I reached for his hand. “What happened?”
He wasn’t willing to say a lot at the moment, but he did let me know that he was just waiting for some kind of paperwork and then he could leave. “There’s nothing wrong,” he assured me.
“I can see you! I have eyes!” I pointed to them in case he’d missed that fact.
“There’s nothing wrongenoughthat I needed to come here,” he amended. “I only agreed so I could get the hell away from the police.”
“The police?” I gasped. But at that moment, someone in scrubs approached with instructions and papers, and then Silas was free to leave. I ran to get the car so he wouldn’t have to walk out to where I’d parked, which was so far away that it could have been in another city. He slid into the passenger side when I pulled up and I saw how stiffly he was moving.
“What happened?” I demanded again.
“I got jumped on my way out of work,” he said, and shifted in the seat.
“By who? What did they do to you? Did they steal your wallet? Were they trying to kill you?”
“No, I’m fine,” he said soothingly.
“Silas, if I hear those words from you one more time, so help me, I’ll—I’ll—” I wasn’t sure, but it was going to be drastic.
“Ok, I won’t say it. But I am,” he assured me. “They jumped me but they didn’t do any real damage. I got in a few licks back. One of the guys was another the bed in the ER, in fact, before they brought him up to surgery.”
“Surgery?”
“They took the other three to a different hospital, I think Midtown General. They were in bad shape so nobody went directly to jail. I’m not the one in trouble this time,” he said, and he laughed quietly but held his ribs as he did.
“That’s it. That’s it!” I told him. “I’m putting my foot down.”
“You have such nice little feet. Do you mean that you’re going to use the gas pedal?”
“What? No, I—” I shook my head with confusion, which had probably been his goal. But I refused to be thrown off my game. “You can’t work nights anymore.”
“You’re exactly right.”
“I am? I am!”
“You are,” Silas agreed again. “This was going to be my last week anyway, and now I’m not going to bother to come back except to pick up a check. I’ll go in the daytime if that makes you feel better.”
“It would also make me feel better to know who did this to you,” I said. “Was it Dax?”
And when he didn’t immediately answer…
“Please don’t cry,” he said, and he reached over to the steering wheel to put his hand on mine. “I don’t know who it was for sure. I didn’t recognize them but I’m not usually considered as an easy target for random muggers. I assume that those guys were new members of the Pickle-Dick Posse under the leadership of Maggot Miststuck.”
“I thought they had given up on everything,” I said.
“Mostly.Not quite.”
“What does that mean?”
He went on to tell me that nothing had ever ended, that Dax and his friends had been trying to fight him for months and also that they had been trying to mess with me. In fact, he had recently intercepted one of the guys from the Pickle-Dick Posse at my office building.
“What?” I was so shocked that I’d hardly been able to get the word out.
“Remember Deb from Château Moderne?” Silas asked, and it would have been hard to forget the woman who had placed her mouth around my fiancé’s penis on the night that I’d broken up with him. “Dax did her dirty too, so she’s ticked off and she let me know that some of his friends were on their way to cause trouble for you. One of them was pretty speedy. I missed him but I caught the other one, and he promised not to bother youagain after I pulled him into an alley and made him cry. And piss himself. Dax had paid them to scare you.”
“Oh, no. Silas, this can’t go on! I’m going to talk to him and—”
“Nope,” he told me. “You’re not going near him.” But then he looked in the back seat and got nervous, too. “Where’s Lyra?”
