Sometimes the authors at Worlds Redeemed like to play in each other’s playgrounds. Short fiction is a wonderful way to allow characters to “guest star” in another fictional world. Often, we’ll take a friend’s character and drop them into our world to see them interact with our characters.
If you read Kessie Caroll’s post last week The Three-Jayesh Problem, you already know Jayesh. Rick and Dante are the buddy cop duo from my Rick and Dante Paranormal Mystery series. Dante is a phoenix cursed to human form and Rick is his human partner. Together they solve crimes involving mythical creatures in Washington DC. Dante is a devout Catholic known for his dramatic personality and expensive suits. Rick is very much his opposite; a Baptist with a down to earth personality and casual appearance. Both are good investigators and loyal to each other.
Jayesh fit wonderfully into my world. I just adjusted his backstory to be fae-blessed with healing powers where Dante was fae cursed, and sent Dante to him with a critically injured Rick. The result was this fun little short story full of whump and banter.
The Healer
The hunt was getting out of hand. Phoenix-cursed-to-be-human Dante Brand and his very human partner had tracked a mythic hunting club to Phoenix, Arizona, when the club had declared open season on phoenix – and since Dante was the last of his kind, that meant they were after him.
He’d learned a long time ago that trying to send his partner away was futile, but as he carried Rick’s near-lifeless body in his arms, he cursed himself for not trying harder. Merciful God, allow us to find the healer in time. The hospital was out of the question. Human doctors couldn’t cure basilisk poison.
Healers were about as rare as phoenix, but there were rumors that one lived in town. Dante turned down the street his contact had given him, a dank, dirty street with tall apartment buildings flanking it. The kind of low-income apartments he’d usually only find himself at during an investigation.
He leaned against the doorway to the quad of apartments to catch his breath and check on Rick. “Rick? Come on, Bulldog, hang in there.” His partner had stopped responding to his voice three blocks earlier, but his chest still pressed against Dante’s body with each shallow breath. Dante looked up the stairs at the “D” apartment above them, and gritted his teeth against the pain from his own injuries. They were an inconvenience he could not afford. He mounted the stairs, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other up to the apartment.
Knocking with Rick in his arms was out of the question, and he really didn’t have time to stand on decorum. He kicked the base of the door sharply with his shoe.
The door opened to reveal a youngish man with olive skin, a brown quiff, and surprised brown eyes. The apartment behind him was small and sparsely furnished, but clean.
“Please. No one else can help us.” Mince. His own blood loss was making him light headed, and he pulled Rick closer to avoid dropping him. He was still breathing, right? Dear God, I can’t lose him. His legs gave and he sank to the floor.
The healer jumped forward with a cry. He used one arm to help support Rick and wrapped the other around Dante’s back to support him as they crossed the room to a tattered, lumpy couch. “Why didn’t you go to the hospital?”
“The blade that got my partner was dipped in basilisk poison.” Dante lowered Rick carefully to the couch and pressed a pair of gloved fingers to his partner’s throat. Panic brought darkness to the edges of his vision when he couldn’t find a pulse. He pressed his trembling fingers deeper with a cry somewhere between a moan and a sob. There! Faint, weak – frighteningly irregular – but it was there. Dante sat hard on the arm of the couch near Rick’s head and closed his eyes. “Only a fae-blessed healer has the skill to heal basilisk poison.”
“Now hold on, I don’t know that I can… I’ve never…” Fear lit the young healer’s eyes. He plucked Dante’s blood-stained jacket open away from his torn shirt. “Look, maybe we should focus on your wounds. Your friend…” The healer looked skeptically at Rick and lowered his voice. “I don’t think I can help him.”
Dante’s eyes snapped open and he grabbed the healer’s hand with his own gloved one. He leaned toward the young healer, unsure whether to threaten or beg, or both. Somewhere behind the fear, pain, and blood loss he realized scaring off the only healer with a chance to save his friend would be a disastrous mistake. “I will pay you just for trying. Charles – our boss – will pay you more if you save him.” His grip on the healer’s wrist tightened as his voice became a whisper more deadly than he’d intended. “What kind of healer lets a man die on his own couch?”
A quick flash of orange darted out of the inside of the healer’s tee shirt, scrambled up the healer’s arm, and bit Dante in the hand. With a surprised squawk, Dante dropped the healer’s hand and shook out his own. A tiny dragon glared at him from his perch on the healer’s hand.
“Jay’s a good healer!” The tiny dragon snarled at him with a high-pitched voice befitting his size. “It’s not his fault you brought him a dead man and expected him to do the impossible. What kind of friend–”
“That’s enough, Suntala.” The healer, Jay apparently, gently lifted the tiny dragon to his shoulder and stroked his back lovingly. He looked Dante in the eye firmly. “I will try to heal your friend, but Suntala’s right. There’s a reason no one can heal basilisk poison, it just works too fast.” He cast another doubtful look at Rick, but set his jaw and started unbuttoning his shirt to get a better look at the wound. “Someone cauterized this wound.” His hands glowed as he laid them over the wound. “You?”
