Page 41 of Vengefully Matched

The door to her office made an odd sort of popping sound when she opened it, and the force of the blow was strong enough, hot enough, to let Agatha know that this was more than simply an errant teakettle.

The blast pushed her back, and the heat was unbearably intense on her cheek and her jaw and her collarbone. Agatha felt the crushing impact of her body against the floor, and something thudding on top of her. Her desk, maybe?

Her ears ringing from the sound of the blast, she felt the burn of fire, actual fire, on the right side of her face, but her body was surprisingly… unburned.

And yet it hurt everywhere. She looked up and realized that she was lying on the ground just outside of her office. Nancy was yelling for help, and several people were gathering around her. Kevin was in the background, jumping from foot to foot and talking rapidly into a cell phone, probably procuring whatever help was most necessary.

It didn’t make sense. She had personally checked the office for traps since the earlier incident. It was clear. Safe. Untrapped. Her foggy brain said she was not dead, and that the thing on top of her was not her desk.

In fact, it wasn’t a thing at all, she realized, as it groaned, and she recognized the inside-out seams of the dress, the black tennis shoes when she looked down.

Priscilla had rolled her partially out of the way, catching some of the burn herself, as evidenced by her singed dress sleeve on one side and the angry-looking burn where the fabric had been, harsh and wet. This was much more serious than the kettle.

This was the real intention. The kettle was a distraction.

Nancy was helping Hart, and even Otho ran over to help Agatha. Priscilla gritted her teeth and swallowed hard while Xiomara snapped magic and muttered softly, summoning an herbal poultice for Priscilla’s burns, working powerful emergency spells while Otho summoned a few smaller ones for Agatha and her face.

Despite the heat, her face had sustained only superficial burns, the sort of thing that Otho’s bits and bobs dealt with swiftly for her. But Hart’s had to be second-, maybe third-degree burns. Xiomara was more than up for the task of healing, but Priscilla had to be in terrible pain.

She had shoved Agatha out of the way and taken the brunt of the magical force.

“If I didn’t believe that the cool, collected princess of darkness herself was in love with you before, I would now,” whispered Nancy, as she handed Agatha a glass of water and a painkiller. “That was horrible, but, like, heroic, really. What’s it like to have someone literally jump in front of a fire for you?”

Agatha could see the young girl’s mind working, cogs turning, eyes practically sporting hearts in them. She swallowed.

The rumor mill would know about this and then some. So much for a quiet soft launch.

“I’m fine,” Agatha insisted, brushing off Otho’s attempt to examine her face again, and turning instead to Xiomara and Prissy.

“Are you all right, chérie?” Her breath came out too ragged, fear on the surface, but she was glad for it when Priscilla looked up at her with tears—actual tears—in her eyes.

“What, this?” She smiled, and it was a rickety thing that spoke of the extremity of her pain. “I’ve had much worse than this. My brother and I had a pranking-with-guillotine phase that required a reattached toe once. This is nothing to a detached digit.”

She hadn’t realized her hand was pressing to her heart until the weight of it, the pressure, actually started to hurt.

“Steady, now,” said Xiomara. “I’m just going to put something on to help the healing so it won’t scar.”

Magically healing things more serious than small cuts never worked out well; a body had to do the work to heal, or the healing didn’t take, and the pain would linger.

Xiomara whispered a few words that Agatha barely recognized and snapped her fingers to affix a bandage on Hart’s arm. It stretched the length of her biceps to her elbow and forearm, and the way she moved, gingerly, careful with that side of her body, made Agatha think that it hadn’t just been the burn, but also the impact of the dive on the side of her.

“You’ll want to keep that burn dry, magic it a protection spell, and maybe try a nice relaxing Epsom salt bath for the bruising. Take it easy.” Xiomara looked worried. “Follow up with a doctor tomorrow.”

Agatha recalled that Xiomara had been premed before switching to public health, and that for the Council, she had done a fellowship in crossover magical and mundane healing. She made a mental note to reach out to Xiomara for a list of things that Hart absolutely should do.

She had never been an impulsive person; she was well-known for her spreadsheets and her careful planning and her thoughtful approach to, well, all aspects of her life. It was why it had shaken her so hard to be humiliated in that dreadful speech Jonathan had delivered impromptu after Evelyn ran out in pursuit of Priscilla at the wedding, and it was why she had dithered so long on the possibility of Prissy being the attempted murderer.

But now Agatha Vanderbilt Voisin was absolutely certain of two things, impulsively and yet unequivocally.

Number one: Priscilla was most certainly not the person trying to kill her. Which meant that it had to be someone else close, someone else clever and magical enough to get past the Council wards. Likely it was someone else on the Council, but she couldn’t, for the life of herself, decide who would hate her enough to try to off her. Nevertheless, it was not Priscilla. The severity of that burn, the tears in her eyes. A killer would never.

Number two: Damn decorum, and protocol, and her desire to fill out the appropriate magical resources–required paperwork. It could wait until Monday. For now, she was leaving, and she was taking Priscilla home. Even if she had to white-knuckle it the whole time, and she definitely would; she hated driving, but there was no way that she was letting Priscilla drive.

“I’m driving you home,” she said, in her most imperious voice, the one she reserved for difficult Council meetings and family arguments on the rare occasion they popped up.

To her surprise, Hart didn’t argue this time; she only nodded, wincing at the motion.

“Does anyone have a car I can borrow?”