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figuring out how to walk out of here, up the stairs to my apartment, and if I could make it to the bathtub before I fainted from the pain. Be a lot easier to clean blood out of the bathroom than my living room carpet. I’d never get that security deposit back.
    “Harper, go with Jade. The less people messed up in this, the better, no?” Ciaran said.
    “I’ve got to stay since I called the Sheriff,” Levi said.
    “And I do also, since she’ll never believe only one of us was here,” Ezee added.
    “I’ve got her,” Alek said. He moved with insane speed to my side and then somehow I was in his arms. “Don’t protest,” he whispered in Russian, his breath warm on my hair. “Clearly you don’t want them to know you’ve been shot, so shut up and let me carry you.”
    Since the Zerg queen of white hot pain and all her little pain-filled broodlings were currently setting up a summer home in my hip, I decided to shut up and let him carry me.

Harper tried to follow us into my bathroom, but I shut the door in her face, muttering something about too many cooks in the kitchen. I hoped I made some kind of sense, but I was in too much pain and panic to care.
    I’d used my magic, like a lot of magic. Maybe too much. My head certainly thought I had used way too much. It was out of practice and I felt like a former athlete who’d spent a couple years on the bench suddenly trying to beat Usain Bolt in the hundred meter dash.
    Plus the more passive side-effects of not being human were taking a toll. My body was shoving shards of cell phone and what felt like a million pieces of bullet out of my hip, with what looked like a million gallons of blood.
    Alek set me down as gently as he could in my bathtub and then pulled out a knife.
    I flinched and held up my hands, but he just sighed and reached for my pants.
    “I need to cut those away, take a look.”
    “Harper,” I whispered, then switched to Russian. “She can hear us.”
    A weird warmth slid over the room and I watched as the walls took on a slightly silvery sheen.
    “No one outside this room can hear anything now,” he said.
    “Guess being a Justice comes with bonus features.”
    “First we take care of your wound. Then we’ll talk.”
    I wasn’t sure which part of that I looked forward to less. He cut my jeans away and it wasn’t anything like the fantasies I hadn’t let myself have about him cutting my clothes off. I was too busy trying to seal my teeth to each other with my jaw muscles to tell him that, thank the universe.
    With the wound washed off, which let me tell you was a peachy experience I never want to repeat, it didn’t look so bad. Kind of like a steak after you take out your aggression on it with a hammer. And bonus, I now know what my hip bone looks like and I had a nice collection of metal fragments to show the grand kids. My phone seemed to have eaten the worst of the bullet and it was super FUBAR.
    I laid back in the tub once we got the wound clean, focusing on breathing and not passing out.
    “The bleeding has stopped,” Alek said. Helpful guy.
    “Yeah. Give it a little while. I’ll heal.” I wished he would shut up and go away.
    “You are no hedge witch.”
    “You are amazing at pointing out obvious things,” I said, opening my eyes. “How did you know I’d understand Russian?”
    “Call it a hunch.”
    He leaned against my bathroom counter, looking entirely out of place in the small room. I turned my head, choosing to look at the Dragon Ball Z poster I had on the bathroom door instead of into those speculating, piercing blue eyes.
    “What happened back there? What kind of magic was that? And how did you save that boy?”
    “That’s way too many questions for my brain to handle right now,” I said. All questions I didn’t really want to answer. Some I didn’t even have the answer to, anyway. Like what kind of magic this was. Human magic, I was pretty sure, so that meant ritual most likely. But it wasn’t like just