“I don’t know.”
That, Maisie could believe. It was clear this guy was fading fast.
“Hey, stay with me now,” she said, urging him to walk a little faster. “Fine. If you can get to my car and tell me where to go, I’ll drive you there. Okay?”
“You have to come too. Wyvern venom… on your finger…”
Maisie blinked, looking up at him incredulously.
Wyvern venom? What next, is he going to tell me he got bitten by a manticore while he was running away from a basilisk? Give me a break…
Or maybe ‘wyvern venom’ was some trendy street name for some new kind of drug that hadn’t yet hit the mainstream. And to be honest, she’d heard wilder tales from time to time.
I’m probably walking right into a nest of criminals,Maisie thought, as she shouldered her front door open, maneuvering them both out of it before she kicked it closed behind them. The deadlock snapped into place behind her.
Her car was parked in the drive. She leaned against it as she unlocked the passenger’s side door, letting the man rest against her.
Geeze, he’s heavy.
It didn’t help, she supposed, that all of his sweaty, muscled side was pressed against her body – but she couldn’t think about that right now. Instead, she focused on getting the car door open, and bundling him inside.
Slamming the door behind him once she was sure there were no parts of him still left outside, she raced around to the driver’s side, yanking the door open.
“You never told me your name, by the way,” she said as she sat down, jamming the key in the ignition. She had to keep him talking – it was pretty clear he was on the edge of passing out, and that would beverybad. “Can you tell me what name to call you?”
“Rhys.” The man’s voice was barely a whisper. “Rhys Richardson.”
“Well, Rhys Richardson, you better wake up enough to give me some directions,” Maisie told him, as her car lurched to life. Silently, she thanked her lucky stars – her car was so old that sometimes it took a few goes for the engine to turn over.
She didn’t get any answer to that, however, as she drove the car probably a little faster than was wise out onto the street, her tires squealing on the asphalt as she accelerated.
“Hey – hey, you stay awake now, got it?” she said, hoping this Rhys Richardson – which didnotsound like a real name to her – couldn’t hear the rising panic in her voice.
She shouldn’t be panicking, she told herself – she’d faced more emergency situations than she could count over the course of her job. It was just that she was usually a little less…involvedthan this.
And usually,she thought, glancing at Rhys again,the patient didn’t have my fingers in his mouth five minutes previously…
She looked down at her finger again. It still hurt a little, and there was still a little red mark like a burn right on the tip where she’d touched the goo. Clearly, whatever that stuff was, it was lethal.
And who knows how much of that got inside him? Howeverthathappened...
And then, when he’d realized she’d gotten some on her own fingers, he’d grabbed her hand and sucked it off, she thought, feeling her face coloring a little before she forced the memory of the warmth of his mouth out of her head.
“You still with me?” she asked, when she didn’t get an answer. “Look. If you want me to take you to your work, wherever that may be, you better start giving me some directions. Or else I’m just going to drive you to the hospital whether you like it or not.”
“No. You have to take me to… to the Agency.”
Thatat least got him to talk, even if it was a slurred, barely lucid series of words that didn’t make much sense to Maisie.
“The Agency?” she repeated, confused. “I’ll need a little more information than that.”
This time, Rhys didn’t respond at all – and a moment later when she looked over at him, Maisie could see him fishing around in his pants for something.
“You better not be trying anything on, mister,” she warned him, though she didn’t really think he was in any kind of state to be doing any such thing. “You keep those on!”
But as it turned out, he wasn’t trying to take his pants off at all, which she realized a moment later when he pulled a mobile phone out of his jeans pocket.
“Here,” he said, voice rasping. “I’ll –”
