Mad Lizard Mambo (11 page)

It all made my teeth ache.

Despite the scrubs—or maybe because of them—I was getting looks from the staff, and none of them were good. I probably smelled, and my hair was dusty from the explosion, but none of the hospital staff stopped me. A woman standing behind a nurse station pointed me in the right direction, and I limped off, my paper booties scratching out a long shush with each lurching step I took. From the orange-tinted black sky framed out at a waiting room window, it was pretty late, but from the soft murmuring voices and worried glances from the four women and two men standing around a table, dawn was still a ways off.

“Kai!” One of the women broke off from the group, a tall ebony goddess with sloe eyes and a graceful sway when she walked. “What are you doing out of bed?”

She’d probably thrown on whatever clothes were nearby when she got the call about Jonas, but the slight dishabille suited her. A wrinkled gold swath of fabric pulled Najiri’s waist-length braids away from her face, their ends caught up with tiny orange rubber bands and morning-sky-colored beads. Her long red dress swirled about her legs, then caught on mine when she reached me, and her hands were dry and cold, icy on my only slightly warmer palms.

“Najiri.” Her lips on my cheek left a hot stain on my skin, guilt at walking around while Jonas lay flat on his back somewhere behind a door. “How are all of you doing?”

I’d have expected resentment from anyone else, but Jonas’s close-knit marriage was built on tolerance and acceptance, something I wasn’t sure I deserved at the moment. I got it anyway.

“We are fine.
He
is fine.” Najiri put her hand on my back, lightly guiding me toward an open door off the main corridor. Jonas’s marriage murmured at me, consoling words meant to lift my guilt, but instead it simply settled into the cracks in my heart. “The doctors say he will be back on his feet in a week or so.”

“The Dawn Court lord has offered to pay for his stay and for the contracts he will miss, but….” Angus, Jonas’s slender, pale husband, joined us, placing his hand on Najiri’s back. “We told him we are okay. We can manage.”

“Yeah, chances are, the bill’s already been paid. You don’t know him.” I had no doubt Ryder would take care of it, but even if he did, I would pay him back. Somehow. Jonas’d been down there because I’d asked him to. His injuries were on me. “Is he awake?”

“Perhaps, but you shouldn’t be
here
,” Najiri said, frowning. “You should be healing as well. Angus looked in on you just a while ago, and you were asleep. In a private room. Where you should be right now.”

She had a good mother’s frown, honed sharp on the many children running around the Wyatt household, including her own son, Razor, whom I accidentally nicknamed after Najiri’d yanked a piece of Jonas’s hair from his scalp while she’d been in labor. Her mother skills were strong, and I almost quailed beneath her glower.

Almost.

“Yeah, I’m checking out. It’s a battle of wills. Ryder wants me to stay in Medical. I want to go home. He’s slowly getting used to a new reality where he doesn’t get his way. It’s character building. Good for him, really.” I shrugged as Angus bit back a smile, but I saw the edges of his mouth quiver. “I just needed to check in on Jonas.”

“You can go in, Kai,” Angus said softly. “He might not be awake—they have him on medication—but a few minutes will do him good. He will still be able to hear you.”

“Five minutes,” Najiri asserted. “Then you are going to find yourself in a bed, Kai. And do not think I won’t put you there.”

I moved as quickly as I could. When Najiri said five minutes, she meant four minutes and fifty seconds, and injured or not, she’d pull me out by one of my ear tips if I crossed her. She could have at least warned me Jonas wasn’t alone, because I sure as hell wasn’t expecting to find Dempsey sitting in a chair next to the bed.

I wasn’t sure who looked worse, Dempsey or Jonas. Both were various shades of gray, and their chins sported a bit of uneven scruff, but Dempsey’s was scraggly and unkempt, more silver than brown, and his years dragged his skin down, pouching out bags under his tired eyes.

He also was leaning forward in the chair and dressed in one of those damned hospital gowns, so I got a full view of his pasty, blue-veined back and ass when I shuffled past. Not exactly something I wanted to see on an empty stomach. Or a full stomach for that matter.

“You’re supposed to be laid up, boy. Heard they put you in a fancy room downstairs.” Dempsey’s hands shook while he tugged a blanket up over Jonas’s chest. He eyed me again. “Where’d you get the pants? All they gave
me
was this damned bib.”

