Drina sighed, but rearmed the crossbow just in case and listened blindly for another moment before she heard approaching sirens.
"Fire trucks," she muttered, beginning to shuffle backward on her butt in the direction she thought the stairs were, using one hand and her legs to move herself. The entire time, she continued to point her crossbow blindly in the general direction of where she thought the yard's front gate was.
"Well, they put out the fire," Teddy Brunswick announced wearily, stomping his feet on the mat as he entered his kitchen and began to remove his coat.
Drina glanced to him from the stool Anders had silently set beside the back door for her . . . as far from his own position at the far end of the attached dining room as he could get her without sticking her outside. Her vision was still blurry, but she could see well enough to make out the way the police chief's nose wrinkled as he caught her scent. She also didn't miss how quickly he scooted out of the kitchen and into the dining room, straight across the room to the desk against the far wall, where Anders was busily punching away at Teddy's computer keyboard. He was searching the Internet for suggestions to remove skunk spray from a person.
Sighing miserably, Drina glanced toward the ceiling, wondering how Harper and Stephanie were. They had been placed in one of the two bedrooms upstairs in this tiny, two-floor house of Teddy's. Dawn, Leonora, and Alessandro were tending to them. Tiny had been moved to the second bedroom, with Mirabeau and Edward continuing to oversee his turning.
Teddy had arranged to have them brought here to his home while the fire trucks were still working on putting out the fire at Casey Cottage. It had taken two ambulances and his deputy's car to transport them. Everyone else had gone in the ambulances, and Drina had been the only one in the police car. While she hadn't yet been able to see at that point, she was sure she'd heard the deputy making muffled sounds that could have been either gagging or weeping. Either was possible considering how she smelled, and the fact that the deputy had been in such a rush to get her where he had to take her that he hadn't thought to put anything down on his seats before ushering her quickly into the back of his car. His car could very well carry that horrible smell forever for all she knew. Drina could certainly understand if he'd been sobbing over that.
It turned out the sound of breaking glass they'd heard had been a rock crashing through one of the windows in the second-floor porch. It had been followed by a Molotov cocktail that had shattered just inches from the blanket. The fuel inside had splashed across the blankets, pillows, and Harper and Stephanie. The two had apparently come staggering out of the room in flames.
Edward and Anders had heard their shouts and were the first to reach them, with Teddy, Leonora, and Alessandro hard on their heels. They'd somehow doused the flames eating away at Harper and Stephanie, and then-afraid the fire would move through the entire house-had gotten everyone out, along with as much blood as they could grab.
Drina had been the last one anyone had thought of, which she didn't mind since she wasn't seriously hurt or anything, but the whole thing had been incredibly frustrating and frightening. She'd been worried sick about Stephanie and Harper and as useless as a baby as she dragged herself to the front porch and inside. It was the firemen, charging into the house, who had found her using the door frame to pull herself to her feet in the foyer, shouting frantically for Harper and Stephanie. One of the men had led her through the house to the back door and out into the yard with the others.
"Damage?" Anders's voice made Drina leave her self-pitying thoughts and tune in to their conversation.
"Surprisingly little," Teddy said, and did sound surprised. "Apparently the house is double-walled brick, and that helped prevent the fire from spreading from the porch to the rest of the house. Both the upper porch and the one below it are write-offs, of course, and the hallway between the porch and Elvi and Victor's room took some damage before the firemen arrived. There was a good bit of smoke damage, though," he added with a grimace. "And the fire chief said no one can stay there for a bit due to the possibility of hot ashes starting the fire up again and something about toxic air and residue through the house."
She saw Anders nod acknowledgment.
"Did you call Lucian?" Teddy asked.
"No. He likes full reports, so I waited for your return," Anders said, and then punched more keys and Drina heard a sound she recognized as a computer printer kicking to life.
"What's this?" Teddy asked, and his blurry figure moved over to peer down at whatever printed. "Hmm. Carbolic soap, vinegar, and tomato juice."
She saw his head swing her way and sat up a little straighter. "Is that how to get rid of this damned smell?"
Drina had already removed her clothes and now sat there in the kitchen in the rattiest old sheet Anders could find in Teddy's linen closet. It was almost gauze thin and frayed on the edges, wrapped around her twice or three times and tucked into itself above her br**sts. She still smelled horrendous, though. Along with her clothes, the skunk-or smelly cat as Alessandro called it-had gotten her in the face, neck, hair, and hands when he'd sprayed.
"Yes," Teddy murmured, and then shifted. "I have some vinegar, but she'll need more than I have, and I don't have any tomato juice at all. I can get both at the twenty-four-hour grocery store, but it says here you have to get the carbolic soap at a drugstore and they just recently reduced the hours on what used to be our twenty-four-hour drugstore. It closes at 10 p.m. now."
Drina turned to peer at the clock on the kitchen wall and squinted to read the time. When she saw that it was 10:03, she could have wept. Did she have some rotten luck or what?
"We'll have to wait till it reopens in the morning," Teddy said unhappily.
Drina turned to take in the men's expressions. Neither Teddy nor Anders looked happy at this news, but she was so miserable about it herself, she had little energy left to care about how they were feeling. It wasn't just that she was tired of stinking to high heaven, but Anders insisted, and rightly so, that she should stay in the kitchen and not spread her smell through the rest of Teddy's house. This meant she was stuck right where she was, on the hard vinyl barstool in the kitchen. There would be no creeping upstairs to watch over Harper, no checking on Stephanie, no looking in to see how Tiny's turn was going. She supposed she'd even be sleeping there on the kitchen floor, like the family dog, if she slept at all.
It was not being able to go up to Harper that bothered her the most, though. Drina wanted to be at his side, nursing him back to health as he'd done for her when she'd woken after the accident.
"Well . . ." Her gaze slid back to Teddy at that muttered word to see that he was shuffling sideways toward the doorway to the hall. Avoiding her gaze, he mumbled something about checking on the others, and ducked quickly out of the room.
"Calling Lucian," Anders announced, following quickly.
Drina watched them go, suspecting it would be the last she'd see of them until the drugstore opened in . . . oh, ten or twelve hours was her guess . . . it seemed like a lifetime at that point.
"I don't know what the hell Drina thought she was doing playing with the damned thing."
Those gruff words drifted through Harper's consciousness, the sound of Drina's name, stirring him from sleep.
"She probably didn't know what it was, Teddy," Leonora Cipriano's calm tones said soothingly. "There aren't any in Europe."
"That is because we no would suffer the smelly cat," Alessandro announced firmly.
"No, you'd most likely transport them somewhere else." Teddy sounded irritated. "That's probably how we got the little beasts ourselves. You guys put them all on a boat and sent them over here to North America a couple of hundred years ago."