“Sedgewick?What did he do?”
She just looked at me some more.I’d seen that expression from a couple of my instructors when I was being particularly dense.It hadn’t been pleasant then, either.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, frustrated.“I’ve...had a day, okay?”
She sighed and tried again.“Dead?”
I shook my head and sat down opposite her.It was warmer here.I didn’t realize until that moment that I’d been cold.
“No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.We’re not—”
She held up a hand, and an expression that might have been slight irritation crossed her features.“No.Listen.”
She pointed at me with a dirty finger that had a nail long enough to be considered a talon.And maybe it was, for all I knew.I shut up.
“Dead,” she said again, and waited expectantly.
“Uh, dead?”I repeated, because that seemed to be what she wanted.
She nodded.“War Mage,” she added, and then looked at me again.
“War mage.”
“Did this.”
“Did...this?”
She just looked at me some more.It seemed to be taking a lot out of her to have this conversation, maybe because, while we weren’t dead, we were close.How much blood had we lost?
Too much, at a guess.
And she was probably the one healing us, too, because that sure wasn’t me.
“Together!”she suddenly roared, startling and frightening me to the point that I scrambled back on the bone-strewn floor.
“I don’t know what you want!”I yelled back, and had half a dozen heads turn toward mine, because I was suddenly conscious again and being wheeled down a hall on a gurney.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!”Sedgewick said crossly, and the next second I was out again.
???
I woke up to an immense sense of déjà vu.I was back in my bedroom at home, it was crowded with people, and one of them was Hargroves.I was pretty sure that your boss wasn’t supposed to see you in your nightie quite this much, I thought blearily, struggling to sit up.And going nowhere.
“It’ll be like that for a while, mage,” Hargroves informed me dryly.“You almost bled out.”
No shit, I didn’t say, mainly because Cyrus was holding a glass to my lips.
He knew me too well.
I drank the tepid water anyway, because I was thirsty.And then struggled into a more or less seated position, just because Hargroves thought I couldn’t.I was slanted to the side a little more than strictly normal, but technically, itwassitting.
He sneered at me, or maybe not—he pretty much always looked like that—and tossed something onto the bedclothes.
“What’s that?”I asked thickly.
“The report.Useless thing though it is.We were infiltrated,” the voice was as clipped as I’d ever heard it, because Hargroves was pissed.But he was old-school British, so that meant he just gotmore.More straight-laced, more starched-collar uptightness, more angry little gimlet-eyed stares, more of all of it.
It was Hargroves at his irascible best, and I was not here for it.
