Once Broken (Dove Creek Chronicles) (7 page)

“I’ll go get Gabe. We can help,” I said. I handed her the set of keys she had left on the coffee table.

Joss shook her head. “I got this. It’s not far from here. If it’s bad, I’ll let y’all know.”

I nodded and stayed behind as she hurried out the door, but I didn’t bother sitting back down. Garrett was speaking into his headset, telling Casey to get back to headquarters. There was a first aid kit in a closet near the front door, so I pulled it out to have it ready and waiting. I spent the next few minutes pacing, waiting for Casey to get back. If he was sounding the retreat, it must have gotten hairy for them. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was optimistic since he was still able to drive himself.

After what felt like an eon passed, I heard the slam of a car door outside and I turned around from where I was wearing out the tile floor. I opened the front door and gasped.

It wasn’t like it was unusual for any of us to come back to headquarters after a rough night with a few bumps and bruises, but Casey was worse off than I had ever seen him. I thought he might drop like a rock right there
on the porch. Moving to his side, I slid an arm around his waist to help support his weight.

“C’mon big guy. Let’s get you sat down,” I told him as I steered him toward the sitting area.

With a nonverbal sound of assent, he swayed unsteadily next to me. It felt like he was trying not to let me help him as much as he needed me to, but I didn’t call him on it. He looked relieved when we reached the couch and he could get off his feet.

“Case, do I need to take you to the hospital?” I asked, concerned that his injuries needed more attention than what I could deliver. Like any of us, I knew enough from watching Meredith to get by, but I was no doctor.

“No, not that bad,” he insisted. “Just need to catch my breath.”

I turned and went into the kitchen to get him a glass of water and to take a couple of ice packs from the freezer. The least I could do was patch him up as best as I could.

After a few seconds of rummaging, I found ibuprofen tablets in the first aid kit. “Here. Take these.” I settled down to kneel on the floor in front of him as I offered two of the pills in one hand and the glass of water in the other.

After swallowing both tablets with a swig of the water, he murmured, “Thanks.”

I took the glass back from him and set it behind me on the coffee table. Since he didn’t look like he would refuse help from me like he did the hospital, I set to work cleaning up his face. I took his chin between my thumb and forefinger to steady my aim and dabbed at a streak of drying blood that originated at the corner of one eyebrow. My movements were careful, but I could feel him wince at the contact.

“They worked you over pretty good, huh?” A note of sympathy played in my question.

Casey didn’t answer me right away, so I kept working in silence.

“Just one. It was a girl,” he finally said, his voice hushed.

I waited to see if he would continue.

“A young woman,” he corrected. “That did this to me.”

Was.
I read between the lines of what he was saying straight to what he was not saying. Still working on the cut near his temple, I raised my eyebrows slightly to show my surprise that he had been dealt this kind of damage by a female. Not to sell short my own gender, but regular girls don’t go around beating up grown men very often. Especially ones Casey’s size.

He offered no more detail than that, so I allowed the silence to linger. Either he was too tired and sore to talk any more, or he simply did not want to hash out every gory detail. I couldn’t decide which.

Placing two butterfly bandages across the cut after I finished cleaning it, I moved on to the split in the side of his lower lip. The small nick was only just deep enough to bleed, but his bottom lip was puffy. It made him look a bit like he was pouting, and it might have been cute if I didn’t know that the cause was most likely a punch to the mouth. Not that I was going to go and
tell
him
that.

Moving on, I ran my fingertips gently along his jaw to check for swelling. It was stubbly and prickly from not having been shaved since the previous morning, but otherwise intact. Hearing a low rumble from somewhere deep in Casey’s throat, I paused. At first I thought I might have hurt him, but when I looked back up, his eyes were closed and the expression on his face was hardly one of pain.

With that little sound he made, I was suddenly hyperaware of our nearness. Sitting up on my knees, with his on either side of my waist, my hands on his face and my own only inches from it . . . It was not a feeling I was used to. At least it hadn’t been for quite some time. My heart drummed out an unsteady little rhythm.

I bit my lip and recovered quickly. If Casey noticed my brief hesitation, he said nothing of it.

I gently turned his face in my hands, revealing a set of four long scratches that started just below his ear and disappeared into the line of his collar. Fingernail marks. They wept with a small amount of blood and the kind of clear fluid that usually accompanies shallow wounds.

“That
bitch
.” I hissed the words without realizing I had spoken aloud.

Casey began to laugh his easy chuckle, but it was abbreviated with a pained grunt. Rather than self-consciousness at my outburst, I felt renewed concern at the sound of his reaction.

“What is it?”

“My ribs.”

“Broken?”

“I don’t think so. Just bruised.”

“You sure you don’t wanna go see a doctor?”

“Positive. Besides, I like having you play Florence Nightingale.”
He smirked.

I answered his impertinence by swiping an anesthetic wipe across the fingernail trails without warning him. He inhaled sharply from the sting.

“Oh, don’t be such a little girl.” I admonished him with a countering smirk.

We were interrupted by Jocelyn and Aric appearing at the front door. Aric was soaked, his red mohawk dripping and plastered to his head.

“What happened? Why are you all wet?” I asked, getting to my feet.

“
Four of those freaking maniacs tried to take me out,” Aric started. “I jumped in the creek. Didn’t make the All State swim team for nothing.” He smiled and looked over to exchange a look with Garrett. It looked like they were saying that they were relieved to see each other without expressing that feeling out loud for the rest of us to hear.

