Flint Lock (Witches of Karma #10) (2 page)

WINTER

I
rubbed my eyes. I knew that I shouldn’t be on the road, driving, when I was exhausted like this, but I was just a couple miles away from home, where my bed and/or a pot of coffee would be waiting for me.

Beside me, Jazz, my over-excited border collie, whined. She, too, was sure that I shouldn’t be driving. Unlike me, she wasn’t tired at all.

Of the two of us, she was the most intelligent. If only she’d had the stature required to drive the truck.

I’d been out all night, trying to treat a pregnant mare who had a bad attack of colic at one of the big racehorse farms about forty miles north of my veterinary practice. The trainer knew me, so I’d been dragged out of my bed to take care of the emergency.

After all, I had a great track record. Even better than that of my patient.

A record that was no accident. I had a kind of magic touch that helped with situations like this. I wasn’t a healer, precisely—actually far from it, but I did have a knack for helping a body begin to heal itself. Mostly because they pretty much told me what was going on with them—the underlying issues beneath the issues.

Of course, my trainer-friend didn’t know that. He would have thought I was nuts, if I tried to explain. All he knew was that he’d seen me work with more than one desperate case and ended up the champion against Old Black Death.

I twisted the volume on my radio. Maybe, if I cranked the bass, it would help me stay awake.

Jazz put her paws over her face, and whined again.

“Just a little further,” I told her. “We’re almost home.”

I blinked and jerked awake again. The bass thing wasn’t helping much. It wasn’t just the long night with the horse, but I’d only had two hours of sleep the night before, thanks to another emergency. Add in the exhaustion that always followed using my magic, even in such a minor way, and it was no wonder I couldn’t seem to stay awake.

Work was great, but unless some of the work actually turned into getting paid, I was going to lose my practice before we could even get our feet off of the ground.

That’s why I lived in such an out-of-the-way place, on the outskirts of Salem, Massachusetts. Yes, I was a witch and I lived in the most cliché of all witch habitats. That joke had been old when I was six.

It was cheaper to keep my practice out here, in a dilapidated old farmhouse, than to try to move closer to Salem, where the majority of my patients resided. I’d only bought the place recently. I’d extended myself too far to get it, and now it looked like I might end up knocking on the door of my old boss, begging for her to take me back.

I’d only lived on my little farm for about six months, but I already couldn’t imagine having to give it up. I didn’t want to go back to the way things had been at my last job. I wanted to work for myself.

Even if that meant risking the occasional drive into a ditch because I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

“Come on, Winter Daize,” I muttered to myself. “Stay awake! Stay awake!”

For the millionth time my mind marveled at the audacity of my parents, for giving me such a… charming name. My sisters had equally seasonal names. I’d been born on the winter solstice, hence the charming moniker, Winter. I supposed that it could have been worse—they could have actually named me ‘Christmas’. Though, I wouldn’t have minded the equally festive ‘Holly’. But, no, I was a victim of those types of parents who name their children with names that went well together. As that kind of explanation was a little long for introductions, I usually went by ‘Win’, which allowed most people I met to assume my name was Whitney or something relatively normal.

I wished.

My eyelids did that ‘way too heavy to stay up’ thing again. My chin drifted towards my chest in slow motion. I jerked awake, just in time to see something in the road ahead of me.

I shrieked and yanked on my steering wheel. Jazz barked and started wagging her tail like crazy as my old truck slid sideways, off of the road, and groaned into the grass that grew lushly on the shoulder of the road.

“Crap!” I screamed as I fumbled with my seatbelt. “What the heck?”

I jumped out of the truck before I even had time to think about what almost had happened. My heart was absolutely pounding from the shot of adrenaline I’d just rightfully earned.

What the hell?

I hurried towards the shape I had seen, just in time to avoid hitting it. I’d only had the slightest glimpse, but I had a pretty good idea of what it was.

I’d see it before, actually, the shape, if not the location.

Damn. I hated being right.

I whistled for Jazz as I broke into a run and dropped to my knees next to the prone shape in the middle of the road. The last thing I needed was for my crazy mutt to go off, chasing after imaginary sheep. She barked once behind me, telling me that she there if I needed her.

I didn’t think a dog was going to solve this kind of problem.

I bit my lip and moaned.

It was a man. A
big
man. Tall and well-muscled, he sprawled awkwardly across the pavement, his hands thrown away from the sides of his body as if flung out by the force of some kind of impact. His face was pale and tinted with blue, the reason for which was obvious in the growing puddle of blood under his head.

From the condition of his scalp and the gun in his left hand, he had recently attempted to kill himself.

I gulped back a wave of ‘why me’.

I touched him gingerly, turning his head so I could see his wound better. It looked nasty enough, but head wounds generally looked worse than they were. The fact that the blood was still warm and flowing meant that he was still alive at the moment.

There was no sign that the bullet had managed to do more than dig a furrow across his scalp. If he’d been trying to kill himself, he was a lousy shot.

Though, the only thing worse than finding a stranger lying in the road, in a puddle of blood, would probably be finding a stranger lying dead in the road, in a puddle of blood.

I huffed through my nose. Maybe it was selfish of me, but I wished that he had chosen some other place and time to off himself. I was already exhausted—exhaustion that would have ended up with him as a smear on the highway, if my reflexes hadn’t saved him.

