Page 54 of Consort's Glory
Roger blinked at her with his one good eye. He licked his parched, battered lips. “T-to what?”
“Healing, you dumb piece of shit,” Angelique chimed in. “She wants to heal you. Damn soft-hearted healers make just punishment impossible.”
Roger’s eyes darted from Margot’s outstretched hand to her face and then to Angelique with obvious confusion. “Why?”
Margot could feel Theodore’s eyes burning a hole in the back of her head when she answered, “Because I can. Because you want to talk. Because we need you to tell us everything you know. Because I have very limited time on this Earth and I don’t want to spend a second of it witnessing unnecessary suffering. Because he—” she jerked her hin towards Theodore’s livid form “—told me no. Take your pick.”
Roger stared at her for several long seconds, disbelief written across his swollen, battered features, before he slowly leaned into her hand.
The moment the skin of his cheek made contact with her fingertips, Margot got to work. It was the simplest thing in the world for a healer of her caliber to reduce swelling, to repair broken blood vessels, to knit shattered bone. The same electricity that made her a powerful weapon also made her an excellent healer; all the commands of the body ran, to some degree, on that same explosive current.
It took five minutes at most for Roger’s nose to snap back into place and for the swelling and bruises to disappear. When she was done, Margot sat back on her heels and shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat. Out of sight, they shook with a violence that made her stomach knot with dread.
Exhaustion pressed hard on her. A year ago, she could have done a simple procedure like that three dozen times in a day and not broken a sweat. Now, she had to blink away spots to read Roger’s expression and fought, perhaps in vain, not to sway.
It’s gotten worse, she grimly realized. Much worse.
Roger sucked in a deep, painless breath and rocked backwards, tears tumbling down his dirty cheeks.
“I’ll tell you everything,” he gasped. He sniffed hard and bent his neck to scrub his face against his bicep. In a muffled voice, he said, “I never got the name of my contact. You know how it is. I do jobs for people like this all the time. It’s usually the black market m-enhanced technical stuff. I’m good at machines, and word gets around.” He sniffed and looked away, a note of hollow pride in his thickened voice. “Anyway, I just got the message and followed the instructions: Make a small, low-impact bomb, leave it at the back of the Healing House, get the money.”
He sniffed again and looked up from where he’d buried his face against his arm. The look he gave Margot was beseeching, hopeful that she would understand.
She didn’t and couldn’t. Never, ever would it be an option to play with innocent, unknown lives. But Margot nodded anyway, urging him to continue, her expression a mask of careful neutrality she perfected as an apprentice.
“I’m an idiot, but I’m not stupid,” he explained. “I did my homework. I had to be sure I would get paid, so I traced the message back to the IP address, but that was obviously diverted. So I said I wouldn’t do it unless we could talk in person, face to face.”
Theodore’s voice was a rasp of metal on metal above her when he asked, “And did they agree to it?”
Roger licked his lips and finally looked up at Margot’s shadow, his eyes widening comically large. “I… Yes. That was two months ago, back when there was all that stuff going on with the dragons in town. When they closed all the streets off? I remember because we met at a bar off of Mason and it was a bitch to find parking.” He sniffed hard. “I didn’t see their face but…”
Roger sucked in a breath and stared at Theodore like he was looking at the goddess Grim herself. “I know for a fact that it was a woman. An elvish woman.”
