“I know which night you’re talking about,” she said quietly as she tensed.
He met her gaze shyly. “There for a while, I passed out, so I’m not sure what happened, but I know two things. I know I took a mean sumbitch wound. I even remember thinking, damn, I’m not gonna get over this one. Then when I woke up, you and Evie were there. Now I’ve got no scar. I’ve got nothing but the memory of that sword going in, and—” He blinked rapidly as he looked from one to the other. “I don’t know what you guys did or how you did it, but I wanted to say thank you.”
Pia’s face softened. She touched him on the shoulder. “We did what anybody would have done,” she told him gently, as she chose her words with care. She’d gotten used to dancing around telling the whole truth. “We poured all the healing juice we could into you.”
“That’s just it,” he said. “None of our healing potions were used.”
She and Eva looked at each other. “I had healing potion in my pack,” Pia said. That wasn’t a lie either. She did carry a few, just in case.
“There’s Hugh with the car,” said Eva. “We gotta go, sport.”
Eva and Johnny looked at each other. Moving as one, they stepped into a fierce hug. “It’s not gonna be the same without you,” he said, muffled.
“’Course it won’t.” She thumped him on the back. “You kids gonna have to worship my bitch-goddess self from afar.”
He laughed, his arms loosening. “See you around, bitch.”
“You know it.” Eva slapped him on the cheek, an affectionate tap, and turned to Pia. “Ready, Tink.”
She blew out a breath. “Let’s go.”
As they walked outside to the Cadillac idling at the curb, Eva said telepathically, See, like I told you. He’s confused and he don’t really know anything.
Pia didn’t reply as she climbed into the backseat.
No, Johnny didn’t know anything, she thought. But he knew enough to wonder about what really happened, and to question her story. Healing potion couldn’t have healed him so completely, not that bad of a wound, and not without leaving a scar.
And people talk.
She told Hugh and Eva to wait outside, then she walked into the Cuelebre supersuite at the Madison Square Arena. Dragos stood at the window that looked out over the arena. He had his head bent over a file while Kris talked to him. Both men turned as the door opened, and Dragos’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. They lowered again immediately.
“What,” he growled, “are you doing here?”
“I’m doing the same thing you are, so don’t give me any lip about it,” she said calmly. As he assessed her with a narrowed gaze, she walked over to kiss him. Then she looked out over the arena.
A smile hovered at the edges of his hard mouth as he bent his head again to read his file, and she could tell that he was really pleased. He murmured, “It’s that whole partnership thing again, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. She braced herself. “Dragos, in the spirit of partnership, we need to talk about something.”
He lowered the file and brought his head up with a frown. “What’d I do this time?”
She shook her head at him. “Nothing. It’s what I did.”
“Kris,” Dragos said without looking around at his assistant.
“Yeah, I got it,” Kris said. “Go work somewhere else for a while.”
As soon as the younger man left, Dragos threw his file on a chair and turned to her. “What happened?”
She told him about Johnny’s injury and how she had healed him. When she had finished, she said, “He doesn’t know what happened, but he’s really puzzled.”
“Ah,” said Dragos. “That’s the other healing you were talking about.”
“What? When?”
The corners of his lips twitched. He told her, “When you stuck your elbow in my mouth.”
She rubbed her temples. It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning, and already a pressure headache was beginning to build behind her eyes.
“The thing is,” she said, “Johnny’s bound to talk about what happened. In fact, I’m sure he already has to his unit, and who could blame him? Then there’s what happened to you out on the battlefield, when, as you say, I stuck my elbow in your mouth. You were clearly down and not getting up on your own. People have got to know that I did something to heal you. And Dragos, you may not have noticed this, but I certainly have—people are starting to resent the fact that I haven’t revealed my Wyr side.”
His amusement had vaporized, leaving him taut with tension. He said, “Where are you going with all of this?”
She threw out her hand in a gesture of frustration. “I’m wondering if we should just throw my Wyr side out there and let the world know. I’ve thought before that this whole issue is like watching a slow-building train wreck—”
“No,” he said. His gold eyes flared with incandescence. “We should not.”