Kirby and Starkad held their position until they received the All Clear from Aeval and Gwydion. Kirby hated walking out of that building without any fae behind them, but if the other team got everyone, that was what mattered.
The knowledge didn’t stop the crawling over Kirby’s skin that something was wrong.
Aeval opened the portal back to her realm without issue. Go figure. Which god could block someone else from accessing their full magic? A question to figure out when they weren’t still in a war zone.
Aeval, Kirby, and Starkad left the eerie silence of the warehouse behind.
They stepped into a hospital ward in Aeval’s palace, where her people were huddled. Aeval rushed to their side, and a chorus of sighs accompanied hugs and chatter.
Gwydion’s portal was still open—a shimmering doorway with near-zero visibility to the other side. Where were he and his team?
Min stepped through, Brit cradled in his arms and Gwydion by his side.
An unwilling sob escaped Kirby’s throat, and she rushed forward. All she saw was them. Brit lay limp and lifeless, a glaring red hole in her throat with fresh blood spilling from the wound and clotting in an ugly stain on her body.
Instinct lingered at the surface, driving Kirby’s actions. She brushed her fingers over Brit’s cheek, focusing healing energy on the contact.
Her magic collided with an invisible wall and rushed back into her, like a jolt of adrenaline. Like she needed more of that right now.
“I need equipment.” Gwydion’s sharp tone yanked Kirby from her thoughts.
Aeval looked up from her reunion, and shock spread across her face. “Follow me.”
They spilled into the hallway and traveled down a few doors.
“You two stay here.” Gwydion looked at Kirby and Starkad. “Min, with me.”
Kirby wanted to protest, but apparently she couldn’t help. She planted her back against a nearby wall and slid to the ground. Her thoughts were too numb to even touch questions like, How will I feel if she’s dead this time?
“Hey.” Starkad crouched in front of her.
“I swear, if you say something like Mission Accomplished, I’ll smack you.”
He rested his hands on her knees. “I’m not your combat instructor. I’m your lover.”
“Thanks for the update, asshole.” Seriously. What the fuck?
He gave her a dry smile. “It doesn’t matter how much certain parts of the palace look like campus; this isn’t TOM. You’re safe here, and Brit won’t find better treatment anywhere in the world.”
The words wrapped themselves into a lump in Kirby’s throat, and she swallowed the reassurance she hadn’t realized she needed. She recognized Brit’s wound. If a soldier was going to shoot someone in the back of the head at point-blank range, they’d do it at the base of the neck. No skull. Better chance for a kill shot. “That’s the kind of injury no one is supposed to recover from.”
“Brit’s not no one. She survived the wrath of a god.” Starkad sat next to Kirby and tugged her to sit on his outstretched legs.
Kirby rested her head on his chest. “Thank you.” She’d sort out her feelings later. Maybe go back to wishing Brit dead, once Gwydion confirmed she was going to live.
How long could Kirby sit here with Starkad, before their legs went numb?
The door next to them opened much sooner than she expected. Half an hour maybe? That couldn’t be a good sign. Her stomach bottomed out, and she looked up at Gwydion. She’s gone. His voice was already echoing in her thoughts.
“She’s alive.” Gwydion offered Kirby a hand and tugged her to her feet. “X-Rays fifteen minutes apart show the damage is healing. I suspect she’ll be fine in about twelve hours.”
Kirby almost choked on a laugh of relief. “All on her own?”
“As far as I can tell. If you’re going to hang around, do so in her room. There are chairs in there.” Gwydion looked at Starkad. “Not you, though. At least let the wounds heal before you turn that glower on her.”
“Fine.” Starkad kissed Kirby on the forehead and squeezed her hand. “Will you be all right?”
Kirby nodded. “I’m not the one with a hole in my neck.” The gaping chasm of confusion in her heart wasn’t the same.
She followed Gwydion into the room, where Brit lay in the sole bed. Machines surrounded her, but she was only hooked up to a vital-sign monitor, which beeped contentedly with a regular pulse and heartbeat.
