3. CRACKPOT DOCTOR

3

CRACKPOT DOCTOR

" W e need you! Cin! Don't give up!"

Someone was yelling and right in my damn ear where I was sure the splinter still stung from the tree. I wanted to slap them away, but my body was heavy with…something that felt like a hundred pounds on my chest.

"Out of my way, cat!"

"I'm her best friend, don't you fucking tell me to get out of the way!"

Bebe, that was Bebe screeching. I was alive then?

A hand pressed hard over the left side of my chest, mashing my boob flat, another hand was pressed against the wound in my side.

"Her heart is beating. She's…she's healing. You haven't lost her. It was a close thing, but if Jor hadn't al erted me…" The voice was not one I knew. Matter of fact, like a doctor would deliver news to a patient's family. Was I in a hospital then?

I wanted to open my eyes and see the person talking, but honestly, my lids were so heavy that they might as well have had anchors on them. I just let them stay closed.

"What do we do now?" Bebe curled up in the small space between my head and my shoulder, her tiny head resting on my throat. I wanted to reach up and clutch her to me, wanted to tell her that I was here, that I was ok. That I could hear her. That I was alive and well.

"We let her sleep," Berek said. "She needs to heal properly."

A grunt. "Agreed. And we get to Alaska as fast as we can." Richard spoke with authority. "That's where she said she needed to go, so that's where we go."

As if the others would just listen to him. Funny enough, there was no argument. Not even from Jor.

That did make me open my eyes, slowly, unsticking them as if they'd been glued shut, the world blurry and fuzzy. I was staring up at a…well I wasn't entirely sure what I was in at first. A building of some sort, but that was kind of stretching it.

Gems and rocks were strung up over head by thin strands of filament and small lights flickered in and amongst them like fireflies, only they weren't little bugs.

They were tiny glowing flowers that flapped their petals as if they were bugs. Drugs, they had to have shot me full of drugs to be seeing flying flowers. Which of course would make sense if I were in a hospital, only I was sure I wasn't in a hospital. Not with hanging gems over my head. Not with the smell of burning incense instead of antiseptic flooding my nose.

"Where?" I managed the one-word question, but my throat was dry as if I'd not had anything to drink in days. How long had I been out?

Richard leaned over my face first, and the tension around his mouth and eyes was tighter than I'd ever seen. "Think you could not die on us again? Whatever grays I have are all because of you."

I shook my head—or tried to at least—"Not dying. How long?"

"A day and a half," Richard said. "We made it across the border and met our new friend. Jor went ahead of us and got her to follow him. She brought us here after stabilizing you. We're in Northern Alberta."

Another person shoved Richard out of the way and an unfamiliar face leaned over me. Her features were all sharp angles and prominent bones, as if she'd been carved from ice. Her skin was pale, and her hair so light and lacking in color I would have called it white. Her eyes reminded me of the night sky above the tree of life, dark, with a few specks of light in them. By all that you would think she was old, but by the smoothness of her skin she was in her mid-twenties. Of course, the moment she spread her wings above us, I was pretty sure she was not a twenty something hitchhiker that Ship and Richard had randomly picked up, or even some hippie healer they'd stumbled across. She was the healer Jor had wanted to bring me to. I mean…I was guessing anyway from what I was piecing together in my muddled brain.

"You were dead. For like, a good day and a half." Her nose wrinkled up. "You smell like it too."

I stared up into her dark eyes. "I was…talking with someone. It took some time."

She scrunched her face up, pouting her lips and wrinkling her nose and eyebrows all at once. "Right. So anyway. She's alive now. The wound is healed. Try not to engage with enchanted weapons. I can't guarantee I'll be around to help you again."

And with that last bit of stellar advice, she pulled back, and waved a hand over my face as if she were done with me. Bebe butted her head under my chin. "Please don't do that again. This almost dying business is giving me grays too."

I managed to lift a hand and hug her tight to me. "I will do my best, Bebe."

There were so many questions I had, but I forestalled all but one, because I couldn't smell one of our party. "Where did Jor go?"

The pale woman with the wings sniffed. "He ran away. He figured you were dead. So the end of the world was here, but he didn't look at the cat, did he? Didn't notice she was carrying the sun, did he?"

I smiled, though the motion felt strange on my lips. In all the chaos that had been, it looked like Jor hadn't noticed I'd handed off the sun to Bebe, just in case I kicked the giant bucket of life. "I guess he didn't."

Bebe sighed. "You want it back?"

I moved as if to sit up, and my two brothers were right there, helping me, their hands at my back and wrapped around my biceps. Their quiet strength was a comfort, like Bebe's unwavering loyalty—something I'd not had a lot of in my life, which made it all that much more precious. "Probably best. But we have a backup plan now. If it looks like I'm about to bail on this world, you take it."

She sniffed. "I don't want it anyway. Can you imagine Havoc trying to fuck me? What a mess that would make of him." She sniffed again. "Not that I'm not amazing, just…well the whole cat versus pussy issue."

I held my hand out to her, and she bopped her nose into the center of my palm. "I'll willingly take the sun from you, Bebe." I felt the rush of the sun's warmth flow through my veins and settle once more in my bones.

"No glitter for you." Bebe looked me over. "Maybe because you've already held the sun?"

A heavy sigh erupted like a small explosion from the other woman, the one with the wings. I turned to her. "I owe you my thanks."

"You do and you don't. I…I healed the wound, but you were on the cusp of death. Technically you were dead, but I was able to hold you to the edge until you decided to come back. It was your decision."

I winced and sat forward. Richard kept a hand on my back. "Decided to come back?"

Her eyes flicked over me. "For some of us in the pantheon, it's a decision to live or die. Likely you would have been able to come back, even without me. Still wounded of course, but you would have survived. It would have taken you longer, is all."

I winced and touched my side where the spear had gone deep. Kieran had done that to me, stabbed me straight through my guts. I mean, who needs enemies when you have family that will literally stab you in the back…er…side.