Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [124]
Gone from the room. But not entirely. Wren was still grounded in the building. Now that she knew what to look for, what to feel for, there were threads of Jamie throughout, like a parent watchful over a child on the playground.
It made her feel safe, protected. And as she slowly disengaged from the building, she could swear that she felt him acknowledge her in return. Then even that faint awareness faded, and she was totally herself again.
A clunk and a whine deep inside the building, and the overhead lights came up again. The sharp click of computers rebooting came from somewhere down the hallway—the one in this office would never work again, not fried as it was—and somewhere deep in the steel she could hear the whine and wail of an alarm.
The elevators were running again. They didn’t have much time left.
“Come on,” she said to her client. “Get up.”
He cringed away from her, scrambling backward like an animal.
“Get up,” she said, infusing as much command into her voice as she could manage. He didn’t stand, but did stop cowering. “People will be here soon. Do you really want them to see you on the floor?”
She personally didn’t give a damn. But better they rush to him for answers than look to her as the only person still standing.
The appeal to his pride seemed to work, as she thought it probably would. Grabbing the edge of a still-intact table, Frants hoisted himself to his feet, using the back of his arm to wipe away the blood that still flowed from his face. He stared at the blood left on his sleeve as though he had no idea where it came from.
That’s going to hurt once he comes out of shock, she thought, not without some sympathy. “Come here,” she said, rubbing her hands together and trying to find some remnant of current left in her system. It stirred, sluggishly. The building was too weak, still, to pull from, and there were no other sources available, so it would have to do.
When he—understandably—refused to come any closer, she sighed and stepped forward over the wreckage of what had once been an antique chair and reached out to touch the side of his face. “Hold still, I just want to make sure you’re not going to bleed to death standing there, okay?” She’d read somewhere that scalp wounds bleed worse than they actually were, damage-wise, but she didn’t know if that held for facial wounds, too.
“Slow, breathing steady
The body repairs itself.
Cells reknit, blood clots.”
A standby she had been using since high school, something even her limited Talent could make work reliably on surface cuts and abrasions like this. If he was bleeding internally, they were both just shit out of luck.
She winced as her arm reminded her that Frants wasn’t the only one injured. It would have been damned useful if the healing cantrip worked on her, but self-healing with current was a major no-no. You were too close, things could get overwhelmed and go wrong way too easily. Neezer had told her horror stories of organs fused together by a Talent who got carried away feeling the inside of his or her body. It still gave her major jeebies, just thinking about it. No thanks.
Taking her hands away, she frowned. The blood had slowed, anyway. But that’s going to scar pretty badly. Good. She wasn’t feeling too charitable toward the bastard right now, for all that she wouldn’t let him get killed.
A familiar-sounding chime pinged out in the hallway, and the rumble of voices indicated that the cavalry had finally arrived. She picked out Sergei’s lighter bass out of the worried-sounding cacophony with relief.
“In here,” she called, and two very serious-faced cub scouts rushed in, followed by their father. She blinked, and the boys refocused into still-young paramedics, who zeroed in on Frants. They knelt in front of him, pulling out instruments and bandages, and doing other paramedic-like things. Their “father,” she assumed, was building security, since he immediately started talking into his