Page 30 of The Fae Menagerie
"It was dead!"
I laughed at his outrage. "Still enough to knock you on your ass. I thought you knew about wasps."
"I didn't think it was going to coil in on me like that." He lifted his hand from the water and stared at it. "Still hurts."
"It will hurt until you sweat all the venom out. How's the rest of you?"
"Much better." He rested his head on the lip of the tub. "I thought my arm was on fire at first. Now it's just numb."
He was already doing much better than I'd expected. With my sting, the fiery burn from my toe to my groin had lasted for days.
"You have hardly any swelling," I said. "I stepped on a live wasp once. My toe swelled to three times its size."
Parker rubbed at the red spot on his finger, and it disappeared. I was so startled, I went looking for Chani.
They were still cleaning gunk off the floor in the viewing room.
"He's already awake. He barely has a mark. Whatever you did for him, thank you."
Chani's head snapped up, and they gazed at me with six wide eyes. "I did nothing but check his vitals."
"Thanks for my gloves, at least." I chuckled as I kneeled to scrub the final splash of bug guts from the floor. With my enclosure once again spotless, I led Chani back to the tub, where Parker freaked out and covered his private parts with both hands.
"Hi, Chani."
"I need to see your wound."
Parker lifted his hands from the water and pointed to a spot of unmarked skin.
"I don't know if this is a human trait or a miracle," Chani whispered to me as we left Parker alone to rinse and dry off. "I expected him to be unconscious for days. That's what Aidan?—"
They slapped two of their four hands over their mouth.
"Aidan fucking knew?"
Chani backed away from me, and I followed with both hands raised for their throat.
"You killed them all before they could touch him," they said.
"I did." I dropped my arms.
"Aidan thought it was all for naught, and then the dead one got him, anyway." Chani patted my shoulder. "If it makes you feel any better, I was rooting for you."
My laughter sounded bitter. "Thank you." I pulled off my gloves and handed them over.
"Keep them," they insisted. "Clean your bedroom. Aidan will never know. He was sound asleep when I left his apartment."They lifted a small vial of swirling purple liquid from their apron. "I doused him with this before I left. He'll be upset with himself that he fell asleep. He will probably come check on you, to see for himself."
Chani gave me a slight bow. They gathered their supplies and the bag of wasp carcasses and disappeared.
I would give Aidan something to check on, all right.
First, I needed to make sure Parker was all right. I found him in my bedroom.
"I'm fine," he insisted. "Had a pleasant nap before you dumped me in the tub." The tub had also disappeared the moment Parker stepped out of it, he said. Either Chani's magic was more powerful than I'd ever imagined, or they'd lied about drugging Aidan with the sleep potion.
"You look worried." Parker smoothed his thumb between my eyebrows and the crease I saw in the mirror whenever I was perplexed. I was definitely perplexed now.
I grabbed his hand and searched his ring finger for the mark that had once been there. When I couldn't find it, I searched his other hand.