“Let’s say that I am intimately familiar with fae.” Dante wearily pulled a glove free and lit a weak flame in his hand.
Jay glanced up at him and nodded, then went back to work. “Blessed with fire powers?”
“Cursed to humanity, actually.” Dante chuckled softly as he replaced his glove and rested his hand on his partner’s shoulder. “What fae meant for evil, God used for good, no?”
Jay fell silent as he moved his glowing hands toward Rick’s heart. He frowned in concentration.
Dante didn’t dare interrupt, but the room tipped dangerously and he was perched on the arm of the couch. He slid down to sit on the floor with his back against the couch and his head near his partner’s.
“I can heal you first,” the healer offered, but didn’t move his hands from Rick’s body. “I’d rather not lose both my patients in one day.”
“If you touch me before my partner is healed, I’ll burn your dining table to ash,” Dante threatened without feeling – or moving. He wished the healer would hurry up and heal his partner so he could go outside and die in peace. “I cauterized my own wounds before I attempted to move Rick, and apparently basilisk poison isn’t fatal to phoenixes.” Just incredibly unpleasant.
“Basilisk poison is fatal to everyone.” Jay scoffed. “Is that what you are – er – were? A phoenix?”
“Yes. I insulted a fae and was cursed to live out the rest of time as a human. So dying is not exactly a concern of mine.” Dante groaned as he pressed a hand to his side. “Dying would be honestly more desirable than living right now.”
“Are you always this dramatic?” Jay laughed tightly. Something in the healer’s voice alarmed Dante, a weariness and fear that hadn’t been present earlier.
“Oh, no. Usually I’m worse.” Dante pushed himself up to look at the healer grimly. Sweat slicked Jay’s face and weariness reflected in his brown eyes. “What can I do to help?”
“You already did a lot by stopping the bleeding and getting him here. Otherwise, you might want to start praying if you haven’t been yet.”
“I haven’t stopped since the attack began.” Dante wiped a drying smear of blood off his partner’s gray face with the cuff of his sleeve as he started the Rosary in his head again. “He’s still alive after all this time. That has to be a good sign, no?”
“The fact that he didn’t die before you lifted him from the ground is a miracle.” Jay agreed. He paused long enough to wipe the sweat from his face with a trembling hand. The little dragon nuzzled his ear and Jay responded by stroking his head. “I’m pouring all my healing power into him just to keep him from dying. At this point, the best we can hope for is for me to get him stabilized and hope his body can do the rest.”
Dante frowned at the edge of warning in the healer’s voice. Jay still didn’t think Rick was going to make it, and he was trying to prepare Dante for the worst to avoid triggering him into burning the apartment down in retribution. Dante blew a sigh through his nose. As much as he hated it, the healer was clearly doing his best. “Thank you.”
“If you really want to help, you could get a pizza delivered up here. Everything, as many toppings as they have.” Jay put both hands back on Rick’s chest and returned to healing him. “There’s a Detroit style place about a block from here that delivers.”
Dante pulled his smartphone free of his pocket, wiped the cracked screen on a dry spot on his pants, and ordered two pizzas from the website. He checked the convenient “contactless delivery” option to avoid questions about their bloodied and torn appearance.
“How did you end up blessed by the fae instead of cursed?” Dante asked. He wasn’t actually sure he’d ever met anyone who was truly blessed by the fae. Most were either outright cursed or given tainted blessings.
“Delivered a baby in an elevator. Mom nearly bled out. I managed to control the bleeding and keep her alive until the paramedics got there.” Jay shrugged like it was no big deal. “Turned out the dad was fae. They named their daughter Jayla and he blessed me with the power to help others the way I’d helped her.”
A sharp knock at the door alerted them to the pizza delivery.
“I’ll get it.” Jay stood and stretched. “I think he’s stable for now.”
“For now” wasn’t encouraging, but “stable” was and Dante was willing to take what he could get at this point. He stayed low and out of sight as Jay retrieved the pizza and closed the door, then turned to his unconscious partner.
“Come on, Bulldog.” Dante leaned heavily against the couch and laid a hand on Rick’s chest, desperate for the assurance that his friend was still with him. “You’re stubborn. Too stubborn to die, yes?” The wound looked less angry red, and the vascular corruption that had spread outward from the poisoned wound was fading, but Rick was still not responding, and his pulse and breathing were still shallow and weak. Was the healer right? Was there really little hope he would survive the poison? Dante bowed himself over Rick’s body and fought back weary, terrified tears.”Merciful God, please don’t take him yet. I need him at my side.”
