35. Chapter 35

35

Z ida took off across the infirmary again, filling it with the sound of drawers and cabinet doors rumbling open and banging shut, plus the clink of various glass vials and the clang of metal instruments smashing around, as if the old woman still hadn’t figured out how to properly organize her supplies.

As steadfast as ever, Maxwell hovered beside the bed, looking Rebecca over with such deep concern behind his eyes—concern bordering on crippling pain—that she wondered if the explosion had also wounded him and she’d just been too preoccupied to notice.

“You’ll be all right,” he told her, his voice thick with emotion she didn’t recognize and didn’t expect. Not from him. “You’ll see. We got you here in time.”

“I know,” she croaked. It felt like a ridiculous thing to say, but it was the truth.

Rebecca knew she’d be fine. She just wished they could get all the fiddling and fussing over with so she finally could be.

Maxwell didn’t look very convinced, though. In fact, as he stood rigidly beside the bed, his eyebrows drew farther together and darkened with unseen pain while he looked her over again from head to toe.

Almost as if he couldn’t bear to see her like this.

She was certain the injury looked far worse than it was, with three inches of a thick wooden stake protruding from her belly and blood all over her.

Blood all over him. Blood everywhere, really.

What a mess Rowan had made of the entire morning.

And to think, Rebecca had started today feeling so good about everything until the elf had fired that Hells-cursed machine gun.

“What are you doing? Just standing there like a useless lump?” Zida snapped as she returned to the bedside, shooing Maxwell absently with a wave of her hand. “Move. Get out of the way.”

He tried to reach for Rebecca—for which part of her, she wasn’t sure—but the healer slapped his hands away until he finally relented and took two hesitant steps back.

“This is the only issue we’re dealing with today?” Zida asked as she stooped over Rebecca’s belly and narrowed her beady eyes at the wound.

“The only one I know of,” Rebecca choked out. “Yeah.”

A tremendously powerful surge of debilitating fatigue swept over her then, drowning out all other sensation as her eyelids fluttered.

Seriously? The woman was taking so long to fix her up, she was actually losing consciousness.

“Oh no, you don’t. Hey!” Zida snapped her fingers several times in Rebecca’s ear until Rebecca’s eyes finally opened again. “No, you stay with me and stay awake . Understand? I will ruin you if you do anything else.”

Zida’s wrinkled old face disappeared from view, replaced almost instantly by Maxwell’s.

“Just hang in there,” he muttered.

When Rebecca felt a warm weight settling around her hand, she tried to pull out of it but didn’t have the strength. Even the tingling jolt of energy zipping through her hand and up into her arm at the contact felt weak and somehow far away.

Was he holding her hand?

More than anything else, that possibility baffled her entirely.

Since when did her Head of Security grow so concerned over anyone’s injury that he stayed at their bedside in the infirmary and held their hand?

Her eyelids fluttered again until she somehow forced them to stop so she could focus on his face.

It was much harder than it should have been.

Now Maxwell looked like he was the one lying in this bed with a wooden stake poking out of him.

“All right, Hannigan,” Zida called from the other side of the room. “You’ve done your due diligence. You brought her to me. Now I need you to get out.”

“I’ll stay,” he declared, which only confused Rebecca that much more.

The healer’s skills were well-known and greatly appreciated, not to mention highly valued. Every member of Shade had seen her results with countless other operatives coming in and out of this infirmary.

It wasn’t like Zida’s effectiveness had been put on a trial basis until she could prove herself capable of handling something like this.

But the shifter sure looked like that was what he thought. Like he was afraid Rebecca would slip off into oblivion forever if he left her side or so much as took his eyes off her.

What was he so damn worried about?

She hadn’t thought it possible for him to look this worried about anything.

Maxwell stared at her wound, grimacing, the muscles of his jaw clenching over and over as he stood there in some kind of frozen indecision. “Zida…”

“That’s my name,” the healer replied. “And I told you to leave.”

“You can help her, can’t you?”

By the Blood. He had to have been hit by something during the explosion. That was the only explanation for the way he was acting now.

“Huh.” Zida scoffed. “Is that why you came here? Bust down my door just so you could question my expertise? Because let me tell you, judging by the last however many decades I’ve been healing Shade operatives—back to full health, I might add—I was under the impression that I know what the Blue Hells I’m doing.”

“I have to be sure,” Maxwell muttered.

“Uh-huh, yeah.” The healer dismissed him with a toss of her hand. “Trust me, I’m not all that eager for another change in leadership just yet, either, okay? But for me to do my job, I need you to leave. I’m going to the back for a few more supplies, so you’ve got…two minutes. Not a second longer. Deal with it.”

