Ashes of Honor
Page 66

“Ah,” said Jin softly. Her wings stilled their buzzing as she studied Tybalt, assessing his condition from a distance. She’s been Sylvester’s personal physician for a long time—long enough to see most of the damage that a body can sustain and still survive. So it was more than a little unnerving when she shook her head and said, “You should have called for me sooner.”
My mouth went dry. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you should have called for me sooner.” She stepped toward me, reaching out to touch my wrist, much as Li Qin had. Unlike Li’s touch, hers sent a wave of serenity washing over me, dimming and dulling my fear. Ellyllon can secrete both sedatives and stimulants through their skin. It’s what makes some of them such great healers, even as it makes the rest of them such great hedonists.
I glared at her, or tried to, anyway. With her artificial calm spreading through my body, the most I could manage was faint peevishness. “Don’t drug me.”
“Would you rather I knocked you out? Because I could do that. And I will, if it looks like you’re going to interfere.” She took her hand away, leaving tingles of chemical peace dancing over my skin. “Etienne, Quentin, get over here. I’m going to need the two of you to help me lift him onto the table. I need him higher.”
“Sure,” said Quentin, moving to join her. Etienne didn’t say anything. He just went.
Li Qin was abruptly at my side, taking my elbow and turning me away from the sight of Jin and her makeshift assistants descending on Tybalt’s unmoving form. “Let’s make some coffee,” she said, soothingly. “Wouldn’t you enjoy that? You like coffee.”
“Yes, I do,” I agreed. My voice sounded distant. I was aware, in an almost academic fashion, that I should be more upset than I was—that I should be doing something to help, not going to fix myself a cup of coffee. Now that Jin wasn’t adding to the calm, I could feel the shape of it in my blood, smooth and foreign. I could remove it if I wanted to. I might not have seen that if I hadn’t been so relaxed, but I was too calm to get in my own way. If I wanted it to stop, it would.
And that was why I couldn’t want it to stop. The only thing I could do to help Tybalt was stay out of the way and let Jin do the job I’d begged her to come to do. If he was going to be saved, she was going to be the one who saved him, not me. Not even a hero can do everything.
Li Qin led me to the coffee maker, where my current serenity turned the process of grinding beans and pouring water into something slow and ritualistic. It was like watching my friend Lily, the Lady of the Tea Gardens, setting up a formal tea service. Only this time, the end result wasn’t going to taste like licking the lawnmower.
“You like strong coffee,” observed Li Qin.
“Don’t sleep much,” I said. “Need the caffeine.”
“Jan didn’t sleep much either. She always said she could sleep once she was dead.” Li’s voice didn’t quaver. She kept watching me, smiling just a little. “I suppose that means she’s well-rested by now.”
“Jan was weird,” I said, pouring coffee into my cup. The part of me that was still aware that insulting a dead woman’s memory might not be a good idea cringed. The fact that Li Qin was Jan’s widow just made it worse.
But Li Qin didn’t seem to mind. Her smile didn’t waver as she agreed, “That’s very true. Everyone in Tamed Lightning is weird, one way or another.”
Living flesh being sliced open makes an unmistakable sound. Raw meat being cut is a kissing cousin, but it doesn’t really compare. Living flesh fights back. It resists in a way that dead things can’t, muscle and bone fighting against the invasion of the knife.
The thick, wet sound of someone being cut open hit my nerves like a cattle prod. I didn’t drop my coffee cup—it would take a lot more than shock, fear, and hope, all mixed into a sick cocktail, to make me drop a perfectly good cup of coffee—but I did go stiff, my fingers locking on the handle until I would have sworn I felt the porcelain bend. Jin’s peace fled as quickly as it had come, chased out of my body by adrenaline and my own rising magic.
“That’s gross,” said Quentin.
“Never become a doctor,” said Jin.
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Good,” said Jin, and started to sing.
The Ellyllon songs are strange things. They’re unique every time, because they bend to suit the needs of their subject matter. Ellyllon can sing both harm and healing, and what they can’t sing away, they can at least dull down. Jin kept singing long enough for me to raise my shaking hand, drink an entire cup of coffee without tasting a drop of it, and pour myself a refill.
Jin stopped singing. Silence fell…and in the silence, Tybalt coughed.
“And that’s how you perform home surgery,” said Jin.
I forced myself to move slowly as I put my cup down on the counter, barely registering the suddenly silent Li Qin, and turned around to face them.
The first thing I noticed was the blood, which covered the surface of the white plastic table and pooled on the industrial-blue linoleum floor. The second thing, oddly enough, was the glitter. A thick haze of silver and green glitter shimmered in the air around them, making them look like they were having a small, quiet, horror-movie-themed rave. Etienne and Quentin were standing on the far side of the table that Tybalt was lying on. Jin was standing in front of the table, blood coating her arms to the elbows, soaking into her shirt, and even covering the bottom half of her face.
And Tybalt, for all that he still looked pale and unwell, was struggling to sit up, eyes open, and looking back at me.
“Massive internal bleeding,” said Jin, tilting her chin up so that she was talking to no one in particular. “Damage to the liver and spleen. Three broken ribs, one of which managed to puncture a lung, which, let me tell you, takes talent. Also a cracked femur—shouldn’t have been walking on that—and a pretty severe concussion. Congratulations. It’s a nice, macho death, which nobody gets to die today.”
“For that, I thank you,” said Tybalt, swinging his legs over the edge of the table, gripping it hard for balance as he stood.
Jin glared at him. He was more than a foot taller than she was, but she still managed to look imposing as she gestured for him to sit back down. “No walking! No standing, no bending, no moving, no accessing the Shadow Roads, nothing. You don’t swim for an hour after eating, you don’t swan around like an idiot for an hour after narrowly avoiding death.”