Zaid turns and heads off to grab some medical supplies, and Zora sits on the couch beside me. She doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t say a thing. But I know she heard the distress in my voice, and she’s sitting next to me in a show of solidarity.
Carrick’s expression remains flat and resolute.
So I ask again, “Deandra? Really?”
“Really,” he replies. “Her powers of healing far surpass that of Stan, and I don’t have time to go track him down.”
“Surely you can heal me,” I sputter.
“Yeah, I can,” Carrick snaps, anger suffusing his face. “But not as well as Deandra. Besides that, I need to talk with her about joining our cause so her trip here serves two purposes.”
“We don’t need her—”
“We do fucking need her,” Carrick snarls, and I shrink back against the fury in his voice. I’ve never seen him this mad before. “While you were off almost getting yourself killed like an idiot, I was getting my ass handed to me by Kymaris and the Blood Stone. We need every fucking soul that’s willing to help us at the ritual or else Earth is going to get decimated.”
I can actually feel my skin pale. It tingles with chills, and something uneasy skitters down my spine. I put aside the fact he called me an idiot, as we can argue about that later, and I know we will as that’s the main source of his anger.
“What happened in Hungary?” I ask him softly, just as Zaid returns to the living room.
He shakes his head, eyes heavy with disappointment. “I’m too angry at you right now to even look at you.”
“Carrick,” I exclaim softly, shocked he’d shut me out over something like this.
Ignoring my plaintive cry for understanding, he turns his attention to Zaid. “Once Deandra gets here, have her heal the remainder of Finley’s injuries and then send her down to the library so we can talk.”
And with that, he turns on his heel and moves toward his office, not even bothering to give me another glance. My gaze follows him the entire way, even as I have to crane my neck around to watch his departure. I take in the lines of his body, the clenched fists, and I know I have some apologizing to do about running off for Blain.
Except the problem is… I’m not sorry about it.
“You deserve that and more,” Zaid mutters as he motions Zora away from me so he can sit on the couch to get a better look at my arm. She moves down toward the end to make room.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur as Zaid cuts away the sleeve of my shirt.
Keeping his eyes on his work, he says, “You need to be saying that to Carrick, not me.”
“Actually, I’m saying it to you because I need to say it to you. I should have never tied you up like that.”
Zaid’s gaze lifts, admonishment heavy in his expression. “I would have let you go, Finley. I would have gone with you and helped to rescue him. You should have trusted me.”
Alarm causes me to flush hot that he would ever think such a thing. I reach out to grab his hand that holds the scissors, putting mine over the top to squeeze him. “I do trust you,” I exclaim. “I trust you implicitly. I tied you up to save you from Carrick’s wrath. I was protecting you.”
His eyes flash with surprise, and a tiny smile comes to his mouth. “I can hold my own with Carrick.”
“You said he’d kill you if you let me go,” I remind him.
“Dramatics,” he says with a wave of his other hand, then he pulls the one with the scissors away so he can continue working.
It’s silent as Zaid cleans the wound on my arm. As I expected, it’s nothing more than a deep groove in my skin, more burned from the speeding bullet as it grazed me than anything else.
He doesn’t bother putting a permanent bandage on it, presumably because Deandra will make the wound disappear soon enough. He merely tapes some gauze over it to keep the oozing to a minimum.
Boral and Maddox return, and I look to Maddox in question. “Blain will stay asleep until we’re ready to wake him up. He looks like hell, though.”
“I know,” I lament woefully. All my dislike for the man has evaporated, and I have nothing but empathy for what he’s been through and guilt churning in my gut that he got caught up in all of this.
“Where’s Carrick?” Maddox asks.
I toss my head toward his office, which leads to the library. “Avoiding me because he’s pissed. He called Deandra to come heal me and then talk battle strategy.”
Maddox glances toward the office and then back to me, and he must decide to avoid Carrick’s generalized ire. Instead, he plops down on a chair, throwing his booted feet up on the coffee table. “So tell us how it went down rescuing your ex-future-brother-in-law.”