Five: Out of the Pit (Five #2) (33 page)

I raised an eyebrow at him. “What is it?” I asked as I took it from him.

He smiled and his slimy, blue tongue slipped out to lick his thin lips. “Is salve. My mama made it for me. It will help, I promise. I gots bit by a Haunt. Mama’s salve saved my life.”

“Okay, I’ll rub it on after we shower him. Thank you, Surpy.” I patted the ugly little creature on his sparsely covered head.

Seth and Johnathan carried Alec into the bathroom and deposited him in the already running shower. His body heaved as more of the green vomit exploded from his mouth. His friends held him in a sitting position, his back to the cascading water.

“That’s good enough.” I reached over and turned the water off. I looked for a dry towel before realizing we’d used them all up. I took my jacket off and used it to dry his back, sickened as the blackened skin fell off in chunks.

I started to lay my hands on the worst of his wounds when Surpy’s head popped up next to me. I jumped, nearly falling off the side of the tub.

“Use the salve, m’Halli’s friend. Use it first.”

I looked at the Imp sideways with a scowl.

“Try it,” Joe said.

I used my teeth to pry the cork out of the little metal vial. I poured a small amount into my hand. The sickening smell of rotten fish wafted into my nostrils and I nearly gagged. “Are you sure this hasn’t gone bad?”

“What? No way. It always smells like that,” Surpy answered. “Is made of Naiad tears.”

I wrinkled my nose and shook my head. I rubbed the smelly stuff on Alec’s back, wishing I had some gloves. Instantly upon meeting the open gouges in his skin, the salve started to bubble into green foam.

“Is it supposed to do that?” I asked.

“Yes! Is working!” Surpy clapped his hands and jumped up and down.

Hissing noises escaped from where I’d rubbed the salve. I shrugged and rubbed the rest of it on the remaining wounds. I hated to admit it, but the stinky stuff seemed to be working. Alec’s breaths quieted and returned to normal. The bubbling and hissing continued, but at a decreased level.

Alec’s drooping head raised up, wobbling like a bobble-head doll. “What happened? Why’re we all showerin’ together?”

“Just sit still, Alice. You’re hurt,” I said. “That Demon’s venom has done quite a job on your back.”

“Hmm. Tha’s why it feels like I’ve been skinned back there.”

“Yeah. That’s why it looks like you’ve been skinned.” Seth wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“Paige’ll fix it, won’t ya Paige?” Alec muttered.

I swallowed. “I’ll try my best. You might have a few more scars you can use to impress the ladies with, though.”

The green, hissing foam evaporated, leaving the ravaged skin in much better shape than it had been. The skin was now, instead of decaying black, a red color around the open wounds. I laid my hands on his back, covering as many of the wounds as I could at one time.

Joe touched my arm. “These are deep. You’ll want to heal them from the inside out so as not to leave any pockets.”

I nodded. I drew in a deep breath and closed my eyes. The damage was more extensive than I’d imagined. I pictured what I wanted my spell to do, then, infusing it with my will, I said, “
Sano
.”

I felt the power draining out of me as the magic worked to heal the deep wounds. I tuned out the sound of Alec’s grunts of pain. I tuned out Surpy’s incessant chatter and Johnathan’s bouncing legs as he perched on the closed toilet seat. When the area my hands covered was sufficiently healed, I moved them to a new spot. All in all, I had to perform the spell three times.

When I finally opened my eyes and removed my hands from his back, I was surprised at what I saw. The horrible looking gouges from moments before, were now just pink scars that looked weeks old. I smiled. “Feeling better, Alec?”

He let out a breath. “Much. Thank you.”

All three of the boys still had small cuts on their faces, hands and arms—anywhere their bare skin had rubbed up against the Demon’s scales. Halli healed any of the deeper ones. The rest were left to heal on their own.

Johnathan helped me up as the exhaustion of spent magic set in and the adrenaline wore off. We made room for each other on the two queen sized beds, Joe choosing to sit in the chair next to the window.

“So,” Joe said. “It looks like you found them.”

“We definitely found them,” Alec huffed. “They were in my mom’s room.”

The explanation of what transpired took only a few minutes. When I described to Joe what the Demon looked like, the blood drained from his face.

“That was a Greater Demon. You’re all lucky to be alive.”

Alec shrugged. “We’ve faced Greater Demons before. She wasn’t our first.”

Joe shook his head. “Wow. You kids are amazing. Good job. How’s your mom, Alec?”

“She seemed okay. I’d like to go visit her one more time before we leave. But, visiting hours aren’t until seven tonight.”

Johnathan said, “I really feel like we should go sooner than that, Alec.”

“Then go without me. I’ll catch up to you after I make sure my mom’s okay.”

