Page 32 of Junk Magic

Oh, God.

“What did I just say?” Sedgewick demanded, gesturing at some hovering orderlies.

But to my surprise, Hargroves waved them off again. “Are you going to be sick?” he asked me, stepping back a pace to preserve the mirror-like shine on his oxfords.

“Probably.”

He passed over a trash can. I guess the clinic was out of the usual kidney-shaped basins they used for such things. Like they must have been out of water and napkins, because nobody offered me any of those, either.

They had found a hospital gown to stick me in, one of those ridiculous paper-thin things with no back that was like trying to wear a tissue. I gathered the equally thin blanket that had been draped over me more securely around myself, so that I didn’t flash the boss. Assuming I hadn’t already done that.

Sedgewick stood there, eyeing me hopefully, probably anticipating autopsy number two. But when I just sat on the edge of the exam table, clutching my trash can and stubbornly continuing to breathe, he sighed and padded off. I seriously thought about using the can, but literally felt too bad to be sick.

“What the hell?” I croaked.

“That is what I would like to know.” Hargroves’ little pebble eyes varied between blue and gray depending on what he was wearing. They were gray today, because he had on a snazzy charcoal pin stripe with an emerald silk pocket square folded so perfectly that its little blue dots lined up in regimental rows along the creases. I wondered if magic had been involved. I decided that I didn’t care.

The pebble eyes abruptly became pebblier and shot out at me like rocky asteroids.

I yelped and flinched back, and he said a bad word that contrasted with his genteel suit.

“Sorry,” I said, which was ignored.

“You were found wandering about downtown in a state,” he informed me sharply. “You attacked several groups of people, made a spectacle of yourself on one of the busiest streets in Las Vegas, and for a finale, grabbed onto the spell Mage McGibbon was using to calm you so tightly that you pulled him into your fevered state. He had to be carried back here on a stretcher alongside you.”

Yeah. Some of that was coming back. “Is McGibbon okay?”

“Other than for screaming at the bedside light to stay away from him?” Hargroves asked dryly. “Yes, he’ll recover—in time. What I want to know is why you have enough punch in your system to kill a platoon.”

I blinked at him slowly, because I had to remember how. “Is that what’s wrong with me?”

“You didn’t know?”

I paused before answering, because breakfast was debating whether or not to make a reappearance. It finally decided in the negative, and I answered thickly. “No.”

“Then tell me what you do know.”

“It’ll be in the report—”

“Yes, and we both know how assiduous you are at filing those. Give me the shorthand version now.”

I swallowed bile and tried to drag my fractured thoughts together enough for a summary.

“Checked out a grow farm off 95 that I didn’t know was a grow farm. Owners objected and attacked. I lost and blacked out, and the next thing I knew, I was inside a fun house mirror and the sidewalk was eating my shoes.”

Hargroves gave me the look that deserved, but honestly, it was the best I could do. I needed time for the room to stop spinning and for my stomach to settle down from imminent disruption to seriously perturbed. I needed a bed and a shower, probably in reverse order as it felt like half the sand in the Mojave had been imbedded into my flesh. I needed a break.

What I got instead was a silence spell clicking into place around us.

Great.

We were in the bowels of the Circle’s HQ, which meant that the best wards available were already protecting us from prying ears. And the only people down here were fellow members of the Corps anyway. But apparently that wasn’t good enough for Hargroves, which made me clutch my makeshift bucket even tighter.

This was really going to suck.

“You weren’t merely given a dose of the so-called punch,” Hargroves informed me. “You received the same adulterated drug we found in the Were’s system last night—a great deal of it.”

I looked at him blankly for a moment, not sure that I’d heard right. “What?”