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With protectiveness blazing across her face, Gabi put her arm around Joy and led her back to the hallway. She kept that arm around Joy as she got tea from a vending machine, and then settled Joy in a padded green-and-wood seat.
She was treating Joy like a spooked animal or a scared child, but Gabi’s care made Joy feel a little bit better, so she didn’t complain as Gabi led her to a seat and left to talk to the healers and nurses.
Joy sipped the hot, insipid tea and stared at the door across the hall, where Victoriya’s mum and her colleagues were treating Neil. Joy’s throat closed up and tears threatened when she thought of what could happen, that the healers might not be able to save him.
He’d always been a friendly face, helping her carry heavy bags, chatting about the weather, inviting her to Christmas parties when his wife used to throw them. He’d made sure her coven knew that Joy had been locked up when he saw Paulina drag her into the town hall. He didn’tdeservethis. There’d been so much blood on him. Joy’s hands shook around the paper cup, spilling a drop to the linoleum floor.
Who woulddothis to him?
Joy spent a long time thinking about him, replaying her memories, and realisation struck slowly.
His wife.
Was she the wife who’d sent Victoriya on her way, mistaking her for one of Neil’s students?
Joy peered up and down the hallway but didn’t see the woman. She’d always seemed distant to Joy, a self-made distance that spoke of everyone else not measuring up to her standards. If that was the kind of woman Mr. Ivers liked, well … he shouldloveVictoriya’s sharpness.
If he didn’t die from blood loss or infection or a number of other threats Joy’s mind sped through. Her eyes filled with tears again. If she’d gone straight to work, if she hadn’t lingered helping Mor Margaret…
Joy jumped when a body threw itself into the chair beside her, and pale fingers snatched the tea out of her hands. Victoriya lookedyoung. Her hair was tied back in a hasty ponytail, her face clear of its usual war paint, and her lips were so strange when Joy was used to seeing them a dark red. The only red on her today was her bloodshot eyes, and the blood stains on her jeans and T-shirt. No make-up, no malice. Joy had never seen this side of Victoriya. Shehatedseeing it now.
“What the hellhappened?”
Joy tore her eyes from Victoriya and saw Gus striding towards them. For a second, she only frowned at the empty space behind his feet, and then she realised animals weren’t allowed in the clinic. The nurses wouldn’t make allowances even for witches trapped in fox form.
Joy stumbled through an explanation, and then they sat for three hours while the nurses and healers—most of them fae who’d deigned to help all species thanks to the high pay Paulina offered—worked their magic on Neil.
When Salma finished her shift, she joined them, and Eilidh came sprinting through the doors a few minutes before school was supposed to let out, her eyes puffy and red from crying—from worrying that someone else would be taken, like her cousin had. Joy tucked her friend under her arm, and they sat like that for a long time, in utter, fearful silence.
Gabi paced. Once she’d taken Joy’s and Victoriya’s statements and spent an hour tapping at her tablet, she was left with nothing to do but wait for an update on Neil, or for Victoriya’s mum to make her own statement. But Mrs. Stone was busy trying to save Neil’s life.
Gabi paced, and paced some more until Victoriya snarled for her to sit the helldown. She finally did, taking a seat next to Joy, but her leg bounced, and her fingers tapped, and she was no less restless.
“Maybe you should go home,” Joy suggested, her shock long worn off. Other emotions had flooded back in—fear, hatred, disbelief, and now, for Gabi, worry. “I’ll call you when we’re allowed to see him.”
Gabi started to speak, but the door across the corridor swung open and Gabi sat up straight, her attention fixed on the nurses who exited.
This was it. The moment when they’d find out if Neil would live or die.
TWENTY-SIX
GABI
Gabi was used to being level headed and unflappable, but for the past three hours a jittery, impatient beast had taken possession of her body. She’d found out everything she could about Neil Ivers in the first thirty minutes of waiting, and now she was antsy. Neil was a good man, it seemed, though his moral standing had been thrown into shade by Victoriya’s reaction to his attack. If someone as dangerous as Victoriya was fond of him, he couldn’t be completely innocent. Unless that was the allure. Gabi couldn’t say; not only was the man injured and locked in a hospital room, but men weren’t of any interest to her.
Her thoughts were disconnected, blasting from one subject to another like a tornado. She returned, as always, to the attack. It wasn’t safe to assume Neil Ivers had been hurt by the same woman who’d killed Freya, but Gabi worked on that assumption for now. Joy had interrupted the killer and forced them to abandon the murder. But why not kill Joy? Why only injure her, shove her into the sand, and run? Shock, panic, or some other reason?
Joy had interrupted the killer and saved Neil Ivers. Would the killer find a second victim to fix that? Gabi needed to speak to her professor immediately, needed to go home and look through everything she’d collected so far. Joy must have been thinking along the same lines because she suggested Gabi go back to the Law House and promised to tell her if something happened with Neil.
But then the door opened.
Gabi shot to her feet, hopeful and nervous, her stomach fluttering.Please let him be alive. Please let him be conscious.
“Are you all for Mr. Ivers?” a middle-aged male nurse asked, his glasses slightly askew on his red nose—the only bit of colour in his pale face.
“We are,” Salma confirmed with a polite smile, putting her hand over Victoriya’s and squeezing to keep her still.
“I shouldn’t really tell you anything unless you’re family.” His sympathetic green eyes said he was about to break the rules. “But since you’ve been waiting here for hours, I’ll tell you he’s stable.”
