Demons of Good and Evil by Kim Harrison

            “Is he okay?” Bis said, but I didn’t know, and my gaze lifted over the park to where Al had been. He left?

            I reached for my phone only to find an empty pocket. Mother pus bucket . . . “Bis, will you tell Jenks what happened? That I’m with David and will call when I can. I lost my phone.”

            “You got it,” the kid said, and with a whoosh of wings and air, he was gone.

            “David?” Cassie whispered, the pants of the pack an eerie backdrop as they began to shift painfully fast before the I.S. decided to do something more than keep people back.

            “He’s been cursed,” I said, and Cassie’s expression became stricken.

            “He’s breathin’,” she said, her usually faint Australian accent hard in her worry. “Damn it, wake up, David!”

            “Hey!” I exclaimed when she smacked his face. “Cassie, don’t.” I reached to stop her, halting when her gaze met mine. Fear was there, and anger—mostly at me. “I’m going to fix this,” I added, and her expression blanked. But not until I saw her outright terror that I couldn’t uncurse him this very second.

            Someone handed her a pair of sweats, and she wiped her face as she tugged them on. Red, blue, and green stars decorated her thigh in a constellation-like pattern, the slow color gradations making me think it was where she had tested her tattoo colors. “Get him in the car,” she said as she stood to put on the rest. “I’m takin’ him to the hospital.”

            I backed up, awkward and feeling out of place as everyone else seemed to have something to do: getting dressed, handing out sticks of wolfsbane-spiked gum to alleviate the pain of shifting, hoisting David into an offered truck bed since lugging a wolf into the front seat of a sports car wasn’t going to work.

            Hospital. Yes, I thought as I hustled to catch up to Cassie. “I’m coming,” I said as I closed the gap.

            “They were all alphas,” Cassie said as she scrambled up to sit beside David in the truck’s bed, and I joined her. She was still angry, but I couldn’t blame her. She wasn’t the one who had slung a stupid spell and made him vulnerable, much less called him to come down here.

            “I don’t recognize this magic,” I said as I put a hand to his shoulder. Senses searching, I sent a sliver of thought out to find his mind somnolent and still. The focus was still there, twined about his soul, but silent. Ring magic had downed him. He had invoked the Goddess. Bis had called him a witch, but he sounded like an elf to me. “Walter downed David to negate the focus,” I whispered, but Cassie was too intent on David to listen.

            The I.S. continued to stay out of the way as everything broke up, a single officer making the effort to get traffic flowing past the park again. Leaning over the side, I smacked the truck’s door, pointing at the street to get us moving. I wasn’t sure if I was more worried about the I.S. finding my phone, or not.

            “Was it an alpha challenge?” Cassie sniffed back the tears as she wedged herself into the corner and dragged David’s wolfy head onto her lap.

            “No.” I reached for a grip as the truck rocked over the curb and into traffic. Three cars fell in line before us, two behind, protecting us should Walter be waiting somewhere between here and the hospital. “It was Walter Vincent and some magic user I didn’t recognize,” I said. Walter didn’t have much of a paper trail beyond the necessary entry in the Were database, but I had a feeling that Parker had been in the judicial system more than once. I have a possible lead.

            “Walter Vincent.” Cassie’s fingers were lost in David’s ruff. “The man you stole the focus from?”

            “I didn’t steal it,” I said, still feeling the sting. “Nick, my dead boyfriend, did. I just didn’t let Walter have it when it showed up on my doorstep.”

            Uncaring of the distinction, Cassie bowed her head. Hands never leaving David, she whispered into his fuzzy ears, tears continuing to spot his fur. It took forever to get through the initial crush, and I felt relief as we turned into a brightly lit street and picked up speed.

            But the closer we got to the hospital, the more pensive I became. Walter clearly wanted the focus, and this time, he had a magic user helping him. A powerful one.





CHAPTER


            3

            I wasn’t keen on hospitals, but if I had the choice between a narrow bed with an oversize mug of water and rubbery Jell-O, or a chair in the hall waiting for news, I might take the rubbery Jell-O. Frustrated and anxious, I checked the hall clock again. David’s room was across from the alcove of chairs I had settled in. The nurses’ desk was between me and the elevators at the end of the hallway, and their whispery-soft voices and furtive looks in my direction were driving me crazy. I was sure they were talking about David.