Samhain (Matilda Kavanagh Book 2) (28 page)

“I’d like your help, Ms. Kavanagh,” he warbled. When his voice broke, he lifted his chin, his bottom lip jutting out slightly.

“Then you are welcome here,” I said with a nod.

The boy shouldered his way to the front of the group, but the girl standing in front of me refused to move.

“Move, Dani,” the kid said, putting his hands on her and shoving with all his strength.

Dani stumbled to the side. Only the body of the boy next to her stopped her from falling. “God!” she said.

“Take it easy, Nathaniel,” the boy who had caught Dani said, helping her get her feet under her.

“No! You shut up!” Nathaniel shouted at the boy.

Dani tried to step in front of Nathaniel again, but he was ready for her. I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing when Nathaniel hip-checked Dani, sending her to the ground before he darted over my threshold and hid behind me.

“You guys suck!” he yelled from behind the security of my body.

“Nathaniel, calm down!” someone yelled back while Dani cursed him from the floor.

“You calm down!” Nathaniel shot back.

“Nathaniel—” Dani started once she was on her feet again.

I stopped her with a hand in the air. “Enough.”

The ten pairs of eyes still in the hallway blinked at me. They were finally looking at me.

“Ma’am,” another boy said, stepping forward from the back of the group.

I tried not to visibly cringe at that stupid word.

“I need your help, please.” His left arm was in a sling across his stomach, and the blue fabric was already stained with the wet blood from his open wound.

When I looked at his face again I realized just how pale he was. He needed to stop the bleeding. Fast.

“Don’t call me ma’am again, and you can come in.” I waved him in, and he nodded his thanks before stepping around me to join Nathaniel.

“So you’re going to make us beg?” the boy who’d helped Dani to her feet asked at little too heatedly.

“James, calm down,” Dani said, touching his shoulder, making him hiss and jerk away from her. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry!”

James pointed into my apartment at the supernaturals crowded inside. “You just let them in, but we have to beg? What the hell?”

There were a few gasps in the hallway. They were clearly scandalized by his swearing.

“No,” I said calmly, “you don’t have to beg. But you do have to ask. One of your members tried to kill me a couple of nights ago, then a bunch of you tried to firebomb an entire encampment of people, once again, almost killing me. Now you’re here looking for my help, expecting a
witch
to help you, and you’re not even going to show me the courtesy of asking? I don’t think so. If you can’t figure out how to ask politely and act civilized, then you can just go.”

“We’ll die,” James said, his voice losing some of its heat.

“Yes, you probably will.”

“You’d let us die?”

“No,” I said with a shake of my head. “You would.”

“God, you guys!” Nathaniel said. “Just ask! Why do you guys always have to be such assholes?”

I fought not to laugh. I really just wanted to turn around and give Nathaniel a hug and a plate of cookies. How the hell had he gotten mixed up with these people? He seemed so normal.

“Please excuse our behavior,” Dani said, but she couldn’t manage to keep the attitude out of her voice.

I raised an eyebrow at her in warning.

She coughed and tucked her hair behind her ears and tried again, this time sounding genuine. “I’m sorry. We need your help. Would you please help us?”

A chorus of “pleases” went up around Dani, and everyone looked me in the eye and leaned toward me. With a nod, I stepped back and allowed them entrance into my home.

I quickly separated the members of P.E.A.C.E. from everyone else in the apartment. There were other humans there, but they weren’t members of the hate group. I assumed they’d gone to the festival to join in our celebration, so I let them stay in the kitchen with the supernaturals. The others were in the living room. It wasn’t far, but it was far enough. Nathaniel stood behind my couch, one foot on the tiled dining room floor, as if he was trying to distance himself from the others.

After a cursory count, I realized there were about thirty people in my house, which was too many to manage on my own. I called Ronnie, waking her up, and told her I needed her and Joey to come help me. Looking as exhausted as I felt and in their own rumpled clothes, Ronnie and Joey were in my apartment within ten minutes.

I was extremely happy I’d taken time to restock my stores of healing potions and pain amulets. Joey took the pain amulets and passed them around to those who weren’t bleeding profusely. We concentrated on helping the ones who were bleeding out first.

