Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,47

whirled and marched away from me, back to her office. She slammed the door and dropped the blinds, giving me one last glower before her face disappeared.

“You awake, girl?” Clary’s stupid drawl drew my attention to him. He was laying on his back one bed over, a bandage over his eye.

“No, I’m talking in my sleep.” I tilted my head to look at him. “What do you want?”

“That was a cheap shot, blowing me out the back of the building. Hurt a lot too, when I woke up.” He blinked with his one good eye.

“Oh, yeah?” I adopted a disinterested tone. “I’m so not sorry.” It took a minute for him to register what I’d said.

“Yeah, well, I’m not sorry I busted your guts.” He guffawed. “That was the best tussle I’ve had in a long time. Cojones. Girl, you got ‘em.”

“Actually, I don’t.” I turned away from him and stared straight up. “But it doesn’t surprise me that you wouldn’t know that about women.”

He looked at me, blank. “That was a good fight, you hear me? That was good.” He put his hands behind his head and leaned back and smiled like he’d just won a prize.

I was about to tell him just how dumb I thought he was when the door clicked open. “I can assure both of you that what you did in the cafeteria was not good.” Ariadne stood silhouetted in the entry to the medical bay, a paper in her hand and a fury in her eyes that was only a couple degrees shy of what I’d seen from Dr. Perugini. “Thirteen people with minor injuries, Byerly—” she seemed to be flustered, searching for a word, “—soul drained or death touched or whatever, Clary lost an eye, Sienna with a host of broken bones and severe blood loss, and OH, let’s not forget! Over a million dollars in damage to the cafeteria!”

She made it across the medical bay and slapped the folder in her hand down on Clary’s tray. “She’s not even eighteen, Clary! Did it not even occur to you that she might have made a rash decision—a mistake—in attacking Byerly?”

“Well, no,” the big man said. “She was draining him pretty hard. I just wanted to put her down, you know—”

“Rhetorical question, Clary!” She thumped her hand on the tray, stunning him into silence. “Try to pretend you’ve never assaulted anyone before! It’s not your job to break up a cafeteria altercation by bludgeoning the offender to death; it’s your job to pursue the dangerous metahumans we send you after.” She pulled back after delivering the last directly to his face, causing him to flinch. “Get it straight. You’re not a four-year-old. Keep your damned hands to yourself and stop looking for a fight everywhere you go.”

“But—”

“If the next words out of your mouth are anything besides ‘Yes ma’am, I’ll never do anything like it again’ then I will personally have Bastian come down here and deal with you.” She faded. “He wanted to, desperately.” Clary shrank away, almost seeming to recede into the bed.

I snorted and instantly regretted it. Ariadne turned her withering stare on me. “Don’t get me started on you.”

I coughed and tried to look contrite. “I’m sorry. I...overreacted when Scott put his hand on me.”

She continued to stare for a second longer then shook her head in disbelief. “Overreacted? You nearly killed him. How is that an overreaction?”

I thought about it for a moment and shrugged. “Because it sounds better than the way you put it. He wanted to see what I could do in the worst way. So I showed him. In the worst—”

She let out a noise of disgust. “Is that how you’re going to operate if we train you to be an agent?”

Clary looked up in surprise. “You’re gonna make her an agent?”

“Shut up,” Ariadne spat at him and whipped her head back around to me. “You wrecked the cafeteria and blew up the kitchen. You could have killed somebody.”

“Um,” I shook my head, “I believe that the persons most likely to have gotten killed today were myself and Byerly, in that order.”

“What about me?” Clary’s face was puckered, as though he were insulted by what I said.

“You don’t count.” I looked to Ariadne, who was steaming. “He was trying to kill me! I just repaid the favor.” I looked down. “If it’s going to be a...um...an insurmountable obstacle—”

“It’s not an insurmountable anything.” Ariadne’s withering stare turned to a simmer. “But if this is what we can