Kinked

TWENTY-ONE

After taking in the mess strewn all over the beach, everyone leaped into action. Something happened to Galya’s body and detached head. Someday Aryal meant to ask what they did with it, although they probably just did the predictable, boring thing and buried her somewhere. All she knew was that the witch’s remains disappeared.

Others collected Quentin’s supply sack, their borrowed Elven weapons, the empty healing potion vials and the brandy bottle, and folded up the sail they had used for shelter, while Pia and Alex, who was the most accomplished field medic in the sentinels, examined Quentin and tried to examine her.

“Don’t touch me,” Aryal told them hoarsely. They both hesitated, clearly unwilling to listen when she was so injured.

“Do as she says,” Quentin snapped at them. “She needs to see a specialist as quickly as we can get her to one, not another round of blanket healing.”

His tone was so harsh that both Pia and Alex recoiled. Pia’s expression was tight and closed off with some kind of suppressed emotion as she handed Liam over to Eva. Aryal watched dully as Pia talked with Quentin in a low voice. Then, still talking, they both walked away.

When they returned several minutes later, Quentin was healed. Completely.

During the confrontation two months ago in January, Dragos had been hurt badly—worse than Aryal had ever seen or believed was possible—yet somehow after Pia had reached him, he had risen to his feet, apparently unscathed.

So Pia had done whatever magic hoodoo she knew how to do on Quentin. Aryal was glad for that. It was one less thing to worry about.

Quentin was not unscathed. He carried scars on his chest and shoulder, neck, and along the ridge of his cheekbone and on the brow on one side of his face. She wondered if it was because his wounds were magical in nature, or because he had gone some time and had been partially healed by the time Pia got to him. In the end, the reason didn’t matter. He was better, and part of the tight, worried coil inside of her eased.

As soon as Quentin had mentioned a specialist, Dragos strode over quickly to kneel beside Aryal where she huddled and hugged her good knee. She had cut off the longbow splint but didn’t want to strain her leg, which she kept straight.

Dragos put a hand on her shoulder and asked his question with a look.

She couldn’t say the words out loud. She told him telepathically, My wings are pretty fucked up.

Dragos’s gold eyes widened in sharp concern. His Power speared through her in a quick, comprehensive scan. Then he shapeshifted into the dragon so abruptly that everybody else had to scramble out of the way.

“We’re leaving now,” he said to Pia. “We need to get Aryal to a hospital as quickly as possible. Quentin’s right, she needs surgery. The broken bones in her wings weren’t set properly, and they are already fusing together. Any healing right now might make the damage permanent.” He turned to the others. “Stay only long enough to finish cleaning up and do a sweep for more looters, then come home.”

Pia, Liam, Eva and Quentin climbed onto the dragon. Aryal couldn’t sit astride because of her bad leg, so she sat sideways while Quentin’s arms settled around her firmly. Dragos wrapped them in his Power to protect them from the harsh, chill winds in the upper air and he flew with such speed, she watched the route she and Quentin had taken to the shore scroll backward like a movie on rewind.

There was the side street where the shadow wolves had crippled her.

There was the house with the silent, still nursery.

There was the long meadow, rippling like another sea, and the forest, and a quick glimpse of the riverbed that had shrunk to the size of a creek, and last, the Guardian’s house set high in the cliff by the crossover passageway.

It was almost like watching the recent events of her life come undone, except that what had happened in Numenlaur, for good or for ill, had marked her indelibly.

Dragos didn’t slow as they hit the passageway. Instead he speeded up. Aryal’s heart thumped as she remembered how the canyon narrowed at ground level, but thirty feet in the air, the dragon merely banked his wings and used his momentum to shoot through the opening with so little room to spare, she could have reached out with one hand to touch the canyon walls on either side of them.

Immediately past the bottleneck, he snapped his wings out and they completed the crossover passageway without ever having touched earth.

On the other side, the Bohemian Forest looked chill and pale in comparison to the summer heat they had just left. She caught a glimpse of a hastily erected encampment for a much larger group than four inexperienced Elves. The new High Lord Ferion had learned a hard lesson. Unfortunately it was one that had cost the Elves yet another life.

“How much time has passed on this side of the passageway?” Quentin asked.

Pia answered him. “Almost two weeks.”

Time had passed more quickly than it had in Numenlaur.

“Plze will have the closest hospital,” Dragos said. The dragon’s deep voice vibrated through his body. “We’ll go there.”

“No,” Aryal said. Everyone riding on Dragos’s back turned to look at her. She shook her head at them. She said, “I want to go home to Wyr doctors.”

