Descendant by Lesley Livingston Page B

himself groan in pain at the thought.
    “There he is!” Maddox said cheerfully. “Just in time for the finale . . .”
    He waved a hand, and Fennrys opened his other eye to see someone else standing beside him where he lay, shirtless, on what seemed to be a banquet table in a low-lit room—apparently the unused back room of a club or a restaurant or something, judging from the stacked chairs and table linens and shelves lined with red glass candleholders and columns of dinner plates. The person standing there, tall and rather homely featured, was one of the Fair Folk. Fennrys recognized him instantly.
    Webber was one of the Ghillie Dhu , a race of Fae with certain uncanny abilities. “Webber” wasn’t his real name. Rather, he was nicknamed for the iridescent membranes that stretched between the long fingers of his hands. Hands that, at that very moment, he had pressed to the wound on Fennrys’s shoulder. The blood flow had slowed to a dark, sullen trickle thanks to Webber’s healing magick.
    Fennrys rolled his head to the side and watched with detached fascination, as a small crumpled ball of dull gray metal rose up out of his shoulder, with a small, sucking pop sound. It passed between the tips of Webber’s fingers, hovered in the air for a moment, and then, with a disdainful glance from him, it vaporized with a flash and a tiny puff of acrid smoke.
    “Ta-da!” Maddox enthused with a grin.
    “Humans and their nasty little toys,” Webber muttered, his goatish face drawn with disgust. “Barbaric. That’s the last of the damage taken care of. Couldn’t do much about Scylla’s sea-dog venom, but that’ll probably just give him a taste like cilantro in his mouth for a few hours. Horrible, sure, but no real danger of expiring from it.”
    He glanced down at Fennrys and smiled. Fenn noticed that there was a hint of wariness—or perhaps, worry—in the expression. But the healer-Fae just nodded briskly, and with another pass of those long, webbed hands, a wave of numbness washed over Fennrys’s wounds, dulling the pain enough for him to try to sit up.
    “Oh, good,” Rafe said drily from where he stood over by a red velvet curtain that hung in a doorway. “I’d hate for you to be the first person to ever actually expire in my club.”
    Fennrys glanced around the room. “This is your place?” he asked.
    Rafe nodded. “Welcome to the Obelisk.” He raised an eyebrow and looked over at the healer Fae. “You sure he’s not going to die? He sure looks like he is.”
    “No, no,” Webber said, dusting his palms together. “Everything should be right as rain now. Or near enough, at least, for him to go out and try to get himself killed again . . .”
    “What happened?” Fennrys sat up slowly and swung his legs over the side of the table he’d been lying on. He ran a hand over his face. His brain felt cottony, his thoughts unfocused. And, yeah—his mouth tasted like he’d been eating at a cheap Mexican restaurant.
    “You got shot and fell off a train,” Maddox cheerfully enlightened him as he held out a hand to help Fennrys stand. “Then the bridge you were on exploded. Then you fought a sea monster. As far as I understand it, that is.”
    “Right . . .” Fennrys nodded stiffly. That account seemed to correlate with his own impressions of the night’s events. And with his various aches and pains. He groaned and rolled his uninjured shoulder. He still wore his jeans and boots, but they’d obviously had to cut the shirt off him so that Webber could do his work.
    “Where’s Roth Starling?” he asked, remembering suddenly that he hadn’t seen Mason’s older brother since the moments before the bridge explosion. He wondered what had happened to him—whether he was okay, or had suffered a fate similar to Cal Aristarchos. He hoped it was the former. He knew how dearly Mason loved Roth.
    Rafe put his glass back down on the bar. “After the Hell Gate exploded, he took off to go see if he could