Page 20 of Family Found

I sighed. We’d done it. We’d saved Kinnek, and in doing so, so many others too. I wasn’t the biggest fan of my own magic necessarily, but today, I was glad I had it.

“Come,” Hove said, and we followed him inside the Raiken.

Chapter 8

We made it into the Raiken’s stone building with its beautifully intricate wall decorations, following Hove’s lead. Despite the commotion our arrival had caused, no spectators were clogging the hallways. The protectors helped the bagua who had trouble walking, and two of them stood by with a stretcher ready. Apart from those emergency responders, the only people I saw—students in copper and gray, mostly—hurried along quietly as if they had errands to complete or places to be.

The last time I’d needed to be checked out, Fellisse and Inkiri had taken me to a kind of lab, but that was not where Hove took us. We went down an incline and into a room that looked a lot like an Earth hospital with three sections on either side, all of them separated off with wooden screens on wheels. The ceiling was too tall to make privacy curtains feasible.

The bagu in taupe who’d called Lissir to help with translating was now taking notes while Lissir spoke to one of the survivors. While I looked around the room, Hove asked another bagu—this one also in taupe but wearing short sleeves—a question. I wished my Lugarra were better, but I only managed to catch the question word “gu” at the end of it, none of the actual question.

“I’m really fine, Ink,” I mumbled. Hospitals were rarely fun places to be, and the bagua we’d saved probably needed the doctors a lot more than I did right about now.

Inkiri nodded. “Then the healer will just have a quick look and confirm that you’re fine.”

The bagu Hove had spoken to—a nurse, I was guessing—beckoned for us to follow him to the back.

There, the open concept ended, and individual treatment rooms were one next to the other. That seemed smart—triage when you came in, then specialized treatments after. From all the hospital shows I’d watched, I wasn’t exactly sure whether that was how Earth did it. The shows loved focusing on ER drama, improv surgery, and lots and lots of sexual tension between doctors and nurses. There wasn’t a lot of that happening here though, from what I could tell. Probably for the best.

I could sound out the letters above the doors here in the back thanks to my training with Kinnek, but once again, I didn’t know the words. When I recognized the character for “eye” though, I felt very proud of myself.

The nurse knocked then opened a door, the second to the last on the left. The bagu inside exchanged a few words with the nurse and Hove.

Hove bowed toward me and Inkiri. “I will leave, then. We enjoy that your mate be here again, and well.”

Hove left to do whatever a visdena had to do when a bunch of Koa Esher captives were suddenly dropped on his doorstep. He was probably going to be busy with that for the foreseeable future.

The nurse stayed, and the doctor—healer—smiled at me.

“Hello, my name is Gesango, and I will be your doctor today,” the bagu doc said, and my jaw dropped.

“You speak English!”

“I am learning.” Gesango patted the treatment table. “Please come.”

Before I could so much as tell Gesango that I was fine, actually, Inkiri picked me up and lifted me on the table. It was fine though. I needed to get back into trophy mate mode, and trophy mates were carried around a lot, I hoped. They looked their best. I patted myself down, making sure my scarf was still in place. It was muddy, especially the ends. I had no idea when that had happened, but my hand flew up to my brooch.

“Oh no. Dang it.” I flinched when the three bagu in the room immediately clicked at me.

“Sweet thing, what is it? What hurts?” Inkiri squeezed my knees, and his eyes searched my face.

“I lost it! My brooch.” I reached under my scarf and breathed a sigh of relief. “I still have my necklace though.”

Inkiri let out a sigh. “I will beg Noki to make you another, sweet thing. Do not worry about it. It’s just a brooch.”

But it wasn’t. It had been a lot more to me. However, I would not complain or cry about a stupid brooch when my mate had jumped into danger to fight off the celadon, and when the survivors—after everything they had endured. Trophy mate or not, I would not sit here and grow whiny over a brooch.

I nodded. “Okay.”

Gesango stepped closer. “May I have a look at the patient?”

He had less of an accent than my guys had when I’d met them, but the way he spoke was like he’d memorized all the words and lines, a bit stilted. Still, that made his British accent come out strongly, and all in all, that wasn’t a terrible combo. Of course, I had the best combo ever in my mate, but I could appreciate that someone else would be lucky if Gesango did dirty talk for them. Which made me blush. Stupid train of thought that was trying to distract me from my brooch.

I cleared my throat. “I’m pretty much fine, really.”

“Pink skin can indicate a fever, and a sore throat may also point toward infection.” Gesango narrowed his eyes at me. “I know that it was not too long ago that you were very sick, so we need to be careful.”

He said something to the nurse, who got a thermometer out of a drawer. This one was bagu made, of course, and glass, like old thermometers on Earth.