Page 55 of Lucky or Knot

Hopefully only I caught the quaver in his voice, the faint crack, the signs of weakness. Everyone else would probably think it was fearofme, rather thanforme, but I knew better, and a horrible suspicion started to slither up my throat from my churning gut and choke me.

Raven raised his voice again, calling out, “If you crowd him, which one of you morons wants to explain to Arnold that I fell down a stairwell and went splat? Give him your word he can go. And then he’ll put me down and hand me over, and you won’t have to.”

I could have roared—or wept.

I’d been right. Raven was trying to trade the very last of his currency as something valuable to Cunningham for a chance at my survival.

No. Not a fucking chance in hell, in any sense of the word.

Fell down a stairwell and went splat.

Less than twenty stories to the bottom. Splat, indeed, for a normal human. Maybe for a more durable fairy, too, although I knew even regular people sometimes survived falls like that under freak circumstances.

But Iwasa freak circumstance, wasn’t I? Mostly mortal flesh—but with the supernatural strength and healing magic that ran through my every nerve and vein and bone and cell, a lot less mortal than most people.

Death might be more pleasant than the agony of healing a couple of hundred broken bones and a dozen-odd ruptured internal organs.

On the other hand, I’d promised Raven he wouldn’t spend one more night with that piece of shit Cunningham. I’d promised I’d protect him.

Fuck it. Splat it had to be.

I bunched up my muscles, crouched, and leapt, my spring through the air high enough and graceful enough to do any tiger proud, whirling up into the center of the stairwell, flailing like Wile E. Coyote—and then plummeting straight down, as all of the security team shouted and panicked, their shocked faces and the railings and the lights on the walls nothing but blurs as we fell.

In the couple of seconds of freefall, I yanked Raven around, getting one glimpse of his horrified face as I pulled him over my shoulder and clutched him to my chest.

Air whistled by my ears, I banged a foot into a railing, and then…

Splat. Or more of a deafening thud and a crunch, really.

The impact knocked the wind out of me first, and my head hit and everything went black, and the last things I heard before unconsciousness took me were Raven’s scream and the snapping of my spine.

Searing, pounding agony.

And then nothing.

Chapter 18

The bliss of unconsciousness didn’t last nearly as long as I would’ve liked.

So much pain, everything, everywhere, the instant my brain woke up again, and I wanted to curl in and die and tuck it into my center and smother it, but I couldn’t move a single splatted muscle.

My eyelids lifted for a second. Raven, his hair hanging down over me, his black eyes so wide the whites were showing, tears falling like crystal jewels.

He was yelling into my face, sobbing, braced on my chest.

Not hurt.

Not dead. I’d kept him on top of me, and I’d broken his fall. A human might still have been badly hurt, but the fae were pretty resilient by comparison.

Thank the gods. The pain didn’t stop, but I remembered why I’d welcomed it.

Raven. The pain crested as my bones started to knit, my organs repairing themselves, my lungs finally sucking in a bubbling, labored, choking breath of air.

I was gargling my own blood, fucking gross, and I managed to turn my head and cough it out, wracking agony in my chest as I did.

No sensation from my legs, because of that broken spine, but the stabbing torment in my vertebrae suggested that it’d started to heal.

Not quickly enough, because they’d be following. Chasing us down the stairs. Precious seconds lost to this bullshit.

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