“Stole them,” I lied.

“That’s my boy,” Dempsey muttered as I dragged over another chair.

“They could have at least left you your underwear. Bastards took mine,” I grumbled.

“What makes you think I was wearing any when I came in?”

Moving the chair hurt like hell despite its light weight, and I collapsed into the seat, exhausted from the effort. If anyone’d asked I’d have said I was brand-spanking-new, but I’d overdone it. Or it could have been the shock of seeing Dempsey and hearing him call me his boy. I expected that from Jonas, not from Dempsey.

“Docs say he’ll be fine. Or so everyone keeps telling me. So you hear that, old man?” I slid my hand over Jonas’s wrist, thankful for the strong, steady beat I felt under his skin. “You’re probably going to be chasing nurses around the station in the morning.” I turned slightly to glance at Dempsey. “Why are you here?”

“Visiting.”

“They don’t strip visitors and put hospital gowns on them for shits and giggles.” I nodded at his arm, where a gauze wrap was coming undone from its knot. “And that’s an IV catheter you’ve got sticking out there. They put you in for tests or something more serious?”

“If it were more serious, I’d have told you, so yeah, it’s tests,” Dempsey grumped. “Sylvia dropped off in the chair, so I thought I’d come down and take a look at Jonas. Make sure they’ve got him done up right.”

“They will,” I promised softly. “I’ll cover it.”

He cleared his throat then asked, “You went down there for a run, didn’t you? A run for that cat-bastard lord in Balboa Park?”

I didn’t like the softness in Dempsey’s voice. He’d always been a snarling man, rough and hard. It was unsettling to hear—to see—the change in him, and it scared me more than nearly any run I’d ever been on.

“Yeah. I got a transport off of Sparky, but it’s not loaded for bear—or anything else for that matter. Suddenly she’s anti mounting guns, so I had to make some deals. We were going to make a pickup of something, but those assholes hit us before we could make the deal. Seller probably thinks we flaked, but he wasn’t there when we showed up.”

“I’ll reach out and touch base with him. If he fucked you over….” Dempsey’s mouth twisted around a cigar that wasn’t there, and his nicotine-stained fingers brushed over the seam of his lips. “Can’t let something like this go past without a response, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” I nodded in agreement. “Someone killed the old professor who was coming with us. Some expert on digging up elfin artifacts. Ryder thinks it was the same guys or knows them. I need to know why they jumped us and who sent them, so if that guns guy knows something—”

“That can probably be done.” Dempsey chewed on the end of his overgrown mustache. “I’ll put the word out. Shouldn’t take long to find them. Hanging a price on a Stalker brings some huge-ass karma.”

“I just need one of them alive, Dempsey,” I reiterated. “Okay?”

Pulling a hit on a Stalker was a good way to end up dead. In the eyes of a lot of cops, I was just another elfin many of them would sooner see dead, but my badge meant something to anyone else carrying a SoCalGov license. And Jonas—hell, he walked on water and through fire for most of us. Whoever sent Scooter, Ferret, and the rocket launcher after us probably wouldn’t live long enough to see in the inside of a jail cell once word got out.

“Got it. One. One we can probably do.” He chuckled. “Considering you’ve already killed one of them, you’re one to talk.”

“I didn’t kill him. He just ended up dead.” The room was growing cold or I was. Either way, I shivered, cursing my bruises for not keeping me warm. “I’ve got to make this run work, don’t I?”

“Probably. They—the doctors—don’t like the odds. Hell, I don’t like them much either,” Dempsey replied, his voice low and thick with emotion. “I don’t want to die, kid. I mean I keep telling myself I’ve had a long run and I should be happy with what I’ve got, but….”

“Yeah, I don’t want you to die too.” I closed my fingers over his trembling hand. We rarely touched. I could count on one hand the times we’d actually made contact for something other than patching one another up or brawling, but now—especially now—I needed to feel him on my skin.

Guess I was more sidhe than I thought, because touching him… comforted me… much like the sidhe sought one another out, a weave of strokes and glances I usually found disturbing. Touching Dempsey felt…
right
.

“I’m not going to let you die, old man. Not without a fight.” I sighed. “So yeah, while I know it might be too much to ask you to turn those two over to the cops, I’d like you to make sure at least one of them can talk. Because someone’s killed Ryder’s prize pigeon, and I need to find him another reason to make this run happen.”

