It didn’t matter how much better I felt, or how much I had recovered from my actual injuries. The process of getting everyone else to see me as better was going to take so much longer than I wanted it to.
“The wind,” I said, standing and turning so that I was facing her properly. “It was blowing on the other side of the road, but it wasn’t blowing here. Do you know of any cryptid that can control the wind?”
“Sorcerers can,” said Elsie uncertainly. “Not Annie, not yet—she’s mostly all about the fire—but I know it’s a thing they can learn to do.”
Two sorcerers in one city when they weren’t working together was even less likely than two cuckoos in one city. It was still an explanation, and that made it better than nothing. “I’ll ask Evie about it. Maybe she can help.”
“Maybe,” agreed Elsie. She was still radiating wariness. I found myself suddenly glad I couldn’t read her expression as well as I could read her mind. At least her mind was honest. “For right now, how about we don’t run across dark roads at night with nothing but a cellphone, okay? I really don’t want to have to explain to Aunt Evelyn why you’re a smear on the pavement.”
“Right,” I said. “You want to go back?”
“Please,” said Elsie.
Whatever else she might have said was lost as Annie shouted, “A little help down here? This jerk’s heavy and bleeding, and I’m worried about getting an overdose of incubus juice.”
“I get to tell him she called it ‘incubus juice,’” I said. “Just me. No one else. I get to tell him, and then you get to tell me how ridiculous his face looks.”
“I will grant you this great boon because it means he’ll be awake for you to tell,” said Elsie, speeding up. Her concern for her brother was getting larger, sending jagged spikes through her thoughts. She was focusing on it hard enough for me to pick up the reason she’d allowed Annie to risk incubus overdose in the first place: she’d been afraid his injuries might be even worse than they were, and she couldn’t handle the idea of pulling her brother’s body out of the car. I followed her and didn’t say anything. She wasn’t the only one who was worried, but she was maybe the one who had the most right to her concerns.
Annie had managed to wrestle Artie out of his seatbelt and halfway out of the car, and was now just standing there, blood on her hands and forearms, hands hooked under Artie’s arms. He still wasn’t moving, and although he was breathing, he wasn’t conscious enough to be projecting thoughts outside his little bubble of personal space. My blood had clotted over the cuts on his face, stopping the bleeding. That was a small improvement.
“I wish Sam were here,” said Annie, adjusting her stance to avoid dumping Artie on the ground. “He’s stronger than I am.”
“Sam’s the boyfriend,” explained Elsie, moving to help Annie by sliding her arms under Artie’s middle. “He’s a former carnie.”
“There’s no such thing as a former carnie,” said Annie primly. “He’s just temporarily a carnie without a carnival. And forever, unless he decides he wants to go home and take over from his grandmother.”
“Uh-huh,” said Elsie. Working together, the two of them were able to slide Artie out of the driver’s seat and get him into a comfortable carrying position. “Sarah, can you get whatever the two of you are going to want from the car, please? Artie will never let me hear the end of it if we set the thing on fire with his comic books in the backseat or something.”
“Sure,” I said, with an uneasy glance at the unconscious Artie. My fingers twitched with the desire to touch him, just long enough to find the distant shadows of his thoughts and reassure myself that he hadn’t gotten worse. I couldn’t. I’d be in the way, and if he had gotten worse . . .
We needed to get him home. We needed to get him to where he could get help. There was nothing we could do here, except grab our things and go, and all I’d do was slow us down. I climbed into the car through the still-open driver’s-side backdoor, feeling around on the seat for anything Artie might be planning to keep. I found a plastic bag of comics, as predicted; a first aid kit, which could be useful, and