Jenn Bennett - Banishing the Dark

Blurry memories of my hospital room rearranged themselves like frames of film spliced out of order. Nurses. Doctors. A painful catheter being removed. Being walked to the bathroom, my legs too weak to support my weight. Everything smelled funny. I wanted a real bath. I wanted my ribs to stop hurting.

And I wanted my brain to work better.

Pain meds slowed everything down. Made me dream crazy things. But I wasn’t dreaming now. I was awake.

I gazed up at an enormous circle of sigils painted on the ceiling. A circle inside a circle. Two spells. One that prevented magick from being used. The other was magick to hide something. The same ward we’d seen on the boat Lon chartered last fall.

“It’s to keep your mother out,” a kindly female voice said.

I craned my neck to see the haloed head of one of Lon’s housekeepers, knitting in a chair by the fireplace. This wasn’t the hospital. I was home.

“Mrs. Holiday.”

“Hello, Cady, darling,” she said, tucking her needles and yarn into the chair cushion. “You with us this time?”

“Yes, I think I am.”

“Good. Lon gave you something to clear out the medicine. He said it would take you an hour or so to wake. He’ll be back from the store any minute. How does a bath sound?”

“Heavenly.”

What I really wanted was half an hour in Lon’s luxury steam shower, but I was too weak to stand by myself. Still, the tub was nice. Once I’d sloughed off a few layers of dead skin cells and brushed my teeth until my gums bled, the Holidays got me back into bed and left the room, and when they returned, Lon was with them.

His expectant face brightened when he walked into the bedroom, dressed in a thin brown leather jacket and jeans. Green eyes squinting, he strode through a patch of sunlight to pull a chair over to the side of the bed while Mrs. Holiday set down a tray of food. The Holidays left us alone, pulling the door shut behind them.

He sat down and leaned close. He had a full beard, a darker shade of his honey-brown hair, with two streaks of silvery gray at the chin—gray I’d never seen when he had it trimmed down to the pirate mustache. Had it always been there, or did my time in the hospital cause it?

Gray or not, beard or not, he was divine to look upon, painfully handsome and oh-so-serious. At that moment, I felt as if I hadn’t seen him for months.

“Oh, Lon.”

“Thank God,” he mumbled, dropping kisses over my eyes. “I couldn’t sense anything through the morphine. Damn, it feels good to hear you again.” It took me a second to realize what he meant: he could “hear” my feelings with his demonic knack. “You scared”—he kissed one cheek—“the living shit”—he kissed the other cheek—“out of me.”

When his lips pressed against mine, I threw my arms around his neck and pulled him close, crying a little. Drowning a little.

He pulled back and wiped my face with trembling fingers as I wiped his. We both laughed at ourselves. Then he sat back down and slid one warm hand around mine. “Christ, I’ve missed you.”

“How long was I—”

“You’ve been home a day.”

“What about the hospital?”

He ran his fingers over the damp hair near my ear, sending pleasant shivers racing across my skin. “Three days since that first night you woke up. Do you remember that now?”

Barely. It was all so . . . confusing. “I remember dreaming you were some crazy mountain man coming to kill me. What’s all this?” I raked my fingers through his beard.

“Laziness.”

“Hides the tic in your jaw,” I teased. “How will I know when you’re mad now?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll shave it.”

“It’s sort of sexy.”

“You won’t say that when it’s scraping sensitive skin.”

“Don’t tease me when I’m feeble and debilitated. What’s the date?”

“February fifth.”

February . . . I’d been in the hospital an entire month?

“Are you in pain?” he asked.

“Everything aches. My ribs hurt when I bend a certain way.”

“Then don’t bend that way.”

I smiled. “What did you give me?”

“Ginkgo biloba and the detox medicinal you gave Bob when he quit drinking. They had you on morphine after you woke, because Mick wasn’t there to tell them no. You were pretty out of it.”

“Mick. Your Earthbound doctor friend?” One of the best surgeons in La Sirena, Lon had bragged, thanks to a crazy-strong healing knack.

“He did most of your work. Do you remember?”

The faces of several doctors and nurses blurred in my mind.

“Do you remember Mick telling you anything before he put you under for healing?”

“Like what?”

“Something very important. Think, Cady.”

Whatever he wanted me to remember, he was super-intense about it, so I tried harder. Something finally came into focus inside my head. Yes, that’s right. I remembered Mick in the hospital. Remembered his bright blue halo and his handsome smile. But he wasn’t smiling when I was hurt, was he? No. I was remembering meeting him before I got hurt. The night before—

“I killed Dare,” I said, suddenly sobering. Not just Dare but also his thugs, the ones who beat and punched and kicked my body until I nearly died myself. “They trapped me, Lon. Dare knew I could be trapped in a binding triangle. He knew, and he . . .” I inhaled a shaky breath.

Lon’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. “Don’t you even think about being sorry.”

Never. I steadied my emotions and concentrated on the here and now. “Do the police know?”

He reached over to the tray and uncovered a bowl of soup. An intoxicating scent wafted from the steam. “Chicken stock. Ginger. Seaweed. Vegetables.”

“You made it?”

“Same thing I make when Jupe’s sick. Plus a few other things.” When I began to ask what those “things” were, he cut me off with a stern look. “Just eat it.”

“Yes, sir.” Thank God for Lon’s cooking skills. It tasted a thousand times better than the hospital’s canned soup. Between spoonfuls, I said, “See, I’m eating. Now, tell me. Am I going to jail?”

He shook his head. “I paid someone to collect the ash and bone from Tambuku before anyone else showed up.”

“Who?”

His eye twitched. “Someone Hajo works with when he’s death dowsing.”

“Oh, God.”

“No one knows what happened but you and me.” He squinted one eye closed. “And Jupe. And Priya—your guardian appeared to Jupe to tell us what happened. That’s how we found you.”

“I sent him to get help,” I said, remembering. “But what about Tambuku? The bodies?”

“I took the bones to Dare’s wife, Sarah. Told her a version of the truth, that he was looking for the person who’d leaked his bionic knack drug. Do you remember all that?”

“The red liquid that amped up demonic knacks. Tambuku was robbed . . .”

“And Dare used a magician to manufacture the drug until he realized someone had stolen it and leaked it to the general public. So I told Sarah that Dare had traced the leak to the magician, and some Earthbound’s juiced-up knack went haywire and burned them all. It wasn’t that far from the truth, and it kept the whole thing out of the papers. She announced that he’d had a heart attack; their money and influence prevented any further investigation. The funeral was two weeks ago.”

It was overwhelming, how much I’d missed. And my foggy memories made everything feel surreal. My brain felt broken. “I hate that you had to lie for me.” He never lied. Loathed lying, in fact. I was the professional liar; he was a walking lie detector.

“I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” he said very seriously.

“What about Kar Yee?”