“Sweet baby J in a manger, what did you do to the matchmaker, my friend? Love hurts, huh?” Nina asked, her fingers dabbing at the scrape on Quinn’s forehead with an antiseptic wipe as though she were swatting flies.
But Quinn wasn’t complaining. At least Nina wasn’t choking her out. That surely meant a friendship with the vampire was in the offing.
Wanda brushed at Nina’s hands with an impatient flap. “Be gentle, Nina! You’re not washing the tires on your big rig, for heaven’s sake!”
Nina threw up her middle finger in Wanda’s direction, along with the antiseptic wipe. “Oh, put a sock in it, Nightingale. I’m helping. You said help, didn’t you? This is me being all sensitive over a minor boo-boo.”
Marty plopped down on a chair next to Quinn and shooed Nina away with disgust—a tone Marty took often with Nina, but Quinn realized was always tempered with love. “Go help Carl. Last I saw him, he lost his hand again. Now move, and let the experts do their thing.”
The vampire made a face of disgust. “Carl!” Nina shouted, her husky voice making Quinn’s aching head wince. “Carl? Where the hell are you, buddy? You know what I said about hiding. You can only do it when we’re playing a game with Charlie. Olli-olli-oxen-free, pal!”
Quinn gripped the edges of the chair she sat in and tried not to think about Carl the zombie or where his hand had gone. Or that he was a verified zombie. Or that he needed duct-tape with him at all times to keep his essential parts from falling off.
Marty rolled up the sleeve of her sweater and ran gentle fingers over Quinn’s elbow. “I think we’re going to need more Band-Aids. Arch? Band-Aid, stat, please!”
She felt so fussed over, so nurtured, it was almost overwhelming. From the moment she’d hobbled into her apartment, still brimming with people, they’d all worked as one. Everyone had a job, from Arch right down to Nina, and they all knew their roles.
“I’m okay, really, Marty. I can do this. I’ve been single and taking care of myself for a long time. I don’t want to put you out. Don’t you have a little girl and a husband you should be with?”
“I definitely do, and I love them more than I love my shoes and my false eyelashes—”
“Which is a huge admission for our ass-sniffer here,” Nina crowed with a chuckle.
Marty shook her head, the jingle of her bracelets clacking together in a symphony of silver and gold. “But we all need something that fulfills us outside of our families, right? Something just for us. Doing this, OOPS, I mean, helping people who are scared and unsure in a world that’s far scarier than the human one, is what I love.”
Marty’s words made her chest tight and her eyes well up. She was a hot mess of emotions tonight, a myriad of oversensitive nerve endings and feelings she didn’t know how to absorb.
As a result, her words stuck to the roof of her mouth like peanut butter, but she needed them to know how much she appreciated everyone setting their lives aside for her because she was such a chicken. “I’m so grateful to Ingrid and you and Wanda and everyone else. Even Nina. I…”
Marty’s perfectly made-up eyes twinkled as she lifted Quinn’s leg and tentatively touched her ankle. “If you didn’t let us help, it’d be an arrow to our hearts, kiddo. Where would we be if we didn’t have someone to take care of, Wanda? And you don’t have to do anything on your own anymore if you don’t want to. You have us. Like it or not. Now lean back and relax and let us mother hen you to death. It’s what we live for.”
Wanda chuckled, pressing some antibiotic cream to Quinn’s road-rashed cheek. “We do, indeed. So tell us what the heck happened, for gravy’s sake? You look like you went a couple rounds with Holyfield, honey.”
Quinn shook her head in a slow motion of total confusion and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. One minute I was kis—Um, fist-bumping Khristos over my first matchmaking success, the next I was rolling around on the concrete like a plastic bag, blowing in the wind.”
Which was so damn strange. She remembered her foot slipping from the curb, something she was going to attribute to the wow factor Khristos’s kiss had evoked, but she had no clue how she’d managed to hit the ground with such force. Enough force to cause her to skid along the concrete, scraping her until she was raw and bruised.
Marty stopped pressing an ice compress to Quinn’s ankle and sighed a breathy sigh, giving her hand a light squeeze. “Khristos told us all about your awesome matchmaking. How incredible and heroic and so dreamy!”