Flint Lock (Witches of Karma #10) (3 page)

Blood was starting to seep from his head wound again. It didn’t look that bad, but head wounds were notoriously messy. I wrinkled my nose. Should I go ahead and stitch it, or should I call 911 and let the authorities take care of it for me?

I wavered indecisively.

I didn’t have the greatest faith in the authorities for taking care of suicide risks, like this fellow. If he hadn’t been a complete stranger, I would have probably decided that he was better off in my hands.

Heaven knew whether he was in the frame of mind to be grateful that he was still alive, or if he’d just go out and try again until he was successful.

That wasn’t the face of a quitter. The lines of his jaw were too stubborn. I had a feeling nobody could force him to do anything he didn’t want to do in the first place.

Being more than a little mule-headed myself, I recognized one of my kind when I saw one.

Of course, I could always use my magick to figure things out, but there was one problem with that…

My brand of magick came with a huge backlash of stimulation—to put it short and simply, pain. The experience, sadly, wasn’t as simple as that. It was an overwhelming thing, communicating with a person the way I did. The worse off my patient was, the worse the experience was for me.

I wasn’t an empath, nothing close. I didn’t feel what my patients were feeling. I just sort of knew things about them—those core things way under the surface. I just got caught in a kind of feedback loop when I used my magick to help someone.

My sister, Summer, liked to call me the ‘soul whisperer’.

“Just call the police already,” I said out loud to myself, trying to ignore the fact that I was still stroking the hair off of this stranger’s forehead. I tried to tell myself it was so I could get a better look at the furrow in his scalp. “You don’t need this right now. You already have so much on your plate. Anyway, it’s the right thing to do.”

Cautiously, I brushed my fingers against the strange man’s forehead, wondering if I dared call up my magick.

So abruptly I couldn’t react, his prone form lurched upright. His huge hands wrapped themselves around my throat, choking off my air supply as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do. His eyes, now open, had no iris, no nothing, they were dark and empty. They glittered with a malicious kind of glee.

I tried to scream, but that was kind of impossible considering that he was choking the life out of me. All I managed to produce was a rasping, gagging sound. Even that became impossible after a nanosecond.

I kicked my feet, trying to hit him somewhere it might hurt. Did his arms have to be so damn long? The room was already starting to turn dark around the edges. My lungs burned, begging for a hit of oxygen—that ultimate addiction for living things. I could feel my hands, gripping his arms, start to weaken.

I was totally going to die.

Crap. I should have left him in the road where I found him.

And then there was a rush of a furry hurricane as Jazz came to my rescue.

FLINT

I
became aware of several things at once. One, I was not dead. I was not sure how I felt about that; part of me was disappointed, while that little niggling voice in my head that had considered suicide an idiotic quest at best, was doing the Macarena with joy.

Second, my head hurt. It didn’t just hurt, it screamed. It felt like it was on fire, or that, perhaps, someone had tried to brand my skull with some kind of iron. And hit it a couple times with the iron while torching my skull.

Third, my butt hurt. Something sharp was digging into me. It felt like that same something was clamped firmly onto the fleshiest part of my backside.

Fourth, I was holding a girl by the neck.

I gasped in horror and yanked my hands away from her.

As she slid, wheezing and grasping for air, to the floor, I became aware of a sound other than the high-pitched ringing in my ears.

Growling. A low, constant, angry vibration. I seemed to be able to feel it as much as I could hear it.

A glance over my shoulder revealed that the pain in my butt was a dog. A big, furry, pissed-off kind of dog.

I raised my hands over my head, as if she had a gun, instead of canines, which felt like they were each eight inches long. It also felt like there had to be a couple hundred of those canines, all pressing into my tender flesh.

“Easy,” I murmured to the dog, in the gentlest voice I could muster, considering the fact that she was digging her teeth into my flesh. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The girl on the floor coughed. I dragged my eyes away from the dog to see how she was doing. Her chest heaved, just short of hyperventilating. She rubbed her neck as she leaned over her knees, still trying to catch her breath.

“Enough, Jinx,” she croaked. She snapped her fingers.

“I feel so violated,” I muttered, as a pretty border collie, not quite the fiendish hellhound I had imagined, dashed towards her mistress, her tail moving like a miniature cyclone. She let out high-pitched whines and yips as she bounded around her owner.

I gingerly patted my backside. Despite the pain, she hadn’t even broken through the cloth of my pants.

