Magic Rises

his eyes, but his breathing was even.
    I wanted him to wake up. I wanted him to open his eyes and chide me about something, anything. I would drink whatever medicine he demanded, I’d promise to stay in bed, I’d do anything just to have him wake up.
    Hugh had said he would live. Being in a coma did technically count as living.
    I pushed that thought away from me. That way lay dragons.
    Barabas strode through the door, wearing a pair of sweatpants and nothing else. A wide gash streaked across his neck and his pale chest. He saw me and came into the bedroom. George followed him, carrying scissors, and pointed at my bloody jeans. “I’m sorry. I have to cut them off.”
    “I don’t suppose I can get some privacy?” I asked.
    “No,” Derek said.
    “Absolutely not,” Keira said. “You can be modest later, when we’re not under attack.”
    “This is probably a shock to you.” Barabas crouched by me. “But we have all seen naked women before. The sight of your legs isn’t going to traumatize anyone.”
    “Thanks.”
    George took the scissors, stretched my jeans, and cut. The fabric tugged on the wound. I inhaled sharply. Argh. George cut the other side and pulled the blood-soaked denim rag away. “Okay. There are wounds. I’m not sure how severe this is for a nonshapeshifter.”
    “Mirror?”
    Derek got up and passed George a handheld mirror. She held it. The left corner of it was gone, but enough remained to give me a view of my side. Three long jagged gashes cut the lower right side of my stomach, stretching all the way across my hip down over my thigh.
    “Tilt it toward me?”
    She did.
    The wounds looked shallow. They bled and hurt like all get-out, but none of them would impair my ability to swing my sword. I tried moving my leg. Still worked. Little creaky. Little agonizing. But it still worked.
    My face hurt, too. My lip felt swollen. “How’s my face?”
    George picked up the mirror. “Ready?”
    “Hit me.”
    She raised the mirror. A big bruise blossomed in all of its blue glory on the left corner of my jaw. My mouth was puffy and swollen, and a long cut snaked its way from my hairline down to my right ear. The swelling and the bruise came courtesy of being hit with a shapeshifter’s tail. The cut, I had no idea.
    “I’m a sexy fiend, aren’t I?”
    She winced. “It’s not that bad.”
    “It’s good that Curran is gone. He might not be able to contain himself. If he decides to ravish me in public when he comes back, I expect all of you to look the other way.”
    Mahon cleared his throat at the door.
    “You’ve got a status report for me?”
    “The attack involved five creatures,” Barabas said. “It started here. They busted through the door. One smashed Doolittle’s equipment and attacked Eduardo and Keira. They crippled her and then the doctor latched onto her throat. That’s her.” Barabas pointed at the woman’s corpse outside the window, on top of a short tower.
    “He never let go,” George said quietly. “When I got here, she’d smashed everything, rolled, flailed, rammed the walls with him. Eduardo got knocked out, and Keira would jump out of the way, but Doolittle never let go. I had to rip him away, and then she tried to fly away.”
    “She was dying,” Keira said. “Doolittle had clamped onto her neck and severed the jugular. His teeth kept her wounds open and bled her dry. Thirty seconds more and she wouldn’t have been able to fly.” She put her hands over her face. “We should’ve fought harder.”
    “We’re all still here,” Mahon told her from the door. “You did your job.”
    “While Doolittle was fighting, the second and third attackers blocked access to this room,” Barabas said. “Aunt B and Mahon took down one in the hallway, and Curran met the third in the hallway and fought it into Desandra’s room. The fourth busted in through the balcony into Desandra’s room after the fight began. The fifth, we are not sure.”
    “Injuries?” I asked.
    “Doolittle is the worst of it,” Barabas said. “Derek has a broken arm. There are some cuts and wounds, but everyone is still alive and moving around.”
    They hit here first. “Doolittle was the primary target.”
    “It appears that way.”
    Curran had said Doolittle wanted to talk to us. He must’ve found something, something that made him a target.
    Barabas sat on the floor next to me, his face serious.
    “Whenever you have that face, it means something nasty is coming.”
    “Do