournful baying raised the hairs down my arms.
“There’s no way.” I slid off the bed and hobbled to the window. “She wouldn’t…”
The noise didn’t come again, and I started doubting whether I had heard it in the first place. Probably wishful thinking. Our situation was getting more intense, and backup wouldn’t be the worst idea ever, not that I would admit it to Cletus. I was no longer sure we could solve this haunting within our time limit, but the potentate in me felt obligated to try.
The door swung open before I reached the bed.
Busted.
“What are you doing up?” Linus entered with a tray he must have found downstairs in his hands. “Did you see something outside?”
“I heard something.” I tottered in his direction. “I probably imagined it.”
Noticing the phone on the quilt, he asked, “Any news?”
“Bishop touched base with me.” I sat on the mattress and pulled up the message. “No families of any shape or size have gone missing in a fifty-mile radius during the last thirty days, so that’s a break in the pattern.”
“Or it hasn’t been reported yet.” He joined me. “If they were traveling or on vacation, it might take time for their family and friends to realize something is wrong.”
“True.” I set my cell aside. “I was hoping for a neon sign or flashing lights or something.”
“Sadly, villains tend not to advertise their dastardly deeds until after they’ve been successfully committed.”