Page 45 of Pixie Problems
Finn grumbled as he dug my phone out, and then he called in an ambulance. Lucky came out of the bathroom wearing clothes, but her hair was still a mess, and she was still dripping water everywhere. It was like she had barely bothered to dry off.
“Thanks, Lucky. You saved me from being dog chow.”
“Coyote chow,” Finn corrected.
“Same difference.”
He sighed.
Naut laid down beside me, and I looked at him. “I’ll be okay, boy. Just some new stitches. Nothing to worry about. Go find Fayliss. I’m sure she’s freaked out and hiding somewhere.” Lucky’s mini adolescent unicorn was a bit of a scaredy cat.
Finn pulled the towel away and looked at my hand and wrist. “You’ll need stitches again. Pretty soon you’re going to look like Frankenstein’s monster with all the stitches you’ve been accruing the last few days,” Finn said. And it made me laugh because the three of us were just sitting or laying there. Three friends. Finn was grumpy and also indecent, but Lucky, great person that she was, was ignoring his state of undress even though her cheeks were a little more pink than usual. Lucky was still holding her frying pan, and I gazed at it in appreciation. That thing must be cast iron. It wasn’t even dented from the shifters’ heads. And that said something about its durability.
Finn sat down on the floor beside me. He was still applying pressure to the tears in my arm, looking concerned when he could clearly see that the towel was soaked in my blood. And this was from someone who probably saw this kind of stuff every day. “You doing okay?”
I nodded. “It hurts, but I’m mostly woozy right now. I don’t think I’ll try to stand, if that’s okay with you.”
He grimaced. “Standing is not recommended right now.”
“How bad is it?” I hadn’t looked at my arm since the fight. I didn’t want to see how bad it was. Ignorance was bliss in this case.
“It’s just a scratch,” Finn said dismissively. “You’ll be fine.”
Lucky looked like she disagreed with his assessment but she kept her opinion to herself.
Draven arrived, and to say he looked ticked would have been like saying Antarctica was cold. Oh, yeah. My bodyguards. Were they okay?
He crouched by my side. “They took out your guards,” he said in a tightly seething voice. “One of them must be part wizard because the guards followed a person that looked like you. The coyotes made it look like you were leaving the house for a run. They had no reason to believe the shifters had the capability to produce a duplicate realistic enough that it would fool them.”
He looked at me, and I quavered in fear at the chilling depth of his gaze. Master vampires were terrifying when they were angry. “I was going to release them from your guard, but they begged me to remain as your protection detail. They have some honor to reclaim, and they still want to protect you. I’ve chosen to keep them on.” He checked that I was okay with this decision, and I nodded my head.
“On the plus side,” he continued, “this attack and the one last night has allowed us to move against them more fully. The whole pack will be sent to the paranormal prison Deep Dark, and their genetic makeup will be given to the boundary witches so that they can add them to those unwelcome here.”
“They’ve probably gone to ground and scattered,” Finn said. “We need to get them out of the town before the boundary magic can keep them out.”
“I thought you guys didn’t want to prosecute the ones who haven’t made a move to attack me yet,” I said woozily.
Finn and Draven looked at each other, and then back at me. “When we find the others, they will be going to Deep Dark as well, unless we find evidence they were coerced in some way. Those who disagreed with coming after you should have come forward to the police or tried to leave Moonhaven Cove’s boundaries well before now. The magic added by the boundary witches just protects you in the future, if and when they’re able to get out of prison. Those that haven’t tried to attack you will get reduced prison time, but they can still be a danger to you when they get out, so they’ll all be added and will be unwelcome here for the remainder of their lifetimes.”
I wanted to cheer at that, but I couldn’t help but remember the fact that Hux’s pack contained more than fifty coyotes, and so far only Hux and twelve others had been found and contained.
That left almost forty others.
“That leaves forty or so left,” I said unhappily.
“We’ll find them,” Finn growled, patting my hand with his other hand not covered in my blood.
Finally, the ambulance came and Lucky let them in. They strapped me to the wheely cot, despite my protests, and Lucky came with me to the hospital, while Finn and Draven started amassing paranormals for a city-wide manhunt. Coyote hunt? Whatever.
They—thank all pixies and pestles—knocked me out this time for the sewing up part.
I woke, groggy and disoriented, to find Rhys by my bedside looking like the north and south wind had had a brawl in his living room, and he had been the only survivor.
“Rough morning?”
“Don’t even joke about this,” he growled at me. Despite his anger, he held my hand very gently. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, but I didn’t tell him to let it go. Maybe it was the look of utter devastation in his eyes when he gazed at me in the hospital bed.
I wanted water. My mouth felt like I’d been sucking down sand for the last two days. I tried to sit up, but Rhys, without letting go of my hand, grabbed my water cup which had a lovely bendy straw and helped me sit up enough to drink it without sloshing it all over me.
