Jen snorted. “Some people would say that stopping breathing was the worst of it.”
“Got any more water?” I asked, deciding that arguing would get me nowhere fast.
She gave me a disgusted look and disappeared behind the velvet curtain, returning a minute later with water, Luke trailing behind.
He carried a collection of things in his hands. His wary gaze fell on me.
“You okay?” He asked, crouching down in front of me and setting his supplies next to me on the chaise.
“Been worse.”
He reached for my hand, taking away the torn cloth. He opened a brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “Might sting.” He poured on my hand, using a hand towel underneath to catch the runoff. “Interesting night. This stuff happen to you a lot?”
“Just on days that end in -y.”
“You told Mike you’d been protecting Stacey and Jen. From stuff like this?”
“Sometimes.”
He dabbed my hand with another towel to dry it and started wrapping gauze around my palm.
“I’m beginning to see why Mike might be worried about what you bring to the table as far as Stacey’s concerned.”
“Fuck you, Luke,” the woman in question said, hands on her hips. “I’ll take twelve Becks over one of you, so you can shut your damned mouth and keep your idiotic opinions to yourself.”
She shoved him aside and finished bandaging my hand, wrapping it in athletic tape to hold the gauze in place. She pushed my hand back onto my lap, then poked a sharp finger into my clavicle.
“Don’t you go listening to Luke and Mike. I know how you are. You take your guilt trips very seriously, but we let you keep your secrets and let you wallow in your misplaced sense of responsibility for way too long. Not anymore. Jen, Lorraine, and I make our own choices, and nobody—not even you—gets to tell us who our friends are and what we do. Anything happens to us, that’s on us. Got that?”
She’d kept stabbing me with her finger for the entire speech. I grabbed it in my healthy hand and held it away from me.
“Loud and clear. You can stop the woodpecker bit.”
She glared and then snatched me in a tight hug. “I love you. You scared me.”
I hugged her back and then Jen when she came in for a three-way.
“I wasn’t scared,” I said. “I knew you had me.”
Jen scowled. “Scared the fuck out of me. I don’t know CPR. Yet. I’m putting that on my to-do list ASAP. I’m not going to be that helpless again.”
“I swear, if a genie ever pops out of a bottle for me, my first wish is going to be that you can only die after a long, healthy life,” Stacey said. “All three of you.”
“Same,” Jen said. “Wait, if there are witches and psychics, does that mean there are genies, too?”
I shrugged. “You’ve got me. I guess you’ll have to start rubbing bottles to find out.” I slid my loosely held fist back and forth to represent a man beating his meat.
That was enough to finally break the tension. All three of us broke into peals of laughter, while Luke stood watching.
We sobered quickly, remembering Lindsey. I stood and went to stand beside her, recapping to the others what had happened when I’d grabbed her hand.
“Her pulse is okay,” Lorel said, knotting her fingers together. “So she’s out of the woods as far as that goes. But how do we bring her back to herself? What’s she doing?”
“Might want to get her a pen and some paper,” Mikey suggested.
I glanced at him, wondering what he thought about all of this. His expression remained cool and detached. He was in full cop-mode.
“She has something she’s trying to capture,” he continued. “She’s repeating herself now. You might even want to let her have at a big wall or floor. Have a lot of pencils handy.”