A sheet covered Brit, the pale blue drawing out the translucence in her skin and making her look like she was cast from ice.
Kirby’s mind was chaos that refused to use words. A jumble of jagged edges she couldn’t vocalize beyond a frustrated scream. So she bit it all back. “Where’s Min?”
“He went to change.” Gwydion nodded at another door in the room.
Right. Because he’d been covered in blood. Brit’s blood. Kirby looked at the motionless body again. The dark red, clotted and clinging to her skin. “You haven’t cleaned her up.”
“That’s next. Diagnosis was most important, and then telling you. She’s going to sleep for a while, either way.”
“May I?” Kirby winced at her own question. Did she want that kind of contact? It was medical. Nothing more.
Gwydion nodded and pointed her toward sterile water and sponges.
Kirby wiped away the dried gore from Brit’s skin as gently as she could. So many people had their lives cut short, by disease, outside forces, or even themselves. Why did some get so many chances? Kirby’d had more than a dozen, and now Brit was on Number Three.
Two people trained to end lives, who kept getting extras in return.
Kirby shook the thought aside before it could creep toward the shadows that always lived in the back of her mind.
When she finished cleaning Brit, she covered her with a robe and settled into a chair to wait.
Gwydion stayed as well, monitoring Brit’s vitals and holding Kirby’s hand.
Aeval stopped in, to shower them with gratitude for returning so many of her people. Kirby and everyone else involved in the rescue were welcome in Aeval’s palace for as long as they wanted or needed to stay, with an open invitation to return whenever they needed.
For the next four or five hours, Gwydion sat with Kirby, waiting. He checked Brit’s bandages occasionally, removing them when the flesh had knitted together, leaving fresh, bright-pink skin where the wound had been.
“She’s going to wake up soon. She shouldn’t speak yet, though,” Gwydion said.
Kirby nodded. The news didn’t offer relief or disappointment, just more ambivalence. “They knew we were coming.” Her words tumbled out. It figured that was where her mind would arrange itself first. Who needed to focus on the emotional, when there was a mission gone bad to pick apart? “Not just one of us. They chose that location, and staged it to stifle most of the skills we’d have on our team.” The addition of a second TOM trained sniper, Brit, may have been the only variable they didn’t account for.
“Aeval vetted that intel. I guarantee you.”
Casting blame could masquerade as catharsis, but it didn’t offer solutions. “It doesn’t matter. The longer we wait for something to do with TOM—for a lead, for a direction—the more likely that information will be another setup like this.”
“What do you propose?” Gwydion asked.
“I don’t know.” Kirby’s frustration puffed out in a ball of uselessness. Her gaze landed on Brit again. “Thank you for taking care of her.”
The door opened and closed on a whisper, and Starkad stepped into the room. His presence was calming, which meant he wasn’t here with bad news.
Gwydion rose to check Brit’s wounds again. It was a brief examination. Not much to see at this point. “She was a soldier through and through in there. She didn’t hesitate to shoot or react.”
“That’s the wonder of the training,” Starkad said. “Drilled into them until it becomes instinct.”
His tone rubbed Kirby wrong. O
r maybe it was the words. He wasn’t only talking about Brit. “So is self-preservation. But she knew taking that shot would get her killed.”
“You would have done the same.” Gwydion’s response was what Kirby wanted to hear, but it wasn’t comforting.
“Self-preservation is at the core of what Brit does,” Starkad said.
Unlike Kirby. The unspoken second half of his statement echoed in her head regardless. Her selflessness wasn’t bad, except... Was she doing it for any better reason than Brit? Just a year ago, Kirby would have taken that same shot to taunt death. Now she didn’t know how she would react.
“That’s my point.” Gwydion lingered near the bed and crossed his arms. “She was there for us. For the mission. Not for herself. Min is right about her.”
Was he? The single question jarred loose the rest of Kirby’s jumbled thoughts. Brit didn’t act this way. She didn’t rush in. She didn’t shoot at the risk of sacrificing herself.
