So much for keeping Ollie hidden until his bruises healed. Noble grimaced at the looks now being turned his way, before he glanced down at Ollie’s face. Behind his glasses, his eyes seemed partly unfocused, and the man was breathing heavily and trembling like crazy. The bandage over the cut beside the right corner of the man’s mouth remained, and it appeared that while asleep the witch had developed a black eye, on top of the dark, violent purple bruising that almost completely covered the swollen right side of his face. Ollie’s neck didn’t look any better, with the prints of Mikael’s hands clearly visible.
His poor Baby honestly looked worse than before, his voice sounding rough, but he supposed things did tend to get worse before they got better in most cases.
Aside from the dark coloring of the bruises, the little witch looked deathly pale, and not even his freckles helped to cover it up. Then again, based on Ollie now being collapsed on the floor, and everything else, he’d guess the man likely hadn’t eaten a damn thing before running down there.
“Jahla, could you grab some of the donuts we left up in Ollie’s kitchen, along with his morning meds, or maybe just his meds in general?”
It may have been around 1pm, but he figured it didn’t matter what time it was since Ollie hadn’t taken any of them today, or the ones he usually took the evening before, as he’d been sleeping. He should have woken him up to eat, but he hadn’t had the heart to do it when the man had finally seemed to be resting without nightmares.
Jahla nodded and took off running down the same path Ollie had just come from.
At the same time, a librarian named Percy Argent said, “Eat this before you pass out, you dork.” Pulling a small candy bar from his pocket, the man almost forcefully fed it to Ollie after unwrapping it. Percy was the only male librarian Ollie had, and was rather tall and thin, with short blond hair and red-framed glasses. Noble only vaguely remembered seeing the man around the second floor of the library before this.
Ollie made a discontented noise as he choked down the candy bar, while he kept trying to peer around everyone, as if it was even possible to look into the room that was damaged from where they were. The entrance may have been in that hallway, but it was at least five doors down. Though, he may have been trying to look at the many piles of books that were now stacked and spread out on tarps around the circular center of the third floor.
As the witch finished swallowing, Noble scooped Ollie up while saying, “Let’s get you settled somewhere with your meds and something to eat.”
“No, no, no, I need to see?—”
“What you need to do is eat before you pass out,” he stated flatly.
Hanna Cindric, the third floor librarian, a petite, curly-haired brunette who was shorter than Ollie, mused, “And maybe an ice pack for his face?”
“A more detailed explanation for what the fuck happened would be nice as well. That vague text and email, and the shit explanation from your man, just isn’t adding up, even more so now that we can see your face,” Percy said stiffly.
“He can explain when he doesn’t look like he is about to pass out,” Fleur LaGarde, a blonde-haired woman with androgynous features, and a light, bright voice, who stood a little under six foot, snapped.
Eashaa Ansari, a shorter woman with dark golden-brown skin, who was currently clinging to one of Fleur’s arms, scoffed. “Yeah, as much as an explanation would be nice, Ollie not passing out pretty much takes precedence.”
Aurora Calwell, a woman with dark-brown skin and hair pulled up into two afro puffs, snorted. “I don’t know, him almost passing out is practically a common occurrence compared to whatever the fuck the rest of this shit is.”
Noble cleared his throat and altered the lie they had come up with, as what else could he do. “So, we weren’t entirely truthful. But the only reason we lied was because Ollie didn’t want to worry you. He was hoping his bruises would be gone, or at least faded, before you saw them.
“It wasn’t a pack of wild dogs or coyotes. What happened was…he opened the door, thinking it was me, when a man in a mask attacked with his dogs, and so he tried to run. I got theresoon after, and fought with the assailant, which caused most of the damage to the tables, but the asshole fled when the fire started. As I mentioned before, the security system glitched and nothing was caught on camera.”
Percy grumbled, “How the hell did you think his bruises would heal fast enough to be gone in a few days? Also, a man with dogs?! That doesn’t?—”
“Just drop it, Percy!” Winnie snapped.
“I need to—” Ollie sputtered, his words choking off when Percy shoved another candy bar into his mouth.
Noble hesitated for a moment, before sighing heavily. “Someone fetch a chair. He can sit in the hall and watch while he eats.”
Ollie satin a chair in the hall eating the breakfast sandwich that Jahla had taken the time to make, which consisted of toast, bacon, and cheesy scrambled eggs. He also had a donut that he wasn’t sure he would eat or not, because swallowing kind of hurt.
His chair had been placed against the wall across from the doorway into the damaged room. Ollie was as close as they would allow him to be without a respirator. From his seat, he could clearly see into the damaged room, and only just barely see parts of what was going on at the center of the third floor to his left, where books were being piled up for cleaning. And it really was just barely, as the entrance was like six doors down, situated on the left side of the hall.
While the broken tables and chairs remained, he could only assume that Red, Noble, and possibly Jahla, had cleaned up thebroken glass and the blood before the others arrived. Tarps had thankfully been put down to set books on, and they also covered the path from the room to the center, so if they tracked soot, it would at least be easier to clean up.
The goal right now was to remove as many books from the room as possible before starting to clean. Mainly as the less books they had to leave overnight in the fume-filled room, the better. But they also couldn’t take out more than they could clean that day, because they didn’t want soot being circulated in the air.
After finishing off his sandwich, he took a bite of his donut, despite the pain, because it was an apple cider donut—his weakness that time of year.
When he was done chewing, he asked hoarsely, “Has someone set the air filtration system to hourly cleaning, and did you make sure to set the circulation in the damaged room to contained and self-cleaning?”
Whatever setting the system was on, either way, the filters would need to be changed at some point soonish.
“Yes, yes,” Jahla said, not even looking over as she pulled books from the shelf. “By the way, I’ve already talked to Elias. He should hold off on his questioning for a few more days, but you may want to talk to him sooner than later.”
