My gaze skimmed his body again. Some of those wounds looked pretty deep.
"I’m fine, Risa," he said softly. "Go find your water. I’m sure your friends will appreciate the effort."
In other words, I stank. I snorted softly and headed for the café door. It only took me a couple of minutes to find the bathroom and I quickly stripped off, rolling up my T-shirt and using it to wash off the worst of the gore.
Thankfully, the coat had protected my sweater, even if the left sleeve had been shredded by the shifter’s claws. But my jeans were unsalvageable. I dumped them in the waste bin along with my undies, then washed my hands and headed out, suddenly glad that my sweater was long enough to cover my butt. Although the cold night air teased me in unmentionable ways that had my pulse rate humming happily.
Or maybe that was a result of the brief look Azriel gave me as I walked back into the room. Intense didn’t even begin to describe it. And though it was a weight I felt deep inside, I wasn’t entirely sure just exactly what it meant. Frowning, I walked around the other side of the café counter to raid the cookie jar, picking out a huge chocolate chip one as well as a macadamia and white chocolate.
"So," I said, meeting his gaze again, a little relieved that the intensity had been replaced by his more normal inscrutability. "How will we know if whoever has stolen the key has used it?"
"We will feel it."
"We? As in, you and I, or everyone who lives in this world and the next?"
"Those who are connected to the fields or who can walk them will feel it. That’s how we became aware of the keys first being tested on the portals."
I frowned. "I didn’t feel anything when they did that."
He shrugged. "It might have been nothing more than a sense of unease that you weren’t able to place."
Maybe. And maybe he was overestimating my abilities. "These people might not have stolen the key to force the portals closed."
"No." Grimness briefly flickered through his expression before he caught himself. "And I do not know what will happen should the gates be eternally forced open. None of us do."
"How could it be worse than that whole human-race-becoming-zombies scenario?"
"That," he said, and this time the grimness did more than flicker, "would be a walk in the park compared to the hordes of hell being unleashed."