Page 77 of Demon Touched

“She works at an illegal market, and her main customers are criminals. I think discretion and weirdness are two things she has a handle on. Bring her in.”

Martha ducks into the room with a curious expression, which instantly switches to shock when she sees me. I step aside to reveal Filippa on the table. Martha recovers quickly as soon as she sees the injury, her gaze taking on a professional focus.

“How long?” she asks.

“I’m not sure exactly. Less than an hour, more than thirty minutes.”

Martha nods as she places the large bag she’s carrying on the table. “If it had hit something important, she’d probably be dead already, so that’s good news.”

I exhale, my relief expanding a little more as Martha fishes a vial out of her bag.

“This should stop her waking up during the next part, though we should work fast. I’m not sure how long it will last on her kind.”

We share a loaded look, as she seems to realize that I, too, count as one of “her kind.” Then she gets to work. She makes Hodges start a fire in the small grate in the corner while I help her clean the wound with the alcohol and strips of boiled cloth she brought with her. She heats a sterilized iron in the fire and uses it to cauterize the inside of the puncture—to stop any internal bleeding, she explains.

“That’s the urgent bit done,” she says. “Now I just have to stitch her up.”

I sit down beside the table as I watch her prepare the needle and thread, feeling like I can breathe a little better.

“Will she be okay?” I ask, only now feeling strong enough to ask the question.

“Wingers heal fast, from what I’ve heard,” she says, glancing up at me briefly before she lowers her hand and starts stitching.

“That’s true. A deep cut can take days to close rather than months.”

“So maybe we’re looking at a matter of weeks for this?” she asks, nodding at Filippa’s stomach.

“Maybe? This is all a bit new to me,” I admit.

Hodges hovers silently in his bedroom doorway, listening carefully.

“I did wonder,” Martha says, keeping her eyes focused on her needle. “That allergy of yours—with the demon blood? It was unusual. You’re nephilim?”

“Yes,” I say, unsurprised that she put it together. To do a job like hers, you have to be sharp. “I didn’t know until recently.”

“I thought it was odd when that man came asking of you. I told that one about it,” she nods at Hodges. “Whoever he was, he was clever. I didn’t realize he was fishing for information about you until he’d gotten me too chatty about my allergy remedies.” She frowns, annoyed with herself. “It was stupid, and I’m sorry about that. Were you in some kind of trouble?”

“Maybe. But nothing you told him made it worse. They were already suspicious of my…origins,” I say.

She tuts, I guess reading between the lines and not liking the implication that someone was after me.

“You’re safe now?” she asks, pausing to look over my armor. “You were always a good customer.”

“Safe enough,” I say. A half-truth. There’s a lot of danger in my life—the trials, the risk of my secrets being discovered by the seraphim, bastards like Keros—but being in Aradis is still the only real option for me.

Right?

There’s something about being back here, sitting in these familiar rooms. This place used to be the portal to the one part of my life I felt I could truly be myself—not the neglected servant-stepdaughter but the scavenger who was in charge of her own life. After learning I was nephilim, I couldn’t picture myself coming back here. It felt impossible. And yet here I am, chatting away with Martha like we would at the market.

“The faster she heals, the less risk there’ll be of infection,” Martha explains as she finishes up the stitches. “That’s the key concern right now. I can give you a few things to help mitigate the risk, but she’ll need to be monitored for fever and swelling around the wound.”

I catch Hodges’s eye, the next few steps of a plan unfolding in front of me.

“Can I talk to you in private?” I ask.

We cram into his box of a bedroom, my wings making it a tight fit.

“I still have your scavenging stuff, you know,” he says, poking his toe at the box under his bed where my clothes, bow, and satchel are stored. “I kept them, in case you came back.”