Nobody tried to argue with that. She knew if they were in her shoes, they would want to go home too.

Dragos said, “Then I’ll bargain with one of the Djinn for transport to New York.”

“Don’t bother,” she said dully. “While I appreciate the effort, it’s not worth any possible danger that might come from a bargain with the Djinn. I’ve already healed so much from the first time we were attacked, some of the damage has already solidified.”

He spread his wings and glided a moment, his body language clearly speaking of his reluctance as he thought about that. Everyone else remained silent, waiting, while Quentin’s arms tightened around her to the point of pain.

Then Dragos flew for the airport at Plze, where the corporate jet sat on standby. They boarded the plane rapidly with a minimum of fuss. Moments later, the plane taxied onto a runway and took off. When a ruler of one of the largest Elder demesnes on Earth was in the middle of an emergency, he could slash through a lot of red tape.

As soon as the plane reached a high enough altitude, both Dragos and Quentin started making phone calls. Aryal lay on one of the couches, eyes closed against a pounding headache, as she listened to snatches of their conversations.

… notify the hospital of our arrival. We’ll be there in eight and a half hours, max …

… call Dr. Shaw, and have her assemble a surgical team …

… book an operating room and have it on standby …

“I don’t care if operating rooms are limited,” snarled Dragos. “This is one of my sentinels we’re talking about. We will get there just as soon as we can, and you will hold that room ready and available for when we arrive, or I will tear through your hospital from the inside out. Got it?”

Coming from Dragos, that was not an idle threat. Apparently the administrator on the other end of the line understood, because that was the end of that exchange.

For the rest of the flight Aryal dozed. When she did wake up, Quentin urged her to drink lots of water, so she did. Occasionally she caught glimpses of Pia, holding Liam and staring at her intently. Weirdly enough, the baby seemed to stare at her too, his soft, miniature Buddha’s face scrunched up and pensive.

But that couldn’t be right. Pain and tiredness must be making Aryal hallucinate. Liam was only a few weeks old. She doubted that he could even track anything with his gaze yet.

In less than two days, at least according to her internal body clock, Aryal went from a beach in Numenlaur to surgery in Manhattan.

Her arrival at East Manhattan Medical went by in a blur. In her Wyr form, her body and wingspan were much too large and unusual a shape for an MRI scan. Nurses x-rayed images of her wing joints in sections.

Then she met with the surgeon, who was a sharp-eyed Wyr falcon named Kathryn Shaw with thick chestnut hair, honey brown eyes, and a blaze of Power that was as sharp as a scalpel in her nervy, slender body.

Dragos kept Kathryn on retainer to treat high-level staff when needed, and Aryal already knew her. Kathryn had worked on all the sentinels at one time or another over the years, for injuries sustained on the job. That familiarity, along with the fact that the surgeon was both female and avian comforted Aryal immeasurably. Maybe her wings couldn’t be repaired, but at least she knew that this surgeon would feel any failure instinctively deep in her gut.

The pre-surgery consult was brief and to the point.

“Hi, Aryal,” the surgeon said. “I hear you’ve had a rough trip.”

“You could say that,” she said through clenched teeth.

The other female was obviously too intelligent to offer to shake the stressed-out harpy’s taloned hand. Kathryn scanned Aryal’s wings magically for a long moment, her gaze turning internal while her expression remained professionally neutral.

Quentin never left Aryal’s side. While the surgeon examined her, he gripped her wrists and talked to her telepathically while she flexed her hands and suffered the invasion of someone else’s Power coursing through her body. The harpy hated it and had to fight to keep from lashing out.

“I won’t go under,” Aryal said. She stared fixedly at Quentin. “I can’t.”

“You know that’s not a good idea,” Kathryn said. “I have to advise against it. It will be safer for you and for everybody else if I put you under a general anesthetic. Otherwise you are going to be fighting your instincts throughout the entire surgery.”

“No,” growled the harpy. The thought of going blank while someone cut into her body made crazypants want to come out to play again. “You will use a local.”

Kathryn and Quentin looked at each other. The surgeon asked, “Can you control her?”

“Of course I can control her,” said Quentin nastily. “Every time she lets me.”

Kathryn took the reprimand with a steady silence. She looked back at the harpy, her falcon’s gaze piercing and calm. “The only way I’ll consider it is if you’re heavily sedated,” she said. “If you endanger either me or my team, I will stop working on you immediately and you won’t get me back to the table. You must keep yourself under control. Understood?”