He could decide if he was lucky, when—or if, he woke up.

Jazz whimpered and nuzzled the man’s face. Her pink tongue darted out and left a damp patch against his scruffy cheek. She didn’t usually take to strangers, but she settled down next to him and leaned her chin against his chest. She looked up at me with her huge, bright Border collie eyes.

I groaned. “Fine. We’ll take him home—and then we’ll call the cops.”

Lugging a prone body was not the easiest thing in the world. The injured man was easily seventy or so pounds heavier than my hundred and two pounds, and, if my judgement was correct, well over my five-foot-even frame.

Thank God for all those years working around horses. I might be tiny in stature, but I was a boss, when it came to strength. I was one of those ‘small, but mighty’ kind of girls. She-rah and the Hulk mixed into one.

Still, I was relieved that my truck was only a couple yards away. The guy was heavy. I staggered under his weight. Once he woke up, he was not going to be happy with the damage his expensive-looking pants were getting from the pavement I half-dragged him across. His three-hundred dollar shoes weren’t coming up better for the experience, either.

Jazz, unhelpful as always, despite her moniker of a working breed, wagged her tail and gaped open her mouth with a cheerful doggy expression. She hopped into her seat, as I slid my own seat forward to shove the injured guy into the narrow backseat in the cab of my truck. I tried to be gentle, but, hey, he wasn’t conscious anyway. What he didn’t feel wouldn’t hurt him.

Well, at least not until I got the bleeding stopped and he woke up.

I could always blame some of those bruises on his fall. After all, he
had
tried to kill himself. In the middle of the road.

Really, he had no reason to complain.

I floored my truck for the last few miles to my house and clinic. Since the rare traffic I saw in this place was either a client, or someone who was lost on the way to Salem, I didn’t feel a shred of worry that I was going to get pulled over. Anyway, the closest cop had a big bloodhound that had a habit of going after porcupines. We were on good terms, if it came to that.

Explaining the bleeding man in my truck could have been fun, though. That would stretch even my credibility a bit far.

At least I was wide awake, now.

“Don’t you dare die on me,” I growled to my passenger as I pressed the gas down with a lead foot that would have put most NASCAR drivers to shame. I whipped around the last turn before my house. “I did not drag you into my car, just so you could die. It’s new…ish. I don’t need it haunted.”

I pulled into my long driveway. The man’s head jolted awkwardly as we bumped over the pothole-riddled surface. I didn’t have the money to have it regraded and the winter storms had given it metaphorical measles. Gravel kicked up under my tires as I slammed on the brakes. We skidded to a stop with a complaining screech of brakes.

I winced. My truck wasn’t going to last long under this kind of treatment. I couldn’t afford another truck. This one was new-to-me and was a necessary part of living out where I did.

Heck, I could barely afford ramen noodles and dog food. A new truck was not on the list for at least ten more years.

Dragging the man into the clinic was a lot easier than getting him into the truck in the first place. I just pulled him into the huge wheelbarrow that I used to tote hay bales to feed my larger patients, and wheeled him into my surgery. His legs hung out of the back, but didn’t drag on the ground, so that alone was an improvement.

I pulled the cart right into my surgery and maneuvered him onto the surgical-steel table I usually reserved for my largest patients.

Once he was on the table, I took a better look at his injury.

I pursed my lips. Really, it wasn’t too bad. The guy must have been a lousy shot. Who could mess up point-blank on himself? Unless…

I leaned forward and sniffed suspiciously at his breath.

“Ah ha!” I announced, with Holmes-esque flair. “Nerved yourself up with some booze, first, did you, buddy?” Not that I could blame him. Hard enough to try to shoot yourself in the head without the help of liquid courage.

Though, that had obviously back-fired on him at this point.

Pun not intended, of course.

I started in on cleaning his wound. It was a good thing that I didn’t have issues with blood, because there was a lot of it.

He had thick, dark hair, which fell across his face, as if he wasn’t used to wearing it so long. Based on his clothes—casually expensive—I got the impression that he’d just stopped caring about his appearance sometime recently. There were shadows under his eyes that suggested that this probably wasn’t his first do-si-do with alcohol in the recent past, either. It was a shame, too, because he was one of the prettiest men I’d ever laid my eyes on.

I cleaned his face carefully, more and more aware of the refinement of his features, as they appeared from behind the mask of blood that had flowed from his head wound.

“What does a guy like you have going on that’s worth killing yourself for?” I murmured, wiping the last bit of blood off of his face.

His features were striking—dark eyebrows slashing across a high-browed, narrow face. His nose was straight, making me aware of my own slightly up-turned nose. If there was any comfort to be had with his nose, it was, perhaps, just a little too big for his face. His mouth was wide and masculine, framed by a rather square jaw.

I let my fingers brush against his face. He hadn’t shaved in a couple days, and the longish stubble felt course to my touch. Give him a few more days, and he’d have a nice-looking beard.

He had a dimple in his chin, visible still under the stubble, echoed by lines on his face that I thought might equate into more dimples. As if a face like this needed any more charm. His eyelashes were long and sooty, leaning heavily against his too-pale face.

“Seriously?” I looked up at the ceiling. “Why is it that men always get the best eyelashes?”