Vivian wanted to talk to Reg too. Not to thank her, maybe, but she wanted to have a word with Reg, and not in front of the two men she didn’t know. She hung around, waiting for the others to disperse so that she could have a word with Reg alone, but Davyn and Damon weren’t about to leave her side anytime soon.
“I’m sorry,” Damon apologized, “I didn’t mean to cause you any trouble… but I couldn’t think of any other way to let anyone know that there were still people inside. I didn’t even think I’d be able to reach you when we weren’t in the same room. I haven’t been able to cast a vision that far before.”
“Maybe it was desperation,” Davyn suggested. “You had a lot more motivation to get her the message than you normally would have. I hear that when soldiers start practicing with live grenades instead of duds, they can throw them twice as far.”
“Motivation,” Damon agreed, smiling. “Well, I certainly had that!”
He looked sunburned. His eyes were very red and swollen, and he was still coughing occasionally, a paramedic watching him from a distance away, not liking the fact that he wouldn’t agree to be kept under observation at the hospital for the rest of the day. Reg remembered the heat of the fire, and worse, the acrid smoke that had burned all the way into her lungs and made her eyes stream with tears. She’d hardly been able to keep them open, the smoke stung so much.
“Are you sure you shouldn’t go to the hospital for a while? Just to make sure you’re okay?”
“I’m not going to the hospital.” Damon coughed into his fist. “I’m just fine. A little irritation, that’s all.”
“I think it’s more than that.”
Damon eyed her but didn’t argue. He knew that she was psychic. She could sense much of what he was feeling. And it would be a lie for him to tell her that he wasn’t suffering more than he would like to admit.
“Maybe we should both go home,” Reg offered. “Do you want to come over? We could keep an eye on each other.”
Vivian was still hovering within earshot, and she looked irritated by the offer. She clearly had been hoping to get Reg’s attention herself.
But Damon’s health was more important. Vivian might be the one who kept narrowly escaping death, but she was escaping it and, as her parents had, Reg could only assume that she would continue to come out of the dreadful accidents unharmed. Damon might not be so lucky. And if it were Vivian’s fault that the building had blown up to begin with…
Maybe Reg didn’t want Vivian hanging around her house too much. She didn’t want to make her own home a target for something disastrous to happen.
“I don’t think either one of you is well enough to drive,” Davyn pointed out.
Reg looked at Damon. She was okay to drive. But he was looking pretty grim. With his bloodshot eyes and lingering cough, he might be too distracted or unwell to drive.
“You are looking pretty tired,” Damon agreed, looking back at Reg.
“I’m just tired, though. A few minutes sitting here, and I’ll be just fine.”
Davyn shook his head. “I don’t want either of you driving. I’ll give you a ride home. Especially if you’re both going to go to Reg’s. You can pick up your cars tomorrow.”
“They’ll get ticketed or towed.”
“Then you pay it and appeal it after. It isn’t like you don’t have good reason for leaving your vehicles here overnight. No one can argue that you didn’t have reason.”
“Damon maybe,” Reg said. “He can say that he was injured when he played hero. I can’t exactly go to court and testify that I was too tired because I was psychically holding back the fire.”
“Well, you could,” Damon teased. “But they probably wouldn’t believe you.”
“Why don’t you just shut up?” Reg returned good-naturedly.
In the end, they both let Davyn talk them into it. While they were both pretending to be feeling better than they actually were, neither could really deny it for long.
Reg fell asleep in the car on the way back to her house. Damon was looking pretty uncomfortable when they got out of the car.
“What is it?” Reg asked.
“I’m just wondering if maybe I could get a Tylenol.”
“Yeah. Are those burns bad?”
“I’m not burned. Just… a little warm.”
“You’re burned.”
The two of them shuffled down the pathway toward the cottage. “Why don’t you let me heal you? I can do a little bit…”
“You’re already drained. Just a Tylenol. I’ll be fine.”
“Or I could help,” Davyn offered. “I haven’t just been trying to put out a raging inferno with my powers. They are still intact.”
“You should help Reg,” Damon suggested. “You could give her a little bit more energy, couldn’t you? Help her to recover faster?”
“I could do both, I suppose.”
Reg let them into her cottage. It still caused her a little anxiety to allow any warlocks over her threshold, but neither of them had ever harmed or threatened her. Unlike Corvin, they were not likely to in the future. But she was still a little nervous whenever she let someone into her home. The wards were there to protect her against anyone with harmful intentions, but there were ways to bypass the wards.
She looked around the cottage. Nothing happened. She thought about how Sarah had showed her to detect whether there was a magic spell on the cookie, and to look around her kitchen and house with eyes that could see the spells and protections that had been placed there. She tried to do the same with her own home. It wasn’t just familiar walls and furnishings. There was much more to it than that. Sarah had gone to considerable trouble to make sure it was a place that would be welcoming to Reg and her clients, and would keep her safe from harm.
What about Vivian? If she invited Vivian in yet again, would the protections that Sarah had set up on her own house and Reg’s keep her safe? Or would Vivian’s bad luck overpower everything else?
Looking around with new eyes, Reg could see the bright aura around several everyday items throughout the house. Around her doorknob and over the top of the doorway. Her stove. The hearth, as Sarah had called hers. In the living room area, Reg had left the crystal ball out on the coffee table, and there was a strong glow around it. Reg glanced around for more magical objects.