The harpy bared her teeth and hissed. “Understood.”

“See you in the theater.” Kathryn walked away, muttering under her breath, “God help me, I’m actually going to operate on a harpy while she’s still awake. Somebody better give me a medal for this.”

“Coward,” the harpy snarled after her.

“I think she’s probably the opposite of a coward,” Quentin told her. “Anyway, I’d go easy on her if I were you. You are looking a little like Freddy Krueger at the moment, punkin.”

His grip on her wrists was so tight that her hands were beginning to go numb. Only then did she realize she was struggling against his hold. She forced herself to quit. She couldn’t bear to look over her shoulder at her wings spilled lifelessly down the exam table, or she might start struggling again.

Then they waited, and waited. Aryal fisted her hands in the hair at the nape of her neck, held her head and closed her eyes while Quentin paced the examination room. She could hear people talking through the doors. They sounded like they were arguing, although she couldn’t hear what they said. She could recognize the voices though. One of them was Dragos. The other was Pia.

So much came back around to Pia.

Then a third voice joined the other two. Kathryn. The harpy’s gaze went to the scars on Quentin’s face. The muscles in her body were strung tight, but she forced herself to be still and wait.

Finally a nurse came to tell them it was time, and led the way to the surgery room. Aryal limped down the hall, wrestling with panic the whole way.

Quentin stalked beside her. They had both showered at the hospital, and while the harpy refused to don a hospital gown, he wore scrubs. As he had dropped a few pounds in Numenlaur, he looked sharper than ever, the strong elegant bones of his face standing out under the pitiless hospital lights.

They had barely touched down in New York and people were already staring at him in shock and awe. Most of them were women.

The scars on his cheekbone and brow gave a remarkable illusion, as if half his face was masked, and if that wasn’t an example of how blind fate could still on occasion strike with immaculate accuracy, Aryal didn’t know what was.

To Aryal’s eyes, he had always looked dangerous. Now even the thickest, most insensitive of idiots could see it too.

“Are you going to want plastic surgery?” she asked.

He gave her a blank look. “Why?”

“The scars on your face,” she said.

He shrugged, patently indifferent to the idea. “If I were to take the time to do anything, to tell you the truth, I’d rather finally get a rooftop garden over my apartment.”

One corner of her mouth lifted, because she loved the scars.

She said, “Good.”

Then they arrived. The nurse pushed open the doors for them and they walked into an alien place filled with medical machinery, an operating table and more masked people. Two of them, off to one side, were Pia and Dragos.

The harpy stopped and scowled at them. “What are you doing in here?”

The dragon looked at her, his gold eyes mesmerizing.

Trust us, Dragos whispered in her head. Leave your panic behind. All will be well, Aryal. There is no need to fight anybody here.

Ah. It was going to be that kind of sedation. She had wondered, since adrenaline would have helped her to throw off any medication before they could possibly be done with the surgery.

She gave herself over readily to the dragon’s enthrallment, and climbed on the table to lie on her stomach, placing her forehead in the headrest as instructed. They wheeled tables in on either side of her to spread out her wings.

Quentin sat cross-legged on the floor so that he could look up at her. He took her hands again in an unbreakable grasp. “Hold on to me,” he said. “Don’t let go.”

“Okay.” She struggled not to hyperventilate.

Power filled the room from more than one person, and she lost sensation from the neck down. The harpy cried out as a blind animal panic tried to take her over again, and the dragon whispered. Trust. No need to fight. All will be well.

Vaguely she could sense tugging on her body. The smell of her own blood filled the air. They had cut into her. Then came other sounds, like a tapping of either a chisel or a small hammer.

The surgeon said in a cool, calm voice, “I’m going to have to break this again.”

Razor teeth. Her carpal joint crushed. Muscles torn.

She was lost in a nightmare, lost …

Aryal, the harpy’s mate said telepathically. Look at me. Look. At. Me.

He had a surfeit of his own Power, and his words penetrated both her panic and the dragon’s beguilement. As she looked at him, he stroked her face, and she knew that he would do anything he had to so that they survived.

Tell me again the promises you told me in Numenlaur, he said.

Her lips shook. You need reassurance now? You really are high maintenance, aren’t you?

You know everything’s always all about me, he told her, the steady, concerned look in his eyes belying their attempt at banter. Please. Tell me again.

There were so many words to that promise, and people were making noise and doing things to her, and she almost screamed at him to fuck off, all of it swirling in her head like a tornado looking to break out of her body.

