Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(67)

Back to headquarters where my body lay. And up into the soil of the potted plants.

I sucked in a breath, and my lungs made a now-familiar rubbing, flapping sound, as of air-deprived tires chafing against smooth asphalt. I coughed. Tried to force my eyes open. They were still sticky from the fire, gummed shut, the lashes sealed. Someone placed a warm, wet compress over them. I could hear the distant murmur of voices. Feel the softness of the blanket over me. An air mattress beneath me. I had been taken to the new sleeping room, my fingers still in the potted Soulwood soil that someone had wet down with fresh water. Cool air moved over my lower face and it didn’t hurt to the touch. I was healed. I was whole. Minutes passed as I mentally searched my body. Finding myself restored, recovered. Though rather more leafy than I might have wanted.

“How long have I been out?” I whispered. “How many of my plants did I kill?”

“Two hours, give or take. Ten plants. Two more that look a little wrinkled but will probably live. Another batch are fine. Are you . . . all here? Feeling better?” It was T. Laine, her voice calm and even-toned.

I pulled my fingers from one clay pot and clutched the edge of the compress, easing it off my face. My eyes opened and the first thing I saw was a hand, my hand, with green leaves curling out of the tips of my fingernails. From my thumb, a thin brown vine coiled and curled, tiny green leaves unfurling. “Grapevine,” I murmured. “I’m sprouting.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Lainie said.

I breathed out a laugh at the crudity. “I’m healed, though, I think.” And saved from Brother Ephraim’s assault. He had waited until I was already in some kind of danger to attack. I wondered what he had done to Soulwood but was too much a coward to drop back into the land and look.

“Yeah,” she said. “But things went to hell in a handbasket while you were growing leaves. You need to talk to Occam.” I didn’t respond, and she added, “When you first got hit, he went catty. We got shredded clothes and cat hair everywhere. Place is a mess.”

“No hairballs?” I managed.

T. Laine barked a surprised laugh. “God no.”

I chuckled with her, a breathless, strained sound. “Is Devin okay?”

“Yeah. Still asleep. The senator had flown to DC with his brother, Justin, and so we’re waiting on someone from the child protective services and the kid’s nanny to get here.”

“I hate not being human.” The words startled me.

“If you had been human, the blast might have killed you. Or disfigured you forever.”

“If I’d been human, I wouldn’t have been reading Devin.”

Lainie was silent for a few moments and I managed to focus on her face in the dim light. Pugnacious chin, dark brown eyes and hair. Her mouth wrinkled in a pursing frown, as if something tasted bad. “Okay,” she said. “I got nothing.”

I laughed again. “Help me sit up. Then water. Then you can debrief me about Occam’s problems.” T. Laine pulled me to my butt on the inflatable mattress. While I drank the room-temperature water that I remembered asking for earlier, she filled me in.

“You know the guy’s nuts for you, right?”

She meant Occam. I shrugged, an embarrassed noncommittal response that said, Yes, but . . .

“He lost it when you got hit. Shifted. Ruined a perfectly good pair of boots and a break room chair. Went at the kid. Pea came at him out of nowhere and cut his face up. Then Rick went catty, pulled into the shift by werecat magic. Talk about ruined clothes. And blood. Pea and Bean . . . well, all I can say is that those little things can freaking move.”

“And Soul?”

T. Laine hesitated. “Not as cool as a cucumber, but she kept it all together. She and the grindys kept the kid safe and threw the cats into the null room to deal with dominance issues in the only way their cats know how. They’re still alive, if a little bloody.”

“And Devin?”

“He’s a pyro of some kind. A firestarter. There’s a couple dozen different kinds of firestarter species in mythology. We think the assassin is a pyro too. So our entire investigation is . . . officially, let’s call it askew. It’s either closer to being solved, because we stand a better chance now of figuring out what the assassin is and the Tollivers are, or it’s really totally bollixed up.”

I frowned. I had heard the word bollocks in a film or two and had looked it up. It was from a German word for testicles, though I had no idea what they might have to do with this investigation. “Bollixed up?”

T. Laine rubbed her forehead with a hand. A slash of blood was dried across it. Blood Spatter 101 class at Spook School had taught me that the droplet had been moving laterally at speed when it hit her. Her hand fell to her lap. Fortunately my bloodlust didn’t rise. She said, “I was trying to find a word that was acceptable to you. I was trying to say the investigation probably just took a major wrong turn and dumped all our potential conclusions into a ditch.”

“Fubared?” Fubar was Rick’s term. I was used to hearing it.

“That works better than bollixed up, I guess. Though I’m surprised to hear you say it.” Her expression was sly.

My face relaxed at the teasing. “Yeah. Well. Bollixed up is fine. We routinely castrated animals in the compound.” I leaned to her and said with a straight face, “That means cutting off their bollocks. Want to know how it’s done?”