The Pack medic whispered. His voice built to a low murmur, a measured chant spilling from his lips.
The pain in my knee receded, dulled by medmagic. Doolittle straightened. “I’ll mix you a solution and send it up to your quarters. Will you be needing a stretcher?”
“I’ll make it on my own power.” I pushed to my feet. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I left the hospital and continued my climb. The knee screamed but held. Eventually the stairs ended, bringing me to a narrow landing before a large reinforced door. During business hours, eleven a.m. to eight p.m., the door stood open. I walked through it and nodded to the guard behind the desk on the left.
“Hey, Seraphine.”
Seraphine tore herself away from the bag of popcorn long enough to duck her head, sending her nest of braids into a shiver, and went back to her food. Being a wererat, she had the metabolism of a shrew.
The rats ate constantly or they got the shakes.
Derek stepped out of the side office and nodded at me.
“Your nods keep getting deeper and deeper.” Pretty soon it would be a bow, and we’d had words about that. The only things I disliked more than being bowed to was being called Mate.
He shrugged. “Maybe I’m just growing taller.”
I surveyed him. Derek used to be embarrassingly pretty. Beautiful even. Then terrible things had happened, and now nobody would call him pretty, not even in weak light. No sane person would dare to even bring up the subject of his face. The boy wonder wasn’t disfigured, although he thought he was and nobody could tell him different. His face had hardened and lost its perfect beauty. He looked dangerous and vicious, and his eyes, once brown and soft, were now almost black and had no give in them. If I met him in a dark alley, I’d think very hard about stepping aside. Luckily, he’d once played Robin to my Batman, and whatever happened, he was on my side.
We headed down the hallway. Derek took a deep breath, the way shapeshifters did when they sampled the air for scents. “I see Andrea is back.”
“She is. And how is His Great Fussiness today?”
Derek’s eyes sparked a bit. “His Majesty is in an ill humor. Rumors are flying that his mate almost got herself shot.”
Derek worshipped the ground Curran walked on, but he was still a nineteen-year-old boy and occasionally he came out of his shell for a quip. His humor was dry and hidden deep. I was grateful it had survived at all.
“Where are my boudas?” Before I became a Beast Lady, Aunt B, the alpha of the boudas, and I struck a bargain. I’d help Clan Bouda when they got in trouble—and they got in trouble a lot—and in return Aunt B gave me two of her finest, Barabas and Jezebel, who’d help me navigate the murky swamp of the Pack politics. They referred to themselves as my advisors. In reality they were my nannies.
“Barabas is asleep in the guardroom and Jezebel went downstairs to get some food.”
“Any messages for me?”
“The Temple called.”
This ought to be interesting. I’d gone to the Temple trying to restore a Jewish parchment to figure out my aunt’s identity. She took exception to that and the Temple had suffered some damage. The rabbis had chased me off the Temple grounds, but not before one of them healed my wounds. I hadn’t handled the entire situation very well, so when the storm was over, I’d packed the parchment’s fragment and sent it to the Temple as a gift, with my apologies.
“Rabbi Peter sends his regards. He’s very happy with the parchment. It has some sort of historical value. You’ve been forgiven and you may visit the Temple, provided you give them twenty-four hours’
notice.”
To mobilize their forces, no doubt, and lay out an adequate supply of paper and pens to counteract whatever trouble I unleashed. Jewish mysticism was difficult to study, but it gave its practitioners great rewards. When rabbis said that the pen was mightier than the sword, they meant it.
Derek’s lips curved into a slight smile. “Also, Ascanio Ferara got himself arrested again.”
“Again?”
“Yes.”
Ascanio was quickly turning into the bane of my existence. A fifteen-year-old bouda, he was 125
pounds of batshit-crazy hormones and had no sense to go with them. The kid had never met a law he didn’t want to break. The Pack was very much aware that outsiders viewed them as monsters, and they made a point of cracking down on any criminal activity with steel claws. The same deal that brought me Barabas and Jezebel compelled me to ask for lenience on Ascanio’s behalf. Unfortunately, Ascanio seemed bound and determined to earn himself some hard labor.
“What did he do now?”
“He was caught having group sex on the morgue steps.”
I stopped and looked at him. “Define ‘group.’ ”
“Two women.”
It could have been worse.