Page 92 of The SnowFang Storm

“I noticed Maya arrived with two large women,” he said.

“You notice everything, Hamid.”

“Yes, ma’am. Should we call the police?”

I spit some blood into my towel. All my teeth seemed to be firmly attached. And the vision in my left eye had come back, even if I could barely see through the eyelid. “No. Broke one of their arms. Two on one.”

“Then should we call a lawyer?”

“Their move, as far as I’m concerned. I want to go home.” My hands were shaking. I felt oddly empty. All the rage that had been pushing up inside me was gone now.

I’d been so close with those humans. I’d been so close for so long I hadn’t even realized it, and it had almost—

Hamid pulled into traffic.

“Home is the other way.”

“You need a doctor.”

“I’m fine,” I said, although the buttery cream leather of the backseat had started to resemble a surgical suite. I pushed the towel into my head while pinching my eyebrow with my other hand. “I want to go home.”

“I know you’re shaken, but you need stitches first.”

Yeah, I was shaken for an entirely different reason than he thought.

Hamid took me to a shiny building (all buildings in New York seemed to be shiny, unless they were grubby), into an underground garage, and then into an elevator up to one of the top floors. Ushered through silent, discrete hallways into a suite walled off with frosted glass.

A waiting room. Quiet, empty, and staffed by a single human: a man in a trim suit who manned the only desk. Hamid spoke quietly to him while I tried to minimize dripping blood on the floor. Within a few minutes I was ushered by a composed nurse into an exam room and given the usual little paper dress.

So this was how the ultra-rich got their medical care: boutique doctors with small client bases and dealing in ultra-discrete bespoke service. Although the paper dress and paper over the exam table were still the same.

The doctor was about fifty, and exactly what I’d have expected: gray haired, good looking, fit, groomed, and patronizing. Nothing like the doctors and nurses I’d known back home. In Alaska, we’d been a solid two hour flight from the nearest medical clinic, and in Montana, it’d been sixty miles. The handful of times I’d been in anything resembling a doctor’s office, it had always been crowded, miserable, and frightening, reeking of long illness and open, infected sores. The doctors and nurses, even when they did manage to smile, always smelled of hopelessness and despair.

His nurse wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm while he turned his attention to the cut on my scalp and put me through the usual paces to make sure I wasn’t concussed. As he squeezed at the edges of the gash over my eyebrow, he inquired, “How did this happen?”

“Sparring. Another member took exception to my opinion on something.”

“That’s not one I hear too often. Should we call the police?”

“It was a stupid meet-me-at-the-monkey-bars brawl.”

X-rays revealed a small broken bone in my hand. But my jaw wasn’t broken, my teeth were in place, and while I had welts and indents from smashing into the lockers and dials, they were superficial injuries that would just hurt like hell in the morning. Have a drink and sleep it off. A tiny line of four stitches in my eyebrow, two stitches in my scalp, some sacrificed red hair, and I was done.

If only it was that simple.

As I carefully stretched my rashguard’s neckhole over my head, my phone buzzed.

[Maya] >> You got your wish. They want to meet you.

My wish? Maya was confused. Time for the passive-aggressive party games to stop.

I’d been so angry and so full of frustration for so long, I’d grown numb to it.

But right now, I needed that anger.

Winter [Maya] >> This was THEIR offer and THEIR wish. If they want any chance of it coming true, a proper Messenger needs to be at my den before dusk. I hope Thessa understands what I mean by “proper” Messenger, or if you lot have been the deluded kings of this concrete maggot pile too long.

Little dots dancing on the screen said she spent the next thirty minutes trying to formulate a response.

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