I wasn’t too sure how I felt about the cameo anymore. I couldn’t quite bear to take it off—right now, it was the only link I had to my dad. But I did tuck it back under the neck of my shirt where it didn’t show.
chapter eight
I shivered once more in the cold of the cave. There was no way I was using that afghan again, so I just tucked my hands under my arms and bit my lip. I’d worried that more students had been hurt, but apparently I’d slept a couple of hours and most of them had gone home before the attack. Kimber and the unwounded human boy, whose name was Brent, grabbed one of the other couches and dragged it closer to where the rest of us sat huddled in our safety-in-numbers group. Jason sank into it gratefully, though the movement made him grimace in pain.
“I thought you healed him,” I said, giving Ethan a puzzled look.
His expression was grim, and I noticed dark circles under his eyes. They seemed to have popped up very recently, since I didn’t think they’d been there before the attack.
“I’ve healed the ribs themselves. The soft tissue around them is probably still bruised as all hell.” He patted his friend on the shoulder. “Sorry, mate. I’m not too good at this yet.”
Jason gave me a sardonic look. “He’s being modest.”
“There’s a new one,” Kimber muttered, but no one cracked a smile.
“Ethan’s a magical prodigy,” Jason continued. “Most healers have to train for years to be able to mend bone, and they have to train so hard they can barely manage any other magic.”
Kimber sniffed disdainfully. “And if Ethan hadn’t wasted his energy showing off earlier, he might have been able to heal the flesh wounds, too.”
“Enough, Kimber!” Ethan snapped, springing to his feet. “How was I supposed to know’”
“Um, guys?” I asked tentatively, partially to head off the argument, partially because I was really worried. “Do you think there are more of them? I mean, what if they come back?” I shivered again, and this time it wasn’t from cold. I looked at the piles of guck that used to be monsters and wondered if any of this could possibly be real.
“I doubt it,” Ethan said, but he didn’t sound too sure. “If there were more of them, they’d have all attacked together.” Pointedly turning his back on Kimber, Ethan turned to the last of the human boys, the first one who’d been injured.
The wound had looked really bad when I’d first seen it, but when Ethan carefully peeled the sweatshirt away, it looked like it had stopped bleeding. Three angry red lines slashed across the boy’s chest, but the cuts weren’t as deep as I’d originally thought. Ethan did another healing spell, but apparently he was really low on juice. The wounds closed, but just barely. It would take very little to rip them open again. When Ethan finished the spell, he swayed on his feet, and for a moment, I thought he was going to pass out. Instead, he lowered himself to the cave floor and sat with his head propped against the end of the couch and his eyes closed.
I glanced up at Kimber, who was still giving her brother a sour look. “Can you finish up the healing?” I asked, and I could tell right away that it hadn’t been a good question to ask.
Her expression turned even more sour. “No.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked away.
O-kay. Guess that was kind of a touchy issue. I looked at the other Fae, the one who might or might not be Kimber’s boyfriend. He shrugged.
“I can’t do enough to make a real difference,” he said. “Even if I do a bit of patchwork, we’ll still have to take them to the hospital.”
“So are we going to have to talk to the police about this?” I asked. Maybe the police would help me, get me out of this mess.
No one met my gaze, and I had the feeling my question had made them all uncomfortable. Then again, I’d seen a startling number of weapons make an appearance when the Spriggans attacked. Perhaps the Student Underground had too much to hide to risk talking to the police.
“That won’t be necessary,” Ethan said. “Spriggans aren’t under police jurisdiction. We’d have to talk to the border patrol, and I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not a good idea at the moment.”
I wasn’t as sure about that as Ethan assumed, but I wasn’t up to making an issue out of it, either. “Then can we get out of here? Please?”
No one had any objection to that idea. Ethan helped Jason to his feet, and Kimber helped the other boy. Everyone seemed capable of walking, though it was impossible to miss the strain on the human boys’ faces.
When we left the cave, I was pretty sure we weren’t headed back the way we had come, but my sense of direction sucks. I’m the kind of person who can get lost in a closet. Turned out I was right for once, though. Ethan didn’t think he had the strength to lift the flagstones again, so instead he took us to a different entrance to the underground tunnels. Conveniently, this one was located in the basement of the Fae boy’s house. I still hadn’t gotten his name, nor that of the second wounded human, but this didn’t really feel like a good opportunity for introductions.
We split up from there, the humans and Kimber’s friend heading to the emergency room and leaving me with Ethan and Kimber. The three of us trudged back to the apartment complex. There was hardly anyone on the streets this late at night. I wondered if monster attacks were commonplace in Avalon. Surely in all her efforts to make me never want to set foot in the place, my mom would have mentioned attacks by nightmarish Fae creatures in the streets of Avalon. But there had to be a reason that the human boy had had a gun and the Fae had all been armed with knives.