I nodded. This was either going to work or it wasn’t, and hesitating could be fatal. I gripped his spirit as tight as I could, stepped into my body and thrust him back into his. The whole thing took a couple of seconds, and suddenly, we were home.
He blinked at me blankly for a moment and then winced as the pain hit. “That was it? That’s all it took?”
“I guess,” I said dizzily. The sudden absence of pain made me a little light-headed.
“Why didn’t you just do that before?”
“Because I didn’t know about it before!” I snapped, sticking my head through the ward over the door.
I borrowed the least sparkly thing I could find—a plain white cotton blouse—to rip up for a bandage and ducked back inside. A glance at the monitors showed that the mages had spread out, with a few left in the club to guard the portal and the others doing a systematic search of the street. I wondered how long it would be before they decided to retrace their steps.
“I’m going to owe Dee big-time,” I said, shredding the cotton with the help of Pritkin’s knife. “I just hope this was off the rack.”
He didn’t say anything, and he was sweating and trembling by the time I got a pad secured around his leg. It didn’t look like it was doing much to staunch the flow. It didn’t help that there were other wounds rending his flesh in several places that I hadn’t even noticed; courtesy of the chase, I assumed. But the leg was what had chills running up my arms, making my hands clumsy, churning my stomach.
“Pritkin,” I said carefully. “Why hasn’t the bleeding stopped?”
Perspiration gleamed in the hollow of his throat as he breathed faster and more shallow than usual. But there wasn’t a flicker of emotion in his voice when he spoke. “As soon as you are able, shift back to Jonas. Get him out of here and do not leave his side. You can protect each other until the issue with the Circle is—”
“What do you mean, when I shift back?” I demanded, the cold feeling in my stomach growing exponentially.
“Listen to me; we don’t have much time—”
“Before what?”
“Stop asking questions for once and pay attention. Don’t rely on the vampires to protect you from Saunders. There are too many tricks they don’t know and won’t be able to counter. And tell Jonas . . . tell Jonas he needs to—”
“Stop giving me orders!” I hissed, glaring at him.
That was less than satisfying since I couldn’t see him very well. What little light there was in the room seemed to fall at an angle to him, skirting his edges. I moved in front of him so I could grab his arms, so I could get in his face.
“You said you could heal this. So do it!” He wouldn’t look at me. “Stop the bleeding, Pritkin,” I pleaded, my fingers digging into his arms. “Stop it and I’ll do whatever you want.”
He licked his lips. “My energy level is . . . lower than usual. Healing will take time.”
Yeah. Time he didn’t have. I stared at him in utter disbelief. “You tricked me! You wanted me to switch back because you knew—” I couldn’t even say it.
I stared at him, unable to believe this was happening. That he could just disappear, along with everything rich and strange he’d brought into my life. Vanished, like magic.
“You can’t do this,” he said, finally meeting my eyes. And if I’d had any doubts that he was serious, that look would have dispelled them. “You can’t tear yourself up every time you lose someone. War—”
“Don’t give me some stupid lecture about war when the person we’re talking about losing is you!” I said, surprised by the savagery in my tone. At least my voice didn’t shake.
His face blurred and I tasted salt on my lips. It was warm, warm like Pritkin’s hands coming up and framing my face, his thumbs brushing over my eyelids, soft as his fingers in my hair. “One person is not so important in the scheme of things,” he said, and his voice was gentle, gentle when it never was, and that almost broke me.
But you are important, I thought. And yet he couldn’t see that. In Pritkin’s mind, he was an experiment gone wrong, a child cast out, a man valued by his peers only for his ability to kill the things they feared. Just once, I wished he could see what I did.
“Then neither is this,” I said, leaning in and pressing my mouth to his, the kiss lightened by desperation and weighted down by everything he meant to me.
His bloody fingers tightened on my face, but he kissed me back with a tenderness, a reined-in need that contrasted painfully with his passion in Marsden’s kitchen. There was no spark of electricity this time, no cool breeze rolling up my body, ecstatic and draining, no—
No power loss.
I tore away and stared at him. “Wait. What was . . . You healed earlier—back in Marsden’s kitchen. A scratch on your arm. I saw it!” Pritkin didn’t say anything. “You’re half incubus—you can feed from my power,” I said, slowly catching up. His ability must be spiritual rather than physical, like my power. That was why I could still shift, even in his body.
Like he could still heal.
“You don’t have any power to spare!” he told me.