Page 55 of Ensnared
“Are you okay?” I mutter into her sweet-smelling hair.
She turns her face into my chest and shakes her head. “This is my first time at a human hospital.”
“What?” I don’t move for fear of jostling her, but I can’t believe that’s true.
Skye lowers her voice to a whisper. “Well, we’re witches. If one of us gets injured, someone just heals them.”
“Can you heal yourself?” I ask, incredulous.
She thinks about it for a moment. “Not on my own, I can’t. I don’t know the right spell, and you saw that I can’t use my power on anything but tech. Besides, healing magic isn’t that easy. I might set the bones wrong, and then I’d be left with a healed injury that a doctor would need to re-break.”
I shudder at the thought. “But could you speed up the process after the bones have been set?”
Skye purses her lips, then asks for my phone. “Can you send my sister a message?”
Typing for her, I write a text for Alice Jones.Skye here. Broke my arm. Do you have a spell to help? Please.
“Yeah, that’ll work,” Skye says. “No need to tell her I won’t actually be usingmymagic, right?”
“Right.”
I send it off, and we go back to waiting. Skye’s name is called at last. She refuses to let go of my arm, so I accompany her to see the doctor. The kind woman with long dreadlocks orders an X-ray, then tells Skye that the injury isn’t severe.
“You were lucky.” She examines the ghostly image of Skye’s bones. “You only broke the ulna, and even that’s a fairly clean break. You’ll be back to normal in a month or two.”
I stay at Skye’s side and hold her left hand as the assistants wrap a pristine white cast around her right arm. Skye’s fingernails sink into the flesh of my palm, but I’d rather have her draw blood than abandon her in that moment. I’m aware of the smiles and smirks directed our way—the nurses probably think we’re a couple—and I wish there was a true foundation for their assumptions.
The moment the sliding glass doors of the ER close behind us, though, Skye drops my hand as though she only now realizes she’s still holding it. “Sorry,” she mutters. “And thanks for staying with me.”
I don’t know how to reply to that. ‘Anytime’ feels like such a platitude. ‘My pleasure’ sounds as though Ilikedseeing her injured.
Instead, I touch her elbow gently. “Come on, let’s grab some breakfast.”
If nothing else, I can make sure Skye gets great waffles and coffee this morning. The drive through Downtown has me itching with annoyance. Compared to some of the cities in the lower states I’ve visited over the years, Anchorage is small, the buildings are low, and the streets broad, but it’s still too enclosed for my tastes. The roar of the traffic is almost deafening to my ears. I wish I remembered to grab some earplugs. The only upside is that there’s a café nearby that does big portions of carbs and good grilled fish. That’s exactly what we order, along with milky coffee for Skye and a black one for me.
“This is so good,” she exclaims after a bite.
I want to tell her we can come here every time we visit Anchorage, but that sounds almost like a date plan. I’m saved from having to answer by the buzz of my phone.
“It’s your sister,” I tell Skye and show her the message.
It’s a photo of a page from an old book. Its edges are browned with age, and the inky script is very neat—something about it tells me that the person who wrote this is no longer around. The letters are too precise. No one writes like that anymore.
“Wow,” Skye whispers, reading the spell. “This is some seriously advanced stuff. Ty should have most of the ingredients in the kitchen, but I don’t know if I’m strong enough yet to do this.”
“I’ll help,” I blurt immediately. “Whatever you need.”
She eyes me with suspicion. “Are you saying this because you feel guilty?”
“No.” I cover her uninjured hand with mine. “I enjoyed what we, uh…” I lower my voice and glance around the café to make sure no one can overhear us. “I won’t let you take too much again, I promise. But I liked what you did and I want to help.”
Skye chews on the inside of her cheek. “Okay. Thanks.”
I leave Skye at the café with her laptop for a couple of hours while I run errands and pick up crates of provisions for the clan. We grow a lot of our food ourselves, especially in the big greenhouses, but staples like flour, salt, sugar, and oil need to be delivered by plane. Ditto for any non-local items like bananas. It’s not easy to plan what an entire village of people might need over the next weeks, and we need to stock up in case the weather turns too nasty to fly.
At the post office, I find that Skye’s sister has sent her the first of the boxes; we won’t be able to take all of them on this flight because the plane’s too small, but we can store them at the hangar on the airfield until our next trip to Anchorage. I also buy Skye a new phone and endure the shop owner’s smirk when I pick out the hot-pink case. I’m half tempted to growl that this is the fucking twenty-first century, and that men shouldn’t be smirked at for choosing pink. But I figure the idiot isn’t worth my time—I’d rather spend it with Skye.
I return to the café and discover she has made friends with the waitress and is chatting happily with her while she types out emails on her laptop using her left hand and the index finger of her right. She grins when she spots me walking toward her, and it hits me straight in the chest.