But, how had I ended up with a Border collie hanging off my backside in the first place?

I bit my lip as I realized that I had no idea where we were. The sterile-looking room didn’t look familiar, and neither did the girl. The last place I had been aware of was a stretch of road, about thirty minutes outside of Salem and the hotel where I’d been ‘staying’—at least, as far as my family knew. I’d chosen carefully, where to put my plan into motion. I was so sure that nobody would find me there, at least, not until it was too late.

Obviously, somebody had found me, and, in thanks, I’d apparently tried to choke the life out of her.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. I reached a hand out to the girl, offering to help her up.

She raised an eyebrow at me for my audacity, and rose to her feet on her own, ignoring my offered hand completely. She coughed and cleared her throat again.

I could already see the dark marks on her neck. There would be bruises later.

“I don’t know what came over me,” I said in a hurry, in case she was carrying mace or something. I might have a death wish, but that did not mean that I wanted to suffer. Though she had every right and plenty of reasons to mace me. I just hoped she wouldn’t.

So, I was a wimp.

“You don’t usually strangle strange girls when you’re regaining consciousness from a suicide attempt?” The girl raised one dark eyebrow at me.

I tried to babble something. I was a lawyer. I was usually good with words, they were my thing, but, at this moment, I couldn’t even piece together my name, let alone an explanation for doing something that was so patently unlike me.

I had never raised my hand against a woman in my life.

Well, until now.

She waved her hand at me. “Stand down, Aragorn. It wasn’t you, anyway.”

It was my turn to raise an eyebrow.
Aragorn?
“It wasn’t?” I was fairly sure it had been, considering the pressure I could still feel in the palms of my hands. I rubbed them against my pants, trying to remove the sensation.

She shook her head with the deep sigh of a fed-up martyr. She had her hair tucked into a Red Sox baseball cap, which suggested that I was still in Massachusetts, but made it impossible to tell what color it might be. Apparently, it was on there pretty snugly, to have survived my murder attempt.

Hell, she was tiny. She looked like she couldn’t be older than fifteen, which wasn’t helped by those big eyes under the brim of her hat.

She nodded. “It was a demon,” she announced in a firm, bored tone, as if she had spoken the words a thousand times. Her tone was bland, if a little wry.

I blinked at her.
A demon?
“I beg your pardon?”

“A demon,” she said, patiently. “You know, from the bowels of hell, like to destroy souls, all that fun stuff?”

“A demon,” I repeated. I knew that demons existed. The question was how she knew. Who was this girl, anyway?

“Good thing for you—and me—is that it’s just a little, baby demon. At least, it is now. My guess is that it was dormant in your system, for who knows how long, until you tried to kill yourself. Something like that tends to wake up any latent demonic activity.” She pulled her baseball cap off and shook out her hair, running her hands through the curls to unflatten them.

Lavender. I hadn’t expected that.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. My head throbbed painfully and the room was making a good attempt at recreating surrealism. I wanted to focus on what the girl was saying, but all I could seem to manage was to stare at her hair.

And her face, which looked strangely familiar.

“The bad news,” she continued, ignoring my stupor, and the staring, “is that, now that the demon is awake, we have to work fast.”

“We do?” I knew that I sounded like an idiot, but I couldn’t seem to piece even three words together.

“Yep,” she announced, almost cheerfully. “My guess is that you have something like thirty-six hours before the demon takes over completely. Trust me; you don’t want something like that to take over the driver’s seat. Now, would you like to explain to me how you ended up with a demon?” She huffed through her nose as she glanced at the clock on the wall. “And, can you make it quick? I have patients coming in less than an hour, and I’d like to at least shower or grab something to eat. Or at least, consume a jug of caffeine.”

“You’re a doctor?” I asked, understanding suddenly why the room looked so clinical—it actually was a clinic.

Apparently, I’d been found by exactly the right—or wrong—person, depending on which piece of my psyche you were asking. The survivalist side was now doing the Mambo.

“I’m a vet,” she said impatiently, tapping her slender fingers against the leg of her jeans. “And, if I don’t work, I don’t eat. So, can we address the problem? I have a life to get back to.”

I didn’t. I’d made sure of that. My family was going to be finding the note I left for them any day now—as soon as they checked for me in the hotel room I wasn’t staying in.

I frowned. “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t say what I didn’t know, because, right now, that was everything. I lifted my hand and felt gingerly at my scalp.

“Don’t do that,” she snapped. “I just cleaned it up. You’re going to need stitches.”

