Chapter Four (Part 2)

Idris disappeared to the bathroom briefly to wash my blood off his hands while we waited for the healer to show up, leaving an uncomfortable silence between us. I considered taking it back and placating Idris with promises that I would stay in bed and rest like a good little husband, but Idris wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to believe me because he knew me. I might stay in bed for a couple of days, but he knew that I would get antsy long before the scar fully faded, and would wiggle my way out eventually.

Which is why his demand for me to stay in bed that long was utterly ridiculous, and he had to know that even as he said it, but he was worried and freaked out, so the protective instincts were taking over.

Odds are that he would stew for an hour or two, come to his senses, and make a deal with me to stay in bed for at least forty-eight hours.

Which I would very generously accommodate.

But then after that I was getting right down to wherever Gabriel had decided to store the deer and cutting that bitch open.

It was rare for anyone, gods included, to be able to successfully hybridize a creature. Not that many other than I had really tried, considering it an abomination and a ‘waste of the power of creation.’

My Sublime Ones were the only creatures I knew of that had been successfully fused through magic, and they were perfect. At least, I thought so.

It had taken me several years and several unfortunate mistakes to get them to come into being, but I didn’t regret it. I’d tried fusing panthers with Marrow Bears, with shadow creatures, with Porous Alligators, but none of them fused quite right until I’d used the highly poisonous Mimic Snakes.

My Sublime Ones had been created entirely through magic, which was why they had lived this long and why they didn’t suffer any ill effects from the clash between snake DNA and panther DNA. But when I looked over the deer briefly earlier, I noticed faint markings around the human hands on its forelegs, and strange scars around its eyes. I would need to get down there and look at it more closely, but I strongly suspected that that deer had been created through good old-fashioned slicing and dicing. Someone sewed those hands on. Someone gouged out those eyes and replaced them with human ones. A small amount of magic had been used to keep everything running smoothly with the new additions, but only the barest amount was really needed for that.

Which meant fucking anyone could have created that creature. If it had been perfectly fused, I would suspect a god of creating it, because only a god or demigod would have that kind of power.

But if they used only a small amount of magic to keep it together and used their sewing kit to do the rest, then it could be anyone.

They’d have to be smart though. Incredibly fucking intelligent.

But I’d only gotten a cursory glance, so I needed to get in there with a knife to see for myself and see if I could find anything else noteworthy.

First and foremost, however, I needed to stop bleeding all over everything and get well enough to leave without Idris having a heart attack.

Easier said than done.

The healer showed up five minutes later – and he was going to pay for that five minutes, if Idris’s glower was anything to go by. The poor bespectacled man shivered as he passed him to come into the room, studiously avoiding those furious blue eyes.

The healer was a half-immortal named Ameen, and he’d been in Idris’s employ as a healer for centuries, working mostly with Idris’s guards. Now that the medical industry was seeing such a huge boom, he’d also secured a position at the nearest hospital and taught classes on the side. I only really knew about him because he’d been the one to heal Gabriel back when Calix attacked him, and because Wisdom was always pestering him with questions.

And speaking of Wisdom, she trailed in after him only a moment later, hovering over his shoulder as he got to work sewing up my side.

He injected an anesthetic before doing so, and I resisted the urge to tell him it was unnecessary, because I knew Idris and Wisdom would both protest the decision. While Ameen was bent over my side, coffee brown eyes squinting at the wound through his round, gold wire-framed lenses, I took a peek at Idris, because I could still feel anger boiling off of him, and it bothered me.

Feeling my gaze, Idris looked away from watching Ameen like a hawk and met my eyes. I took the opportunity to point to my own eyebrows and mimed separating them with my pointer and index finger. He huffed and rolled his eyes, but some of the tension left his shoulders.

While Ameen slid his needle through my side with the gentlest possible movements, entirely too conscious of Idris’s laser-eyes on him, I rolled my head back to look at Wisdom, who was also avoiding my stare, clearly unhappy with me.

Damn. I was going to win the award for pissing off the most loved ones possible in a day. My stomach rolled a bit, though I put that down to the sensation of my skin being tugged by the suturing.

“Did Gabriel find anything when he searched the grounds?” I asked Wisdom, knowing that even when angry, she wouldn’t withhold such information from me.

She glanced at me briefly before looking away, which meant she was trying hard to stay angry at me and knew that looking at me for too long would dissolve her rage.

“I can’t stay mad at you,” I remember her huffing at me when she was perhaps all of twelve years old, small arms crossed indignantly over her chest, lips curled in a pout. “Your eyes are too sweet.”

Oh, yeah. I knew her weaknesses. And I was absolutely going to use them to my advantage.

“No,” she responded in a monotone that made me sigh. “There was no sign of a disturbance anywhere. Just a broken length of fence where the deer busted through to the garden.”

“Where is the deer being kept?”

Her piercing gray eyes lifted to mine, which I widened innocently, but Wisdom wasn’t the personification of wisdom for nothing, and she scowled.

“That’s none of your business right now,” she said tersely. “You can know that when you’re not bleeding out.”

“The bleeding has stopped!” I protested weakly. It was a losing battle, but I couldn’t help but try. I felt like I needed to get down there. Partly because I was fucking pissed that someone had attacked me, and partly because I was absolutely fascinated with their work.

“Mostly,” she bit out.

“…Mostly.” I dropped my head back onto the pillow in defeat.

Ameen finished patching me up a few minutes later and went to wrap me up with gauze like a neat little present, but Idris stepped in before he could, indicating that he’d like to do this part, because of course he would. Ameen handed off the supplies to him with barely concealed gratefulness, probably just happy to get out of this suffocating room. I was a little envious.

Wisdom pressed a decidedly peeved kiss to my forehead and trailed out of the room after Ameen, already asking him questions about my wounds and rate of recovery.

Which left me alone with Idris once more, who had relaxed a bit now that my insides weren’t in danger of falling out, but his mouth was still a hard line that I was debating kissing if only to get him to stop looking like the world was ending.

I was perfectly fine.

Idris disappeared into the bathroom again, reappearing with a damp towel that he used to wipe away the excess dried blood clinging to my skin before applying an ointment that Ameen had left behind and then winding the gauze around my torso.

By the time he was done, I was actually feeling kind of sleepy, the adrenaline from the fight finally wearing off, and his gentle touches were only helping coax me further into sleep.

I didn’t fight it, because what the fuck could I do right at that moment? With Idris and Wisdom both hovering over me, I couldn’t do jack shit. Might as well get some rest.

Idris somehow managed to change the bloody bedding from underneath me without jostling me too much, and once he was done, he laid down next to me, leaving a careful distance between us to avoid touching my wound. I distantly felt his lips press against my cheek and sighed, turning towards him. Soft fingers brushed my temple, pushing stray hair out of my face. That was nice…

“Rook,” I heard him mutter a few moments later, possibly thinking I was already asleep. I was too tired to even hum in response, and just continued floating blissfully somewhere in between wakefulness and dreams.

He mumbled something I couldn’t make out, and then, just before I finally drifted off, I heard him say something else that would have normally made me snap to attention, but I was far too warm and comfortable to bother.

“…it’s for your own good.”