“Oh, my gosh, I am so sorry, I didn’t even see you there!” I dropped to my knees and saw she had been carrying a martini glass before she fell. A glass which was now broken with the stem sticking out of her wrist.
“Fuck, oh shit, my wrist,” she whimpered, tears streaming from behind tightly shut eyes as blood began flowing freely down her hand. Her other hand was clutched at it, holding just above the injury, which was actually a smart thing to do to stem the blood flow.
“Here.” I reached out to her without even thinking about what I was doing, wrapping one hand over hers where it was applying pressure to the veins and quickly yanking the broken glass stem from her flesh with the other. Tightly, I covered the wound with my hand.
The magic surged through me, sealing up her broken veins and arteries and repairing the deep cut in her arm, which I knew without a doubt could have been life threatening. She’d somehow managed to sever an artery when she fell, and I seriously doubted if they would have gotten help here quickly enough. Or maybe they would have, but was I really going to run that risk when I could help? What if she died, all because I couldn’t look where I was fucking walking?
“Kit.” Vali’s voice broke through my concentration, and his firm hands pulled me back from the girl who was still crying and clutching her wrist. There was blood all over both our hands, but the gash on her wrist was nothing more than a deep scrape now.
“Enough,” he murmured in my ear. “She’s fine now.”
“What..?” The girl sobbed, opening her eyes and blinking at me in confusion, then down at her wrist and back up to me.
“You cut yourself on that glass when you fell,” I explained. “But it doesn’t look too bad. You’ll need to go get it checked out, though.” I squinted at her, frowning. It was dark in the corridor to the bathrooms, but there was something familiar about her.
“Do I know you?” I asked, and she seemed to pale. But maybe that was my suspicious, slightly tipsy, now magic-drained imagination at work.
“No, you don’t. Thanks for bumping into me,” she sneered, scrambling up from the ground and stalking off, still clutching at her bleeding wrist.
“Drag?, what the hell were you thinking?” Vali scolded, taking my hand and tugging me further down the corridor, away from the main bar. He snatched a bottle of water from the floor outside the bathrooms, where someone must have left it when they went to pee, and pushed through the fire exit door leading to the back alleyway.
“Hands,” he commanded, and I held them out to him. Twisting the cap off the bottle, he tossed it aside and used the water to rinse the girl’s blood off my skin.
“Now,” he sighed when he appeared satisfied all the blood was gone. “Tell me what on earth you were thinking, using your magic like that in public?”
“I didn’t really think at all,” I admitted, feeling a bit damn stupid in hindsight. “It was my fault she fell and hurt herself, and that glass had severed an artery. I couldn’t risk her dying just because I’m a klutz.”
“She would have been fine, beautiful. So long as she went straight to a medical center, they could have stitched it up for her, no troubles.” He ran a hand through his wavy, shoulder-length hair.
“Oh, I, um, I didn’t know that.” I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the exhaustion of the healing. It was nothing even close to how I felt after big healings though, so I’d probably be fine to go home and sleep it off.
“I know,” he sighed. “It’s adorable that you want to heal the world, drag?, but what about the side effects? What if that girl had any supernatural DNA in her? Have you just totally changed her life without any explanation?”
“I think that I have worked out how to not do the magic part of the healing,” I told him, but the uncertainty was clear in my voice. “It’s sort of just a theory, but I noticed when I healed you guys from, like, nearly dead that right at the end, before I’m done, it changes. I can’t really describe it, but it’s just a different sort of feeling.”
“So you’re thinking that if you don’t heal the injury completely, that it doesn’t risk healing their magic? If they’re even supernatural to begin with, that is. From what I understood, it’s a whole different genetic set, so there really wouldn’t be any danger in healing humans, right?” Vali pondered this theory aloud. “It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s also totally untested. Please, drag?, please don’t go healing any more random people?”
“I can’t promise,” I admitted, not trying to be combative, just honest. “It just... happens. I see someone that is injured, and I act faster than my brain can really process what’s even happening. It’s happened a couple of times during Omega training too.”
“This has happened more than once?” His eyebrows shot up, and I nodded.
“Once, on our first day of training, a girl was knocked over the stair railing and plummeted four floors. She would have died if I didn’t do something, and I sort of figure it’s better to be scaly and alive than human and dead, right?” I gave him a pointed look, reminding him that was the choice I’d made for him, too.
He grunted acknowledgement. “And the other time?”
“Yesterday, one of the boys fell from the high wires course and broke his leg pretty badly. I just healed the bone only and then Austin pulled me away, so it seemed like just a really bad sprain.” My belly flipped, remembering the way my magic had reacted to Austin’s hand on mine as we’d walked back to our apartment after that class.
“It concerns me that these things keep happening around you, beautiful. Has it occurred to any of you that these could be tests? That someone is setting these accidents up to see how you will react?” His eyes blazed with anger, and his brow furrowed deeply.
“Yes, it did. But like I said, I can’t seem to help myself.” I shrugged helplessly and staggered a bit. My balance wasn’t the best after countless daiquiris and a minor healing.
“You’re exhausted,” Vali commented, clearly receiving my emotions down our weird spidey sense thing that we had going on. “How do I fix it for you?”
“Don’t worry about it.” I smiled. “It’s not so bad. If you can feel it from me, I dare say the other guys can too. They’ll probably be here any second.”
“I’d feel better if I knew how to help,” he murmured, sliding his hands around my waist and backing me against the wall. “After all, if we are going to be in this... relationship... for eternity, I anticipate I’ll need to help you out at some stage.”
“Are you saying I’m a magnet for trouble or something?” I arched a brow at him indignantly, and he snorted a soft laugh.
“You said it, drag?, not me. Now, how am I helping you? Vic said it needed to be sexual contact, no?” His lips curved in a wicked sort of smile, and fuck if my heart didn’t contract a little at the promises that smile held. Something gave me the impression he could definitely give River a run for his money in the domination department. At least in the bedroom, anyway.