Page 6 of Shield of Fire

The IIT—or the Interspecies Investigation Team, as it was more formally known—dealt with all police events involving non-humans, and had both a day and night division. Sgott Bruhn was in charge of the night division, but had also been my mother’s lover for over sixty years. In very many ways, he was the only father I’d ever known.

“I’m afraid my phone is buried under that rubble somewhere,” I said. “So, unless you have yours, we’ll have to borrow one.”

“I’ll see if one of the bystanders has one, then head over to what’s left of the building to see if I can detect any life under all that rubble.”

I touched his arm. “Be careful. That fire isn’t natural, and the building could collapse at any moment.”

He smiled. “All the more reason to go over there—I can shore it up and protect anyone who might, by some miracle, still be alive. In the meantime, you need to get across to that ambulance and have your shoulder looked at. You’re bleeding heavily, and there’s a large strip of skin hanging down your back.”

The pain radiating from my shoulder immediately intensified, and a cold sweat broke out across my skin.

Cynwrig cupped my elbow, obviously sensing the wash of weakness. “You okay? Would you want me to help you over there?”

“No, I’m perfectly fine.”

He snorted softly. “From what I’ve seen, you’d say that even if you were stepping through death’s door.”

“Death wouldn’t have me. We Aodhán pixies are too ornery for the likes of him.”

He raised an eyebrow, amusement briefly muting the concern in his expression. “Says who?”

“Says death himself. Or so Gran once said.”

His amusement increased. “And how did she know this?”

“She had a fireside chat with him once, apparently. And no, I don’t know the details. It was an off-the-cuff comment she wouldn’t explain.”

Of course, death—or the devil, as humans preferred to call him—not accepting us didn’t mean we couldn’t die. It just meant our souls couldn’t enter his realm. And to be honest, that wasn’t a bad thing. Hell, from all reports, was not a fun place to be.

I rose on my toes and kissed him, tasting dust and weariness and strength. “To repeat, be careful in that building.”

He nodded, lightly touched my cheek, then turned and walked over to the gathering crowd. I sighed and forced my feet to move in the opposite direction, heading for the ambulance pulling up behind the two cop cars blocking access to this section of the street.

Two paramedics jumped out of the ambulance, one running to the back of the vehicle while the other darted across the road to the woman I’d pulled from the rubble. He knelt beside her, felt for a pulse, and then snapped directions toward his partner.

She was alive.

The relief stirred so fiercely that my knees threatened to buckle.

A second ambulance pulled up behind the first, this one marked as an ASP ambulance, meaning there was an elven healer on board to deal with both human and non-human species. Which made sense, given the building would have been flagged as elven-owned when the destruction reports came in.

I walked toward it. The paramedic took one look at me and immediately grabbed my arm, ushering me into the back of the vehicle. Obviously, I looked every bit as bad as I felt.

He took my vitals, tsked over the various cuts and bruises, then cut away my jacket and sweater to examine that wound more closely.

“I take it a shifter did this?”

“Yes.” I paused, briefly debating whether I really wanted an answer before asking, “How bad is it?”

“It’ll need to be fixed at the fae hospital,” he said. “He’s torn through muscles and damaged the bone, and it’ll take a specialist to repair and knit everything back together.”

It was a common misconception that all elven healers could heal any wound, no matter how great the damage. In truth, just as there were human doctors who specialized in specific medical fields, there were also elven. Human doctors had one distinct advantage over their non-human counterparts, though—their patients generally had the same physiology. That wasn’t always the case with non-humans.

Of course, there was another difference—humans relied on surgery and drugs to repair. For an elf, it was basically a psychic talent—an ability to read the ebb and flow of the patient’s life force to discover what was wrong with them. They then used their own life force to repair.

Which could drain them to the point of death if they went too far.

While I hadn’t seen it happen, my best friend Darby had. She worked at the fae hospital and specialized in poisons, with a secondary specialization in wound repairs. She wouldn’t be there tonight, though. Lugh, my brother, had recently given in to the sexual attraction that had burned between them for nigh on a decade, and the two had headed to Scotland for an extended four-day weekend break. I rather suspected Lugh intended to combine business with pleasure, however, as he’d casually mentioned before they’d left that he’d finally tracked down the dwarf who’d double-crossed us after our return from Ben Nevis’s peak.

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