He stepped to me. Lifted my shirt. “Is any of this yours? Did they get you?”
“I don’t think so.”
He peeled off the shirt despite my squirming for him stop. But I was drained of all energy, as though gravity had leached it out of me. After a detailed examination, he wrenched my left arm. A scalding heat seared through to my bones, and I felt anger rise within him.
“Where is Rey’aziel?” When I glared at him, the Dealer stepped closer. Lowered his voice. “Where is your fiancé?”
“At the bar,” I said, exasperated.
After ripping the towel out of my hands, he stalked out. “I’ll get a clean one and find something for you to wear. Get in the shower. I have bandages in the kitchen.”
“I need to call my uncle first. If anyone saw me, they’ll think I was trying to cover up a crime. I need to report – Bandages?”
I looked down at my arm as the Dealer – who refused to tell me his name – returned with another towel and some disinfectant. Blood gushed freely from a wound on my arm, and I suddenly remembered the pain I’d felt while underneath the dead man’s body.
“It bit me,” I said, my shock complete.
Before today, the Twelve had just been a mild threat. A vague possibility. Escaping hell was one thing. Making it onto this plane was quite another. The fact that they had done both, that they were here to finish what they’d started, was slowly sinking in.
He took a closer look at the wound, dabbed it with a bandage to check the flow of blood, then turned me around to face the shower.
“This wasn’t an accident,” I said to him as he undid my bra and pushed the straps over my shoulders.
I covered Danger and Will as he turned me around and started to unbutton my pants.
“They were summoned,” I said.
His fingers stopped and his gaze, as dark as his black hair, turned incredulous. “How do you know?” he asked after a long moment.
“A little girl told me this morning.”
“And you believed her?”
“Yes.”
He took a step back and braced an arm on the wall as though trying not to fall down.
“Who could do such a thing?” I asked him.
For several long beats, he stood in silence. “I have no idea,” he said at last. “There’s no one with that kind of power on this plane.” He raised his lids. “Besides you, that is.”
Was he accusing me of something? “Why would I summon the Twelve beasts of hell? I didn’t even know there was such a thing.”
“There’s no one else,” he repeated. Shaking off the moment, he went back to the task at hand: struggling with the blood-soaked button on my jeans.
“This is your world,” I said. “Your area of expertise. You have to know who did this. Maybe if someone out there controls them, we can stop them by stopping him.”
He shook his head to indicate he had no clue.
My clothes fell on a fuzzy beige rug underneath my feet, effectively ruining it as the Dealer stepped past me and turned on the shower.
“It’ll take a minute. You need to get warm.”
Only then did I realize every part of me quivered visibly. “It’s probably the fact that I haven’t had any caffeine in twenty hours.”
It was the oddest thing. I stood there in front of him, completely naked, and felt no shame or guilt – though he did look just over half my age. There was something between us. Something pure that had tugged at me the first moment I saw him, but it wasn’t attraction. He was stunning – no doubt about it. But what I felt was more like… trust. Deep down inside, I’d trusted him despite his heritage. I felt I could trust him with more than my life. I felt I could trust him with my most prized possession. With something that meant more to me than my life.
Was that why I’d gone to him instead of to Reyes? Or was it simply because of the fact that Reyes was going to kill me?
Dread caused nausea to spike within me. That combined with all the blood, with the memory of seeing a man’s throat literally ripped out, made the world topple beneath my feet. The Dealer caught me to him with one arm, pushed the shower curtain back with the other, and then lifted me over the edge of the tub, soaking and bloodying himself simultaneously.
“That’s never going to come out,” I said, gesturing toward the crimson stains on his meticulous white shirt.
He offered me a tilt of his mouth before I slid the curtain closed.
I scrubbed every inch of me. The soap he had smelled good. Clean. It almost concealed the coppery scent of blood. The dark red substance turned pink as it mixed with the water around my feet and swirled down the drain. I couldn’t wait much longer. I had to call Uncle Bob. But I was taking a shower – washing away crucial evidence. What would he think? Even he couldn’t cover up the fact that my fingerprints were surely all over that kitchen. Smeared in the blood on the floor. Trailed along the walls and over the door I’d burst out of.
Even Uncle Bob could cover up only so much. How was I going to explain the fact that the man’s throat had just magically ripped open? That I’d had nothing to do with it? That a beast, essentially an escaped prisoner from hell, had tried to kill me and got the man instead?
It sounded crazy even to me.
The injury to my arm, clean slices along my biceps, stung under the warm water. They were deep but not deep enough to need stitches. They still bled, though. I’d need to bandage them tightly and lay off the strawberries, a natural blood thinner.