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the light, I was faced by a reflection that looked a whole lot like one of the corpses I’d burned the day before. I poured myself a tepid, bitterly mineral drink from the sink faucet; whatever magic the hotel’s resident Talents were using to keep the plumbing going wasn’t doing much for the water quality. My hands were shaking so much it was hard to hold on to the hotel glass.
    Yep. I was
totally
ready to take on the death goddess who’d destroyed nearly the entire town. Maybe if I gushingly bled out on her she’d slip and break her neck in some new and different way that her regenerative powers couldn’t cope with? Yeah. Sure.
    After I washed my face to try to wake myself up a bit more, I went back into the bedroom to rouse Pal, who was snoozing on the thin sofa-bed mattress. I wasn’t sure how quickly a creature like him was supposed to heal, but it looked to me as if some of the claw marks on his legs were getting worse rather than better.
    “How are you feeling?” I asked as he lifted his shaggy head and blinked at me blearily in the dimness.
    “I’ve felt better,” he admitted.
    “Do you want to see if I can find some more help?”
    He shook his head and licked his muzzle. “I spent some time listening in on conversations while you were otherwise occupied; I don’t think anyone here has much more than basic skill as a healer. Apparently there was one white witch who was attending to the people in Miko’s spell-circle, but she tried to escape and Miko killed her. That’s why Miko resorted to the mundane nurses. At any rate, if Bettie’s and my own efforts at healing my body have come to naught, I don’t expect anyone else here will do better.”
    “Are you sure?” I hoped his pride in his own magic wouldn’t keep him from seeking what healing assistance he could get. “It wouldn’t hurt to try again, would it?”
    “I’ll be fine.” He gathered his legs under him and stepped off the sofa bed. “But how are
you
feeling?”
    “Completely craptastic. It’s taking pretty much all I’ve got just to stand up. I think my meds have reached their limit of usefulness. So I’m going to try something else. But before I get started … do you think you can carry me back to the clinic at the university if this goes horribly wrong?”
    He nodded. “What, may I ask, are you going to attempt?”
    I bent down to get into my backpack; the movement sent a jag of pain through the front of my head, ocularis to eyeball. Ignoring it and the sudden wave of nausea the headache brought on, I retrieved one of the stainless-steel bottles my brother had given me and straightened up.
    “I’m going to try one of these energy potions.”
    Pal looked concerned. “Do you think that’s a good idea on an empty stomach?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t think I can eat for a while. And Randall didn’t tell me I had to take it with food or anything. He just warned me to chug it and not sip it. Some of the ingredients are pretty foul, so … yeah.
    “But no, I haven’t had this before,” I continued, “and no, I don’t know what it’ll do. For all I know I could barf, have a heart attack, turn into a newt. No clue. But as shitty as I feel right now, I’m willing to risk it in the hopes that this will make me even slightly more functional.”
    Pal crouched attentively at the foot of my bed. “Well, if your experiment goes badly I’ll do my best to get you to a healer or a doctor. But I’d suggest sitting down first, just in case. No sense in courting a nasty knock on the head. Even if yours seems uncommonly hard.”
    I snorted. “Right.”
    Perching cross-legged on the bed, I cracked open the bottle. Sniffed it. The liquid inside was black as coffee that had been boiling in the pot all day, and smelled strongly of jalapeños and faintly of something sourly metallic. “Well, bottoms up.”
    I tossed back the potion. The surprisingly thick fluid burned my tongue, and a moment later tripped my gag reflex, but I