"Oh, no," Lenore said, rushing forward, taking in the handcuffs, the wound on the woman's face. "What did you do?" she accused, dropping down, fingers pressing around the cut.
"Got someone to heal Red."
"And who is going to heal her?" Lenore asked, frustration clear in her voice.
It was no secret that she'd never been a fan of mine. Over her time with us, she'd developed relationships with most of the others, maybe especially so Daemon and Aram, the least cold of all of us. But she'd also gotten close with Minos. I'd walked down to get coffee many-a-morning to find the two of them talking in hushed whispers in the kitchen. She also often asked Seven for help with some task or another. She tolerated Drex and his sarcastic indifference. And she kept a wide berth around Bael. Like all of us did, to be honest. The man was not someone who wanted to get to know anyone, form any sort of relationships.
But me?
She openly disliked me much of the time.
I rarely gave her reason to feel otherwise.
"You," I told her, reaching down to lift the nurse off the ground. "It doesn't look that bad."
Lenore followed me inside, mumbling under her breath the whole time as I brought the woman into my bedroom where Red was still on the bed, bleeding, screaming against her gag.
"Fix up her head. Stay with her. Then call me when she wakes up," I demanded to Lenore as I placed the nurse on the couch, then made my way toward the door, needing coffee, to sit in front of the fire, to get some warmth back in my body after being outside for so long.
"Barking orders at her," Ly said as I moved into the kitchen, shaking his head at me. "Easy with that shit. You're my boss, not hers."
"If she didn't talk shit to me all the time, I wouldn't need to bark at her," I shot back as I went to the coffee maker, brewing a pot.
We didn't get a boost from caffeine like humans did, and I found myself envious of their susceptibility to mind and body altering chemicals as the day started to weigh on me. It was early to feel tired, but as I cradled my coffee in my hands and moved in front of the fire Bael was stoking, I knew that this tired wasn't as simple as needing rest.
I was a different kind of tired.
Just life tired.
Exhausted, really.
After finding out Lenore was capable of what generations of witches never could manage—opening the mouths of hell for us—I'd started to let myself hope for something I'd scarcely let myself truly hope for before.
A return home.
It had always been my goal, one I worked doggedly toward, one I obsessed about, but a part of me had always been doubtful it would be possible. Or, at least, that it would be possible for several generations yet.
I always figured that, worst case, eventually there would be a war between Good and Evil. And if Lucifer himself decided to open up a Hellmouth, we would have a way to go home.
But then there was Lenore with her powers, with her control over them.
She'd opened the Hellmouth that had produced Bael and Daemon, the same Hellmouth that Red had jumped into in her excitement over getting home after so long.
There had been a restless excitement among all of us since then. Even after several failures. We all figured it was just a matter of time before we found the right Hellmouth with enough energy left to open it.
I'd been sure as the Earth started dropping down into its own core that this was it, all the years on this plane were finally over, and I could take most of my men back home.
Not having that happen, then having Red show up so mutilated, it was more than my body wanted to deal with, let alone my mind.
I needed a few minutes to sort it out in my head before I could go back there.
"What?" I asked, sensing Bael's gaze on me.
"She didn't get fucked up like that just coming through," he told me, making me turn, finding his eyes intense, his jaw tight.
"I'd deduced that already," I agreed.
"So it stands to reason that someone did that."
He wasn't wrong.
"I've seen wounds like that on her back before," he said. "I've inflicted wounds like that before," he went on. "As I'm sure you have." I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to come to conclusions about it. "Someone lashed her," he finished.
Yes.
There was no way around that fact.
Those lacerations were ones I'd seen a million times in my very long life. Both in hell and on the human plane.
If humans ever believed they were fundamentally good, all you had to do was go back in history a little bit to see how evil many of them were. Lashings and beheadings and burning at the stake. Even those who didn't inflict the pain stood by and witnessed it, took part in it, found glee in it.
"Yes," I agreed, turning back to the fire.
The questions were... who... and why?
Red could be a lot to handle if you weren't used to her. She could be cocky and forward. She liked to push buttons.
Time moves differently down there. For us, it had been a year and a half, give or take. For her, it had been decades. Long enough to possibly make some enemies, push someone's buttons.
We didn't usually attack one another. That was the base, animalistic shit that the humans did. We punished the humans. That was where we took our rage out.
At least, that was how it used to be, how it had always been.
But who knew what had changed since then.
"Was this commonplace?" I asked, hating having to defer to Bael, but recognizing that I was not the expert in this one way.
"Lashing each other?" he clarified. "No."
"Did it ever happen?"
"Not that I ever saw."
"Hopefully once she is healed, she will be in her right mind again. Then she can tell us what happened," I said, shrugging.
I was a facts-based man. It seemed a waste of time to speculate, bat around ideas that may or may not be true. It was better to wait, to get the information right from the source.
One glance into my bedroom showed Lenore fussing over the nurse's head, muttering under her breath. Whether it was words of encouragement or actual spells, I had no idea. I didn't give a shit. So long as she got her up and working on Red.
"What?" I asked when Drex jerked his chin toward the front room.
"Aram," he said, swirling his glass before taking a sip.
Sighing, I gave up my plans of grabbing a book and getting lost for a while before the nurse woke up and could give us some answers.
"Aram," I called, walking into the front room to find him sitting off the edge of the couch, his head buried in his hands.
"She didn't deserve this."
"No one is saying she did," I said.
"No one is worried about her. You just tossed her on a bed with a gag in her mouth."
"Because I needed to go get someone to help her. I did that. I did what I could do. I think we can all agree that hand-holding and comforting is not my department."
It was more of his, though.
And judging by the blood all over him, he had tried.
Unsuccessfully, it seemed, by his defeated posture.
"She shrieked when I tried to touch her hand."
"She's in pain, Aram," I reminded him.
It was easy to forget pain since we so seldom felt it, and when we did, it was fleeting. And Aram had led a much more charmed life on Earth than I had.