Page 61 of Whispered Warnings: Part One

“She is,” Raiden teases with a smirk, and I smack his stomach with the back of my hand, making him laugh.

Neera laughs again, “Thank fuck. Here’s my number, give me a text, and we will sort something out. There is only one bar in town, but it’s good.”

I take the piece of paper off her, and slip it into my jeans pocket, “Sounds good. My schedule is pretty hectic and I’m not just saying that.”

Her eyebrows draw in, “You a part of SID too?”

I nod, “Yeah, I’m on their team.” I reply, pointing at a still smiling Raiden. “It’s a new development.”

“That’s awesome,” she replies.

We chat a bit more while she makes our drinks, and by the time she is done and we are walking out, I know that we will probably make great friends. So long as we can both find the time to meet up. It turns out that the coffee shop isn’t her only job. She has a couple of others in town as well. I get the feeling that she likes to keep busy. My intuition was tingling the longer that we were talking, although I don’t know enough about her yet to understand why.

“Where to now?” I ask as I sip my drink.

“You said that you wanted to check out the apothecary?” Raiden asks.

I nod, “Yes, please. All of my usual stuff is obviously at my house.”

He looks confused as he asks, “What sort of things did you use?”

“I learned some stuff from Sully, and it was mostly simple stuff, things to help with pain and to help me heal quicker. Oh, and I make his awesome mix that I like to burn, that smells spectacular.”

“You needed the pain relief a lot?” he asks.

I nod, “Yeah. HID didn’t like to provide me with medical assistance if it wasn’t life or death, and even then, they wouldbitch about it. It was just less of a hassle for me to take care of it at home. Plus, Sully knew some really good recipes.”

“How come you only stuck three bandaids over the slice from the shifter then?” Raiden asks although it’s clear from the tension in his body that he doesn’t like that I needed the pain relief so much.

“I ran out of the things I needed to make the healing one, and I knew that it wasn’t going to be a problem anyway, not like it is for normal humans. I was tired,” I shrug, “bandaids seemed like a good idea at the time.”

He frowns, “You make it sound like you had been bitten by a shifter before.”

I make the split-second decision, to be honest with him instead of brushing it off like I usually would. “I ran with Dimitri. It wasn’t safe. Shit happens.”

“Fuck, yeah. I keep forgetting that you were with him,” Raiden replies. His eyes dart to mine, “Shit, does that mean that he knows that the bites don’t affect you? That he knows you are something more?”

“That is a two-pronged question, and both have different answers. Does he know that shifter bites don’t affect me? I’m not sure; there were times when he thought I might have been bitten, and I played it off as a close call, but I don’t know if he was suspicious or not. If he was though he never said anything. So, although he may be suspicious that something wasn’t quite right, he doesn’t have any proof of that being the case. The second question is even more tricky to answer. He doesn’t know that I’m something more because I didn’t know. I have also shared more with you guys about how weird I am than I did him.”

“He never saw anything?” Raiden asks, being careful about how he phrases it since we are out in public and should probablybe careful about what we say. I am assuming that he is referring to me dying.

I shake my head, “No.”

I don’t elaborate because that would mean admitting that I had died before, and then we would have to get into how many times, and well, that whole conversation would be complicated and horrifying. I also don’t want to lie outright and say that when I died in front of them, that was the first time. I’m actually surprised that none of them have asked me that yet, although a lot has happened since then, so I think that’s helped to distract them from asking.

I can see the wheels in Raiden’s head begin to start turning as his brain tries to connect the dots to ask the question that I don’t want to answer. Fortunately for me, the apothecary that I wanted to go into is just up ahead, and I grab his hand again, pulling him toward it.

“You’re going to have to tell me if there is a scent that you guys don’t like,” I start, trying to distract him and then effectively distracting myself when I add, “Shit, you will have to tell if I pick up anything that is deadly to you guys. It would be just my luck if I accidentally killed one of you.”

Raiden chuckles as he focuses on my random questions and not our previous conversation.

“Don’t worry, I won’t let you pick up anything that could harm us, although it's really unlikely that they sell anything here that could do that. I have no idea what scents the guys like. Maybe you should just get the stuff that you usually get, and I’m sure they will let you know if they don’t like something.” He smiles, “To be honest, it's River that you need to worry about with scents, his nose is incredibly sensitive, even when he’s in human form.”

I nod as I grab an adorable wicker basket from by the door, “Okay, I can just get him to sniff everything before I use it.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” Raiden replies, watching curiously as I start to put things in my basket.

Sully always drilled into me the importance of knowing what it is that I am using and not using anything that’s not on the list that he has given me. So, even though there are all of these bottles and boxes of interesting looking things, I only get what I know. It’s a good job that I now have my black card because this is going to cost a lot of money. I usually stick to buying an ingredient when I get a paycheck or getting samples when I can, which helps to keep the cost down. This is probably the first chance I have had to buy everything at once, and just like with the clothes, it is a nice feeling.

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