Starlight heard the door and company and left the bedroom where he was sleeping or watching out the window to meow at her and demand to be fed. Reg blinked her eyes as he walked toward her. His light was dazzling. The star between his eyes was like a headlight. Reg turned away and took a few breaths, consciously releasing her magical vision. When she looked back at Starlight, he looked just as he usually did. Just a regular black and white tuxedo cat. Her friend. The same one who cuddled up with her in the night when she was having nightmares.
It was no wonder, given how bright he had appeared to her, that other magical races commented on how powerful he was. How could his magic be that strong, and yet he still looked and acted just like a regular cat? And how had Norma Jean been able to cast such a strong spell over him?
“Everything okay, Reg?” Davyn asked. “Do you want me to give you an energy boost first?”
“No.” Reg switched her attention back to her guests. “Do what you can for Damon first. He’s in pain. I’m just tired. I can manage. Go to sleep if I have to.”
“It’s not that bad,” Damon objected.
“Do him first,” Reg repeated.
Davyn nodded, and he motioned for Damon to sit down on the wicker furniture. The two of them talked as Reg went to the fridge to find something for Starlight to eat, and shredded the meat from some leftover ribs into a bowl.
When she looked back at them, Damon seemed more at ease. More like himself. And his skin wasn’t quite so red.
“That’s better,” Reg observed.
Damon nodded. “I told you it wasn’t bad, just a little bit… warm.”
“Scorched.”
“Not scorched. Scorched is black. I just felt a little… flushed. Hardly anything.”
Reg knew better. But she let it go. Let Damon have his ego. She looked over at Davyn. “And his lungs? Did you…”
“Yes,” Davyn agreed. “I think he’s going to be okay.”
“Good. We’ll hang out for the rest of the day. Then… he’ll be fine tomorrow.”
She didn’t know whether she ought to make some kind of clarification about sleeping arrangements. She would send Damon home before she went to sleep. Or else Damon would sleep on the prickly wicker couch. Reg wasn’t inviting him into her bed.
But she worried that trying to explain this would just result in Damon having hurt feelings and Davyn thinking that she was protesting too much and must therefore be covering up her true feelings. So she let it go. Davyn could think what he liked. Reg didn’t owe him any explanation.
But she was uncomfortable with him thinking that she was pursuing relationships with both Corvin and Damon at the same time.
Which was not what she was doing.
Not at all.
When Davyn had finished, Damon had conked out on the couch. Davyn shook his head in amusement.
“I don’t know if you’ll be able to get him out of here tonight. Sleep is probably the best thing for him right now, while the body does its thing and continues to work on the healing process. But that means that you’re not going to have the use of your couch for a while, and you’ll have to put up with having a guest around.”
“It’s okay. I think I’m probably just going to go straight to bed anyway. In the morning, we can sort things out and he can head home. I’m sure he’ll be feeling a lot better by then.”
“I’m sure he will,” Davyn agreed. “Now you remember… I don’t want you practicing any firecasting while I’m not here.”
“I can still put heat into him, help him to feel better that way.”
“Yes… you can still do that, as long as you don’t kindle fire. But you probably don’t need to. Your energy is going to be at a premium for the next few days. I don’t think you want to use it up on healing someone else. He’s a tough guy. And I’ve done quite a bit for him.”
Reg didn’t make a comment one way or the other. “Well… thank you for looking after both of us today. I guess you probably didn’t figure on that. It was nice of you to take the time, and to drive us here, do the healing, all of that. Above and beyond.”
“Not at all. Happy to help out a couple of… members of my community.”
Reg nodded. “Okay. I’m going to hit the sack, so we’ll talk tomorrow.”
Davyn took the hint and made his way to the door.
Reg was feeling quite a bit better. Not completely up to par, but he had given her enough strength that she could at least walk around the house without feeling like she needed a forklift to get her from one place to the other.
She stood there after Davyn was gone, looking at Damon snoring in her living room. She didn’t really want to go straight to bed. Damon was taken care of for the night, but she knew that if she lay down to go to sleep, she would just end up tossing and turning, unable to get any sleep until the early hours of the morning. Better to do other things until her body was ready for sleep.
She grabbed a small tub of ice cream out of the freezer. It wasn’t the fudgy chocolate and caramel swirl that she had been planning on before the fire had broken out, but it would have to do. She took it with her to the bedroom and lay down on the bed. She put her phone in front of her and checked out her latest video subscriptions. Starlight followed her into the bedroom and watched her, head cocked to the side at her strange behavior.
“I know, I know, no ice cream in the bedroom,” Reg told him. “But I’m going to have to break the rule tonight. I can’t exactly sit in the living room.”
Of course, she could eat it at her kitchen table, which she never actually used, or she could sit in one of the chairs in the living room, but sitting there watching Damon sleep seemed a little creepy. She wanted to relax, and that meant lying down in the bedroom. All of the foster moms who had told her no food in the bedroom were just going to have to deal with it.
Reg tapped through the videos on her phone. There was one in the sponsored videos sidebar that was about discoveries in Egyptian tombs. Reg frowned. She supposed it was because she had previously searched for information on Bastet. That was why the app was offering something so different from what she usually watched.