The door at the rear of the infirmary squealed open and shut again, and then it was just Rebecca lying blood-soaked on the bed and Maxwell hovering over her, his silver eyes slowly pulsing with an intensely dark light.

If she’d known he would react like this, she might have worked a little harder to deny his help to the infirmary. This was getting a little ridiculous.

No matter how much blood she’d admittedly lost already, when Rebecca healed herself, none of it would make a difference.

She couldn’t heal herself if the shifter didn’t quit hovering at her side like some overly protective guard dog.

Dammit, if he’d left when Zida told him to, Rebecca would be alone right now. Two minutes tops, and her gut problems would be over.

But no, Maxwell had stayed, forcing her to lie here like any other wood-skewered invalid and endure that doleful look on the shifter’s face, like he thought he was about to lose something important.

At that thought, Rebecca closed her eyes and forced herself to think of anything else. Currently, not very many alternatives came to mind.

“Knox?”

The gentleness in his voice made her open her eyes.

“I can stay,” he added.

What he didn’t say was “if she wanted him to”, but for some strange reason with no logical validity to it, that had been implied.

Rebecca tried to clear her throat, but it was impossibly dry now.

“You got me here,” she said, her voice hoarse and barely audible. “That’s enough. I’ll be fine. Really.”

“You hear that?” Zida shouted from the other side of the closed door. “She’ll be fine!”

Maxwell’s frown only deepened.

If nothing else, Rebecca needed him to get out of here so he wouldn’t get in the way. She could have definitely healed herself by now.

Maybe a different tactic would help him on his way?

“You trust Zida, don’t you?” she asked.

“Of course I do.” The way he said it made it sound more like a question. Not very convincing.

“Then let that be enough, okay? Let her do her job so—” A cough bubbled up inside her, sounding grotesquely wet and sticky and most likely the cause of the remaining color draining from Maxwell’s face. “—so we can get back to doing ours.”

He said nothing, his jaw clenching over and over at a steadily increasing rate.

Something about the way he stared at her made Rebecca wonder if he was about to change his mind and steal her away from the infirmary bed to take her somewhere else. As if anywhere else would have been safer or better than this room.

She was vaguely aware of the door in the back opening again before the clink of glass jars and vials joined the urgent shuffling of the healer’s footsteps. Then Zida’s face popped up in her vision on the opposite side of the bed.

The old healer leered down at her patient. “Aw… Well isn’t that just so damn cute?”

Rebecca had no idea what that meant, but a second later, the warm pressure around her fingers released and disappeared.

As soon as he’d released her hand, a horrid, debilitating, almost painful grief swept through Rebecca, overwhelming her. As if an integral part of her had just been severed, never to return.

The seeping cold ripping through her core almost made her cry out. Instantly longing for that warmth—that piece of her—to return, she barely stifled the urge to beg for his hand around hers again.

Then she made a mental note to never let Maxwell take her hand again. The sensation of him letting go was almost more than she could bear.

What in the Blue Hells was wrong with her?

She made the mistake of looking up at Maxwell and hoping to see his stoic mask of stony apathy returned, so she could be sure that what she’d felt was some unknown fluke.

She shouldn’t have looked at him at all.

Maxwell’s scowl returned as he backed away from the bed, no longer gazing desperately down at Rebecca but refusing to look anywhere but at the edge of the crumpled, blood-smeared sheets. His silver eyes flashed so intently, she thought she saw tears there.

Now more than ever, it looked like he was the one fighting not to succumb to the agony of being skewered by flying target shrapnel.

Whatever was happening here, Rebecca wanted no part of it.

But she wasn’t in any position to remove herself from the intensely strange situation, and that made it even worse.

“Stop squirming,” Zida hissed, though Rebecca wasn’t aware of having moved on the bed. “Do you wanna lose what little blood you have left?”

Maxwell took another step back and cleared his throat. “I can help.”

“ Help ?” the healer barked before whirling on him. “You listen to me right now. This is the only place where you can’t pull rank on me, Hannigan. Now get out. And no loitering! I’ve got enough wolfsbane back here to smoke you to kingdom come if you don’t do as you’re told. Just try me, huh? I dare you.”

He glowered back at her as she shooed him with violent waves of her hand toward the door, but he had no choice but to relent. “The second she recovers, I want to hear about it—”

“Yeah, yeah, we all want our favorite Thon-Da’al back on her feet. Get out.” The healer waved her claw-like hand toward the door.