“You can’t say that with certainty. None of you knows her.” Kirby looked at Starkad. “Especially not you.”
“Neither do you.” Brit’s voice was a croaking whisper, and her eyelids fluttered.
A chuckle of relief bubbled up in Kirby’s throat, but she swallowed it.
“You’re not supposed to be talking,” Gwydion said to Brit.
Brit flipped him off.
This time Kirby’s snort escaped.
“Out.” Gwydion pointed at the door. “So I can fill the patient in, and so she stops talking.”
“Don’t take that conversation somewhere else.” Brit’s voice was already a hair stronger. “If you’re going to talk about me, do it in front of my face.”
“Hush, or I’ll gag you,” Gwydion warned.
Kirby shook her head. “No he won’t. He’s not the sadist.’
Brit’s eyes grew wide.
Gwydion pointed a finger at her and glared at Kirby.
Kirby held up her hands in surrender. “We’re going. So Brit stops talking. We’ll save the shit about her until she can hear us—cross my heart.” That ought to be an interesting conversation.
She left with Starkad, her conflict raging stronger than before, now that Brit was conscious. She couldn’t trust Brit, but was relieved she was alive. What happened in the warehouse—Brit’s actions before and during—felt different than the other times. That didn’t mean anything had changed. Kirby never saw the first betrayal coming, either.
But they couldn’t keep Brit captive for eternity. Where was Kirby’s shoot first, self-preservation above all else instinct when it came to Brit? It was more than self-destructive tendencies that kept Kirby from eliminating this threat. The thought of Brit being gone curdled her gut and clenched like a fist around her lungs.
And it was going to get Kirby killed.
Chapter Ten
Brit hadn’t expected to wake up. Especially not in a hospital room, with people taking care of her. And she hated that her heart insisted Kirby was watching her with any concern at all.
After the others left, Gwydion explained what had happened.
Shot in the back of the head by one of her own. No. She hadn’t been part of TOM for a long time, and the reflex of thinking otherwise needed to go away. There was one piece of good news buried in the middle of his story—she was pretty solidly unkillable.
And Min had saved her. She’d been brought back here, part of the team, rather than abandoned. Would Mark have done that for her? No. She doubted most of her former classmates would have, either.
Brit slept a while longer, and woke up to find Gwydion sitting by her bed, keeping watch. It might be sweet if she thought he was anything other than a captor.
She coughed, both to test her vocal cords and to draw his attention. When he turned to her, she pointed to her throat and lips. Was she okay to talk?
“Stand by.” Gwydion spent the next few minutes shining a light down her throat and listening to her breath. He stepped back. “It’s still a little raw, but most of the way to healed. You can talk if you don’t go overboard. Give screaming a couple more hours.”
“I don’t have any plans for that.” Brit tested the words cautiously. Everything felt fine. Apparently, she could survive a shot to the head. Or real close. “Are you my jailer for the day?” She kept her question light. He didn’t deserve aggression.
“I’m your doctor for the day.”
Kinder than any TOM physician she ever had. Her head was clear. “You didn’t drug me.”
“I gave you enough to keep you asleep while you were critical. Min said you preferred to avoid drugs.”
They’d respected her wishes by default. The idea was foreign, even after six months of living with Min. “Thank you.” It was nice to be treated like a person, rather than a commodity. She was catching hints of that kindness from Kirby, but they vanished quickly every time. “When can I be released?”
“You can get up and walk around whenever you want.” He side-stepped the word released with ease, and gestured to a pile at the foot of the bed. “Clean clothes. You can go back to your room.”
“Accompanied, I assume.” At least her situation hadn’t changed too much while she slept. The bitter thought gnawed at her.
“I assume the same, but you’ll have a hard time finding better company than me.” His lighthearted arrogance almost made her smile.
She wasn’t ready to return to her cell quite yet. The things she’d heard in the warehouse were colliding with the encounter at the potential’s home. “I need to talk to everyone. Can I make that request through you, or does it have to go to committee?” It wasn’t so easy to force the teasing into her voice this time.