Aric and Garrett are identical twins, but you’d be hard pressed to get them mixed up. Aric is gregarious and outgoing. He sports a dyed
cherry red mohawk and about a dozen tattoos. Garrett is shy and reserved, wearing his dark brown hair longer and more conservatively styled. With his black-rimmed glasses, he has a real Clark Kent vibe about him. At any given time, I half expect him to tear open his shirt to reveal a big yellow “S” on his chest.

“I showed up and they pulled their disappearing act again,” Joss added.

Before anyone could say anything else, Casey hauled himself up off the sofa and made a beeline for the back door without a word. The four of us left in the room exchanged glances, the unspoken question passing between us. Jocelyn looked at me and made a deliberate motion with her eyes toward the door. I acted on the not-so-subtle hint and went after him.

“Hey . . . You okay?” I asked as I found Casey on the back porch.

“Yeah,” he answered. He was silent for a moment, his back to me. He shook his head. “No. I killed that girl, Remi. I didn’t mean to, but . . .”

Closing the space between us, I laid a hand on his arm and looked up at him. “You had no choice. From the looks of you, she was hell bent on killing you.”

“She was,” he conceded. “I was tryin’ to just hold her off, but she kept comin’.”

“You don’t have any problem clobbering female vampires. Why did she give you trouble?” I asked.

“It’s not the same. There’s no tellin’ what those demons are, man or woman, no matter what they look like. I couldn’t help but think that she was just a girl, she was so young,” he said. “Afterward, I lost it. I was hurt, but I could’ve hung on. I just couldn’t hold it together . . . Aric could’ve gotten killed.”

“But he didn’t. That’s why we’re a team, to back each other up,” I said. I wondered if it was me who needed to be preaching this particular sermon, but I continued
anyway because he needed to hear it. “Joss and I were both right here, ready to help. It worked out fine.”

“I hate this feelin’. Like the whole world is out for our blood.”

“Don’t worry, Case. We’ll get ‘em.”

“How do you know?”

I gave his arm a light squeeze. “Faith. That’s what we’re all about, isn’t it?”

Finally looking down to meet my eyes, his guilty scowl eased. He covered my hand with his and my skin tingled under the heat of his calloused palm. “Thanks for patchin’ me up, darlin’.”

“You’re welcome. But from now on, don’t be such a gentleman. We need you alive.”

By the time I got back inside, Aric was in dry clothes and all set to go back out on watch. I offered to take his place since he’d already been busy that night, but he turned me down since he was geared up and I was not. He and Jocelyn assured me that they didn’t expect anything to happen in the couple of hours that were left before daybreak.

I wandered out to the barn to see what Gabriel was up to. As I opened the smaller door that was set into the wall just to the side of the huge double door, I found him at a work bench with his back turned to me. He didn’t appear to have heard my entrance, so I shut the door with a click that was good and loud. I didn’t want to go sneaking up on a man with a weapon in his hand.

Gabe looked around at the noise and spotted me. “Hey, Remi. Wasn’t expecting to see you. What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing. No work tomorrow?”

“It’s Saturday,” he said.

Had I really lost track of what day it was? I wandered closer to where Gabe had been working before I interrupted him. “Oh, right. Well, I was just here to check on things.” I was going to tell him about how Casey and Aric had gotten into a pickle, but he spoke first.

“C’mere. I have something to show you.” He patted the workbench next to him.

A few quick steps, and I was sliding into the open seat. Gabriel was always tinkering around the armory, designing new weapons and coming up with modifications for old ones. As a professional engineer, he was distinctively suited to the task. It was usually Aric who did the actual building, though, so I was curious to see what he had been up to.

In Gabe’s lap, I saw my bow. It was good as new . . . But better. My eyes went wide with delight. “I thought it was lost last night.”

“I saw it as we were getting ready come back here. You were already in your car, so I hung onto it to see if I could repair it.” He explained as he handed me my prized weapon.

“You did better than that,” I said,
taken aback. I looked it over; he had done more than just fix it. There was a pair of silver spikes protruding from the front of the frame, one on top and one on bottom. I carefully put the tip of my finger on one, testing the sharpness.

“I checked the balance. Those are
carbon with silver plate . . . Shouldn’t add too much weight or throw off your aim.”

I looked up at the table and saw his crossbow with the same modifications. “What made you think of doing these?”

“We were fighting in close quarters last night, ganged up on. It wasn’t like usual. We need a way to use our bows without having to put them down. Unless you wanna take sword fighting lessons from Hugo.”

Gabe grinned and I smiled back. “Nah, we should leave the swordplay to him.” I stopped and ran my hands over the new string on my bow before looking over at Gabriel. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Speaking of being ganged up on last night. All those vamps . . . At what point do you think a higher power steps in to help?”

“What do you mean? Divine intervention?”

“Well, yeah. I guess so.”

“Remi, you can’t be that naïve.”

“Naïve?”

“The Amasai weren’t put together in hopes that we would receive divine help against the demons. We were assembled
because
people don’t receive divine help. We get the werewolves . . . That’s it.”

“Oh, well . . . I just thought. Never mind,” I said, feeling more crestfallen than I would have expected.

“Hey, you wanna fling a few arrows before we head inside?” He nodded toward the firing range at the other end of the barn. I could tell that he was only trying to cheer me up, but I needed the practice, especially with the new additions to my bow.

I nodded. “Sounds good.”

I
left the bench to go retrieve a quiver from the rack that held various kinds of ammunition: My arrows, Gabriel’s bolts, shotgun shells loaded with silver shot, an array of sharpened stakes. We were well-prepared folks.

Gabe followed suit before pacing off fifteen yards from the three targets lined up against the far wall. We had to practice longer shots outside, but that would do for testing our newly improved weaponry. The pair of us stood shoulder to shoulder, me on the left so that my elbow wouldn’t be right in Gabe’s face.