“So. How long have you two been… Together?”
Dante looked up to see the healer standing behind him with a plate full of pizza slices watching them curiously. His stress on the last word seemed to indicate an assumption Dante needed to clear up. Not that he particularly cared what the healer thought – he’d had to field that assumption himself since the moment he’d become human. But if Rick awoke to find Dante had allowed the healer to still harbor that suspicion, he’d probably kill Dante himself.
“Partners, yes, but not like that. More than friends, but never lovers.” Dante turned to sit back against the couch, partially turned this time so he could keep an eye on Rick. “We both work in the Secret Service and have been partners for a little less than a year.”
“Secret Service. Right. Never mind. Forget I asked.” Jay picked up another piece of pizza and devoured it. “I don’t care what you are, and I don’t want to know. I just want to get your partner on his feet and you both out of my house.”
“I can prove it.” Dante struggled to pull his wallet from his blood-crusted pants. Even if he didn’t die, this suit was going to be a loss.
“Badges and ID’s can be faked. You’re clearly too wounded to be anything other than a lousy liar. No LEO wears clothes like that.” He gestured with his half eaten slice of pizza at Dante’s stained cashmere suit and torn silk shirt. “I figure you’re either confidence men who tried to con the wrong people, or with the mob. And I DON’T want to know.”
Dante hugged his arm to his wound to dull the pain as he chuckled softly. “So because I care for my partner and my appearance, you assume I must be a gay con artist? You must have a very low opinion of your law enforcement.”
“Not just that. Come on.” He tore a little piece of pizza off and handed it to the little dragon sitting on his shoulder. “You come to my apartment, covered in blood, refuse to go to the authorities, threaten to burn things, duck out of sight when I open the door, and treat him with more tenderness than my neighbors treat each other – and they just got back from their honeymoon.”
“That sounds like their own issues.” Dante waved a gloved hand as he rested his head back against the arm of the couch. He felt terrible. The healer’s comment about basilisk poison being fatal to everyone weighed on his mind. Dying in the healer’s living room would be catastrophic. “I’m a phoenix, not a human. Would you like to mate with a chicken?”
“You look human enough to me.”
“Yes. Very unfortunately. That’s why I dress like this.” Dante gestured to his mangled suit without opening his eyes. He was incredibly tired, but afraid that if he fell asleep, he would wake up to find his resurrection fire had leveled the apartment.
“What’s your partner, then?” The healer’s tone seemed less aggressive and a bit more sympathetic.
“Human. Which is why I insist you save your healing powers for him. If a phoenix dies, they come back. Humans are not as… resilient.” Dante forced his heavy eyes open and turned to check on Rick again.
“He’s still stable.” The healer crouched beside them and ran a quick glowing hand over Rick’s wound. “Let me at least examine you.”
He reached tentatively for Dante’s shirt, hesitating a moment to see if Dante tried to fight him. Dante just sighed and unbuttoned his own shirt swiftly. At the very least the healer could tell him if he was actually as close to death as he felt so he could make the best choice to care for his partner. He loathed the idea of leaving Rick alone like this, even with the healer, nearly as much as he loathed the idea of dying without his partner having his back.
“The cut is pretty superficial, and you haven’t lost nearly as much blood as your partner.” Jay lay a glowing hand on his bare side, and immediately pulled it back with a gasp. “Why does your blood burn?”
“Phoenix.” Dante reminded him.
“Right.” The healer gave him an incredulous look, like maybe he was starting to believe he was just incredibly weird rather than a bad liar. “Well, apparently phoenixes are less susceptible to basilisk poison, you’re already starting to metabolize it.” Jay ran his clean hand through his spiked quiff. “I’m going to guess that if you’re not literally about to die, you don’t want me to heal you.”
“You guessed correctly.” Dante smiled weakly. If he wasn’t going to accidentally kill everyone in the building, maybe he could rest a little. “Just worry about Rick, and I’ll take care of myself.”
Jay hummed skeptically, but thankfully went back to tending Rick. After a while, he went back for the second pizza. Dante startled at the sudden movement and woke to look around the room.
“He’s turned the corner and is sleeping peacefully now. I think he’ll be able to clear the rest of the poison himself.” Jay paused to stroke the tiny dragon as he regarded his more reluctant patient carefully. “I’ve got to crash now. Are you up to keeping an eye on him for a while?”
Dante nodded uncertainly. The short nap had really only served to make him feel more groggy. “You don’t happen to have a pain reliever do you?”
The healer barked a short laugh and crossed the kitchen to a small cabinet. He pulled out a white bottle, took out a pair of pills, and tossed the bottle to Dante, who caught it easily. “I often need them after a particularly grueling healing.” He pulled a pair of bottled waters out of the fridge and tossed one to Dante as well.
