Total pages in book: 40
Estimated words: 38711 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 129(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 38711 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 129(@300wpm)
“And you!”
The auka blinked.
“You’re not even a nechist. You’re a forest spirit. Why are you here? Why are any of you here?”
The auka waved at him again.
“At least have the decency to act contrite.”
He finally rounded the tree. An unconscious teenager hugged the trunk, curled into a fetal ball. Judging by the dusting of snow on his jacket, he had been there a while. A dark red stain spread over his jeans—something had either bitten or stabbed his thigh. Someone had stuck a Christmas wreath, no doubt stolen off some door, onto his head and shoved a little artificial Christmas twig with glitter and bright plastic berries into his exposed left ear. Tinsel wrapped his jacket, binding him to the tree. A small chunk of cookie stuck out from between his lips, smudged with glitter.
“Where did you get this human?”
Nobody answered.
He slapped his hand over his twitching eye, pulled the shiny twig out of the boy’s ear, plucked the cookie out of his mouth, tossed the wreath aside, grabbed him by the shoulder, and shook him.
“Hey kid?”
The boy’s eyelashes fluttered. He uncurled a little and Roman glimpsed a small black puppy in the curve of his body.
“You can’t stay here,” Roman told him. “It’s dangerous for you here.”
The kid’s lips moved. A little blood dripped onto his chin. He struggled to say something.
Roman crouched by him.
“Sanctuary,” the kid whispered.
“What?”
“Sanctuary…”
“Where do you think you are? Does this look like a Christian church to you? Do you see a priest’s collar on my neck?”
The kid’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he went limp.
Damn it.
Logs crackled in the fire, sending an occasional burst of orange sparks into the air. Warmth permeated the house.
Roman set the squirt bottle with saline aside and gulped his coffee. It was bitter and hot. He’d gotten used to drinking it black while in the service, because cream and sugar had been scarce, and he’d never lost the habit.
The kid lay on a pad of blankets in front of the fireplace with a towel under his injured leg. Roman had cut his jeans to expose the wound, and the laceration glistened with red, like an angry mouth. Something had slashed the kid’s thigh, cutting a four-inch gap through the muscle. A pretty deep cut, too. A couple of inches to the left, and he would’ve bled out. His face wasn’t too bad. Someone had punched him in the mouth, but all of his teeth were still there.
Roman slipped latex gloves on—worth their weight in gold, literally, since rubber was pricy post-Shift—pulled the suture needle from its boiling water bath with needle drivers and set about threading it.
The kid looked about fifteen, dark hair, pale skin, about five foot ten or so. Slight build. Not from starvation, but from that typical thinness adolescents get when they grow six inches in one summer. He hadn’t had enough time to fill out.
His clothes said someone took good care of him. His jeans didn’t show much wear, his sweatshirt was relatively clean, and he wore Mahrous boots. Most boots were now custom-made by small shops, but in Atlanta, Mahrous Bootmakers stood above the rest. A good pair of their boots would last years, and they came with a hefty price tag. Only a loving parent would invest that much money in something an adolescent might outgrow in a few months.
All in all, nothing stood out. Just your regular, typical kid, probably from a better part of the city. Didn’t look familiar.
The little black puppy curled tightly against the boy’s body, looking like an oversized doughnut of black fur. The puppy was female, probably a black German Shepherd, and checking her over didn’t reveal any obvious injuries. As soon as he’d set the puppy back down, she’d scrambled back to the boy and huddled against him.
Smoke swirled on the couch and congealed into Kor. The korgorusha twitched his long, tufted ears, and shifted his weight, resting his big body on his favorite blue pillow. His golden eyes shone with a soft light, half-magic, half-glow borrowed from the fire.
“Are we about to have visitors?”
The korgorusha purred. Vicious claws slid out of his soft black paws, pierced the pillow, and withdrew.
Figured.
Roman pulled the edges of the wound closed and made his first stitch. He’d have to wait until the rest of his misfit squad made it in for a detailed report.
At least the cut was nice and even. No ragged edges to trim.
The kid hadn’t asked for shelter. He hadn’t said, “Help!” or “I’m hurt.” No, he’d said, “Sanctuary.” That meant two things. First, the kid knew who Roman was and what he did for a living, and second, he was being chased.
Roman rolled his wrist, taking care to pierce the skin carefully. The fact that he didn’t recognize the kid meant nothing. There were roughly 10,000 Slavic neopagans in Atlanta and four times that number of other pagan religion practitioners, and that wasn’t counting people of Slavic descent and their friends and relatives who didn’t actively worship but would look for magic solutions when trouble came clawing at their door. He couldn’t possibly know everyone.