Free Black City by Christina Henry

drew the sleeves over his arms and off his wrists, dropping the remains of his shirt on the floor.
    I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, took a deep breath and opened the bottle of disinfectant. “This isn’t going to get any better.”
    “Do not weep for me,” he said quietly, then hissed as I poured the solution into his wounds. “After all the pain I have caused, I deserve whatever harm may befall me.”
    I paused. “What happened to, ‘I was under orders, I didn’t have a choice, and I didn’t mean any of it anyway’?”
    “I kissed you,” he said simply. “When our magic entwined, I saw your heart. And I finally understood how you saw me, and why you held me in such contempt.”
    I applied gauze to the worst of the open wounds. Therewere several bullet holes in addition to the broken wing. “That’s probably the first time a kiss from me has ever had such a transformative effect,” I muttered. “And I never held you in contempt.”
    “You did,” Nathaniel said. “Your feelings for me were stronger than dislike from the beginning.”
    I thought back to the first moment I’d seen Nathaniel in my father’s court, golden and glorious and full of disdain.
    “You looked like an arrogant jerk. And it doesn’t make a woman think well of you when you say, ‘Hello, we just met, we’re getting married.’”
    “I was doing as—”
    “Azazel told you, I know. Nathaniel, what happened to the bullets? Are they inside you? I don’t want to patch up these holes now only to have to cut the bullets out later.”
    “My body rejected the bullets as part of the healing process,” he said.
    “Like Wolverine,” I said, cleaning and covering the bullet holes.
    “Whom?”
    “I could explain, but you probably still wouldn’t get it,” I said. “Nathaniel, just what exactly did you do for my father?”
    There was a long pause, and I wondered whether he would answer. I finished bandaging the bullet wounds and then contemplated my final task. I had thus far avoided looking too much at the mess that was his wing. I’d have to find some way to immobilize it until we could get him healed the angelic way.
    “I am not certain that my status will improve with you if you know precisely what I did for Azazel,” Nathaniel said carefully.
    “I know that you didn’t do anything good,” I said.
    I carefully touched the top part of the wing root, the part that had torn away. “I’ve got to move this closer to your back. I’m going to put it more or less in its proper place and tape it there.”
    I cut several long strips of tape to have at the ready.
    Nathaniel nodded. I shifted the wing toward his spine. The exposed muscle and arteries squelched. I turned my head away, gagging.
    “This is not a task for a pregnant woman,” Nathaniel said.
    His body had stiffened as I moved the wing into place, and his fists were clenched so hard that the veins in his arms bulged.
    “The only person available is a pregnant woman,” I said, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth until the nausea passed. “If you want to talk about things a pregnant woman should or should not be doing—I probably shouldn’t be fighting demons or killing vampires, either. But there’s no choice. There’s no one in this city besides me who both cares enough and has the ability to fight.”
    I packed gauze around the wings as best I could and then started tacking on tape to hold it in place. Once I’d managed to fix the wing into the position I wanted it, I took a roll of tape and wound it diagonally from Nathaniel’s shoulder, over his back, under his rib and back up his chest to his shoulder again so that the tape looked like a sling. I repeated the action a few times until I was pretty sure the wing would stay in place.
    “Done,” I said finally.
    Nathaniel tried to stand, trembled, and sat down on the cot again. “Now that you have mended me, you must get home. I am too weak to travel at this moment.”
    “Do we