“If you want to dress, I’ll find out what everyone else is up to.” He laughed dryly. “Kidding. The only thing any of us is doing is trying to figure out next steps.”
“I can help with that. You’re leaving me alone?”
“Wards are in place. That hasn’t changed.” Gwydion almost sounded apologetic.
“I get it.” She wished she didn’t. The situation was wearing on her. Yes, it was her fault, but that didn’t make it any less tiresome.
Brit dressed in the TOM standard uniform of jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Min had offered to buy her other clothing, but she’d worn so little of what she wanted in her life that she didn’t know what to ask for. Anything besides the basics felt like a costume.
She sat on the edge of the bed, tapping a beat on her thigh, until Gwydion returned.
He gestured for her to follow, and led her down a series of hallways that shifted from sterile and white to warm and friendly.
“Aren’t you worried about me memorizing the layout here?” Brit asked. “You don’t want to blindfold me or something?” Min didn’t, when they arrived, but she’d also been kept to a single section of the palace.
Gwydion glanced at her. “No, and not really.”
“You’re not that stupid.” She could have phrased that more kindly, but the desire for political correctness evaporated months ago.
A corner of his mouth tugged up. “And neither are you. Walking from the infirmary to the kitchen isn’t going to tell you anymore than you could figure out on your own.”
“Kitchen?” Her stomach growled at the thought of food.
“Yup.” Gwydion led her around a corner. The kitchen was larger than a private one, but nothing compared to the cafeteria on TOM’s campus, with woodblock countertops, a six-burner stove, and two large fridges side by side.
A large rectangle table was on the opposite side of the room. Kirby, Min, and Starkad were already seated, ceramic mugs and empty plates in front of them.
“Grab a seat.” Gwydion gestured.
She picked a spot at the end of the table that left a chair between her and Min. The scent of spices lingered in the air—onion, garlic, pepper, and something with a little more heat—but it was all ambient. Not like anything had been cooked recently.
Her stomach growled again. Big injuries always t
ook a lot out of her, and this might have been the worst she’d suffered since Hel killed her.
“You wanted to talk?” Starkad was as stone cold as always.
Nice to see some things were exactly as she expected.
“She just regrew parts of her brain and throat. Let her replenish a little.” Gwydion set a sandwich on a plate in front of her.
Thick sliced bread. Fresh cuts of turkey with stuffing and candied cranberries. Brit glanced at Kirby, the only person who knew she liked this.
Kirby shrugged. “The cook was told this used to be your favorite.”
“It still is.” Brit took a giant bite, not caring that some of the toppings dribbled out the back of the bread. These people couldn’t think much less of her, and she was fucking starved.
Besides, Gwydion’s request to let her eat wouldn’t matter. Starkad didn’t care about her comfort, beyond what she needed to be useful to him.
She crammed another bite into her mouth and washed it down with water. It was a really good sandwich.
When she’d shoved enough food in her face to keep her stomach quiet, she set the food aside. “Kirby was right. We can’t wait this out any longer.”
“You heard that.” Kirby didn’t sound surprised. “What do you mean we?”
Brit was part of this team, whether they liked it or not. She’d taken bullets for these people. “Who do you know on the inside?”
“You.” Starkad bit the word off. “You’re my person on the inside.”
“You were there for how many decades, and you didn’t make any friends?” Brit let snideness slip into her words.
Starkad’s growl was primal. That was borderline terrifying. Not that she’d tell him that. “Almost a thousand years running into immortal assholes and their servants, and the list of those I trust is pretty short,” he said. “Whom do you know?”
“As if you’d use any name I gave you.” Brit was going back to her cell if this was an indicator of how this conversation was going to go. “I wouldn’t even rely on those people. We were the top team. Anyone who called us friend wanted my position or Mark’s.” Except Kirby. Not that she’d ever needed to covet a top spot.
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