Falling Light (Game of Shadows #2)(9)

Anger flared, quick and hot. “I’m going to help you first. You need to be healed.”

He slid into telepathy, the contact thin and minimal. I don’t have the energy to argue with you. We’ve got to keep moving.

“Shut up,” she said between her teeth. He reminded her of an abused animal that didn’t expect or ask for help, because it had no concept of gentler things like compassion or tenderness. She felt the urge to slap somebody. Instead she stroked his short, black hair. “I know very well that we’ve got to keep moving. I will get us on the road in a minute.”

Someone tapped on her window.

She startled and twisted. A middle-aged woman peered into the car, her expression concerned. A man stood waiting nearby, holding a dog on a leash. Mary rolled her window down partway and raised her eyebrows in inquiry.

“Excuse me.” The woman spoke in a pleasant soft Virginian accent. “My husband and I were just walking our dog, and I couldn’t help but notice—are you two all right?”

Michael had barely stirred at the intrusion. It was a measure of how depleted he had become. Mary could sense he had slipped into a half-conscious state. Her mind raced as she thought through their options.

“No,” she said. “We’re not. He’s sick and I don’t want to leave him. Would you mind doing us a favor?”

“Why sure, sugar,” said the woman. “We have a cell phone. Do you need us to call 911?”

She shook her head, her thoughts strangled with uncertainty. Should she say she was a doctor? No, that seemed too distinctive, although the situation itself was already distinctive enough that they would already stick out in the woman’s mind.

It was too late to fret about any of it now. She said, “Thank you, but I can drive him somewhere quicker than an ambulance could get here. I need you to do something else, please, if you would.”

The woman didn’t hesitate. “How can I help?”

Mary slid one hand along Michael’s wide-muscled back to the pocket of his jeans, located the bulge of his wallet and pulled it out. A quick, discreet peek at the contents revealed several thousand dollars in large bills, and around fifty-five dollars in smaller denominations. She pulled out a twenty and a ten, and handed the money to the woman.

“I don’t want to leave him. Would you mind going inside and buying all the Gatorade and bottled water you can? I hope there’s a way to get change. When we pulled in, I didn’t notice if this rest stop has a snack shop or just vending machines.”

“Gatorade and bottled water.” The woman’s hand curled around the money but her voice had become uncertain.

It was clear the woman thought she was acting oddly. Mary didn’t blame her. She glanced at Michael lying slack in her arms. Hell, the whole thing looked odd.

She tried to look as sincere as she could. “We thought his fever had broken and it would be okay to keep traveling until we got to our hotel. Now it has spiked again, and I think part of the problem is that he’s gotten dehydrated. It may take me at least a half hour to find an urgent-care clinic. I want to get some liquids into him right away before I leave. If you don’t mind.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” said the woman, her uncertainty vanishing. “Do you have aspirin or Tylenol, or do you want me to see if I can buy any of those little travel packets?”

In spite of her worry, Mary smiled at the other woman’s kindness. “I have a bottle of Tylenol in my purse.”

“I’ll be right back,” the woman promised.

Mary watched her approach her husband, say something to him and hurry toward the nearby building. She shook her head. Her improvised explanation still seemed flimsy to her. She hoped the other woman didn’t think too hard about it.

“This has got to be the road trip from hell,” she muttered.

Feeling a surge of protectiveness, she cradled Michael’s big, heavy body close. She rested her cheek on top of his head and sank her awareness into him. He was still bleeding sluggishly from a couple of the more serious wounds. He had a nasty bone-deep gouge in his thigh.

The Deceiver had attacked them on more than one front, not only with a troop of well-trained fighters but also with hundreds of dark spirits in the psychic realm. When Michael had taken physical wounds in the fight, the dark spirits had swarmed over him. They took advantage of the opportunity his injuries gave and drained him of energy.

The damage he had taken from the swarm seemed fairly shallow. Her main concern with those wounds was there were so many of them. To her mind’s eye, they looked like dozens of claw marks. What disturbed her most were the almost imperceptible shadows that ran like fractures through his energy. Normally his spirit had an indomitable quality, a sense of boundless strength, but now there was something vulnerable, almost breakable about him.

Fresh from the lessons she had learned from healing her own body, she found it was the work of a few minutes to stop his bleeding, enhance his body’s own natural pain inhibitors and pour a lavish amount of her own energy into him.

She was spending strength she could ill afford to spare from her own overtaxed resources, but they were stronger when they could work together as a team. She didn’t know where they should go after they reached Petoskey, and Michael wouldn’t be able to tell her if he was unconscious. Besides, he had scared her when he had leaned over and collapsed. She hadn’t yet had a chance to recover from the last time he had scared her, when the Deceiver had taken him.