cops glanced at each other, and even as foggy as I was, I could see the moment they dismissed the whole thing as a magical crime that was beyond their pay grade, and probably outside their caring.
Jason shuddered and shook his head. “That sucks so much. And you look like hell. Let’s get you back downtown, get a doctor to look at your head. It’s bleeding pretty good.”
That was when Iris arrived.
She was wearing another of her black pantsuits, but this one made her look every bit the forbidding matriarch that I’d initially expected her to be. Or maybe it was just the way she was carrying herself, back straight and muscles tense, mouth set in a firm line.
That changed when she caught sight of me.
“Sage,” she gasped, stepping into the kitchen, where Jason and his partner were trying to coax me onto a gurney. “Honey, what happened?”
One of the cops, who was crouched over David’s body, looked up at her in shock. “Mrs. McKinley?”
She glanced his way, but didn’t stop to talk. Instead, she rushed to my side, hands outstretched, but pulled up short before touching me. “Oh honey, you’re black and blue everywhere. Are you—I want to hug you, but I can’t—”
“He’ll be okay, ma’am,” Gideon assured her from my side.
In that moment, Iris proved to be the most adaptable person I’d ever met. She looked up at Gideon, paused for a mere fraction of a second at the realization that he was alive, then threw her arms around him. “Thank goodness you’re here, Gideon.”
He paused, eyes widening a bit, before returning the hug. “Of course I’m here. Can’t think of a single place I’d rather be.”
Once again, Jason gave me a gentle nudge in the direction of the gurney, but I stubbornly didn’t move. “Fluke,” I said to Gideon and Iris, and felt sick that I’d left him alone in the other room for so long, without even mentioning him to anyone. What the hell kind of mage was I, letting my familiar go so long without treatment? “She hit him with a baseball bat, and he’s hurt.”
Iris looked down at me, then back up at Gideon. “You go with Sage to the hospital, dear. I’ll get someone here to take care of Fluke, and then bring along anything you need as soon as possible.”
“Not leaving without Fluke,” I insisted, but she gave me an imperious glare, that . . . was actually pretty intimidating. I swallowed, but dammit, Fluke was—
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not doing him any good hurting yourself even more. I promise you; he’ll be fine.”
As though to prove her right, the fox himself limped into the room right then. My shoulders went slack out of sheer relief, unconsciously stretching a hand out in his direction. He was moving. He was okay. He made a tiny high whine with every step, but considering he was able to get onto three out of four feet and move, he was probably in better shape than me.
I finally let myself be helped onto the gurney, continuing to hold my hand out to Fluke as I got close enough. “You go with Grandma, okay, buddy? She’ll make sure you’re okay.”
Iris gave a tiny sniffle at being called grandma, even if I was talking to Fluke. “We’ll join you in the hospital before you know it,” she told me, softly stroking Fluke’s head. “You just focus on being okay, sweetheart. You’re my favorite grandson; you’ve got to get better.”
This time when Jason loaded me into the ambulance, Gideon was at my side.
“No wonder you didn’t seem interested in the quaesitor’s flirting,” Jason whispered to me. Then he seemed to recall that he’d just seen that very man dead on the floor of my kitchen, and went quiet, biting his lip.
I managed to reach out for Gideon’s hand, and he took it and squeezed.
“Damn right he wasn’t interested in that flirty Aureum bastard,” Gideon agreed. “He’s spoken for. And I’m sorry I wasn’t there last night. That’s never going to happen again. I’m here now.”
By the time Iris and Fluke joined us in the hospital, Fluke’s leg in a bright yellow cast, she had somehow procured a legal identity for Gideon.
“It’s Marsh, not Knight,” he told her, looking confusedly at the birth certificate that named him Gideon Knight and said he had been born in nineteen-seventy-nine.
She shrugged it off. “It’s Knight now, dear. I didn’t know, and we needed it done immediately. Besides,”—she looked around, making sure there were no