Rebecca could have sworn the door swung open all on its own before an invisible force shoved Maxwell the rest of the way across the infirmary, through the open doorway, and stumbling into the hall before it slammed shut again in his face.

Then Zida thrust her wrinkled face right into Rebecca’s line of sight to inspect her wound again, taking over what little remained of the conversation. “How exactly did you come by this fun little party favor? Because ‘training mishap’ doesn’t check any of the right boxes, does it? Plus, I don’t like vague and mysterious answers.”

Fighting to speak through a raw and scratchy throat, Rebecca relayed the main points of said training mishap exactly as she remembered them. “Then Hannigan got me up and hauled me to your door. End of story.”

Zida leaned closer and squinted with only one eye before she barked out a harsh laugh. “ Vrestí !”

Rebecca settled her head back against the pillows and let out a raspy sigh. “You can say that again.”

As soon as she’d said it, the infirmary fell deathly silent.

Worried that something had happened to the healer now, Rebecca cracked open her eyes and found Zida staring at her with a highly discomforting mix of surprise and amusement. “What?”

A crooked, clawed finger wagged in her face. “I knew it. I knew you were Old World. Hell, I’ll be the last person to look at that pretty face of yours and assume you’re not hiding nearly as many years behind it as you can see on mine. I had a feeling. This whole time, I had a feeling. Even when you elves are so good at hiding all those extra little details.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rebecca said flatly.

“Oh, no?” Zida cocked her head and studied her patient sideways, like a rickety old crow listening for the sound of a fat, juicy worm squirming around beneath the soil. “Tell ya what. I might not be too old to get excited about it, but I am old enough to understand when I’ve taken a thing too far.”

Was this the woman’s way of apologizing and trying to take it back?

“Listen,” Rebecca said through another grunt, “as fun as this is, there’s still a splinter sticking out of me, so can we—”

“Oh, psh!” Zida waved her off before turning toward the wheeled cart of supplies beside her to rifle through its contents. “All work and no play, blah, blah, blah. It’s not like I expect you to tell me your whole life’s story or anything. Damn. Here, drink this.”

She thrust a vial of watery, black-tinted liquid under Rebecca’s nose and wiggled it back and forth.

“What is it?”

“All of it,” Zida snapped. “And don’t tell me you’re starting to have doubts about my methods too, eh? The shifter’s hard enough to deal with, but I thought you and I already had an understanding.”

Being compared to Maxwell rankled Rebecca’s pride. She took the vial from Zida’s hand.

After two seconds of fumbling at the stopper with weak fingers, she found the vial snatched back out of her grasp until the cork popped out and Zida handed it back. “And I do mean all of it.”

Rebecca knocked back the potion just as she’d been told and might have vomited the foul stuff back up all over the floor if there hadn’t been a shard of wood in her guts making the act of leaning forward so damn painful.

After she choked back the urge to vomit a second time, that urge finally subsided. The pain that had pulsed through her belly like a hot poker digging around beneath the coals faded and dimmed into an uncomfortable annoyance.

A massive sigh of relief escaped her as the agony faded, but that relief didn’t last long.

Because then Zida snatched up her patient’s left arm in both clawed hands, turned it over one way and then the other for a close inspection, and dropped it back onto the mattress with a thump. “All right, spit it out. What aren’t you telling me?”

Rebecca frowned at her. “Nothing.”

Always the best line to fall back on when she had no clue what this crazy old woman was talking about. Even though, in this situation, she knew exactly what Zida was talking about.

The healer glanced pointedly at the lack of homunculus wound on Rebecca’s arm. “Uh-huh. Right. Well, until I know what I’m working with, and I mean all the juicy details, all I can do is the generic bare minimum here.

“I’ll take out the splinter, patch you up, pump you with fluids, and if that’s all you need? Well, then we can say I’ve done my job. I’m keeping you here for the next twenty-four hours, minimum. No excuses.”

“I really don’t think that’s necessary,” Rebecca rasped.

Zida folded her arms and nodded. “For observation.”

Rebecca wouldn’t be talking her way out of this one.

This was nothing like what she’d hoped today would become, but she didn’t have the energy to fight the old healer or to pretend she had no idea what Zida was talking about.

Rebecca was already on thin ice with the woman. That much she did know.

For however long, Zida had already suspected Rebecca was an old-worlder, and Rebecca had confirmed it with a mindless slip of the tongue, because she was too out of it to recognize when not to respond to an old-world Xaharí expletive in English .

Pair that with the Bloodshadow crest Zida had to have seen in Rebecca’s possession the last time she’d paid the infirmary an overnight visit, and there was already enough evidence there to support serious suspicion on Zida’s part.

