Spellbent by Lucy A. Snyder Page B

‘we.’ Does that mean you’ll help me find Cooper, at least?” I asked.
    “It’s my mission to help you in any way that I can,” Pal said. “But I need to know that you understand that from here on out, life will be hard for you, and there might be no -good outcome to this. Your eye, your hand—that’s just the beginning of what you might lose.”
    I squeezed my fist. “I have to find him. It’s as simple as that. But first I gotta get myself bandaged back up; I wonder if Mother Karen has a sling?”

chapter eight

    A New Record
    “I really think you should reconsider,” Mother Karen said, worried, as I worked at getting the Dinosaur’s dented door open. “You realize that, five minutes from now, I won’t be able to so much as take you to hapkido practice, right?”
    “I’m not going back to the dojo, not until this is over, anyway. Please give my apologies to the sensei, if you’re allowed to do that kind of thing,” I replied, alternately yanking and kicking the door.
    “Why not use a spell for that?” Karen asked.
    “Not as satisfying as brute force right now,” I replied, the door finally coming open with a metal- scraping squeak. “Hop on up,” I said to Pal, who jumped off the car’s roof to my good shoulder.
    Karen handed me my cell phone and a couple of extra boxes of gauze. “Don’t forget these—and try to keep that arm in the sling as much as possible the next few days.”
    “Thanks. And I will.” I tossed the boxes on the passenger seat and turned on my cell phone, expecting to see a message or two from the Warlock wondering what had happened to me and Cooper. But there was nothing: no messages, nor any missed-call alerts.
    “Did the Warlock call you while I was unconscious?” I asked.
    Mother Karen frowned. “No, he didn’t. . . were you expecting him to?”
    “Well, yeah, kinda. Cooper and I were supposed to get together with him for dinner, but then all the shit downtown happened.. . ah, hell, he probably met someone new at his bar to fall madly in bed with and he forgot about everyone else.”
    Feeling abandoned and frustrated, I clipped the cell phone to the waistband of the cast-off jeans.
    Mother Karen reached up and adjusted one of the bandages on my head. “The tissue’s still really thin over the bone, and if it tears you could get a pretty nasty infection. You won’t be able to get proper healer care, so if anything goes wrong you should see a physician.” Karen made a face. “They’ll want money—a lot of it—and half the time they don’t know what they’re doing. If all this goes on for more than a week, though, you’ll need to see someone about getting a proper glass eye and some corrective surgery.”
    “If any of this goes bad on me, I’ll have to try to take care of it myself. . . I don’t know anyone who has the money for regular surgery, much less plastic surgery,” I replied. “Our next-door neighbor got a bill for ten grand when he busted up his leg in a motorcycle accident. They only kept him overnight. We did what we could for him afterward, but if he’d had to rely on the hospital for care, he still wouldn’t be walking right.”
    “I’ve heard that hospital work is quite lucrative for healers,” Karen admitted. “I’ve never done it myself. I feel bad for all the people dying and crippled out there, but there’s not enough of us to take care of all of them. How do you choose who gets helped and who doesn’t? It seems to all hinge on money and class status; I’m just not comfortable with that.”
    “Cooper told me that most religious hospitals don’t let witches help, so I figure that limits things.”
    “Not as much as you’d think,” Karen replied. “The modern popes have gone from promoting witch hunts to publicly pretending we just don’t exist. Some doctors at Christian hospitals make quiet referrals for their sickest patients. Other hospitals have an attached wing that isn’t technically part of the hospital