I stopped inside Karrin’s kitchen, on the tile floor, so that I wouldn’t get blood on the carpet, and found Waldo Butters waiting for me.
Butters was a scrawny little guy in his midforties, though from his build you could mistake him for someone a lot younger. He had a shock of black hair that never combed into anything like order, a slender beak of a nose, glasses, and long, elegant fingers.
“Harry,” he said when I came in, offering me his hand. “We have got to stop meeting like this.”
I traded grips with him and grinned tiredly. “Yeah, or I’ll never be able to pay your bill.”
He looked me up and down critically. “What the hell happened? You get in a fight with a street sweeper?”
“Octokongs,” I said. “And a turtleneck with a machine gun.”
“Right calf,” Karrin said, bringing Valmont in out of the cold and locking the door behind her. “He’s been shot.”
“And you’re letting him walk around on it?” Butters demanded.
Karrin gave him a look that would have curdled milk. “Next time I’ll stick him in my purse.”
He sighed and said, “Look, Harry, I know you don’t feel the pain, but you are not invincible. Pain’s there for a damned reason.” He waved a hand at one of the kitchen chairs and said, “Sit, sit.”
The kitchen was a tiny one. I sat. Butters was a medical doctor, though he spent most of his time cutting up corpses as an Illinois medical examiner, and since the hospitals tended to get a little twitchy when you walked in with gunshot wounds, he’d taken care of such injuries on the down low for me before.
Butters unwrapped my leg, muttered under his breath, and said, “Let’s get him on the table. Help me extend it.”
“Yeah,” Karrin said.
They fussed about extending her kitchen table for a minute, and then she nudged me and said, “Come on, Harry, I’m not lifting you up there.”
That said, she still got her shoulder beneath my arm and helped me up, and then helped me lift my legs onto the table. It seemed a lot harder than it should have been to get myself into place.
“Butters,” I said, “you going to slash up my tux?”
“Just hold still,” he said, picking up a pair of safety scissors out of his bag of medical tools.
“Awesome,” I said, smiling. “I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute.”
“Karrin, would you hang out with Andi, please. It’s bad enough that I’m working on him like this. I don’t need my elbows being crowded, too.”
“Right,” she said. “We’ll be in the living room.”
“Okay, Harry,” Butters said. “Let me get to work.”
“How you and Andi doing?” I asked him. “Still good?”
He didn’t react to my mention of his girlfriend. “Try not to move.”
I did that. The earring pulsed, waves of sleepy cold coming out a little faster than they had that morning. Butters prodded at the bullet wound with something, and I noted that it probably would have hurt like hell without the presence of Winter in my weary body. I opened my eyes long enough to see him swabbing out the injury with a plastic tool coated with what must have been some kind of antibiotic.
He was running it all the way through the hole in my leg.
I shuddered and closed my eyes again.
Day one of working with the Knights of the Blackened Denarius and I’d already been shot and ripped up by a pair of hideous abominations—and that had been doing something relatively simple and safe, by the standards of the rest of the operation.
I had this sinking feeling that day two was going to be worse.