“Just don’t sleep with him for the money,” Dempsey teased. “Didn’t raise you to be a damned good Stalker just for you to go sell yourself out to the sidhe. Didn’t feed and train you so you’d end up on your belly and being a whore.”

“If that’s what it takes to keep you alive, old man,” I whispered, squeezing his hand once more. “Then that’s exactly what I’m going to be.”

“YOU ARE
not
going, Ryder,” Alexa growled, pacing across my living room, her hands slicing at the air as she walked. I’d fought off vampire pigeons with less fervor, and considering they were literally after my blood, that was saying a lot. “It is stupid to go now that the human is dead.”

Alexa was far from the stereotype of a sidhe woman trotted out in every human telecast and drama. If she owned anything wispy and revealing, I’d never seen it. Lean and muscled, she towered over most sidhe women, and her features were too strong to be considered elfin pretty, but I loved the power in her walk and the strength in her face. She’d softened up a bit since moving down to San Diego, letting her sunset-streaked magenta curls fall loose to her shoulders, but that was as far as Alexa was going to go. Her ocean-blue eyes were still hard and alert, and the heavy gun she wore on her hip was smooth hilted from practice. As the head of the local Court’s security, she often put her foot down about Ryder going off on wild goose chases.

She wasn’t hard on the eyes and was Cari’s sometimes Stalker apprentice and frequently hit on me, mostly to get a rise out of Ryder. Or so I hoped. But there were times when I would gladly let her tumble me into a soft bed, and not just because it would piss Ryder off.

Unfortunately, Alexa being his cousin, he ignored her as easily as most people disregarded their younger siblings giving them good advice.

The night bled inside—darkening the warehouse as the rolling fog veiled any ambient light coming off of the city outside. Ryder’s presence was playing with my nerves. I wanted to sleep, but it hurt to climb the stairs, and he’d refused to sleep in my bed—citing a laundry list of excuses about why he needed to be close to me in case I needed something in the middle of the night—so he wasn’t going away any time soon.

I didn’t want to admit it—especially not to him—but I
hurt
. Every inch of me felt bruised or broken, and I crackled when I walked. His offer to bring in one of his sidhe healers was a nice one, but I made their skin crawl. Touching me—delving into my hybrid, iniquitous body—was too much to ask. I’d been cooked up in a circle of blood and bone, knitted to life by an unsidhe Wild Hunt Master whose main hobbies were bringing about death and devastation. In order to heal what Tanic cuid Anbhas created, a sidhe healer had to become what I was made of.

That wasn’t something I’d wish on anyone.

So the painkillers Ryder brought with him were looking mighty good. He must have sensed I needed something to take the edge off because I heard the rattle of a pill jar come from the kitchen and then liquid being poured.

“You can’t expect Kai to go back out, Ryder.” Cari poked at a sore spot on my ribs. “This run almost got him killed, and you guys haven’t even left the city yet.”

“Hey, I don’t go out, I don’t get paid,” I pointed out. “And living’s expensive.”

Dying was too. In between me going down to lower stretches of San Diego and being brought back home, I’d gotten Dempsey’s first bill from Central Medical, and the amount made my teeth ache. The way things were looking, I was going to have to scavenge a dragon egg every day to play catch-up. I needed the trip out to Groom Lake. Hell, I’d even taken insurance out to pay off Dempsey’s doctors in case I didn’t come back, but one way or another, the grumpy old asshole was going to be taken care of.

Even if I hadn’t done so well with Jonas.

After only a day I was sick of being on the couch, but Cari, Ryder, and Alexa were determined I stay stretched out and under their watchful eyes as I knitted back together. Coddling wasn’t going to make me heal any faster, but Dalia’d taken one look at me and ordered the other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse to keep me contained.

Newt was highly amused by all of this and pleased, because he spent most of his time lounging across my belly or begging for food.

“Jonas still doing okay?” I asked. “No one’s heard anything else, right?”

“He is fine, Kai. You spoke with Angus just half an hour ago. Nothing has changed. He is still under the sedatives and in good hands, resting and healing. Like you should be.”

Ryder pressed the steaming mug of coffee he’d brought out with him from the kitchen into my hands. It smelled suspiciously of cinnamon, vanilla, and cream. Tasted that way too, but I eyed him anyway.