I got two spell pots on the stove to start some fresh healing potions before Ronnie and I waded into the crowd to administer the premade potions to the most extreme cases. I let Ronnie stay with the supernatural group while I helped the gray -clad humans in my living room. The boy with his arm in a sling got my help first. By the time I got to him, his face was as white as a sheet, and the blood had dripped from his arm to stain his jeans. I had to hold the bottle to his lips and cradle his head with my other hand so that he could drink.

He was bleeding so profusely that I gave him a double dose, which I had never done with a human before. I stood there, my breath held, and watched him. His eyes fluttered open after a few tense moments, and when he looked at me, it was with surprise.

“Better?” I asked.

“A little,” he said, his voice weak. Then he groaned, and the hand of his injured arm spasmed.

With quick fingers, I loosened his sling and carefully peeled the fabric from his arm. He had been wearing a long-sleeved, button-down shirt, but when he was attacked, he’d lost the sleeve from his bicep down.

“Oh my God,” a girl whispered.

I felt the press of the humans leaning over to stare at his arm. They weren’t shocked by his injury but by the effect of the potion. His wounds were knitting closed. I watched, brow pinched in concentration, as his skin came together. The boy made a noise of pain, and I saw his muscles jump.

“Hold him down,” I said.

The girl next to him hesitated, but Nathaniel ran up behind the couch and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders just as the boy’s back bowed and a howl of pain ripped from him.

“Hold him down!” I shouted, surprising the girl into action. I gripped his injured arm, holding it still and letting him squeeze my hand hard enough to hurt.

The girl took his other arm and put her weight into it, pressing him into the couch. He screamed as the muscles under his shredded skin came together, the potion swirling through his veins now.

“It’s okay,” the girl at his side whispered. “It’s okay, it’s okay. You’re going to be fine, Collin.”

“Why does it hurt?” Nathaniel asked. There was panic in his voice. He would have to drink the potion too, and when I looked into his eyes, I saw that he was scared.

“Have you ever had stitches?” I asked. When I’d learned that humans actually sewed their skin when they were injured, I’d nearly fainted.

“Yeah, when I was a kid,” he said as if he wasn’t a kid still.

“Did it hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Oh.” Understanding dawned on his face. He looked down at Collin, who was fighting against the weight of three people.

Collin’s ragged skin was finally folding over the freshly healed muscles. He would have a scar, there wasn’t anything I could do about that, but he would be okay. That was all that mattered. It only took ten minutes for Collin’s arm to heal completely, but by then, my fingers were numb. I massaged my hand as the blood rushed back into it. Collin opened his eyes, and they were clearer than they had been when he came in.

“Stay still for a while,” I said. “Just stay where you are while we work on everyone else. You lost a lot of blood. If you try to move too fast before the potion finishes its work, you might faint.”

“Does he need a transfusion?” Dani asked from behind me.

I turned to look at her, feeling my brows coming together. “A what?”

“A blood transfusion?”

“What is that?”

“Seriously?”

I saw the heads of the teenagers around me turning, and they all gave each other confused looks.

“What?” I asked. “Hi, I’m a witch. We don’t do the same things you guys do.”

“A blood transfusion is when you hook someone up to a needle and put blood into them,” Dani explained.

“Seriously? That sounds… barbaric.” A shudder went through me at the thought of foreign blood being injected into me as though I was a vampire.

The humans looked at me as if I was the crazy one.

I shook my head and headed back to the kitchen for more potions. “No, he doesn’t need that. The potion will fix him up.”

Ronnie and Joey were moving through the supernaturals much faster than I was with the humans because most of their injuries weren’t as bad. With their magical abilities, they’d been better equipped to defend themselves and get away without becoming seriously injured. I directed Joey and Ronnie to hurry things along and get the supernaturals and non-members of P.E.A.C.E. out of my apartment first. Joey was careful to collect money for the treatments and potions. I smiled gratefully at her, making a mental note to give her a percentage of the money for her help.

“Are we going to turn into werewolves?” Nathaniel asked as I handed him his dose of healing potion.

“Of course not,” I said with a small laugh, stringing a pain amulet over his head.

