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His arms loosened and fell away. “You should lie down.”
I scanned the living room and kitchen. The place was trashed. Every piece of furniture I owned was either overturned or broken. Shards of glass glittered in the carpet, and there was blood everywhere.
Is that all from me?I didn’t think so. Some of those stains looked suspiciously like footprints. With my eyes, I followed their path crisscrossing the living room until I turned and spotted Leo’s bare feet.
“You’re hurt?”
He picked up one bloody foot. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s my line.” My voice sounded strange in my head, and when I blinked, Leo was standing right in front of me. “Whoa, buddy.”
“Look at me,” he said, with a gentleness in the command that left me with a warm feeling in my chest.
When I tried to focus on him, black spots dotted my vision. I felt my knees give out, but Leo was there, guiding me gently to the floor.
“Couch,” I said, pointing to the overturned hunk of secondhand furniture.
In no time, he had the couch flipped right side up, and the cushions brushed off and in place. He guided me over and helped me lay face down so he could get a look at the damage.
He rucked my shirt up a few inches and tugged at the waistband of my jeans before prodding gently around the cut. “This looks like a lot of blood, but it’s not life threatening. Yet.”
It might be if he keeps poking at it.If I’d had a breath to spare, I would have shared that threat with him, along with a few colorful phrases for tacking that “yet” on his observation. Instead, I sucked air in shallow puffs and tried to focus my watery vision on the front door.
That was my goal. All I needed to do was get patched up, and then we could head out and find my brother.
“Do you know how to stitch up a wound?” I asked.
He cast me a quizzical look.
“Are you seriously telling me you’ve never had a cut bad enough to warrant stitches?”
He was silent for a moment. “I heal quickly.”
Right. Of course. He was from Hook’s realm, and those lucky mother fuckers just healed up all magical like.
“Well, we mortals don’t, and when we get a bad cut or gash, we have to clean it out and bandage it up,” I said. “In the bathroom—down the hall, first door on the left—I have a first aid kit under the sink. It’s an olive-green canvas bag. Will you grab it? And a couple of towels.”
He stood without answering and stalked across the room.
“This should be fun,” I muttered under my breath. Over the years, I’d gotten pretty good at stitching myself up. When I couldn’t do it on my own, I had Matty to lend a hand. But there was no way I was going to train a new guy on the job when I couldn’t even see the wound.
He came back out with the bag and set it beside the couch where I could dig through it. I pulled out everything we needed, including a fresh new package of butterfly closures.
“These will have to do,” I said, handing them off to him.
Leo examined them closely. “What am I supposed to do with these?”
I walked him through the steps, but when he was getting ready to place the first butterfly closure, a loud knock at the door made us both jump.
The sudden movement pulled a wince out of me. My muscles were already tensing up, which meant the full effects of the coming adrenaline crash were right around the corner.
“Never? I know you’re in there.” I recognized the voice coming through the door, though it felt like I hadn’t heard it in ages. “Come on, Never. Just open the door and talk to me.” Clint’s whiny, pleading voice took me right back to the park and the night this whole adventure started.
“Go away, Clint!” I yelled, as best as I could, anyway.
Leo’s lip curled up in a sneer. “Is that the guy you told us about?”
I narrowed my eyes. That wasn’t the part of the story I’d figured anyone would pay attention to when I’d regaled him and Hook with the tale of how I’d ended up in their realm. “You remember that?”