I looked at the blood on my fingers. The blood felt warm. It was a deep, red color. I could remember how blood like this looked, against snow-covered stone. A wave of dizziness hit me. The room began to sway.

“Seriously?” the girl demanded with a growl of frustration. She appeared to be staring at the ceiling. “The guy has a demon, but he can’t stand the look of blood? Are we going for a lesson in irony here?”

I glanced up, trying to see whom she might be talking to.

Nope, no one was there. A crazy person was treating me.

“Oh, geez,” she muttered. “I’m not crazy.”

I stared at her.

She made a face. “Mildly telepathic,” she said, holding her fingers a pinch apart. “Just a teeny tiny bit. And, I’m not crazy. At least, not yet.”

“I was talking to God,” she said, stabbing her finger at the ceiling.

I snorted. “That’s how you
pray
? Aren’t you afraid you’re going to get struck down with lightening or something?”

She almost cracked a smile. “Nope. I’m really not.” She shrugged. “It works for me. Anyway, better to be killed by lightning than to live forever. You’re not vegan, are you? Because that would really be the last straw.”

I stared at her, trying to follow her thought pattern.

“Food,” she said impatiently. “Breakfast. Or, dinner, in my case—or was it lunch? Bacon and eggs or bran?”

I shuddered. “Not bran.”

“Good,” she said. “I don’t have any, anyway. Unless you count feed for the horses, which I don’t. You’d have to be an herbivore to eat that sawdust.” She gestured for me to follow her and her furry shadow through a door past what appeared to be waiting room with a desk, then a hallway, and then another set of doors.

The last door opened, at last, into what looked like living quarters. Homely, but homey, old furniture and braided rugs seemed to be the décor of choice. The couch closest to me sagged sadly, as if it had lost all hope.

I knew the feeling.

“If we’re going to have an exorcism, I’m going to need to fix my blood sugar,” the girl said, over her shoulder, as she ducked into her small kitchen and started banging around pots and pans.

I winced; the sound wasn’t helping my headache. Though, at this point, I wasn’t sure if it was from the bullet or the hangover I’d been avoiding for… let’s see, a month?

“I’m going to feed you before I stitch you up,” she said, pointing a spatula at me. “Believe me; you don’t want me to do it before I eat. Stitching cross-eyed gets a little messy. You need to eat, too. I don’t need you passing out on me, yet again. You don’t like blood much, huh?”

I really didn’t want to answer that. I bit my lip.

She shrugged. “Okay, okay. I won’t bother you. And don’t worry, I don’t pry. I’m not a great telepath, I only hear those surface thoughts that people tend to shout. Or the occasional random firing of a synapse or too. Believe me, that’s awkward. Just so you don’t think that I’m going to raid your brain for your bank accounts or something. I can’t do that, even if I had the desire to give it a try.”

I scrubbed my face with my hands, not sure whether I should feel bemused or numb. Instead, I was caught somewhere in between. I hadn’t shaved recently and my facial hair was longer than I liked it to be. I scratched at the rough sensation.

Bacon started sizzling in the kitchen. The hot, salty scent of meat filled the air. Despite myself, my mouth started to water.

When was the last time I had eaten anything? Well, anything that was actually nutritious and didn’t come in a glass bottle and require an ID for anyone under twenty-one?

I honestly couldn’t remember. Everything in my head was a kind of blur. I couldn’t focus on anything.

It was nice.

Even the alcohol hadn’t been able to fog my head up like this. For once, I was too dizzy, too out of it to think clearly. I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes.

“Hey,” the girl shouted. Something big and fluffy hit me in the head.

I sat up. She had another pillow posed, ready to throw it at need. “What?”

“Until we figure this demon stuff out,” she said sternly, “no sleeping. Got it?”

I nodded. She hesitated before dropped her pillow and heading back to rescue the bacon. Not like I wanted to sleep, anyway. My dreams were always full of Natalie and the horrible night she had been murdered in front of me. It was because I’d been running away from those dreams that I had resorted to alcohol.

I was a weak bastard.

The girl dropped two plates onto the table. I winced at the sound. Did she do nothing quietly?

“Time to eat,” she announced.

I slid into the seat next to her and looked down at my plate. My stomach practically yelped at the sight of eggs, bacon, and toast, slathered in butter and cut into triangles. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had cut my toast for me. Maybe my aunt had done it? Back before my father had taken us away from her?