“Having second thoughts about putting me out of my misery?” Jack asked.
“No,” I said. “I was just thinking that the spell might harm you more than it helped. I’m not sure an ordinary human can handle it.”
“I can handle anything,” Jack said confidently. His face was eager, and I could tell he was more excited about the prospect of having magic performed on him than about fixing what was broken.
“Don’t act like a child,” I said. “If I don’t do this correctly, or your body can’t process it, who knows what might happen. You could explode from the inside out, or have a stroke right in front of me, and there would be nothing I could do about it. You would probably be wishing that you had just waited for a regular doctor to set your arm then.”
“I know you won’t hurt me,” he said.
“Three days ago you thought I had mutilated a person right in front of you,” I reminded him.
“Yes, but now I know better,” he said. “C’mon, just fix my arm since you won’t let me out of the cell.”
He was putting on a brave face, but he was obviously in pain. And I could make it better. And I probably wouldn’t accidentally blow him up. Probably.
I reached through the bars, put my hand on his shoulder. He winced when I brushed my fingers across his arm.
A little pulse of magic flickered through me and into his arm. I was trying to find the precise point where the arm was broken, so that I wouldn’t have to overload him with power. I used my ability to locate the fracture and then sent gentle waves of magic through to heal it.
Jack watched me with wonder in his eyes. “You could do so much with a power like this. You could heal cancer. AIDS. Kids with rare diseases. Why do you hide yourself from the world?”
“This power isn’t an endless well, you know,” I said. “Whenever I use too much magic, it takes something out of me. Can you imagine what would happen if everyone in the world knew that I could heal people? Thousands would descend upon my house, each of them with a story sadder and more horrible than the last one. And I wouldn’t be able to say no. I’d help them, and I’d heal them, and eventually I would be too sick and exhausted myself to help anyone else.”
“But what if you could just help the really needy?” Jack asked as I pulled my hand away.
“Who decides who’s really needy?” I asked. “Does your arm hurt? Do you feel any aftereffects, like nausea?”
Jack bent and stretched his arm. “Nah, it feels great. I feel great, as a matter of fact. Like I just drank a lot of coffee. Wow. Magic is incredible.”
He started doing jumping jacks in his cell, almost like he couldn’t help himself. I noticed that even though I’d tried to pinpoint the fracture, my magic had still spread to other parts of his body. The bruises and cuts on his face were rapidly healing while I watched.
“Okay, I guess there are some side effects,” I muttered as Jack began jogging in place. “Apparently magic makes you high.”
I was about to tell him to quit it when I felt a sudden cramp in the side of my abdomen. The pain seemed to recede for a moment; then it twisted through me again. Something wet ran down the inside of my pajama pants.
“Oh, damn,” I said. “The baby’s coming.”
14
Jack stopped with his exercise-video routine and stared at me. “The baby? You’re having the baby now?”
“Yes,” I said.
The pain was not intense, but it was definitely there. I could feel the baby moving inside me. I didn’t know if normal human moms could feel that when they were about to give birth, but I certainly could.
“Damn,” I said. “Damn, damn, damn, damn.”
This was exactly what I had not wanted. I didn’t want to give birth under Lucifer’s roof. I especially didn’t want to give birth while I was “imprisoned” on a murder charge. Lucifer would use my incarceration as an excuse to whisk my son away from me, which was what he had wanted all along.
I staggered toward the stone bench in the cell. I needed to sit down for a minute, to breathe, to think. It was all becoming clear.
It didn’t matter, really, if Lucifer was the shapeshifter’s master. He had seen the opportunity given by my look-alike’s murder of Evangeline. Once I was locked up, I was under his power, and he could keep me locked up until I had the baby.
Once the baby was born, Lucifer would have everything he wanted. Two new heirs—my child and Evangeline’s—and no rebellious granddaughter or jealous wife to get in his way. He could execute me without even having to justify his actions before the court of the Grigori. No one would question that he would want his fiancée’s killer to receive justice.
And I had made all his plans easier by passively agreeing to be locked up in the basement. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as usual I’d been outmaneuvered by a master.
Now I needed to get out of Lucifer’s house before this labor progressed any further. And to do that I needed Nathaniel.
I could easily fly to the top of the long flight of stairs. But once I got to the top, there was sure to be more security than there was down here. There was no way Lucifer would leave me in a cell with a door that I could easily unlock with magic.
My second problem was Jack Dabrowski. The moron had followed me here and gotten himself locked up by the Prince of Darkness even though I’d warned him about a thousand times about interfering in the lives of supernatural creatures. It would serve him right if I left him where he was, but my conscience unfortunately would not allow me to do that. So I’d have to take him with me. And he was going to be deadweight in a fight. Completely manic high-with-magic deadweight. He’d gone back to exercising, and was now doing squat jumps from the bench on the wall to the floor and back again.