Then something clicked inside, and she could focus on him.

She said, I made a promise to you before you came into my life.

I know you did, he said. There was so much love in his eyes. So much. And I’m so grateful for it.

I will never betray you, she said to him. I will never endanger your life with my carelessness or impetuosity. I will fight for and with you. I will—I will—

Out of her sight, someone started a tiny saw, and her expression twisted.

Quentin rose up on his knees. The intensity in his blue gaze burned into hers, pushing everything else away. He said to her strongly, I will always have your back whenever you might need me.

Realization hit. He had memorized every word of what she had said.

That was when she found her center.

She whispered, I will not leave you, and I will not lie to you, and if you will be patient and forgiving, I will learn how to forgive too. Because you’ve become the most important thing in the world to me. I’ll give everything I have to you, along with everything I can be, if only you will do the same.

And remember, there’s more, Quentin said. Because somehow it’s going to be okay.

She rested in the adamancy in his gaze. Then she said, Because I could never endanger my mate by throwing my own life away.

He smiled at her. She didn’t understand why he looked so proud, because she still felt whacked-out and slashy.

And paragliding is not stupid, he said. He tilted his head and kissed the harpy’s lips. As long as we do it together.

That’s a bargain, she whispered.

The best bargain of all. He was a magician, all right. By using only smoke and mirrors, he had somehow managed to banish the last of her panic.

That was when something really odd happened. Speaking with brisk authority, Kathryn ordered the rest of the surgical team out of the room. Murmuring in puzzlement, they filed out. As the last of them left, the scent of someone else’s blood—Pia’s blood—filled the air.

Aryal said out loud, “What the fuck are you guys doing back there?”

“Hold on a few moments longer, Aryal,” said Kathryn somewhat breathlessly. “You’re doing an awesome job. We’re almost finished.”

A new Power began to fill Aryal’s body, and it was simply ravishing, cool like moonlight and exquisitely clear, like the finest crystal. It filled her entirely and took all the pain away, all of it, and bathed her spirit tenderly with the finest hope.

“My God,” Kathryn said. “Will you look at that.”

While Aryal heard the words, they didn’t hold any meaning for her. She was lost in rightness and a floating sensation like freedom. Through it all she watched Quentin as he swallowed hard.

Vaguely she grew aware that Dragos was speaking again. This time, quite unlike his beguilement, his tone was harsh and commanding. “Nobody speaks about what just happened in this room. Not to anyone, do you understand?”

Quentin’s gaze shifted from Aryal’s face to the people who stood behind her. She watched as his expression turned careful. He nodded.

“I’m bound by doctor-patient confidentiality, and I’ve already given you my promise,” Kathryn told him. “I won’t say a word.”

“See that you keep it,” Dragos said. He never had to say “or else.”

Aryal turned her head as Dragos and Pia walked out.

Then Kathryn laid a hand at the back of Aryal’s neck and squatted to look her in the eyes. The surgeon pulled down her mask. Her honey brown gaze was teary, and she was beaming. “We’re done,” Kathryn said. “Everything looks so much better than I could have hoped.”

She shivered spasmodically. “It looks good?”

“It looks more than good. It looks amazing.” Kathryn kept a steady, firm pressure on the back of her neck. “But I’m going to tell you something before I let you up, and you need to listen. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“What happened just now is a miracle, and I do not use that word lightly. From the hopeless mess that I first saw to what I sense right now—there’s no comparison.” The surgeon’s expression sobered. “So pay attention when I say this to you. Do not take any chances with this opportunity. Your wings were so bad I was convinced you would never fly again. Now you have a real shot, but you must stay out of the air for two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” she whispered. Her mind went blank. She had never been out of the air for two weeks in her very long life.

Kathryn’s eyes were sharp and stern. “You’re a big girl. You can make your own choices, and I don’t order my patients around. It’s up to you whether or not you decide to take my advice. But you have injured and then reinjured your wings. If you don’t give your body a real chance to recover, you might rip away everything of the very great gift that has just been given to you. You are not cleared for work. No crises, no excuses, no exceptions.” The doctor paused to let her words sink in. “Do you understand what I have just said?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good.” Kathryn patted her. “Now I’m going to release the numbing spell and let you sit up. I want you to shapeshift back into your human form and stay that way for fourteen days.”

Aryal and Quentin looked at each other. Quentin said, “She will.”

It would be fourteen days before she knew for sure whether or not the miracle had taken hold.

Before she knew if she could fly again.

Fourteen days.

The wait was going to kill her.