Playing with Fire: A Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count)(11)

Puck did both. “Oh.”

“You’re not going to tell them you inhaled a lungful of gorgon dust, Miss Gardener?” Chief Quinn murmured in my ear.

I screamed, grabbed the nearest object, which proved to be the IV stand, and turned to bludgeon the police chief to death with it. The catheter ripped out of my arm. The man dared to back away, and infuriated over how badly he had startled me, I pursued him while treating the IV stand like it was a giant club. “I’ll kill you,” I hissed.

Professor Yale sighed. “Miss Gardener, please don’t use your medical equipment as a weapon.”

Chief Quinn laughed and disarmed me without breaking a sweat. “You’re dripping blood all over the floor.”

“And whose fault is that?” Taking hold of the IV stand, I strained in my effort to liberate it from him. “What’s wrong with you, sneaking up on me like that?”

“I wanted to confirm you’d made it through revival without incident.”

I gave up trying to reclaim the IV stand and clapped my hand over my bleeding arm. Snarling a few choice curses, I returned to the examination table and hopped up on it. “Who let him in here, Professor Yale?”

“He activated the seal and mask, Miss Gardener. He’s fully within his rights to be here. Perfect timing, Chief Quinn. Perhaps you can impress upon my class the severity of this lesson.”

“In ten words or less, please,” I muttered.

“A city full of dead people.”

Everyone in the room froze, and I had to give the man credit; he’d gotten the point across all right. “That’s one way to put it.”

“Miss Gardener, on behalf of everyone at my station, thank you for detonating the bomb in your apartment rather than at your workplace. We’re very appreciative. Professor, are you almost finished with her? I need to ask her a few questions. I even helpfully removed her IV for you. I also brought her some clothing, which I left at the nurse’s station.” Chief Quinn set the IV stand down beside the examination table and shook my former professor’s hand. “Thank you for coming in to help.”

“Of course. Don’t tell Miss Gardener this, but she was a very promising student once she figured out how to think on her feet. You can’t take her out of this ward, but I’ll remove my students so you can have some privacy. Everybody out. Bailey, put a bandage on your arm for now unless you think you’re going to bleed to death. I’ll ask a nurse to come by later and reinsert the catheter.”

I forced a smile when I wanted to scowl at the thought of having the IV replaced. “Thank you, Professor Yale.”

“Let’s try to avoid a next time, all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he herded his students out of the room, leaving me with Chief Quinn.

Every time I saw him in his blue uniform, I wanted to jump him. Flushing, I turned my head so I wouldn’t have to admire the way his clothes clung to his body. “I know for a fact you have at least thirty qualified operators on staff. There was zero reason for you to be the one handling the mask and coffin sealing.”

Huh. Maybe I should have said something else instead. A thank you would have done the job without sounding quite so bitchy. Damn it.

“You’re welcome.” Chief Quinn sat beside me on the examination table. “Made it to the bathroom this time, I hear?”

“Hell yes. Yale can suck it. He told me it couldn’t be done.”

“Why do I have the feeling everything you do in your life is prefaced with that statement?”

What an asshole. “Hardly. What do you want to know? I have an appointment with every virus known to man in the next few hours. Wouldn’t want to miss it. I’ll probably wish I had died.” Fine, I was whining, but I had earned a good complaint session or two. A bomb had blown up in my face, and I came too close for comfort to a permanent stay in a glass box.

“You’ll be fine. Were you aware someone put a geas on you?”

Someone had put a what on me? I scowled. “A geas? Why would someone waste such high level magic on me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe to hide the identity of the person who gave you a bomb tainted with gorgon dust? Seems like a logical conclusion to me. If they’ve got the skills to make gorgon dust without becoming infected themselves, a geas is child’s play.”

Okay, while I deserved the rebuke, did he really have to sound so damned snarly about it? “Someone really put a geas on me?”

“That’s what knocked you out in your apartment. We’re speculating you were about to say something that would violate the geas, and you were punished as a result. Perkins noticed it, and after I got the mask in place, we called in a few people to remove it. It’s gone, but we couldn’t figure out the exact conditions to trigger it. We have a few guesses, though.”

“Magnus McGee gave me the phone. He said it had important information on it regarding a missing person, and he wanted to hire me to locate them.”

“Magnus McGee was found dead yesterday morning in Central Park in a rather compromised position. His partner was a tree.” Chief Quinn grimaced, and when I glanced his direction, he was hard at work untangling tubes and righting bags on the IV stand. “I had assumed he was the culprit. A few of my cops had seen him near your workplace.”

“I quit.” Chief Quinn’s small role in my change of employment status shouldn’t have pissed me off so much, but it did. It was bad enough Mary had ditched her shift, but to have done it with him? I wanted to wring both of their necks over the stunt.