“I’m quite sure you’re not.” The doorman puffed himself up, indignant.
“Send me up.” Grey spent energy he didn’t have charming the doorman into calling the elevator for him, rather than wasting time fighting with the man. He sagged against the elevator’s walls and let himself fall, hard, against Laurent’s door.
Laurent heard the thud. Looked through the peephole, then yanked the door open. “Shit. Shit. Grey, wake up.”
Grey’s eyes rolled open as Laurent pulled him in the door. “Challenge. Hurt. Don’t tell.”
“Yeah, I can see that you’re hurt. The blood everywhere was my first clue. What do you mean, don’t tell? How did no one notice this?”
“Illusion.” He coughed and blood spattered his mouth.
“You cast an illusion to—you know what, later.” Laurent pulled back the other man’s shirt. Swallowed hard. It looked like Grey had been flogged with a whip made of razor blades. “Okay. That’s . . . that’s not so bad. I can help. But I think you should let me call someone. This is maybe a little beyond the healing magic we were taught in school.”
Grey shook his head, regretting the movement even as he made it. “No calls. They’ll know I’m hurt.”
“Yes. And they’ll fix you. Better than I can.” He spoke slowly and clearly, as much to calm himself as in the fading hope of making Grey see his point. He knew the basics, of course, but the mess of blood and skin was a far cry from the precise cuts and supervised spells he’d been taught.
“No. They’ll tell.”
“Tell who? Don’t be an idiot.” Laurent’s hands were sticky as he tried to clear away the blood, to see the extent of the damage.
“The next House that challenges me.”
“Sydney, then. At least let me call her.”
Grey reached up, wincing, his hand leaving a bloody print on Laurent’s arm. “She’ll know. She’ll remember. If you challenge me.”
“I won’t.”
“Said it wasn’t as bad as it looked.” His voice fading, the words half-whispered.
“I fucking lied, you idiot.” Arguing wouldn’t help, wouldn’t stop the blood washing over his hands in time with Grey’s increasingly erratic pulse. He wasn’t sure they had time to wait for someone to get there. Laurent breathed in and out, regulating the flow of air in his lungs, slowing his own heartbeat from galloped panic into something that approximated stability. He wished very specifically and succinctly not to fuck this up, hoping his affinity for luck would cancel out his lack of practice with major healing magic. Then he spoke the words that would slow blood leaking, would draw severed veins back together, would drive out infection. He bent his fingers into shapes that would have hurt if he’d been thinking of anything other than keeping his hands steady, and bit by bit, he healed his best friend.
Sweat stung his eyes and Laurent was shaking like a man gripped by fever when he had finished, but Grey’s skin was knit, the bleeding had stopped, and his eyes were clear.
“Did you,” Laurent asked, his voice a rasp, “at least win your challenge?”
“After all that,” Grey said as he sat up from the floor, “I better have.”
? ? ?
Later. After Laurent cleaned the blood from the floor of his hallway, after he washed the red handprint that ended in a smear from his door, while trying very hard not to think that it was Grey’s blood he was washing away, Grey’s blood on the clothing he was changing out of, that the blood had gotten there because of magic, and he was so angry at the very idea of magic at that moment that he didn’t even want to use basic spells to clean up, and so here he was, scrubbing like a mundane.
After his apartment almost looked normal again, and not like someone had performed surgery in his front hall. After the blood was gone from everywhere except his memory. After he washed his hands one more time.
After things were clean, he could start thinking about what had happened. Maybe then he could look at it straight on.
He had known the Unseen World could be harsh, knew the Turning carried risks, potentially fatal ones. But these people seemed to treat death like it was a fencing match. There were weapons, sure, but everyone would salute and go home after the ritual was completed. He’d watched it happen, when Sydney had been stabbed at her last challenge and then walked out of the room as if it were a paper cut. He’d let himself get swept up in that—let himself see the idea of death as a possibility, but one they would all shake off at the end.
It wasn’t. It wasn’t that at all.
He washed his hands again.
After the takeout Laurent had ordered arrived—because this was a thing he could do; he could order warm styrofoam containers of hamburgers cooked rare and covered in mushrooms and caramelized onions, thin French fries with some sort of truffle sauce, and he had to do something. After he had poured them both glasses of whiskey, Laurent said, “You could have died.”
“It wasn’t a mortal challenge. It just got a little out of hand.” Grey shrugged and kept eating. “Man, I’m starving.”
“A little out of hand.” Laurent put his burger down, half-eaten. “Speaking of hands, I’m pretty sure I had mine on your small intestine. That seems like more than a little.”
Grey drank. “These things happen. I’m fine. It’s no big deal.”
Laurent stared. “What do you mean, it’s no big deal? This was a nonmortal challenge. I thought there were rules. Precautions. Fucking safety measures, I don’t know.”
“Look, maybe you didn’t understand what you were getting into. Maybe you still don’t—it’s not like you’re the one taking any risks out there. But the Turning isn’t about precautions and safety measures. It’s about power, and about making sure you’re strong enough to claim it.”
Laurent set his glass down on the marble countertop. A big magic duel. Competition for power. He loved those things. Thrived on them—they had bought this apartment, his parents’ house. Every material comfort he wanted. He had thought he would love the Turning as well. “Just because Sydney’s in danger and not me doesn’t mean I think this is a joke, Grey. I know what the Turning is. I’m just trying to decide if I still think it’s worth it.”
“If it’s worth it? Worth it? Establishing a House means the difference between having actual power in this world and being nothing. Nothing else is worth as much. If you weren’t so fucking lucky, you’d get that.”
“Lucky,” Laurent said.
“That is what you’re best at, right? Luck?” Grey shrugged. “Some of us have to work.”
“Right. Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared that up,” Laurent said.