Not that the healer would have recognized an unimaginably old, rare, seldomly seen crest like that belonging to the Bloodshadow Elves, but she had to have noticed that box in Rebecca’s jacket pocket that night.

And now, Zida kept shooting dubious looks at Rebecca’s healed arm…

The woman had already put together several pieces of the puzzle on her own—enough to know there was something different about Shade’s elven Thon-Da’al.

Something Rebecca didn’t want anyone else to know.

Something she couldn’t let anyone else know, and she couldn’t use her Bloodshadow healing here.

Of all Shade’s members, Zida and Bor—possibly even Earl—were most likely to have heard plenty of old-world stories. Stories they could match with what they saw and their own suspicions of another confirmed old-worlder among them.

If that happened, Rebecca wouldn’t even have to give herself away.

She didn’t think Zida would squeal on her. The healer clearly had more than enough secrets of her own, all of which she’d be hard pressed to give up just because someone asked. Still, Rebecca couldn’t take the chance.

Her only other option now was to let the healer do her job and tend to Rebecca’s wounds the old-fashioned way. Which went hand in hand with submitting to Zida’s demands for a round of twenty-four-hour observation in the infirmary.

Forget the fact that, given the circumstances, the patient’s consent wasn’t remotely necessary.

Finally seeming satisfied that her patient wouldn’t fight her on this, Zida huffed out a sigh, nodded, and bent over beside the bed to rummage around beneath it. When she stood again, she lifted four strong, thick, heavy leather straps in her gnarled hands.

“What are those?” Rebecca croaked, eyeing the straps.

“What do they look like, elf? Don’t tell me you were blinded in this mishap too.”

“But you’re not actually going to—”

“Use them on you? Oh, yes, I most certainly am. Watch me. Because at this point, that’s about all you’re capable of right now, isn’t it?” The healer hobbled around the bed, taking the straps with her, then buckled the first one down across Rebecca’s shins.

“Zida, I’m wounded, not rabid. This is—” Rebecca cried out when the healer tightened the first creaking strap without an ounce of gentleness. “Seriously?”

“Wounded and dangerous. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and like I said, I’m taking precautions.”

The second strap tightened across Rebecca’s upper thighs.

“Honestly, I should’ve done this the last time,” Zida continued. “But hey. I’m not stupid. I learn from my mistakes. Something you might wanna try if you intend to survive more than a few months, the rate you’re going.”

“I’m not doing anything—ah!”

The third strap creaked and groaned across Rebecca’s upper chest when the healer pulled it extra tight for good measure. The pressure filled the wound in her belly with an ache that would have made anyone pass out.

She wondered vaguely why she hadn’t.

Then Zida jerked Rebecca’s arms down by her sides and buckled the last strap so tight across her patient’s collarbones and shoulders, Rebecca grimaced. Once she finished, though, the healer patted Rebecca’s shoulder with a surprising amount of tenderness. “Precautions.”

“I don’t see why you’d need them,” Rebecca hissed through clenched teeth. “It’s just a wooden stake through my guts.”

“Uh-huh,” Zida replied flatly. “Sure. And you’re just a random elf who showed up at our doorstep six months ago, nothing more. Hey, as long as we’re swapping fairy tales, you might as well call me the goddamn Lost Princess of Cálindor.”

Taking a step back to survey her handiwork, Zida dusted off her hands and nodded. A smirk bloomed on her wrinkled, puckered lips.

No…

Rebecca knew what the woman was getting at, even before Zida turned those black beady eyes onto her with a knowing look.

The healer knew who she was.

Maybe not exactly who or where Rebecca came from in the old world. Zida probably hadn’t yet thought the words “Bloodshadow” and “elf” in the same sentence. There was still a good chance she had no clue why Rebecca was on the run or the details of what she’d been running from by hiding herself here on Earth.

But she knew enough.

Zida knew Rebecca Knox didn’t actually exist. She knew this elf lying on her infirmary bed was more powerful even when wounded than half of Shade’s most formidable operatives combined.

Why else would she have mentioned the Lost Princess of Cálindor? Because that old wives’ tale and the truth of Rebecca’s real life were alarmingly similar enough to draw an eerie parallel.

Shit.

Now Rebecca had one more person here among Shade’s ranks who suspected she was nothing like the elf she’d claimed to be this whole time.

If she didn’t do some serious damage control, and pretty damn quick, she might even have one more potential enemy standing right here in front of her.

An enemy she’d trusted enough to willingly let the old healer strap her down to the infirmary bed while Rebecca was still too weak to fight her way out of it.