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pass under it. 
     
    “Fuck that hurt!  Do you have that thing on a timer?” I ask, watching the door just barely miss the back of the jeep.
     
    “Sure do.  You can never be too careful when running from the djinn.  Some of those assholes are too stupid to run from the sine wave and I’m not a fan of cleaning djinn guts off the garage floor.”
     
    Yuck.  I’ll take her word on that one.  “You don’t by any chance have a place I can lay down, do you?” I ask, trying to rearrange myself on the seat again.  I hate to be whiny but it’s getting really difficult to hold myself upright.
     
    “I need to examine your wounds before you get too comfortable.  I may have to clean them out,” the doctor says.  Yippee.  Can’t wait. 
     
    He opens his door and gets out of the jeep.  Opening my door, he carefully scoops me up into his arms again.  I don’t have the energy to argue about anything at the moment and walking again is completely out of the question, so I don’t fight him about it.
     
    “This way folks,” Brielle says.  She has walked around the jeep and is standing in front of an open door. “Welcome to my humble abode.  I don’t get a lot of company.  Actually, you’re the first ones I’ve ever had over so don’t expect everything to be neat and tidy.  I like to keep things out where I can see them.  Sometimes I have to grab things quickly and if they were in a closet or a drawer or somewhere, that would take too much time to find them.”
     
    She’s rambling again.  Miss ‘I can kick djinn ass’ is nervous about what we’ll think of her apartment.  If it has a soft surface I can lie down on, it’ll seem like heaven on earth to me.  “Who has time to clean when the djinn are trying to kill you,” I quip through a yawn.  That actually earns me the first smile I’ve seen from her. 
     
    “Alright, come on in.  Don’t step on anything.”
     
    I see what she means when the doctor carries me over the threshold into a large studio apartment.  The room is a mess.  There are clothes and wires and weapons everywhere.  In the middle of the mess, there’s a half circle desk with three high-tech computer monitors and various other electronics I don’t recognize.  In front of it is a worn leather desk chair.  As I look around, I notice that everything in the room has seen better days; the computers being the exception. 
     
    There’s an old flowery couch against one wall with heaps of clothes lying on it, and a large battered table with flaking paint on the opposite wall with an array of weapons on top.  The weapons range from pistols and knives to broadswords and maces.  Where in the world did she find a mace outside of a museum?  I notice some of the pistols have orange tips.  From what my dad taught me before he died, that means they are air guns, paint guns or water guns.  Which seems odd considering how dangerous the djinn appear to be.
     
    In a corner of the windowless room, there’s an unmade king size bed.  A lovely, lovely sight.  It looks so inviting.  As the doctor makes his way across the room to it, I get jostled around a lot because he’s trying not to step on anything.  The pain is getting more unbearable with each step.  I want to jump down from his arms and run to the bed and its promise of comfort, but that’s not about to happen; I wouldn’t even be able to lift my legs high enough to traverse some of the piles of stuff. 
     
    “Set her down on the bed,” Brielle says taking a seat at her desk.  “I have some work to do anyway.”  I believe she is telling me not to get too comfortable.  What, when she’s done working I’ll have to lie on the floor?  Bitch.  Okay, bitch that just saved my life.
     
    The doctor sets me down as gently as he can on the bed.  It still hurts like hell but at least he’s trying.  “After I check her wounds, I think we both deserve some answers,” he says to Brielle.  I wholeheartedly