“How do you know? I mean, we’re humans,” Dani said, coming around the couch and into the now-empty dining room where Nathaniel and I were. Dani was tall and lithe. Her yellow-blond hair was shot through with white highlights and hung to the tops of her narrow shoulders. She had a nasty bruise on her cheek that was split in the middle, but it didn’t take away from her looks. She had a kind face when she wasn’t sneering.

When I looked at her, I saw a ballerina, and I wanted to put her into something other than that gray -raincloud uniform. “But what attacked you weren’t Weres.” I motioned to Nathaniel to keep drinking until every last drop was gone.

“I don’t understand,” Dani said.

Looking out into the living room, I saw I had a captive audience. Fear and curiosity were waging war over their faces.

“It’s kinda hard to explain,” I said, glancing at Ronnie for help, but she ran into the kitchen.
Coward
, I thought at her.

I didn’t want to tell them that a rogue pack of werewolves had been kidnapping humans and feeding them some strange potion to turn them into monsters when the full moon rose on Samhain. The last thing those people needed was more reason to hate supernaturals.

“Please try,” Collin said in his weak voice.

“Um, well…” I glanced around and finally took a seat at the kitchen table.

Ronnie and Joey were passing out cups of hot chocolate, and Ronnie pressed a warm ceramic mug into my hands.

“So you know how you guys hate supernaturals?” I paused. I wanted them to really think about the word “hate,” but only a few of them looked uncomfortable. Most just looked normal. My shoulders fell. “Well, because so many humans hate our kind, many of us feel oppressed, and some supernaturals aren’t willing to wait for things to change, so they lash out. So this one small group of people decided they didn’t want to follow the human laws that have been put on us and didn’t want to be treated like second-class citizens anymore, and they lashed out.”

“Who was it?” one of the girls whose name I didn’t know asked.

“That’s not important right now. Suffice it to say, the monsters that attacked last night were not Weres, so you won’t become Weres.” I took a breath. “Okay?”

“Good,” Nathaniel said for everyone. “Right?”

I took a sip of my hot chocolate and smiled when I realized Ronnie had doctored it with a little Irish cream. When I caught her eye, she winked at me from her perch on the counter. I held up my mug in a silent toast before taking another, larger swallow.

“Well, at least there’s that,” Dani said as she took her seat on the couch again.

We’d dealt with the life-threatening injuries, so we could help everyone else with their minor injuries. Ronnie, Joey, and I were in the kitchen making poultices when someone knocked at my door. I glanced at my two friends and tried to ignore the lump in my stomach. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take this weekend.

Wiping my hands on a dish towel, I crossed the apartment to the front door. Through the peephole, I saw Jameson’s impressive form, flanked on either side by Kyle and Spencer. I fell back on my heels, hands braced on the door as I considered my options. I was sure when I opened the door that the humans would flip out. Being Alpha meant that Jameson was well known, and his face as recognizable as any celebrity. I opened the door.

“Mattie,” Jameson rumbled.

“Jameson.” I stepped back to let the three impressive men in.

There was a collective gasp from the group in the living room when they saw who had come in. I heard two girls saying a prayer in unison, and Dani lost all color in her face.

Young Nathaniel came forward, wide-eyed and grinning. “Awesome! You’re Jameson McKendrick, city Alpha.”

“County,” Kyle corrected, smiling that bright white smile of his.

“Whoa,” Nathaniel breathed.

Jameson looked from me to the kid and back again. I just shrugged. I didn’t understand how a P.E.A.C.E. initiate could be so impressed by the presence of three werewolves either. I’d expected them to want to throw liquid silver on them.

“Nathaniel,” Dani hissed, “get away from them. Come over here right now.”

“Dude, shut up,” Nathaniel snapped back.

Jameson cleared his throat, somehow making it sound like a rumbling growl, and magically shut Dani up. Nathaniel’s face scrunched up in a wide grin, and the two praying girls squealed in fear. I rubbed my forehead, totally ready for this night to be over.

“Mattie.” Jameson turned his back on the group of humans and placed his hands on my shoulders. He bent forward to peer at me, taking in every little detail of my face as if he was looking for something.