“Maybe…”

A thought occurred to me. “Alec, they might not even allow her to have visitors after what just happened. You should be prepared for that. And you can’t just portal in there in the middle of the day. I’m sure they will have moved her to a different room, too.”

His face turned hard. “They won’t stop me from seeing her… one way or another.”

Not even Joe challenged his statement.

espite Johnathan’s feelings of foreboding, we decided to all stay in Provo until Alec could visit his mom one more time. Joe felt that we should all at least stay in the same town until we figured out what Brone was up to.

It was 2:30 in the morning before the boys went to their room. Halli and I crawled under the covers of our beds and let the exhaustion of the night’s activities take us away.

Even though we didn’t plan on staying the next night, we kept the hotel rooms so we wouldn’t have to find somewhere to hang out until visiting hours at the hospital.

I slept until noon—when Johnathan knocked on our door. “Paige? You awake?”

I wrapped the pillow around my head and groaned.

“Paige?”

Halli jumped from her bed and opened the door. “Hey, Johnathan.”

“Hey, Hal. I see Paige is still sleeping.”

“Trying to,” I mumbled, peaking at him with one squinted eye.

“Sorry.” He shut the door as he stepped into our room. “I’m hungry and Joe said you’d probably need a good meal after all the healing you did last night.”

The growling sound my stomach made convinced me I was hungrier than I was sleepy. I sat up and laughed when I saw my reflection in the mirror across from the bed. “Wow, talk about bed-head. It’s a good thing you love me, Johnathan. I look like a Troll this morning.”

He sat next to me on the bed and stared at our reflection. “You look like an angel, as always. Now go get ready. I’m seriously starving.” He gave me a little shove.

“Fine. Give me five minutes.”

“You can come, too, Halli.” He said as I headed for the bathroom.

The temperature had dipped far below what it had been the previous days we’d been there. My jacket was in the hotel dumpster, ruined after using it to dry Alec’s unhealed back. Without saying a word, Johnathan removed his jacket and draped it around my shoulders. I could have just used the warming spell, but being wrapped in Johnathan’s scent was much better. He barely even noticed the cold anymore anyway, even without using the spell. Increased body temperature was one of the things he’d retained from his time as a lycanthrope.

“Did that creature have to come with us?” Johnathan scowled at Surpy.

Halli looked down at the Imp skip-hopping close beside her. “Yeah, he’s kind of attached to me.”

None of the other people we passed seemed to notice him at all. It made me wonder what they saw when they looked at him. Maybe they saw a homely child. Or, maybe they saw nothing at all.

We ate at McDonald’s—they had the best fries. Surpy sat huddled next to Halli in the booth. He wrinkled his nose at the food—even the fries. “What is this yuck?”

“It’s food. Good food.” Johnathan took a huge bite of his burger.

“What kind of food do you like?” Halli asked him.

“Mmm. Fish. Just the heads and guts, the rest is yuck. And, I likes rats… mice’ll do if there aren’t any rats. My favorite thing, though, is bat wings, cooked over a fire ‘til they’re all crispy-cruttered.”

Johnathan looked at him with a raised eyebrow and a tilt to his head. “You don’t even have any teeth. How do you eat those things?”

The Imp smiled a toothless smile. “I rips ‘m with m’ fingernails and swallows ‘m. Chewing is un-needed.”

You would think the picture he’d just painted would make me lose my appetite, but, it didn’t. McDonald’s fries, that’s all I’m saying.

“Well,” Halli said with a frown. “Aren’t you hungry? You need to eat something.”

“Oh, m’Halli. I eat when you all sleep. I’m a hunter. The place with your beds has a goodly pond, fulls of golden fishies!”

Johnathan, Halli, and I looked at each other and laughed.

Back at the hotel, we congregated in the boys’ room. “Where’s Seth?” Johnathan asked, looking around the room.

“In there,” Alec hooked his thumb toward the bathroom door. “I have a feeling none of us will want to go in there for a long, long time.”

Surpy slunk over to the wall that cornered with the bathroom door. I looked at him questioningly. He put his long pointer finger to his lipless mouth and shook his head. I decided to play along, just to see what he was planning.

The toilet flushed; water ran for a few seconds in the sink. Seth opened the bathroom door and came strolling through. “Whew…” That was all he got out. Surpy jumped from around the corner and yelled in a deep, basso voice I didn’t think was possible from the little creature.

“Raarrrrrrr!”

I had never, ever, in my life seen a reaction quite like Seth had. He
dropped
to the floor. Just dropped—like he’d been shot. He clutched at his chest, unable to breathe for several long seconds. When he finally drew in a gasp of breath, the rest of us started laughing. Hard. Tears rolling down our faces. Joe laughed so hard the only sound coming out was an intermittent wheeze. And, that made us laugh even harder.