“Thank you.” Dante meant more than just the water and medicine. Only a few hours before, he’d feared his partner was gone. Now he had hope, and his own injuries seemed even less important. He rested his hand on Rick’s shoulder again. “I will wait with him as long as it takes.”
Both men froze as the patient moved restlessly under Dante’s touch for the first time all night.
“Rick, mon ami, please wake up.” Dante’s heart pounded in his chest. He wanted to shake his partner awake just so he could see the life in his eyes and hear his voice and know for himself that he would be alright. That, however, would probably be the opposite of what was best for his friend, so he settled for squeezing his shoulder more tightly.
“Dante? Man, you look worse than I feel.” Rick’s voice was barely a whisper and his eyes were bleary and confused, but Dante was too glad he was awake again to care. “Where are we, and why do you look like death?”
“We are in the home of a healer, and we both barely cheated death tonight.”
“A healer? You mean a doctor? Why not a hospital?” Rick tried to push himself up to sitting, but Dante pressed a firm hand to his chest to keep him still. Rick looked down at the brown and red stains on Dante’s usually immaculate gloves and lay back, but gave Dante a worried look. “It had to be bad, Peacock, if you didn’t even clean up.”
“I have not left your side since the attack. It was…” Dante blew a short breath through pursed lips. “I nearly lost you. The blade that struck us was coated in basilisk poison. My phoenix blood was barely able to overcome it, your human body didn’t stand a chance.” He gave him a weak smile and a soft chuckle. “Besides, someone neglected his duties and I had no clothes to change into.”
The healer crossed the room and waved a glowing hand over Rick’s wounds. After a satisfied hum, he sat back on his heels and offered Rick his hand. “Jayesh Khatri. Healer. You had a close shave.”
“Oh, a healer, because now that I work for PNI, we can’t have normal doctors either.” Sarcasm dripped from Rick’s voice.
“If your partner had taken you to a normal doctor you’d be dead now.” The overprotective little dragon scurried down the healer’s arm and perched himself on Rick’s chest, trying to make himself look bigger and more threatening than a small kitten. “You were basically dead, but Jay healed you anyway, you ungrateful–”
“Suntala, really.” Jay made an exasperated noise and scooped the dragon back up onto his shoulder. “Rick, is it? I’m afraid I don’t know PNI.” The healer gave Dante a side-eyed glance of triumph that showed he thought he’d finally caught Dante in a lie.
Rick shot an alarmed look at Dante, clearly afraid he’s spoken out of turn. Dante rolled his eyes and gestured for him to go ahead.
“Dante and I are investigators in the Paranormal Investigations Division of the Secret Service.” Rick yawned. “If you’re mythic, you’ve probably heard of Dante Brand at least.”
Dante smirked at the healer, and muttered under his breath, “I do not make a habit of lying.”
“I’m not mythic.” The healer returned a withering look.“Your partner is very strange, you know that?”
“I know. We love him anyway.” Rick reached for Dante’s already mussed and matted hair, but Dante dodged out of his reach, lost his balance, and landed on his butt on the floor. Rick laughed, then caught his side with a groan. Once he caught his breath, he scowled at his partner. Dante’s fancy suit coat and recently unbuttoned shirt had fallen open to expose his bloodied, cauterized, corrupted wound. His angry expression darted back to the healer.
“I tried, he refused.” The healer raised his hands defensively and took a step back. “He actually threatened to burn my table if I touched him before you were healed.”
“I am fine, Bulldog.” Dante looked down at himself ruefully. He looked positively terrible. “At least I will once I have a shower and a change of clothes.”
“Interesting priorities from a guy with a wound from a poisoned sword, but okay.” Jay laughed. “I’ll get a spare pair of shorts and a tee shirt and a couple blankets before I go to bed. The bathroom is in the hall.” The healer brought back the promised items and disappeared into his room.
Dante stared at the worn basketball shorts and faded tee shirt, briefly wondering if maybe he could wash the blood out of the clothes he had on instead.
“Oh, no. Gym clothes. The peacock’s one true weakness.” Rick snorted as he rolled over on the couch to go back to sleep. “So much worse than a filthy, tattered designer suit. Why even shower, for that matter. Surely it’s better to be covered in blood than for everyone to see you in normal clothes.”
Dante rolled his eyes as headed to the hall bathroom. He slapped his impertinent partner on the head as he passed. “Go back to sleep, Bulldog.”
There was a pause, and Dante thought his partner had fallen back to sleep. “And, Dante, thanks. You saved my life again.”
“Thank the healer, mon ami, and thank God.” Dante stopped at the bathroom door. “And thank you for being too much of a stubborn bulldog to die.”
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