control it? Will it kill him by accident like the man outside? I suddenly knew every blade Franco was wearing. The only place I couldn’t see was his back, so he might be carrying there, but otherwise I knew them all.
“Your eyes, your eyes, no one told me you were a bruja.” He pressed himself against that wall where the power had thrown him, but it wasn’t the magic keeping him there, it was his fear.
“Are you going to try to stop us from going through the door?” I asked.
He shook his head, pressing himself a little harder against the wall. “Brujas can go where they like.”
“Good to know,” I said.
Claudia held the door for us. Pierette and I walked through, and Franco kept cowering against the wall. He was a wererat, he shouldn’t be afraid of little rats, so what the hell did the brujas do to put that level of fear in him, and why hadn’t Rafael mentioned that the wererats had their own flavor of magic? If he’d just assumed it didn’t matter to me, we needed to talk. If he’d left it out deliberately, we really needed to talk, but later, after he’d defeated Hector and we’d chased down the vampire that was trying to make a move on the rodere. But first—first I’d let a doctor look at my leg and see if I could borrow some clean clothes. I’d have liked to think a shower was possible, but I wasn’t feeling that optimistic.
21
I DON’T KNOW if it was the magic or interacting with Franco, but I was calmer until I saw myself in the mirror that covered half of one wall. It wasn’t Carrie-at-the-prom bad, I only had a little bit of blood on the ends of my hair on one side, and black hair hides it better than strawberry blond does; so does black clothing. If you hadn’t been around a lot of violence, you might not even have known my clothes were covered with blood, but I’d been around a lot of violence and I knew exactly what I was looking at. I could feel the blood starting to dry on my skin and the cloth of my shirt starting to stick wherever the bra didn’t keep it at a distance. It had never occurred to me that sports bras were meant for wicking up sweat and that meant blood was just another liquid to them. Good to know for later.
Claudia waved her hand in front of my face. I blinked and looked at her; it was as if I was experiencing everything in slow motion. “You’re in shock,” she said.
I thought about nodding and finally said, “Yes.”
“I can’t tell how much of the blood I’m smelling is hers,” Pierette said from the other side of me. Had she been there a moment before, or just walked up from somewhere else? Was this just shock?
Claudia called out to someone and Dr. Lillian was there. She’d cut her thick gray hair very short so that the delicate bones of her face were more noticeable. She looked older, but not old, if that made sense, but knowing how much older Rafael was than I’d assumed, I realized for this much to show on her she had to be eighty, or even older. Could she be over a hundred?
She smiled, her gray-blue eyes full of that no-nonsense warmth that the best doctors and nurses seem to have. “How are you feeling, Anita?”
“Fine,” I said, automatically.
The smile faded and she shined a little light in my eyes, made me follow her finger as she moved it. “You are not fine. You are in shock.” She looked up at Claudia. “You said this blood wasn’t hers.”
“Most of it isn’t.”
Doc Lillian sighed. “The curtained areas are full, but we need to see her wound.”
They had three curtained-off areas in the locker room area, like a makeshift version of an emergency room. Someone was screaming and someone else was cursing in Spanish loudly enough to be heard over the screaming. The third curtained area had blood flowing out from under the curtains like the blood of . . . I looked away from the blood. I’d seen enough for one night. The rest of the room looked like a nice locker room at most MMA gyms, except for the big mirror in the one wall, which was usually something you saw more often in a gym that catered to mostly women.
“I need to see your wound, Anita,” Doc Lillian